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I've tried to estimate this, unsuccessfully. A dean makes somewhere in the neighborhood of $75,000-150,000, all dependent on whether he/she is the full dean or an assistant. In a dean's office with, say, three assistants (as we have in Arts and Sciences), you will likely have at least five secretaries/"administrative assistants," each at $30-60,000 a year, again depending on experience, age, and so on.

So say you have, on average, four deans at $80,000, plus five assistants ad $45,000, then you've got half a mill before you even look at benefits (add 30%, so $800,000) or facilities. This is the hard part: they need offices, phones, fax machines, comuters, and so on. Easily the costs of this exceed $300,000 a year. So I'm betting that you are in the neighborhood of $1.5 mil. for just one college's deans. Multiply that by business, engineering, law, and you are looking at an addition to the budget of perhaps $5 million per year. We have 5,0000 or so freshmen every year, so if I"m doing the math right, this is about $1000 per fresh per year?

Now talk about recruitment and student aid: recruitment is top-heavy in travel and staff, so you are easily topping $1,000 per student per year just to convince people to come to your school. Student aid? probably much more, because of all the "paper pushers" who get medical and retirement.

I'd guess that our tuition, which is $20,000, could be slashed easily by 1/3 by reducing deans and eliminating most student aid.

eliminating most student aid

To their credit, elite colleges (the Ivy League and many others) do make sure that anyone who is academically deserving to attend are able to attend. I would hate to think that an academically deserving student were not able to go to such a college. So I would hope there were still scholarships based on academic merit if financial aid were somehow done away with.