The University of California, Berkeley, introduced Dania Matos, the school’s new vice chancellor of equity and inclusion, in July.

Matos, who goes by the pronouns she/her/ella — naturally, because she is a woman and those are pronouns that identify women in English and Spanish — stated that she/her/ella wants the university to be “a place where people feel that their humanity is affirmed and that they develop as transformative practitioners — a place that they’re proud to be a part of.”

To pay tuition ranging from $57,604 to $181,020 over four years, one would presumably have to be proud of it. But speaking of tuition, it is bureaucratic positions such as Matos’s that result in people paying such bloated tuition prices.

Christopher Rufo pointed out recently that this diversity bureaucrat's salary is $325,000 per year — good work if you can get it. The most natural question is what she does to justify such a grotesque salary. She epitomizes why colleges are to blame for high tuition.

“Honoring the ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging and justice is about perpetuating beauty in the center of injustice,” Matos said in an interview with Berkeley News. “To do that we must confront our enduring legacy of slavery and the structural inequities that founded this nation with actionable solutions that lead to transformative change.”

Fortunately, slavery ended about 160 years ago, but that won't stop people such as Matos from making a pretty good living keeping it as alive as possible. Indeed, doesn't her $325,000 salary and all of the waste that it implies throughout the University of California system contribute to structural inequities? Young people start off life at a financial disadvantage precisely because they have to pay for the ludicrous salaries of silly and completely unnecessary bureaucratic positions such as “vice chancellor of equity and inclusion.”

Since 1978, college tuition has increased a staggering 1,375% — eight times faster than wages, according to Forbes. High-paying and mostly useless bureaucratic jobs are partly to blame. And while it is fashionable to demand student loan forgiveness from the government, the main culprits are the colleges themselves. Schools are dishing out cushy, six-figure salaries for jobs that at best contribute nothing and at worst brainwash students or implement toxic ideologies such as critical race theory.

Furthermore, considering the fact that a significant number of graduates ends up in occupations they most likely could have obtained without a degree, it can be legitimately argued that colleges are expensive diploma mills, more concerned about keeping their resident grifters fat and happy than they are about preparing students for the real world. This leads to a negative return on investment.

Congress should investigate the causes behind tuition inflation, and it should start with the ballooning salaries of useless positions such as that of Matos. The institutions formerly centered on the pursuit of knowledge may be frequent critics of capitalism, but they know better than anyone else how to milk the system.