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My reading this week was, as always, nothing if not eclectic. It covered excess instructional capacity in higher education, why college versus apprenticeships may be the wrong debate, and what the latest EdTech dealmaking tells us about where investors still see opportunity.

Let's start with higher education's remarkable ability to add things.

A new report from EY-Parthenon and Lumina looks at a somewhat different version of higher education bloat. We hear endlessly about administrative bloat and claims that institutions have been adding administrators while neglecting the faculty. Their analysis suggests another possibility worth paying attention to: academic program proliferation.

To measure instructional capacity, the researchers identify each institution’s highest student-to-faculty ratio achieved at any point between FY06 and FY25. They then multiply that ratio by the institution's current instructional workforce to estimate how many students it could theoretically serve. “Utilization” is simply current FTE enrollment divided by that estimated capacity.

Using that measure, they find an interesting divergence. Enrollment declined 3.2% between FY15 and FY25, while estimated instructional capacity increased 2.3%. As a result, system-wide utilization fell from 82% to 78%.

I have some problems with that calculation. Most importantly, it treats an institution's highest historical student-to-faculty ratio as evidence of how many students it could serve today. But perhaps an institution deliberately lowered that ratio to improve teaching and student success. More fundamentally, the measure assumes a degree of fungibility in instructional capacity that doesn't exist. An institution might appear to have excess instructional capacity overall while simultaneously struggling to find enough nursing or computer science faculty. Faculty expertise doesn't simply move to wherever student demand happens to be, and tenure and other employment arrangements make instructional capacity relatively fixed.