The number of administrators at Yale University has increased drastically faster than its undergraduate population, with the Ivy nearing an abysmal ratio of 1:1 before the pandemic due to its more than 5,000 administrators and managers and fewer than 6,000 undergraduates, according to financial reports from the 2002-2003 and 2020-2021 school years. Now the numbers are even worse, with more than one administrator per undergraduate student.
As evidenced by the financial report from 2002-2003, Yale employed 3,500 administrators and managers while there were 5,307 undergraduate students enrolled at the university. Less than two decades later in 2019, before the pandemic affected enrollment, Yale employed more than 1,500 additional administrators while the undergraduate population had only risen by 600 students. Now undergraduate enrollment has dipped to 4,703, with more than 5,000 “managerial and professional staff.”
As a result of this seismic increase in administrators and managers, Yale has the highest manager-to-student ratio out of the Ivy League schools and the fifth-highest among four-year private nonprofits according to the Chronicle of Higher Education.
While some point out that this increase is due in part to the hiring of clinical staff for the Yale School of Medicine, several different faculty members decried the jump in the number of administrators, telling Yale Daily News that academic bureaucracy expansion has been harmful to students and faculty and has also been unnecessarily burdensome and expensive.
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