The founder of the new university that can charge only $10,000 a year and deliver a better education, less overrun with leftist pap, filth, and wasting of everyone's time with the latest French navel gazing exercise...
and mo wrote:
Colleges....in the face of world wide web information availability, may well be anachronisms...captitol cost and investment outweighing the return.
You folks must want to abdicate the sciences and engineering to other nations. Do either of you have any idea what it costs to train a competent scientist to do research at the state of the science in chemistry, physics, or materials science?
For example, a research grade field emission transmission electron microscope, required to study virus structure at atomic resolution or nanoparticle structure at atomic resolution costs approximately $2M (or more, depending on attachments.) Other instrumentation (e.g. a secondary ion mass spectrometer or x-ray photoelectron spectrometer) to study surface composition or a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to study chemical composition have similar price tags. Do you really want students to graduate with a BS or higher degrees without ever having touched this kind of instrumentation? Currently, such instuments are funded by government grants, alumni donations, and tuition.
Not all of the university's money goes to support profs like Ward Churchill... Is there largess without return on investment? Yes. But let's not "throw out the baby with the bath water."