However, the daughter was rejected outright due to a multitude of factors. She wasn't violent, or addicted, or lazy. Nothing like that. She just wasn't ahead of the other applicants.
Well, you can imagine that the parents were none too enthused. All the love they had for that college, those dreams for their daughter, gone. There were phone calls and in person visits. Still, the daughter was not what they were looking for.
In the end, things have gone alright for everyone. The building still has their names on it, though the donations have ceased. The daughter is doing just fine at the school she is now at. The college is dealing with it's own issues just as it ever was.
Though there may be corruption at many universities and colleges, there are still a fair number of places where merit and fair decisions still reign. I'd look to those schools for the graduates to hire. Integrity is still in high demand, just as it will ever be.
My Alma-mater gave me access to leaders, hiring and referral opportunities, and even a life long partner with similar ambitions. I can probably name a good long list of of people I can call and get a a little help from now if I was in a bit of a pinch or need a little perspective.
Granted, I went to a smallish regional state school. The experience there, or at, say, Small Liberal Arts College, may be very different from Big State Engineering or Pressure Cooker Elite U.
Probably? Personally my first semester at uni was depressingly dull other than the novelty and the subjects (well, mostly dull there too but the future semesters looked interesting and I was programming for the first time). By chance I was walking through a club recruitment event when a single person stopped to talk to me and tried to convince me to join and come to a meeting that night. They got my email too. Well, I didn't go to the meeting but a few days later an email showed up saying the first practice will be tomorrow. I figured why not, I'm not doing anything, and showed up. I stuck with it for four years, taking on duties over time until I was president, it was most of my social life (e.g parties, hanging out) and I made most of my friends through it, shifted my lifestyle from videogames and procrastination to working out, having fun with sport and mastering it, having flow/mushin consistently, and getting work done ASAP, and other considerations.
I've never felt the desire to donate to my old college, but certainly I already have donated to my old club and have considered doing more for it. I assume folks with very good experiences were part of some sort of organization: my high school friends that stuck together in college without branching out had a good time but was overall meh.
Sorry to hear that. What are some ways to cheat school? (waste of time)
Edit: apart from catching on your reading (listening) and scrolling on hackernews.
They provide a service, and they charge money for it. The university operates as a business. I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?
Why wouldn't you instead endow a scholarship for students of your favorite college? Instead of giving cash to Wal-Mart, buy prepaid Wal-Mart gift cards, and pass them out to fellow customers. The university doesn't need your donations. It is fully capable of building its own buildings outright, begging for state funding, or at least issuing bonds backed by future tuition. If someone is so keen on having a building with their name on it, perhaps they should instead construct some off-campus student apartments, and make some nice signs in the same general style as the university signage.
Many people do. They also give money to improve football facilities, bring speakers to campus, and endow a chaired professor position.
> I don't donate to Wal-Mart, so why would I donate to University X?
Because a university is a nonprofit that exists only for the purpose of improving the world. (Not necessarily the employees, who work there as a job, but it's why universities exist.)
You probably don't see a lot of donations to the University of Phoenix or other for-profit universities.
For something like fifteen years of my life I owed well over a hundred thousand dollars of non-bankruptable debt because of the fees this "non-profit" charged.
A "non-profit" university exists for many, many reasons. Giving the dean a million dollar salary is one of those reasons. Student education is likely third or fourth on the list.
Actually, in the US, at the vast majority of universities, the primary job of faculty involves teaching, extension/outreach, and forms of service like mentoring students. Most universities have research expectations, but that is not how faculty spend their time.
> and tuition doesn't pay for research.
This is a STEM-oriented view. In a lot of fields the primary cost of research is faculty time, and it is often paid by tuition.
Because endowing a scholarship is setting up a charity and donating to a University (the kind anyone donates to, at any rate—no one is endowing chairs at the University of Phoenix) is giving to an existing charity; the two probably have similar tax, feeling of giving back, and status/ego benefits, but the former is more work.
As charities, universities massage their financials to make themselves look better. They set the tuition rate. They determine the scholarship amounts. They bring in dollar-denominated donations, but the actual "charity" they provide is a nebulous value for the amount of additional knowledge and education the student would have been otherwise unable to acquire without paying more out of their own pocket in tuition. The university decides what that is worth anyway. They move $50k from one pocket to another, and then say they gave away $50k worth of education.
A private scholarship charity can't play those games, because the costs of education are set by someone else.
Now, you can argue that incentives sometimes get messed up, but that is the case for ALL charities/non-profits.
It is possible to set up a non-profit business such that the money that comes in goes out through different ports than the ownership outflow pipe. A typical setup for a corrupt non-profit is for managers of the business to earn above-market salaries, and to own for-profit businesses that "compete" for service contracts with the non-profit entity.
For example, Jack Grift establishes a non-profit charity for orphan children with fantods. He works the circuit and manages to fund it to the tune of $1M per year. He leases a nice office space in a building owned by Jack Grift AAA Office Space, and contracts with Jack Grift Janitorial Services to empty the trash can, and sets the charity's salary for CEO at $250k/year, and Chief Revenue Officer at $100k/year, plus a bonus of 5% of incoming donations. Jack, of course, holds both positions. He gets $250k as CEO, $150k as CRO, $100k as his own landlord, and $50k for taking out his own trash. He rolls $440k into uncapturable overhead, marketing, and fundraising efforts, and still has $10k left to supply orphans with copies of both Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
The finances of universities are even more obfuscated, but it is undeniable that some university employees have the power to spend the organization's money for their own personal benefit. Catered faculty luncheons. Campus beautification in and around personal offices. Settlements from the university to forestall civil suits based on personal indiscretions. Premium parking spaces. These expenditures may, in fact, be justified by the mission of the university, but it is impossible for me to audit any given university's accounting books to make that determination for myself before deciding whether I want to give them more money than they demand on their invoices.
There are a lot of outflow pipes for business revenues. Non-profits only close one of them.
