Stanford doesn't need competent admin - in fact, that would detract from the organization's hidden imperatives. While Stanford is nominally a university, it is also a high-class university. This is the school all of America's rich elites send their kids to, because they remember it being the best school to go to when they were kids. And those rich elites are perfectly willing to shower money on a school that does not deserve it in exchange for stupid vanity and ego projects.

To be clear: every university has at least one stupidly rich alumni that bought a vanity building[0]. The thing that makes Stanford unique is that they have an outsize number of stupidly rich alumni, all of whom send their kids there. And this means that everyone else who wants to "network" with these stupidly rich kids needs to go to Stanford. So Stanford admin isn't actually selling an education, they're selling access.

What this does to the actually educational part of the school is sort of what oil does to a fledgling democracy. All organizations are colony organisms that must continue bringing in resources to keep individual cells aligned with the colony. Smart leaders know this and will intentionally diversify their income to reduce business risk. On the other hand, if you don't diversify income - or one particular source of income grows so much it dwarfs everything else - then the organization's interests can no longer persist. They must be set aside to serve the interest of maintaining and exploiting that income. The tail wags the dog.

Who's running Stanford? Whoever's needed to get and keep rich kids on campus so they have access to sell in order to justify their high tuition costs. Remember, education has diminishing returns: a $100,000 degree does not get you 10x as much knowledge as a $10,000 one, and people signing up for schools will figure this out. So everything else is an afterthought - including the actual classes, testing, and certifications that people are ostensibly paying for. Because you aren't going to Stanford purely because the classes are that good.

International students are another source of unusually lucrative revenue. China has loads of middle-class students that go to western universities if they can't pass the extremely strict Gaokao test that you need in order to get into a Chinese uni. American colleges manipulated college rankings to increase their share of foreign students. This is great, until China suddenly can't send kids overseas anymore, and then colleges see revenues fall off a cliff.

Athletic departments themselves have done this to other schools that aren't in the Ivy League. The NCAA was set up with a bunch of very odd rules ostensibly established to prevent professionalization of college sports, but in practice they just perpetuate the exploitation of athletes that are pros in all but name. Any college with a half-decent team can command a lucrative sports fandom, so the NCAA became a billion dollar franchise anyway. As a result, more and more of the budget of an educational institution is dedicated to running a sports team consisting of unpaid pro athletes whose courseload is a bunch of fake Swahili courses[1].

When colleges are treated as businesses, the only people who matter are the administrators that can find new ways to increase revenue. Everything else is an afterthought.

[0] From my personal experience: SUNY Stony Brook has the Charles B. Wang Center, an extremely expensive, over-budget building whose primary utilization is housing an Asian fusion restaurant. The actual conference rooms there were rarely used for classes. Hell, back when I-CON was still on campus, they didn't even use that building.

(If something has somehow changed about the Wang Center since the decade and change I went to that school, let me know.)

[1] I did not make this up. https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/unc-investig...