Education & Academia / Education Systems / Higher Education

Why Building More Universities Is Ruining Higher Ed

Managing Change at Universities

Peter Mayer, Marc Wilde

You think opening more universities automatically builds a brighter future? Think again. Across the developing world, higher education expanded at a breakneck speed, yet public funding flatlined. The result is not an intellectual renaissance, but an institutional catastrophe where crowded chemistry labs run on dirty kerosene stoves and students never touch real reagents. This breakdown explores Volume 3 of the book Managing Change at Universities, edited by Peter Mayer, Professor of International Economics at Osnabruck University of Applied Sciences, and Marc Wilde, higher education management specialist at the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The book gathers real-world case studies from the International Deans Course, documenting how elite scholars turn into overwhelmed administrators, how promotion systems incentivize useless research, and why mid-level university leadership holds the key to surviving institutional decay. Slide 1: The dangerous illusion. We assumed more university degrees equaled instant economic progress. We were completely wrong. Slide 2: Parabolic enrollment vs flat funding. Sub-Saharan Africa saw student intake jump by massive margins while actual operational budgets froze. Slide 3: Welcome to the dry lab. Overcrowded science departments literally pretend to run experiments because basic glassware and reagents do not exist. Slide 4: The fatal promotion trap. Universities promote their best researchers into deans, expecting top scientists to magically know how to balance multimillion dollar budgets. Slide 5: Weaponized academic freedom. Tenured faculty fight institutional priorities under the banner of autonomy just to protect personal side hustles. Slide 6: The moonlighting professor. When university salaries fall behind living costs, professors juggle five teaching jobs while student theses gather dust for years. Slide 7: Why student evaluations backfire. Anonymous review forms frequently reward effortless grading while punishing female and minority instructors. Slide 8: The executive boot camp. How the International Deans Course forces academic chairs to execute hard-hitting Project Action Plans that actually save failing faculties. Slide 9: The brutal takeaway. Higher education does not fail because of bad teachers. It fails when nobody trains the middle managers running the show.