I posted this on the CE board but is relevant to the conversation here. It's about state universities upgrading their campuses with seemingly unnecessary amenities all in an effort to attract out-of-state tuition dollars:
http://www.thenation.com/article/207697/gentrification-higher-ed
All of the high-end dorms, hot tubs and lazy rivers being built on campus aren't just useless amenities - they are being built in partnership with private entities in order to attract out-of-state tuition as state funding is cut.
"Many of the participants in this relentless campus upscaling are private businesses, but it’s driven by public policy. Like other campuses, the University of Arizona is not getting fancier in spite of budget cuts; it’s getting fancier
because of them. From 2002 to 2013, state appropriations shrank from $420 million to $270 million. Over the same period, the amount raised from student tuition grew from $179 million to $455 million. As at other schools, cuts in public financing have made the university more reliant on tuition—out-of-state tuition in particular. Over the last decade, the number of out-of-state students has been creeping up, from around 32 percent in 2004 to between 37 and 39 percent in recent years.
“If there’s very low levels of public investment, state or federal investment, you have to rely on tuition,” says University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong, the coauthor with Laura Hamilton of the 2013 book
Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. “If you have to rely on tuition, you need to serve the people who pay the tuition, and given the cost of college, the people who can actually pay that money tend to be from quite affluent families, which puts universities into a position of trying to meet the wants, if not exactly needs, of the most well-heeled of their clientele.”
