Lawmaker claimed WA college has 4 admins per student. What do the numbers show?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Lawmaker misstated data: he flipped the staff/student ratio; it's ~4 students per staff.
- Office of Program Research FY24 table showed 2,194 FTE students, 551 budgeted FTE staff.
- College cites campus size, student needs, staff/manager distinctions to explain staffing.
Tech titan Elon Musk wrote in a Dec. 18 X post that the Ivy League institution Brown University employs one administrator for every two pupils. To that, Washington state Rep. Travis Couture replied, “Evergreen State College in WA employs 4 administrators for every 1 student!”
The Allyn Republican repeated the claim during a Dec. 24 radio report from the Washington State House Republicans.
Turns out, that assertion was untrue.
McClatchy reached out to Couture’s office to ask for the data he cited and received a table showing the number of students per budgeted staff for regional higher education institutions and community and technical colleges for fiscal year 2024. The table featured enrollment and employee numbers for four schools, including Evergreen, and the community/technical college system, as well as student-per-budgeted-staff ratios.
In a mid-January interview, Couture said the data came from the nonpartisan Office of Program Research, which gives policy, fiscal and legal services to the House of Representatives and individual House lawmakers.
The Evergreen State College counted 3.98 students per budgeted staff, according to the fiscal 2024 data: 2,194 full-time equivalent (FTE) enrollments versus 551 total budgeted FTE employees.
In other words, the 4-to-1 ratio cited by Couture should have been flipped: four students for every one budgeted staff.
After identifying the numbers-reversal, McClatchy reached back out to Couture’s office for a response. In a Feb. 2 emailed statement, the lawmaker said that the ratio’s orientation doesn’t alter the “underlying fact that Evergreen’s staffing levels are extraordinarily high by any public college standard.”
“Whether you express it as staff-to-students or students-to-staff, the numbers point to the same conclusion,” Couture added. “Evergreen’s staffing density is extreme, and that’s what the data shows regardless of how the fraction is written.”
By comparison, the table from Couture’s office indicates that the community/technical college system has a 6.52 student-to-staff ratio.
Couture isn’t the first Republican lawmaker to take aim at Evergreen. Last year, Senate Minority Leader John Braun of Centralia sponsored a bill that would have abolished Olympia’s public liberal arts college and transformed it into a health sciences branch campus of the University of Washington.
Couture thinks it’s essential to critically examine such ratios to ensure wise use of taxpayer money, particularly as the state faces a multi-billion-dollar deficit.
When it comes to Evergreen’s staffing numbers, many full-time employees aren’t considered administrators.
Nick Ocheltree, Evergreen’s director of marketing and content strategy, offered context about the school’s student-to-staff ratio in an email. He said that the public-college campus stretches across more than 1,000 acres tended to by grounds staff and facilities professionals, also highlighting a distinction between those positions and central administrative leadership roles.
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System numbers provided by Ocheltree show that in 2024, of its more than 550 FTE staff, the college counted 67 management-level FTE. From 2020 to 2025, the management count increased 6% while student enrollment jumped 15%, per the data.
The Olympian previously reported that the school’s student headcount had grown to 2,667 as of last fall.
Evergreen also serves students with a broad spectrum of needs, both in terms of support and academics, Ocheltree said. About 1 in 5 of its students in recent years have reported having a disability, and helping to accommodate them is a key responsibility for the college that also informs its staffing structure, he added.
“Like all public institutions,” Ocheltree said, “Evergreen regularly reviews its management structures and operational processes to ensure responsible stewardship of state resources while staying focused on delivering high-quality, accessible public higher education.”
This story was originally published February 18, 2026 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Lawmaker claimed WA college has 4 admins per student. What do the numbers show?."
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