This depends a lot on the school. A research university is going to have a lot of people that students never meet: accountants and lawyers to ensure compliance with federal regulation on grants, for example. The phrase "administrator" also gets thrown around a lot in these discussions without much attention to more nuanced differences, i.e., a VP or vice provost is a very different thing than staff who are not paid all that much. And some people classified as staff do teach -- boundaries aren't always that sharp.

This is not to say university bureaucracies are not bloated, but the bloat is multi-faceted and often grows in different directions for very different reasons.