Change height of CKEditor (per profile) without using WYSIWYG Module
UPDATE:

The patch in this thread on DO fixes this issue.



Looking at the ckeditor demo on this page it is possible to change the height of the editor with css alone.

The div .cke_contents has an element style setting the height to 300px, however a rule in the stylesheet marked as important would overrule this.

So, if you can add the roles of the user as a classes of say the body, then you could include:

.role1 .cke_contents {
    height: 400px !important;
}
.role2 .cke_contents {
    height: 100px !important;
}


Alternatively there may be a class added by the CKEditor profile type that you could use.