STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

September 29, 2025

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Stanford’s Administrative Costs Per Student Have Gone Up Again and Remain the Highest in the Nation

 

We have updated the tables and charts that have long been posted at our Stanford Concerns webpage to include the most recent numbers (2023) as reported to the National Center for Education Statistics and as then published by How Colleges Spend Money. 

 

According to the updated numbers, Stanford’s administrative costs per student were $48,231 in 2023 (up from $45,235 in 2022) as compared to $7,770 at UCLA, $9,494 at UC Berkeley, $19,283 at Dartmouth, $24,708 at Yale, $27,903 at Chicago, $32,659 at MIT, $33,277 at Caltech, $37,862 at Princeton, and $43,816 at Harvard. 

 

Some key points to keep in mind:

 

• Quoting from the How Colleges Spend Money website, “administrative costs are defined as a function of what institutions report to the [national data base] as ‘institutional support’ expenses, or those for the ‘day-to-day operational support of the institution.’ Institutional support commonly includes costs for executive management, a legal department, fiscal operations, public relations, or a development office.”

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• “Institutional support does not include items like student activities, career services, or financial aid staff (which fall under a separate category of expenses called student services), or parking facilities, housing, or food services (which are reported as auxiliary enterprises).”

 

• The tables and charts posted at our Stanford Concerns webpage show that the administrative costs per student at more than half of the schools listed there actually declined in 2023 as compared to 2022, so the questions arise: Why do Stanford’s administrative costs remain so noticeably higher than comparable schools and why did Stanford’s administrative costs go up and not down as between 2022 and 2023? 

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• The numbers contained in Stanford Facts 2025 and as posted at our Stanford Concerns webpage also show that Stanford still has nearly one staff person for every student and ten staff persons for every member of the faculty. 

  

We have long posted at Section 3 of our Back to Basics at Stanford webpage some proposed actions to bring down these and related costs and, in the process, hopefully simplify and improve the campus experiences of both students and faculty. We appreciate that making changes in any organization, and especially at a university, can be a complex task and requires the support of many constituencies. But we believe this is the year when significant actions need to be taken.

 

Unlike some other commentators around the country, we do not believe a board of trustees should be involved in the academic activities of a college or university (among other things, the longstanding concepts of “shared governance”) unless those activities significantly affect the safety and soundness of the institution. On the other hand, a primary fiduciary obligation of any governing board and its officers is to assure the efficient and cost-effective operations of the entity vis-à-vis its key stakeholders (per former Stanford president Gerhard Casper, “all of us are here for only one reason, to support our faculty and students in their work of teaching, learning and research”). Something for everyone to consider, and especially Stanford’s trustees and senior officers.

 

We welcome your comments here.​

 

Stanford Ranks First in WSJ/College Pulse Rankings for Preparing Graduates for Financial Success

 

Excerpt (link in the original):

 

“Stanford University tops the list of the best U.S. colleges in the latest WSJ/College Pulse rankings.

 

“Unlike other school rankings, this list emphasizes one point: How well did the college prepare students for financial success? More than any other factor, it rewards the boost an institution provides to its graduates’ salaries, beyond an estimate of what they could have expected from attending any college.

 

“Stanford returns to the top of this list for the first time since the 2017 rankings. Ivy League schools also figure prominently, with Yale University, Princeton University and Harvard University finishing third, fourth and fifth, respectively. Two other Ivy League schools -- Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania -- come in at eighth and ninth, respectively....”

 

Full article at WSJ. 

 

How to Think, Not What to Think

 

Excerpts (links in the original):

 

“Across the country, people are questioning the value and role of higher education, and institutions -- particularly the elite ones -- are experiencing a crisis in public trust. On top of that, tech titans are convinced that AI will break higher education, while many observers lament its corrupting influence and ask whether the 'mind-expanding purpose and qualities of a university,' as one historian of education put it recently, are gone forever.

 

“The idea that higher education has outlived its usefulness to society, however, requires taking an astonishingly narrow view of the true purpose of the university. Higher education is not merely the transfer of knowledge. We live in an age of informational opulence; we are awash in readily available data but lacking discernment, communication skills, and empathy.

 

“As a cognitive scientist, I have studied the negative consequences of excessive information. We are in a state of constant information overload, under assault by relentless alerts, updates, and notifications. Research shows that the cognitive burden of lots of information coming at us simultaneously can negatively affect our brains and, ultimately, our performance -- especially when we are not experts in the topics we are bombarded with.

 

“Despite the reforms that our institutions of higher education must embark on to ensure that we are teaching our students how to think -- and not what to think -- a four-year residential-college experience remains one of the most powerful human environments for cultivating human qualities....

 

“The problem isn’t just a lack of dialogue -- it’s rising polarization. As the Dartmouth political scientist Sean Westwood has shown, disparaging those with whom you disagree as the “other” erodes trust and discourages even the attempt at conversation or engaging across the aisle. That might sound abstract, but in the age of AI, this siloing has tangible consequences. When students retreat into algorithmically curated feeds -- or AI tools that reflect their own assumptions, and validate even their worst impulses -- the divide deepens. Machines are good at confirming biases, real and perceived, not challenging them. We need people to do this hard work themselves, by leaving their information bubbles and interacting with one another in the flesh, not from behind a keyboard....”

