I am faculty at an AAU, Research 1 Public University. In my experience, staff is relatively expensive, especially when compared with faculty. Now the two populations are not interchangeable, but my point is the explosion of staff is very expensive. For example, most faculty are working year round, paid or not, on research, service, and teaching, and conversely the staff work a standard 35-40 hour week during the academic calendar and a light 35-40 hour week during the summer… This makes even basic staff fairly expensive because they are employed year round (not all faculty are on 12 month contracts), but not fully needed year round.
Yes, the staff get significant professional development off campus, in part because some of them would not follow through without making it engaging. Camping in the summer seems like a good example of giving them something productive to do in the summer. Many academic department, however, do not pay for even one conference/year for faculty, or they may pay for an occasional assistant professor. Most faculty, after all, will pay for their own professional development.
Some years ago at a different research university, I attended a conference on teaching on a MTWT or Friday. One of the faculty asked staff members in the audience to raise their hands. They were the majority of the audience. We then had a lively discussion about how they could take off the 8 hour day to attend a conference on teaching, while faculty who taught could only drop in between classes and student conferences: The point being that Saturday worked better for faculty who were, in fact, the teachers.
Now this might sound a bit like sour grapes or animosity. It isn’t. There are wonderful staff on all campuses performing tasks that faculty can’t or won’t. I just want to note that a few more ways in which consumer culture at the university distracts from its core missions of teaching and research as it raises costs.
Finally, on dorm quality, a few years ago, when touring Barnard with D1, the daughter behind us protested the dorm room was horrible. The mother responded, “Don’t worry, dear. I wouldn’t let you stay in such a cramped place.” From my point of view, it was a decent dorm room in one of the most expensive cities in the world. I would have been happy to live in it for a few years.