I think I am appreciating more and more, the reason why college tuitions are sky rocketing.
Richard Vedder, Director of the Center for College Afordability observes that colleges are not only in the education business.... they are in the housing business, the entertainment business; they’re in the lodging business; they’re in the food business. Hell, one university runs a travel agency which ordinary people off the street can use.
Consider Princeton, which recently built a resplendent $136 million student residence with leaded glass windows and a cavernous oak dining hall (paid for in part with a $30 million tax-deductible donation by Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman). The dorm’s cost approached $300,000 per bed.
Meanwhile, university endowments don’t pay taxes on their income. Harvard’s $31 billion endowment, which has been financed by tax-deductible donations, may be America’s largest tax shelter.
Some college officials are also compensated more handsomely than CEOs. Since 2000, New York University has provided $90 million in loans, many of them zero-interest and forgivable, to administrators and faculty to buy houses and summer homes on Fire Island and the Hamptons.
Former Ohio State President Gordon Gee (who resigned in June after making defamatory remarks about Catholics) earned nearly $2 million in compensation last year while living in a 9,630 square-foot Tudor mansion on a 1.3-acre estate. The Columbus Camelot includes $673,000 in art decor and a $532 shower curtain in a guest bathroom. Ohio State also paid roughly $23,000 per month for Mr. Gee’s soirees and half a million for him to travel the country on a private jet. Such taxpayer-funded extravagance has not made its way into Mr. Obama’s speeches.
Colleges have also used the gusher of taxpayer dollars to hire more administrators to manage their bloated bureaucracies and proliferating multicultural programs. The University of California system employs 2,358 administrative staff in just its president’s office.
“Every college today practically has a secretary of state, a vice provost for international studies, a zillion public relations specialists,” Mr. Vedder says. “My university has a sustainability coordinator whose main message, as far as I can tell, is to go out and tell people to buy food grown locally. . . . Why? What’s bad about tomatoes from Pennsylvania as opposed to Ohio?”
And now we have the University of California system renovating a mansion for Janet Napolitano.
RE: Meg Whitman. Was that the “donation” she made so her worthless kid could attend Princeton. Have to look it up, but didn’t he finally get kicked out and arrested on a rape charge??
As a student at Princeton University, the son of California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman—one of the school's most celebrated donors—was accused of sexually assaulting a classmate. Princeton dealt with it quietly and internally, ultimately allowing Harsh to continue his education
He graduated with the class of 2009, three years after his rape accusation—and two years after the inauguration of Whitman College, the residential living complex his billionaire mother donated $30 million to help build. The donation was announced in 2002, the year before Griff matriculated.
After he graduated:
Griff's legal troubles continued even after the rape accusation. Shortly after the Princeton rape incident, Griff was back home in California when he was arrested for breaking a woman's ankle during a brawl at a bar. He was released after his mother posted $25,000 in bail and the charges were eventually dismissed.
Some of this came out during Whitman's campaign, mostly on talk radio. Still, she would have been a better governor than what we're stuck with now!! I doubt she would have seen the efficacy in a high-speed rail from "boon to doggle."