this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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Why colleges ask for donations? I am not American.
Greed
Well no, its for scholarships in the US
Scholarships that only exist in the first place because we have privatized higher education, which is privatized because of greed.
Or because its better. Just a thought
I've got about $25,000 reasons why it is not in fact better.
That's it? That was less than one semester for mine
It may not be much in comparison to others, but that doesn't make absolve me of my debt. Practically every other developed nation has this figured out, it's long past time we caught up.
Damn mine is like $5000
It's only better if you think the opportunities from higher-education should only be accessible for those with a wealthy "bank of mom and daddy" or willing to have a heavilly narrowed scope for risk-taking (such as entrepreneurship) because they start their professional lifes already with less assets than liabilities. (Its not by chance that all celebrated US entrepreneurs of this Age are the scions of at least high-middle class or wealthier parents)
If however you mean it in the Economic sense of the US being as wealthy as possible, then it's not better: maximizing the access to opportunities is the best way to get the best people for a job doing that job quite independently of who their parents are, as that delivers the maximum productivity, and that's especially important at the high-value-added professions which are the ones for which higher-education is usually needed - limiting access to higher education and hence high-value-added jobs on the basis of money actual goes against making the US be as wealthy as possible as only a fraction of the most competent people to do those jobs have a chance to get them. In fact the problem in the US is so bad that the country has to import foreigners on H1B visas because it can't even train enough people for some high-value-added jobs.
All this is just the rightwing, purelly economic argument. I haven't even touched "leftie" things such as Equality.
I'm not saying that college shouldn't be accessible to the masses. It is and there are scholarships, state funding and loads to support it. What I'm saying is that we should spend tons of tax dollars on college. The government already spends enough we don't need to blow away more money by paying this exorbitant prices.
Also the cost of tuition varies widely by where you are going.
Well, I agreed that's a more subtle take on the whole thing.
A hard-nosed take aiming purelly for maximization of tax take in this domain, requires finding a balance between the additional revenue that well educated people will bring to the taxman (not just directly but also indirectly as, for example, they enable other jobs to add more value) vs the money spent now by the taxman to educate them. This purelly economic take does bring considerations about "what is the future tax value of different degrees" and requires that pupil selection uses as meritocratic as possible criteria - and access to money is definitelly not and indication of merit for a degree - so that university education delivers the best people for the job at the end hence maximizing wealth production and thus tax revenue.
Clearly higher-education for everybody for free would not be tax-optimal but that doesn't mean that not-universal higher-education with money as the main criteria to filter access to those limited places is better. Certainly the current method in the US of restricted access through ridiculously high fees and a statistically meaningless schollarship mechanism (outside sports schollarships it's minimal and training athletes is seldom justifiable by economics) to pull it a little bit away from the pure monetary filtering criteria, is also far from delivering economically optimal results and hence a higher return.
Somehow other countries manage to have a huge fraction of the population have access to higher education for pretty modest or even no fees whilst still having a higher per-capita income than the US and require importing far fewer, if any, degree-holding immigrants to generate that higher per-capita wealth, so that would indicate that what's done in the US now is not at all optimal.
It's valid to look at higher education as something that consumes resources hence cannot be available with no restrictions whatsoever, but if there is indeed limited access and your objective is the best possible return for the country's economy or even just the taxman, managing the scarcity that comes from the existence of a limit on the provision of it via a pure pricing mechanism won't deliver the best economic return for the country or even the taxman because theirs is a strategic interest that goes far beyond maximizing the revenue of universities, which is the only thing that higher university fees optimize.
There might be an optimal fee point for the taxman and the economy, which is not zero, but exceeding it reduces the future returns for both because it makes increasing numbers of people who are "the best for the job" in those high value added domains requiring such a degree to not take the degree, so less competent people end up doing the job hence less wealth gets produced and taxed.
Because they like having money? Running a university is legitimately very expensive and there's always more to do. I think it's more common with people who went to business school or became pro athletes, etc. They end up with very profitable careers and a fond recollection of their time in college. It's worth it to the university to ask almost everyone just in case, because sometimes they find that one whale alum.
FTFY
Athletics is actually petty profitable, since athletes can't be paid, so the school gets all the money for sponsorships, tickets, merch, etc.
It can actually be a problem for the schools, since athletics isn't allowed to be profitable. They have to spend all the money athletics brings in on athletics, which is why the athletics department ends up with all the fancy new buildings.
What's the point of having an athletic program if you're not using it to subsidize programs that actually matter?
It kinda does do that, just indirectly. Even if the university can't profit directly off of athletics, a successful sports season increases application rates and donations. Basically it boosts the brand recognition and brand identity of the school.
It's still painful to me that the class size at my engineering school basically doubled the year after the university won some basketball championship. I don't want to believe that people, and especially engineers, are that influence-able but the numbers don't lie
So they can up their investment income from $1B to $1.0001B
I looked up the University of Cincinnati's finances once because I never realized they were public. I think UC owns non-liquid non-realestate assets somewhere in the 30billion range. They still ask for donations, despite the fact they could give free education to every student for multiple years.
It's nuts how wealthy some of those universities are. Several could easily provide free education and still turn a profit
I wonder if they use tuition fees mostly for rationing aceess
Most donations are restricted to the purpose of the donation. You'd need to know how much of the endowment is for scholarships. Sometimes schools will have an immense amount of money, but can't actually lower tuition because the money is tied up in other things. If I give money for an endowment that supports future replacement of electron microscopes, that does fuck all for your tuition.
Yeah, people like to have their names on physical things so they pay for more buildings rather than paying for scholarships.
Presuming of course that they absolutely weren't going to replace those microscopes without that endowment. If they were, then that endowment frees up some money elsewhere in the budget. Unless literally every penny they hold has strings attached, then the fungibility of money means they could use general fund money they aren't spending on X because of an endowment on Y instead.
In many, if not most, cases there would never be room in a budget for an electron microscope at your average mid sized or small school. Keep in mind we're talking about a million+ dollar expenditure.
In many cases improvements like a building or an electron microscope absolutely hinge almost entirely on donations, that's why they are so attractive to a donor. They can make real lasting improvements to a college or university that wouldn't otherwise exist.
Even the endowed scholarships that go to assist with tuition are never as big as people think. If you have a $100,000 endowed scholarship. The school is likely only giving $4,500 of that out each year so they can grow the endowment at the same rate they give out money, thereby ensuring future students get more help.
I'll paraphrase a real world example. School X has a $100 million dollar endowment, with $65 million going to endowed scholarships, that's only ~$3 million a year for tuition relief. That same school is looking at a $45 million a year budget. Certainly they could chose to spend down their endowment and give their students 2 years of free school... And then what? Pass on the 3 million a year budget shortfall to future students?
I work in higher Ed, I agree the system is broken, but most schools endowments come no where near being able to give free tuition.
Purelly and entirely because when it comes to money with no strings attached, having X + A money (if A is a positive real number) always beats having only X money, hence why lots of people are pointing out Universities with X in the billions of $ which still ask for donations.
It's pure unadulterated greed, trying to monetise a (not anymore deserved for most in the US) public image of Universities as places that help people have a better future.
For scholarships