This connects to something I had been thinking about. I had visited my alma mater (State University of New York at Stony Brook) last year and the overall impres

This connects to something I had been thinking about. I had visited my alma mater (State University of New York at Stony Brook) last year and the overall impression is: it is so much nicer than when I graduated in '03 which I heard was much nicer than it was ever before. My idea is this - a hundred years ago, college was a rare thing that a small subset of population (intellectuals, driven to expand their minds) strove to achieved. They did not "mind" the poverty of the experiences because to them the education was the goal. Over time, as college education became "something everyone gets" - the percentage of true scholars became a minuscule part of the student body. However, the student body itself became much larger. As any business, the way a college serves a scholar vs how it serves an average person is different. Because an average person cares not for expanding their mind, but they might very well pick a campus that looked brighter, dorms that looked nicer, etc, colleges obviously invested in those things. I had never seen anything like the dorm in this article, but the idea doesn't shock me as a representation of the movement of a college student from scholar to a consumer.