"The one thing you are forgetting,,," Nope, you don't need an army of Deans making 150,000k to make business decision, that is what a President of a school is supposed to do. He is not just a figure head. He is like the CEO aka The Decider. That is HIS JOB. And he is supposed to be knowledgeable about schools, business and accreditation. Besides, the accreditation The Art Institutes gets are a sham anyways. Its not the same as REAL non-profit colleges which is why most classes do not transfer.
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The one thing you are forgetting is even though EDMC is for-profit, unlike other regular business models, there are many times where what may be perceived as a regular business decision at a non-educational company is not treated as such at EDMC. Many times those types of decisions needs to be approved by both state and federal accrediting bodies and departments of education before they can be implemented.
Do they really still have Deans? That is pretty old school thinking. Right up there with tenure.
It is really simple when you look at how other profitable business work. In my filed, everyone working on a project has billable hours. The more you work, the more a company makes. Everyone else like managers, job captains, directors, non-billable, company looses money. Smart companies eliminate this down to a skeleton crew. In fact some of the more progressive companies dont even have HR departments anymore they outsource. Turns out, the more HR staff you have, the more HR problems you have, which costs more money. Who would have thought. The same with middle management. They need to look busy, so the more you have the more problems the "solve" the more money out of your pocket.
The Ai dean in Pittsburgh already lives in Atlanta. I'd rather faculty than deans. Let's face it - most directors are pretty useless too.
I worked in for-profit for six years, was supervised by nine different deans, and only two of them were really worth anything. The rest were just visionless whipping-boys for campus retention. My years at EDMC proved to me that deans were the least important, and certainly least respected, middle managers by the company. Certainly more time and effort was spent on developing Directors of Admissions into enrollment machines and teaching Directors of Career Services to cook the placement numbers. BMC... looking at you.
Gee, it's about time. It really is just a figurehead middle management job drain on profit. All the ones I met basically did nothing. Not working at the bottom doing the actual work like teaching, not at the top making important decision. Just bossing minions around then going back to their office to bloviate about their importance. If I were a middle aged slacker looking for a low effort high paying middle management job, EDMC is the place to be. Now if they are really smart, they will go regional, then once everyone is used to that, by by regional hello profits.