Annals of obfuscation, volume 4501

This is how you obfuscate, ladies and gentlemen: "There's a good reason for that, says Rex Ramsier, vice provost at the University of Akron, where Gallagher is teaching one class. "Institutions have to be very mindful that if we simply tried to staff every course with full-time faculty that have full benefits, the cost of higher education at any institution would go up 30 to 40 percent potentially," he says. "The public's not going to accept that."

Notice the conflation of instructional labor costs and total costs (including admin salaries, fixed costs (building construction and upkeep, etc), which go to the bottom line of the school, and "cost" to "the public."

There's another equivocation there, between the public qua set of individual consumers (in which case we're talking about "price" to them -- tuition and fees) and public qua set of individual taxpayers. 

Why is this important? A public uni could recoup its increased labor costs by two means. 

One, on the cost side by a) cutting non-instructional labor costs, i.e., admin salaries or b) reducing fixed costs (deferring construction of new buildings, for instance). 

Two, it could also work on its revenue side by getting more tax support (I know, I know, but still) which would mitigate the need for increased tuition and fees, i.e, cost to the public qua consumer, that is, "price."

IANAA (I am not an accountant). And I've heard claims that total admin salaries are such a small percentage of instructional labor costs that there's not a lot of money to be recouped there. But I would be happy to get confirmation one way or the other.

Ed Kazarian comments on this last point (see here for some backup to this point):

I think it depends on how you parse 'admin' there, especially if you also recognize that more FT faculty = more people to share service responsibilities and thus less overall need for professional admins, and also probably less need for specialized, dedicated adivisors (who don't serve studnts nearly as well as faculty advisors in many respects), and possibly other things. So you really have to think in terms of admin + at least some student services.