Is a Focus on Academics the Answer?

How about this for an idea - emphasize academic quality by hiring more full time faculty and shrinking administration? That is what Iowa State University has done, apparently successfully:

After all, it turns out that focusing on academics helps student retention more than climbing walls, anyway. That’s the good news out of Iowa State University, which, according to the report by the Delta Costs Project at the American Institutes for Research, is the only—only—institution of higher learning in the entire country to spend the last eight years hiring full-time faculty and shrinking its administration. ISU President Steven Leath explained to the Des Moines Register that ISU wanted to "run a very lean operation and put as much into direct support of students and faculty” as possible.... 

Here is the whole story in Slate.