Why do schools add, add, add?

• Baumol’s Cost Disease. (It’s easier to raise tuition than to control costs.)

• Politics. (It’s easier to say yes than to cause conflict.)

• Sacred Cows. (It’s easier to keep adding things to the proverbial sled than it is to eliminate things that are underused.)

In “Why Complexity Sells,” Morgan Housel offers four additional reasons:

1. “Simplicity feels like an easy walk. Complexity feels like mental CrossFit.”

2. “Length is often the only thing that can signal effort and thoughtfulness.”

3. “Things you don’t understand create a mystique around people who do.”

4. “Complexity gives a comforting impression of control, while simplicity is hard to distinguish from cluelessness.”

(If Housel’s four reasons don’t explain the typical course syllabus, then I don’t know what does.)

Contrast these quirks of human psychology with the elegance of evolution:

“The path from ‘many things’ to ‘a few really useful things’ is one of evolution’s signatures.

Samuel Williston was a 19th-century paleontologist who first noticed a historic trend in the reduction of body parts. Primitive animals often had many duplicate body parts, then evolution reduces the number but increases their usefulness. ‘The course of evolution has been to reduce the number of parts and to adapt those which remain more closely with their special uses, either by increase in size or by modifications of their shape and structure, Williston wrote in 1914.’”

Whether it’s an individual course you are teaching, or an entire school you are running, what proverbial body parts might you get rid of so that you can increase the usefulness of the ones that remain?

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