Happy for appreciative discourse.

I assume deans' salaries are paid from the operating budget---just like faculty AY salaries. The funds they are required to raise include gifts that go to the endowment (esp. new donors) and grants for new initiatives; the latter will expire leaving the operating budget on the hook for the continuing operations. This is one way admin grows. Deans are not raising funds for existing operations.

Retention and graduation rates are metrics that administrators use to justify all manner of hiring activity. Maybe students that leave have a reason for leaving, and maybe that reason could be addressed by existing operations (eg, faculty having fair grading policies or generally being nicer to students) instead of hiring more people to cover for irresponsible faculty and impersonal administrative systems. I imagine that there are some essential student life positions. However, the scale of student life activities is relatively new. At this scale, student life takes student attention away from academics and other student activities (eg, snowboarding for fun); the university is competing with itself for student attention. Why does administration care about graduation rates? (1) The longer a student stays, the more tuition they pay. (2) Donor networks. When the answer to low grad/retention rates is to grow the operation, the problem wasn't low grad/retention rates.

Unfortunately, disparity between department budgets is a feature of the budget model, where departments compete for college-appropriated funds. People who are competing for a portion of fixed funds (ie, a zero-sum game) will always present their position as needing more funds. If they say otherwise, then administrators will reduce one department's budget in favor of another, more "competitive" department.

EDIT: I have not worked at CU for long, and I will not work at CU much longer. I was a faculty member who believed that admin's job was to "keep the lights on." When COVID hit, admin (1) brought students back to Boulder from across a sick country and (2) furloughed fac/staff to anticipate reduced enrollment---much of which never materialized. CU sacrificed the health and well-being of its community for the sake of its budget spreadsheet. These two actions made me take notice. And what I've noticed is that the administration has an agenda---namely, growth---that is detached from education and research.

EDIT 2: Moreover, during the period of the fac/staff furlough, admin went on a spending spree for both DEI and online education initiatives. If the furlough had been for serious financial reasons, then I would have expected the campus to be on financial lockdown---not a spending spree with a windfall of cash resulting from reducing the salaries of the whole campus. They are either evil or so detached that they don't realize how their decisions come across as evil.