This could just be a case of the profit motive aligning with the good for society as a whole.
New buildings can house new students and academics which is good and also helps bring in more money in future.
New buildings also preserve the status of the university as a top institution - there is some level of competition for students and talented academics and if Harvard fell behind other universities it would be harder to bring in grants. Of course this is a good thing for the university but it's also good for any administrator who wants to preserve their pay.
Many top 100 universities are gleaming with dozens of new buildings:
- Stanford tore down some donated admin buildings across from Schwab GSB that
were not even 10 years old. A good portion of the
med school is being gradually torn down and rebuilt
near the hospital. (Will the roads ever be back to
normal two-way traffic?)
- Davis is littered with new buildings.
- Harvard's 10 year construction schedule and $30,000,000,000.00+ under HMC.
Probably a safer bet. Whether funds begged from donors and liquidated from students are utilized efficiently is another matter.
A lot of misinformation in these comments centers around the fact that many universities constructed new buildings from 2008-2012 as construction costs were low due to the high levels of under and unemployed in the construction sector. This factor combined with poor expected returns to their endowments made it appear wise to make capital investments. Whether this was a good or bad idea won't be realized for many years.
I've never quite understood why so much focus is put on evaluating departments by the newness of their buildings (I've seen quite a lot of universities boast on that subject).
These buildings are replacing elderly buildings/adding capacity so we can serve more students. So the operation/maintenance costs should fall dramatically for the buildings that are being replaced, and new revenue from more students pay for the new buildings maintenance/operations.
This is quite true. For state schools, new buildings may be a "gift" from the political class to show the public their support for higher education. The stupid irony is those buildings typically don't come with operations and maintenance funds. At the same time, state appropriations are decreasing, putting the pinch on O&M and department support. The university (or publicly supported research institute) has a shiny new building in which they can put neither equipment nor people.
I'll take a guess and say easy access to credit for creditless students. Plus universities have big 5 year plans with that money; money allocated before the recession. So most of the capital improvement projects were started when students, parents, and gov't were looser with the purse strings.
And universities somehow never follow the rules of economics. Scales of economy fail to kick in when they should. Large schools get larger and the price per student creeps up, never down. And the building projects get more extravagant and expensive.
At my alma mater you see where the money is going. Old buildings were built like a brick shithouse. Strong and cheap with a fallout shelter. The new ones look like the set designer of MTVs Real World was given the comission. Instead of 2 per room. One student a room for a spacious 4 room suite. Instead of brick and stone we've got glass and steel. This wouldn't be bad if alumni paid for them, but when they are named "New student residence 2008" it means they are waiting for a large donation for a building thats already built and paid for by students.
The idea that real estate speculation being the baseline goal of universities is funny but doubtful.
Instead, consider that survival is almost always one of the main goals of any larger organization. That happens for a variety of personal, individual reasons: job security, reputation halos, personal networks, etc. But in the end, it translates into organizations taking actions simply to survive. And since one of the best ways to survive is to grow, taking actions to grow.
This is true for everything from charities that take care of the poor and sick to for-profit corporations to government agencies. And, of course, universities.
So why does a university spend a ton of money on renovating their football stadium? Simple, it makes alums happier (more donations), it looks better on televised games (enhanced reputation), etc. It helps the university survive.
Unless Harvard was to sell its facilities for someone else to operate, local businesses never could... Not without serious change in local governance. Not close to enough commercial space. You'd have to demolish a bunch of buildings to make larger facilities to handle the load.
This is certainly not true at some universities. For instance, at the University of Michigan dorms have been renovated on an annual cycle (around one building a year) at an expense of millions of dollars for small renovations and tens of millions of dollars for larger ones. These larger upgrades often include fancy dining halls with lots of options, along with well-appointed interiors. Furthermore, the number of new buildings and construction projects (about 10-12 currently) at any given time is insane in my opinion, though some are funded by donors for specific uses so can't be reallocated.
A university incentivized to educate students and do research will do the same because buildings are more suitable for these purposes than parking lots.
On an unrelated note, the new undergraduate business school building at my alma mater cost $55 million.
That's probably one of the most relevant things you could mention. Many schools don't get $55 million a year in tuition. Imagine how affordable education would be if these schools spent more money on research and education than they did on architecture?
True, but that's not the limiting factor in this time frame. From TFA:
"Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that's precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone."
I don't know Waterloo's situation but I know that money for new buildings is largely decoupled from need for capacity and is mainly tied to government make-work projects. I remember during the 2008 "economic action plan" universities got all kinds of buildings. It was entirely because the government was giving free money away to stimulate growth.
UK: Local universities have developed new building syndrome. In some cases a definite enhancement (Birmingham University's new sports centre adds an olympic sized swimming pool and offers community engagement, BCU is moving everything onto one campus as much as possible and financing building by selling land, Aston is upgrading teaching rooms and lab space).
But also some projects not so much clear reason - demolishing functional libraries and replacing them with buildings that have fewer seats &c (although disabled access could have been an issue in one case).
The biggie is large scale speculative development of student residences. That bubble is going to have to burst soon...
Fancy buildings are a marketing tool for schools, even if they're unneeded. Schools would rather raise tuition and compete for ever-wealthier students than refuse a shiny new building.
New buildings can house new students and academics which is good and also helps bring in more money in future.
New buildings also preserve the status of the university as a top institution - there is some level of competition for students and talented academics and if Harvard fell behind other universities it would be harder to bring in grants. Of course this is a good thing for the university but it's also good for any administrator who wants to preserve their pay.
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