So declared an administrator at Penn State late last year in a private meeting, explaining his view of the real purpose of Pennsylvania’s flagship land-grant university. This was his rather tenuous way of defending the lack of cost controls on tuition and fees.

What has surprised me over the years at Penn State is not so much the amount of institutional waste that exists at an ostensibly non-profit enterprise, but how frank so much of the school’s leadership is in admitting the failure of the institution to mind its founding mission: to provide an liberal and practical education to the working class sons and daughters of the Commonwealth.

The university’s annual budget stands at more than $3.4 billion. Ten years ago, it was barely $2 billion. There are other costs, too, like the interest on the nearly $1 billion worth of debt that the university has accrued over the years, largely as a result of its unending building binge.

And while the research-minded administrator quoted above is wrong about the school’s core mission today, time looks to be on his side. According to a recent policy report by the Commonwealth Foundation, a sizable 30 percent of Penn State’s operating budget in 2006 was devoted to research expenditures.

Then factor in the costs of agricultural outreach programs, and suddenly we find out that little more than half of the entire budget  is actually going toward educating the undergraduate. And Penn State’s not even the worst offender: University of Pittsburgh, another state-related college spent 38 percent of its budget on research in 2006.

Now, none of this would be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that colleges like Penn State and Pitt still market themselves as institutions mainly concerned with providing a rich education of both depth and breadth to young men and women at an affordable, worthwhile price.

The problem with higher education is not necessarily its indulgence on research and outreach, but fundamentally in its application of market models where they don’t belong and the absence of those models where they do belong.

Market models should not be used as an excuse to limit the ranks of tenured faculty in favor of cheaper, more interchangeable grad students. Market models should, though, be applied to departments and programs ancillary to classroom education.

Even as tenured faculty have diminished to only 35 percent of the teaching corps in higher education, schools like Penn State spend tens of millions each year on programs that not only have no relation to its mission, but fail even by their own metrics for success.

Condoms give-aways dominate student health center budgets as sexually transmitted diseases burgeon. Equity departments receive more funding to “manage” diversity, effectively asserting that the undergrad is either too racist or too helpless to peacefully exist or make friends on his own.

Vital to a modern university? Let’s see the administrator try to sell that idea to any reasonable Pennsylvanian, who has watched tuition at four-year public colleges increase more than 121 percent over the past two decades while per capita income has increased by a comparably modest 33 percent.

Average state tuition at a four-year public college in Pennsylvania was $9,672 for the 2007-08 academic year. That’s more than Ohio, Delaware, Maryland or West Virginia. It’s nearly $4,500 more than the average state tuition for New Yorkers. Pennsylvania is the fourth most expensive state in the nation if you’re looking to attend a four-year public college, and Penn State in particular is the costliest land-grant university the nation.

The economics just don’t support the concept of the modern resort-style college experience that focuses more on the quantity of its services rather than the quality of its educators and graduates. College administrators are probably right in thinking their institutions are more or less recession-proof, but responsible governance of a public good like higher education should be about more than market demand.

Gov. Ed Rendell put it best in recent remarks to student leaders at Penn State: “If there’s ever been a moral imperative of controlling tuition, it’s now.”

Amen.

At most colleges and universities, the extracurricular experience is as strictly regulated (if not more so) than in-class academic time.

If the primary function of the university is academic scholarship, it strikes one as rather odd, indeed, almost perverse, that the life of the student outside of the classroom is as heavily regulated as it is on the modern campus.

The “other half” of a college education, that half that took place outside of the classroom that John Henry Cardinal Newman described as so vital, can only happen organically and naturally among students in peer-to-peer settings.

On today’s campus, though, students are trained in the thinking that they can only engage and enliven themselves through participation in clubs, events and programming that the office of student life prescribes.

The concept of the student leader has devolved from undergrads as definers of societal standards and college customs to mere union leaders, bargaining with college staffers for better goods and services.

In other words, it’s through the commonly accepted avenues of power in modern academia that administrators wield their authority to wade into even the most minor aspects of campus life.

This involvement impacts everything from student traditions they might deem harmful to the college’s public image to academic policies proscribed for their lack of perceived inclusiveness for all viewpoints.

As a result of this redefining of student leadership and the loss of the idea of a cohesive student body, the university has been castrated, its meaning debauched to education merely for one’s first job rather than for a lifetime of learning.

I should caution: administrators are not entirely to blame for our predicament. In the 1960s, many of the student instigators in the campus riots of that era demanded academic change, changes to residential life, and new models for student power.

In seeking power over fundamental college standards like academics, they quite often demanded the very kind of centralization that played right into the hands of administrative centralizers.

I believe that most young people, and many of their parents, would prefer the classical model of the university as a beacon of intellectual pluralism and vibrant student experience over the modern soulless the university, which is dominated by ideological purity and centrally managed and operated activities.

A place where the life of the university is treated as much as an exercise in consumer services as it is a place for endless power grabs by student leaders and control by administration is not a formula for a healthy campus.

Student leaders should be reminded of alternatives to the “consumer union” model of leadership. Student leaders can have a substantive, long-term impact on campus by establishing a system of power beyond the reach or sanction of the bureaucracy.

College students founded the fraternity and sorority systems before administrators and student life offices were ever conceived. They sang songs, formed reading societies and sporting groups long before the modern college trained them to first ask, “May I?”

The legal liability revolution may have sparked the need for administrators to strictly regulate what students are permitted to do on campus; today, the undergrad can recreate the “other half” of his education outside of the classroom, off the campus.

A new concept of student empowerment beckons, of student leaders who merit their title by virtue of their relationships to and bonds with their peers and friends, rather than by their proximity to committees endlessly tweak rules and regulations.

This can be accomplished by connecting with local townspeople, businessmen and philanthropists who are interested in underwriting new student ideas and initiatives and by networking with Rotarians and Kiwanians to enrich communities.

In this way, the student entrepreneurs, politicians, poets, researchers, authors, and all those with ambition beyond the imagination of the ordinary man can discover that simple friendship is the kindling that fuels the fire of a life well lived, of men and women well liked, and of a well remembered and beloved college experience.

Thomas A. Shakely is president of The Other Half, a nonprofit for renewal in higher education. He can be reached at tom@tomshakely.com.