I Emailed 3,805 Administrators to Find Out Why a Year at Brown Costs $93,064

Alexander Shieh

Brown’s skyrocketing spending and legally questionable DEI programs raise serious concerns about whether tuition dollars are funding mission-critical functions—or just bloating the bureaucracy.

Receiving an Ivy League education is said to unlock upward mobility, but with a nearly five percent tuition hike set to take effect at Brown University this July, the American Dream will soon set Brown students back a whopping $93,064 per year — 143% of what the average American can expect to earn in the same timeframe. According to U.S. News & World Report, Brown already holds the dubious distinction of second-most expensive university in America, with tuition rates just $335 shy of the first-place University of Southern California.

Assuming tuition and fees continue to increase by around four percent each year — as they have historically — the 2027-28 school year at Brown will be the first to come with a six-figure price tag. Yet even as it charges each student the price of a luxury car, this fiscal year Brown is on track to operate at a $46 million budget deficit, dipping into the endowment to stay afloat.

Brown’s skyrocketing spending and legally questionable DEI programs raise serious concerns about whether tuition dollars are funding mission-critical functions — or just bloating the bureaucracy. Numerous academic studies have already pinpointed one major culprit to the rising costs of education nationwide: the ballooning number of university employees working behind-the-scenes desk jobs sitting in meetings and churning out memos of questionable value.

These employees in question aren’t teaching staff — professors or teaching assistants — nor are they workers filling critical operational roles like food service workers, janitors, or security guards. Rather, they are a small army of mid-level administrators working out of sight, and in some cases completely remotely from locations thousands of miles away like Florida or California.

Despite budget shortfalls that leave dorms flooding when it rains, Brown currently boasts 3,805 non-instructional full-time staff members on payroll — a staggering number considering Brown currently has 7,229 undergraduate students. This equates to roughly one administrator for every two undergrads, meaning that every student personally foots the bill for half of an administrator’s salary. Brown’s non-instructional staff count also dwarfs the 1,691 members of the faculty, with Brown employing more than two administrators for every faculty member on payroll.

To offer insight into Brown’s network of administrators, I launched Bloat@Brown, an interactive website hosted by The Spectator that exposed the bureaucracy to which all 3,805 administrators belong. (Not all features are currently available due to several cyberattacks from the Brown network and a subsequent disciplinary probe into the alleged publication of confidential data; no confidential information was published and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has urged the university to drop the investigation.)

At launch, Bloat@Brown featured an AI-algorithm that used data scraped from LinkedIn, student publications, and Brown’s website to analyze administrators in three domains: legality (flagging those in DEI-related roles that led to a loss of $510 million in federal funding), redundancy (flagging those in overlapping roles such as multiple full-time staffers dedicated to ad sales for the alumni magazine), and “bullshit jobs”, a term coined by the anthropologist David Graeber to describe those with useless job functions such as executive assistants for “associate vice provosts,” someone titled “Associate Director for Student Success and Senior Data Analyst,” and a “Household Assistant” tending to University President Christina Paxson.

As limited information was available for many employees, the results of this algorithm were not conclusive and employees were contacted for comment via email; those contacted were asked to explain their roles, what tasks they performed in the past week, and how Brown students would be impacted if their position was eliminated. Only 20 employees responded, including Jose Mendoza, an Event Specialist, who simply said to “fuck off.” According to Brian Clark, a university spokesperson flagged for holding a bullshit job, employees were advised not to respond.

But Brown is only the beginning. Since then the database has expanded to include Columbia, Cornell, and Penn — and the movement is only growing. With many schools facing dire funding shortfalls due to Trump’s funding cuts, the question is no longer whether these schools are bloated, but whether they can afford to remain so.