This article has some great food for thought regarding university student success, retention, and attraction. In too many universities the focus has been (primarily) on marketing and recruitment, on the administrative side. I’ve seen many studies showing the relative growth of administration costs compared to teaching costs.
“I offer a simple hypothesis in response: Many of our problems — retention, class attendance, educational success, student happiness and well-being, faculty morale — might be ameliorated by ratcheting down the bureaucratic mechanisms and meetings and hiring an army of good teachers. If we replaced half of our administrative staff with classroom teachers, we might actually get a majority of our classes back to 20 or fewer students per teacher. This would be an environment in which teachers and students actually knew each other.”
http://chronicle.com/article/Clear-the-Way-for-More-Good/234773