The Paperless Paradox of Dartmouth

Each fiscal year, Dartmouth College, like all tax-exempt organizations in the Unit­ed States, files Form 990 with the Internal Revenue Service. While often viewed as a mere compliance requirement, this document offers the public its most detailed financial win­dow into the institution’s oper­ations, listing everything from executive compensation to contractor fees. A longitudinal analysis of these filings from 2004 to the present reveals a persistent trend in the Col­lege’s cost structure: despite the widespread adoption of digital technologies designed to in­crease operational efficiency, the administrative overhead at Dartmouth has not decreased. In fact, the data suggest that the efficiencies promised by the in­ternet era have been absorbed by an expanding bureaucracy rather than passed on as sav­ings to students.

To understand the scale of the missed opportunity, we must look back to 2004. This was an era before the ubiqui­tous adoption of cloud comput­ing, when “The Facebook” was a novelty and the iPhone did not exist. Administrative work was physical. It lived in filing cabinets, traveled through in­teroffice mail, and required a constant churning of paper. The 2004 Form 990 reflects this analog reality vividly: that year, the College spent $13.4 million on “printing and publications.” Adjusted for inflation, that is roughly $22.8 million in 2025 dollars. It was a time when a small army of administrators was arguably necessary to man­ually process the sheer volume of paper that kept the institu­tion running.

Then came the digital rev­olution. The promise of the internet age was simple: effi­ciency. Software would replace paper, algorithms would re­place manual sorting, and the cost of administration would plummet. Dartmouth em­braced this transition whole­heartedly. The College now spends $21 million annually on “information technology” fees alone. We have automated pay­roll, digitized admissions, and moved everything from course registration to room booking online, eliminating the need for human intervention in all of these processes. By all econom­ic logic, this massive capital in­vestment in technology should have decimated the need for administrative labor.

Yet, the bureaucracy has not gone anywhere.

As of 2024, Dartmouth em­ploys 3,555 staff members alongside just 1,052 faculty—a ratio that has remained stub­bornly unchanged since 2004, when we employed 922 faculty and 3342 staff members. We have digitized and elim­inated the workflow, but we kept the workers. The result is a bloated administrative state that has absorbed the produc­tivity gains of the internet age rather than passing them on to students.

The financial toll of this stagnation is astronomical. In 2024, the College spent $663 million on wages. But the true cost of administration is even higher, hidden in a line item on the 990 innocuous labeled “Fees for services.” This cate­gory, often a hiding place for shadow employees contracted as external consultants, totaled $131 million. When you combine the wage bill with these outsourced ser­vice fees, the grand total for human capital at Dartmouth hits $794 million. To put that into perspective, with a total enrollment of 6,938 under­graduate and graduate stu­dents, the College is spending north of $110,000 per student just on personnel.

This is the scandalous op­portunity cost of the bloated administration. If Dartmouth had simply kept pace with the general productivity trends seen in market-based admin­istrative roles — using tech­nology to do more with fewer administrators — the financial picture of the College would be unrecognizable. Consider the alternative: The $794 million we current­ly spend on this workforce is enough to fund a revolution in access. The total tuition rev­enue for the entire college is roughly $500 million. If our ad­ministrative costs had tracked with productivity, we could neraly cancel tuition for every single student and still break even. Alternatively, we could have taken the $265 million we currently spend on finan­cial aid and increased it sev­eral-fold, effectively making a Dartmouth education free for all but the wealthiest families.

Instead, that money feeds a machine that runs no faster than it did twenty years ago. We have traded the $13 mil­lion printing budget of 2004 for a $21 million IT budget in 2024, but we kept the admin­istrators who used to push the paper.

One can only wonder at the Dartmouth we would have to­day had administrative costs actually decreased with the productivity explosion ush­ered in by the software age. It would be a place where re­sources were poured into the classroom rather than the cu­bicle, where tuition was a frac­tion of its current cost, and where the endowment served the students rather than sus­taining the staff. The Form 990 tells us that future was possi­ble; it also tells us exactly how we squandered it.