Small Liberal Arts Colleges Getting Smaller

But not for administrators. “The most conspicuous change I have seen over my years at Pomona College is that the number of administrators has ballooned,” John E. Seery writes in an essay distributed by the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. “When I arrived in 1990, the catalog named 56 persons as members of the administration, 180 faculty members, and 1,487 students.”

“Cut to 2016. The catalog is no longer printed in hard copy. Everything is on the web, accessed through something called a ‘portal.’ Pomona College now has, by my careful count, 271 administrators. The number of faculty is 186, and the number of students has increased to 1,640.”