Liberal, Educated “Experts” Run American Colleges into the Ground

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

12/14/12

 

The NYT posted today the sixth and final chapter of an investigation into the rising costs of college. Today the focus is on the financial “geniuses” running American schools who have built fancy dormitories and high-tech facilities, saddling students with paying off the debt from the construction.

 

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As Nathan Harden writes in the most recent issue of the American Interest, instead of looking ahead to the future of education, American universities, including the most elite, have been spending more and more money and going further and further into debt trying to attract a bare handful of new students on whose necks they can hang the heavy bill. These universities are stuck with a business model that isn’t going to work much longer:

 

In 2007 Princeton completed construction on a new $136 million luxury dormitory for its students—all part of an effort to expand its undergraduate enrollment. Last year Yale finalized plans to build new residential dormitories at a combined cost of $600 million. The expansion will increase the size of Yale’s undergraduate population by about 1,000. The project is so expensive that Yale could actually buy a three-bedroom home in New Haven for every new student it is bringing in and still save $100 million. In New York City, Columbia stirred up controversy by seizing entire blocks of Harlem by force of eminent domain for a project with a $6.3 billion price tag. Not to be outdone, Columbia’s downtown neighbor, NYU, announced plans to buy up six million square feet of debt-leveraged space in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the world, at an estimated cost of $6 billion. The University of Pennsylvania has for years been expanding all over West Philadelphia like an amoeba gone real-estate insane. What these universities are doing is pure folly, akin to building a compact disc factory in the late 1990s. They are investing in a model that is on its way to obsolescence. If these universities understood the changes that lie ahead, they would be selling off real estate, not buying it—unless they prefer being landlords to being educators.

 

All the brilliant financial geniuses managing these colleges are among the most liberal group in the country, the educated experts who are sure they know better how to run everything else in the country—the ignorant masses should just get out of their way and trust in their wisdom.

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