On 10/12/2011 3:52 PM, David Shemano wrote: > > I agree that these "for profits" are, on average, scams. But > it is not their "for-profit" status that is the problem. I am > surprised a sophisticated leftist would look at "Joe's > Vocational School" and Harvard and say one is for-profit > because one has shareholders and the other is not for-profit > one does not have shareholders. Harvard is a money-making > machine. The fact that the profits don't go to shareholders, > but instead go to administrator salaries, nicer faculty > lounges, more real estate acquisitions, etc. doesn't change > that it is very profitable, and it is profiting from the > buckets of money provided by the government no differently than > Joe's Vocational School.
This is absolutely correct. At some point I had kicked around the idea of a book on Bard College, the 5th most expensive school in the country and my alma mater, focusing on Leon Botstein's insatiable expansionist appetite. I have chatted with people in the budget office here (more technical than executive) about what makes a school follow these expansionist imperatives. Why couldn't Bard have stayed a nice little liberal arts school of 500 students? Why is Columbia created a huge expansion in Manhattanville? I can understand the logic behind Apple Inc. and General Motors but what kind of Marxist economic principles explain the transformation of American colleges and universities into such behemoths? _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
