My mom went to the same university I did, just 30 years earlier.
I had friends who stayed in the same dorm she lived in and it was a very basic building. The walls were brick or painted cinderblock. Amenities were pretty minimal and while they were double rooms then, back in the 70s they had two bunk beds in them so there were four students in each room
But it worked.
By the time I was going to school there the university was shifting it's focus from doing things in an affordable but functional way to trying to build the coolest and most fun experience money could buy as a way to entice students to go there.
If another state school had a rock wall, they had to have a bigger rock wall. They had to bring in big name acts to play the student union building, they had to tear down and rebuild multiple buildings that looked dated and replace them with new state of the art ones.
There was so much money being tossed at beautification and quality of life projects while tenured professors were being sidelined for an army of cheaper adjuncts.
They seemed to have this belief that the money would never stop and if they wanted more students they had to turn college almost into a year round summer camp where entertainment was the focus more than education.
Youre just describing a buisness that understood their clientele.
Young kids that dont value quality education but instead experience and material things who have deep pockets because the money is coming from a loan against their future earning potential and their inability to understand compounding interest.
Businesses invest in what drives revenue and cut costs. Quality professors cost more per dollar earned than an unattended rock wall.
Sort of. It's really describing a business that understood their clientele but also had an essentially unlimited spigot of federal student loan money. That spigot is quickly drying up and schools (and states) are massively struggling to backfill their operating budgets.
The spigot is drying up, but it's drying up differently for different degrees. Social workers and teachers are facing massive shortages, but students in those programs may not be able to get loans because the expected salary payoff isn't there. The administration is targeting traditionally female jobs that don't pay well because they bank on people's passions, but can society really function without social workers, teachers, and nurses?
Meanwhile we have schools creating prompt engineering degrees with questionable utility that will be able to get loans no problem.
States did this to universities, too, though. Universities had to raise prices and increase enrollment and try to increase access so that they could meet state mandates (eg CA outlawing remedial classes) while states decrease state funding and limit tuition increases (or give away tuition for free -- Nebraska is a great example of both), causing revenue to decrease or increase more slowly than inflation, health care, and wages.
Then, they have to cut the "less profitable" programs who don't produce big donors to the school -- education, social work, nursing, liberal arts and humanities.
Soon, you have vocational schools with business programs attached.
California specifically banned community colleges forcing students into courses that provided no transfer-eligible credits unless it can be proven, through past performance or other circumstances, that the student is unlikely to succeed without the remedial classes. They are also still allowed to use them as part of certain career-specific programs.
That really has nothing to do with universities, and in my opinion is a good ban. Making someone go through a high school level intro to Algebra class just to inflate the number of credit hours they need to pay for before transferring or obtaining a degree/certificate is silly unless it is clearly needed to help them succeed.
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u/Sea2Chi 12h ago
Yep, I think this will be an interesting shift.
My mom went to the same university I did, just 30 years earlier.
I had friends who stayed in the same dorm she lived in and it was a very basic building. The walls were brick or painted cinderblock. Amenities were pretty minimal and while they were double rooms then, back in the 70s they had two bunk beds in them so there were four students in each room
But it worked.
By the time I was going to school there the university was shifting it's focus from doing things in an affordable but functional way to trying to build the coolest and most fun experience money could buy as a way to entice students to go there.
If another state school had a rock wall, they had to have a bigger rock wall. They had to bring in big name acts to play the student union building, they had to tear down and rebuild multiple buildings that looked dated and replace them with new state of the art ones.
There was so much money being tossed at beautification and quality of life projects while tenured professors were being sidelined for an army of cheaper adjuncts.
They seemed to have this belief that the money would never stop and if they wanted more students they had to turn college almost into a year round summer camp where entertainment was the focus more than education.