More on Why Universities Charge so Much

The NY Times has an interesting piece on the building boom in universities. They state:

A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories and recreational facilities — some of them inordinately lavish to attract students — has left colleges and universities saddled with large amounts of debt. Oftentimes, students are stuck picking up the bill. 

They then go on in an anecdotal  manner describing examples. Schools with hundreds of millions to almost a billion dollars in new debt for buildings which frankly are questionable.

The best one is as follows:

Administrators at Ramapo College of New Jersey, a public institution founded in 1969, have harbored a dream of making it the premier public liberal arts college in the New York metropolitan area. 

But one big obstacle has been the state of New Jersey, which has provided little money for capital projects on state colleges and universities in the last two decades. 

So Ramapo borrowed, and it borrowed some more, building a new business school, dormitories and a recreational facility that includes a 2,200-seat arena. A new wing that will house the nursing program is under construction. 

Ramapo now has $281 million in debt, and its debt payments account for 13 percent of its budget, high compared with most colleges rated by Moody’s. 

 You cannot make this up. "premier public liberal arts college", yes we need more useless English majors from New Jersey. What are they going to do? Jersey Shore II? Then also who is guaranteeing the debt, are we the taxpayers left holding the bag, and never given a voice in the process. What justification is there for such a program? I suspect that the Trustees enjoy their paid positions and frankly do not want to rock the boat.

But alas this is just one example. As I have argued before this is one of the many examples of what is driving up costs. A new cancer center at MIT, the Koch building, paid for by Koch gifts but it will have a life time costs many times its construction costs. Who pays for that? Well at MIT it would the the research contracts, and not the students, but the students would benefit by having this on campus. But a new recreational facility in norther New Jersey, at a state school, on its way to $300 hundred million in debt, ultimately at the feet of already over taxed taxpayers.