“The following article rebuts from 2011 rebuts your assertions.”
No, it doesn’t. I don’t claim that administrative staffs in general have shrunk. They’ve grown. But professors used to have secretaries, and now typically there’s one for a whole department. Ask anyone who’s been around a university for a few decades. Those administrators free up faculty.
How is that article supposed to rebut my assertion that a lot of CC parents want more non-academic service from colleges? They do. The threads are everywhere. Administrators aren’t evil. Waste is evil. The assumption that administrative staff = waste is pretty obviously false when it’s your kid who needs tutoring, guidance, transcripts, a room change, etc. etc.
Forty years ago, you didn’t have parents saying, “How did the college fail to notice and intervene when my kid slept 19 hours a day/had no summer job/started taking drugs/was purging in the bathroom/cut her wrists?” If you want colleges to act on things like that, well, those are administrators.