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This does sound like a real problem, but what does taxation or a large endowment have to do with it? There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring t
by amluto 4y ago
This does sound like a real problem, but what does taxation or a large endowment have to do with it? There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit.
The best I can come up with is that universities have enough money and little enough tuition price sensitivity that they aren’t adequately pressured to cut costs.
Alternatively: there is a split between universities and departments. Academic departments have their own budgets (combinations of whatever they can extract from the university, earmarked donations, and grants), and universities have become extremely adept at extracting money from grants. But the departments do most of the useful work! Your amazing math professor doesn’t work for the university per se but is actually part of the mathematics department.
So some of the problem may be a mismatch in where the money is and where it’s needed.
- colpabar 4y ago> There isn’t a group of pointy-haired trustees conspiring to waste as much money as possible for little benefit. How do you know? It seems like they’re “wasting” this money so they can point to the amount that they “had to spend” when it’s time to collect donations, similar to what wikimedia does. To them, the value all these jobs provide is inflating the operating expenses, which means they can ask for more tax-free money.
- amluto 4y agoThis makes no sense to me. If I were ran a university and wanted a good story to tell my donors, I would tell them that I want to spend $X million dollars on hiring professors, improving undergraduate education, offering financial aid, reducing tuition, building genuinely useful buildings, etc. I would also want to optimize the actual bottom line, not the tax-free donation revenue earned for the hell of it. There would be absolutely no need to spend money on useless things just to say I spent it.