The pointless admin is from services given to the students. Universities (that aren't household brand names like the Ivys) compete on services and facilities. And because most students are young and using other people's money (their parents or their future selves) they will choose schools not because they have the best deal educationally but, because they beautiful grounds, newer, swankier dorms and all of the social clubs and facilities for those like sports fields, etc.
It's a market problem with misaligned incentives and payment structures that has slowly grown worse over the past 40 years. No one actually says no because competition favors those that fatten themselves up with attractive but functionally useless things.
It's more like peacock feathers than malice or greed by administrators.
Yes. It's not unreasonable to cite this as an example of capitalism functioning normally. Competition produces extra money for institutions that are covering their core missions (one hopes) and also virtue signaling that they're super successful and wealthy.
You could call it greed, or simple self-interest: if the administrators have correctly perceived that the insanely wealthy will only make gifts to institutions plated in gold with peacock feathers, then their personal feelings about gold and peacock feathers are irrelevant: they can seduce the wealthy, or not, and they can win the gifts, or not.
Definitely worth study, and definitely an interesting study in perverse incentives. After a point, nothing is valued BUT gold and peacock feathers because they're so inextricably a part of doing business. And it's certainly not aimed at the students. It's aimed at the impossibly wealthy, who wish their gifts to be associated with institutions that are absurdly swanky for the students. What the students want doesn't have anything to do with it, it's purely for donors.
I have at least one good example...at my university there is an Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Sounds pointless on its face, but it's not. It helps students start businesses and obtain patents, for example.
It's a market problem with misaligned incentives and payment structures that has slowly grown worse over the past 40 years. No one actually says no because competition favors those that fatten themselves up with attractive but functionally useless things.
It's more like peacock feathers than malice or greed by administrators.