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Large alumni donations can and often do increase the cost of education of all the other students. They frequently lead to large capital investments that then ha
by ahi 3y ago
Large alumni donations can and often do increase the cost of education of all the other students. They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs. I used to work for one of the wealthiest universities with 100s of millions in capital improvements annually that couldn't provide functional HVAC and a fresh coat of paint to the buildings it had.
- 1234letshaveatw 3y agoWhat about smaller, recurring donations? Does that increase the cost?
- evancox100 3y agoProbably not, because they don’t come with the string attached that “you must build a new building and name it after me to receive this donation”.
- sangnoir 3y ago"..and the building (a dorm) must not have any windows"[1] 1. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/nightmare-of-the-windowless-dorm-room https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/22/nightmare-of-t...
- ghaff 3y agoYeah. Even if a modest donation is earmarked to, say, the athletic department, the school has a lot of flexibility to move unrestricted money from one pocket to the other. For significant even if not huge donations though, schools really would like unrestricted gifts in general.
- ticviking 3y agoSeems simple enough to get someone that vain to cough up an annuity to pay for maintenance and some admins for that building, “we’d hate for your building to wind up like poor Jefferson Hall, we can’t even afford to pressure wash it every 5 years.”
- jstarfish 3y agoYeah. Stadiums and landmark buildings don't work this way, so why universities diverge is beyond me. Whoever pays for upkeep should get the naming rights.
- LegitShady 3y agoThis is a little bit ridiculous. There is no connection between alumni donations and capital investments except decisions that university leadership chooses to make. The issue isn't the donations, its the university leadership thats choosing to make large capital expenditures. The donations could go to other things and do go to other things. Any blame you're putting on the donations actually belongs to the people running the university. Blaming unwise spending on donations without mentioning who is making those decisions as the root of the issue is ridiculous.
- RhodesianHunter 3y agoI think you're referring to small incremental donations while their person you're replying to is referring to the giant "you must name a building after me" ones.
- LegitShady 3y agoNaming a building after someone doesn't have a financial aspect. If a gift requires further spending later and the overall benefit is net negative, its up to the university to negotiate terms or turn it down. It's all university leadership failing to steward their university.
- lazyasciiart 3y agoIt means a new building. And are you saying that if admitting a legacy kid or taking a restricted donation is net negative they shouldn’t do it? They just need to know in advance if the future donations from the family will be worth it? How simple!
- LegitShady 3y agoAgain if a gift will create a big long term financial obligation that will end up making it a net negative, it is obviously the role of leadership to choose whether to implement it or not. Taking into account fictional future donations and communicating with donator and explaining the issue is called negotiation. Being convinced to make bad financial decisions in fear of losing a donator is again, a failure of leadership. If someone offers you $10 if you spend $100 later you're better off not taking it, even if you could have bought something with that $10. That basic financial stewardship is the role of university leadership to deal with. They failed.
- darth_avocado 3y agoThat’s because the money goes to everything except education. The “admin” is a curse to everything it gets involved with. I went to a public university and I remember our CS classes over subscribed because the UnI wouldn’t fund two additional TAs, meanwhile our Chancellor got a 300k fence to prevent protesters from getting close to his university funded house protesting “his mismanagement of funds and corruption”.
- darth_aardvark 3y agoGo bears!
- melvinmelih 3y ago> They frequently lead to large capital investments that then have uncovered operational costs The problem is not the high amounts, but most donations can only be used for a specific purpose, so even though the endowments are high, the actual working capital will be a lot lower.
- bell-cot 3y agoPlausible. OTOH, a institution can Just Say No to somebody who insists that their donation be used for something which is un-needed. Or will be an ongoing maintenance money pit. Or that sounds plausible...but the complexity of the strings attached to the cash is not worth having to keep track of in perpetuity.
- ARandumGuy 3y agoMost universities have really messy financials. A lot of money gets spent on projects and programs that don't directly benefit the education students receive, or the research output of the university. Things like sports investments, ballooning administration staff, or flashy construction projects. At the same time, TAs, grad students, adjunct professors, and other staff are frequently underpaid and overworked. There's a lot of room to debate on what colleges should spend their money on, and what they should be providing. But American universities are not strapped for cash, and should be spending more of it on things that directly benefit students and researchers.
- at_a_remove 3y agoI only know a little dirt about the one I worked in and it was pretty bad. The redirection of funds, the word games, and so on ... I would have a better chance of making improvements I desired by making little paper airplanes out of hundred dollar bills and trying to hit areas I though needed help.
- tough 3y ago> I would have a better chance of making improvements I desired by making little paper airplanes out of hundred dollar bills and trying to hit areas I though needed help. It was certainly an amusing visualisation lmao
- ethbr0 3y agoThe US federal government should do the same thing to public universities (US definition) that they did to insurance companies via the ACA -- cap administrative overhead. For every dollar in tuition, >Y% must be spent on qualifying direct educational expenses. E.g. teaching faculty salary, etc. If a college fails to meet that threshold, and spends too much on non-qualifying costs, they are required to rebate the difference to students. If a college refuses to do this, they're no longer eligible for federal educational money (Pell grants or loans, etc). Then let colleges optimize themselves to get under the limit. It caused a lot of scrambling and long-overdue efficiency improvements in another legacy, slow-to-change industry (health insurance).
- enkid 3y agoPeople don't want to donate to fixing something old, they want to donate to making something new, even when fixing something old is way more effective.
- ghaff 3y agoNothing like how private companies like Google operate. /s
- balderdash 3y agoIsn’t that more of an indictment of the administration than of alumni donors?
- r0m4n0 3y agoThis might be partially true but I think the bigger implication is that the donations do lead to overall more investment overall which leads to better universities. This is true with literally donations to anything… I battle our elected officials with similar arguments. We want some safety improvements to our neighborhood roads. We ask them to work on a fix. They say there isn’t money for them. We show them there are federal grants to pay for them. They say they need staff to “manage” the grant money. End of the day, now nothing happens and we still have unsafe roads. You can’t argue no money is better than some money. It takes a little more to see change but you go much further