 

Full op-ed by Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock at The Atlantic.

 

Restoring the Academic Social Contract

 

Excerpts:

 

“Higher education in America sits at a paradox: American universities are simultaneously the crown jewel of the American education system and are also enduring their worst crisis in over a century. The crisis itself has multiple dimensions, including the financial challenges of escalating tuition and student debt burdens, the ideological imbalance among faculty and administrators, the institutional embrace of radical dogmas and speech restrictions, the resurgence of anti-Semitism, the deep ties many universities have forged with foreign nations whose interests are often inimical to the United States, and the new punitive measures that the Trump administration and Congress are wielding.

 

“Most fundamentally, the crisis is one of legitimacy and trust. It is now widely acknowledged that a critical mass of the American people has lost confidence in American universities. In last year's Gallup poll, only 36% of Americans expressed high confidence in higher education, compared to 32% who held little or no confidence. The decline is recent and substantial: A decade ago, 57% of Americans voiced trust in higher education...

 

“But academia's political imbalance is not the whole story. The crisis confronting our universities is best understood as both a cause and a symptom of the core problem besetting higher education: the rupturing of its social contract with American society. This fundamental problem lies at the heart of the academy's loss of public trust. It's long past time for universities to meaningfully address it....

 

[Followed by discussion of the historic development of the research university, the involvement of national security, the role of tenure, the punishment and cancelling of leading faculty members who thought differently, the role of foreign students and investments, the decline and renewal of the liberal arts and related matters including specific references to Stanford.]

 

“Many universities have already been taking important steps (albeit often under duress, or mandates from boards or legislatures) -- like eliminating diversity statements, curtailing frivolous general-education classes, and adopting new commitments to free speech and institutional neutrality -- to address their shortcomings. These are needful measures. Yet even with illiberal practices ended and speech protections restored, a major question will remain: What should universities research and teach? ...”

 

[Followed by discussion of the challenges of proposed reforms.]

 

Full op-ed by U Texas Provost William Inboden at National Affairs.

 

Large-Scale Syllabi Study Finds Significant Bias

 

Excerpts (link in the original):

 

“Contentious topics are often taught in college classrooms from a uniformly one-sided perspective, according to newly published research that used the Open Syllabus Project, which hosts over 27 million syllabi, to develop its findings. 

 

“The research focused on three topics -- ‘racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion’ -- to determine how controversial issues are presented.

 

“The research primarily looked at assigned reading materials to conclude that ‘professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies.’

 

“‘Personally, I thought we’d find some imbalance, some activist teaching,’ co-author Jon Shields, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, told The College Fix. ‘I just didn’t expect it to be the norm in the cases we studied. That was genuinely surprising to me.’

 

“The 66-page working paper, ‘Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,’ was also co-authored by Claremont McKenna College Professor of Government Stephanie Muravchik and Scripps College Professor of Philosophy Yuval Avnur....

 

“The paper calls on universities to make reforms through curricular assessments and the formation of faculty groups open to teaching scholarly disagreements. 

 

“Moreover, it suggests universities could incentivize change through course development grants or additional hiring lines for programs that show a commitment to a classically liberal education....”

 

Full article at College Fix, and a copy of the working paper can be downloaded here. See also "Make Syllabi Public"

by Emory undergraduate Alyza Harris at Minding the Campus.

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

Why Columbia Needs Free Speech 101

Full op-ed by Columbia alum Timothy Tracy at Columbia Spectator.

 

When Academics Want to Bring Down the Academy, a Princeton Example

Full op-ed at Princetonians for Free Speech; see also “Princetonians for Free Speech Defends Free Speech for All” at Daily Princetonian.

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Everyone’s a Free-Speech Hypocrite

Full op-ed by Stanford alum and CEO of FIRE Greg Lukianoff at NY Times. 

 

Colleges Once Taught Truth and Character; Now, They’re Unrecognizable

Full op-ed at College Fix.

 

Colleges Must Embed Career Purpose Throughout the Student Journey

Full op-ed at EDU Ledger (formerly Diversity in Higher Education).

 

What To Do About Political Diversity on Campus

Full op-ed at Milken Institute Review.

 

Federally Funded Research Should Reflect America’s Interest

Full op-ed at City Journal.

   

To Save In-Person Lectures, Universities Need to Provide Lessons Worth Showing Up For

Full op-ed by U Melbourne Dr. Hugh Gundlach at The Conversation.

 

Samples of Current Teaching, Research and Other Activities at Stanford 

 

Click on each article for direct access; selections are from Stanford Report and other Stanford websites.

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President Levin Calls on New Students to Create a Culture of Dignity; see also “President Levin in Conversation with Two Student Leaders” (video, 6:17 minutes)

 

Andrew Luck Aims to Recapture Stanford Football’s Glory Days

 

Teaching Robots Realistic Human Tasks

 

Connecting the Gut, Brain and Microbiome to Heal Chronic GI Conditions

 

How a Speech Gene Could Help Treat Huntington’s Disease

 

How Music Supercharges the Brain​​

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