Back when I was a young lad, I remember my teachers saying that everyone’s brain worked a little differently. At the time, I thought this was a way to make the unintelligent students feel a little better about their incompetence.Now, I tend to think of it more in terms of Russell Crow’s schizophrenic character from “A Beautiful Mind.” Some of us see words; others see brilliant patterns (I’m not going to try and make a judgment as to which is better).Maybe I have some form of early-onset madness — most people would probably affirm this — but I was definitely having a John Nash moment while I read Saturday’s New York Times.The front page of the business section presented a story on the ballooning teenage-unemployment rate and another covering the rising cost of college. Like a dazzling spark of lighting, the solution to both problems struck me.Teenage unemployment is at an all-time high of 25.5 percent and the salaries of administrators, who in many cases vastly outnumber the teaching and research faculty, are burdening college campuses (not to discount the other problems, of course).The logical solution is to replace the overpaid and redundant administrators (at least at Chapel Hill, and probably here as well) with college students who are willing to perform those jobs at a fraction of the cost. This would lower the University’s costs and reduce the financial burden on students (through employment and lower tuition costs).Our campus is brimming with a gigantic pool of out-of-work talent. Why not use that resource to its fullest advantage?This campus offers just about every major imaginable — I refuse to be convinced that it doesn’t have qualified workers for almost every possible non-teaching position.I don’t want to start sounding like a utopian socialist (the words burned my lips as I uttered them), but can you imagine that commune.Graduate students are advising undergrads on their classes; finance majors practice their skills by handling the University’s assets (under faculty supervision); turf management students learn on this massive campus instead of in a classroom; engineers and design students spend their classes designing the campus of the future instead of working with hypothetical models.This sort of concept would transcend a bastardly utopia; we could create real learning and send students forth with some semblance of practical knowledge to exert on real-life situations.All the while, newly redundant administrative positions would wither away.It’s not to say that some administrators on this campus don’t serve vital missions. Some administrators enable and create learning moments in a way that a student never could.The problem, though, lies in the fact that the University is under siege by a vicious economy. It may be loosening its death hold, but it’s certainly still in our midst (and most likely will be for quite some time).The American university system requires revolutionary changes, and they need to happen sooner rather than later. A student upheaval may be a little extreme — we’re not necessarily going for shock and awe here. But the system must change.The article by Ron Lieber in Saturday’s New York Times proposed cutting departments or majors (which would in turn slash administrators — kudos to the College of Design), increasing faculty productivity and offering a three-year format.It’s not to say that any of these are necessarily THE FIX. But this is the sort of outside the box thinking that N.C. State and other universities across the country will need if they expect to remain the envy of the world.We all need to work, students, faculty and staff alike, to find real solutions to the problems we’re facing — otherwise we’ll be losing our minds and universities.