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Because the job of schools as a business is to teach.
by edgyquant 4y ago
Because the job of schools as a business is to teach.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y ago(With exceptions…) universities aren’t businesses though. Academic idealism does still exist.
- mountainb 4y agoThis is the kind of rigid formalism that obscures accurate analysis of universities as economic entities responding rationally to the infinite money spigot that the government has inserted into them. Just because their formal tax status says one thing does not mean that it's not better to analyze them as businesses just like any other.
- DaiPlusPlus 4y agoRight, right - I just don’t want people to forget that there are fundamental differences - despite their similarities.
- karaterobot 4y agoI was surprised to learn that, at the university I went to, each department paid the administration to use its own classrooms, and if some other party (say, a research lab) needed the room, they could just pay more. It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. They have a lot of revenue sources these days, and tuition is just one of them: research, athletics, and investments to name a few. Even considering only tuition, the quality of teaching is only one reason students pay to go to a brand name school: the logo on the diploma, the social connections, the job pipeline, the location, and so on also count. For me, it was an unintuitive and disheartening realization.
- bitwize 4y ago> It turns out, teaching is not the main business of universities any more. Astronaut 1: You mean, the purpose of the university isn't to teach? Astronaut 2: Never has been. Even in the 90s, when I was going to a second- or third-tier name brand university, the emphasis clearly wasn't on teaching but on snagging grant money and cranking out papers. Even the professors seemed to consider teaching an annoying distraction from their real jobs.