David Graeber looks at the proliferation of bullshit jobs in higher education. Naturally, he focuses his attention on the massive growth of pointless administrative employment.
During the ten years I spent applying in vain for full-time jobs in philosophy departments, I routinely encountered people with Ph.D.s who either had settled for administrative jobs because they couldn't find proper academic positions or who hadn't even bothered to look for academic jobs but instead had gone straight into administration after finishing graduate school. But I never met a single person who permanently gave up an academic career in order to become an administrator.