This really bothers me.
Universities hold themselves up as virtuous. Then students hire them to provide to provide an education. Instead of being agents for the students, the students are instead treated like a captive market. There is a very real conflict of interest in universities profiting off textbooks they "require" while being hired to provide a class. I really don't get how any of this is acceptable.
Then you get required to take an ethics class as part of your degree.
You can now comfortably afford to hire a staff of PhD students to tutor you 1on1 in every subject you want to learn more cheaply than going to a university. So where the FUCK is all that money going?
Please be aware that higher education is a massive dumping ground for the lowest-performing segment of the politically-connected managerial class, who are too cowardly and lazy to run for elected office, and too stupid and impulsive to make it in industry.
Academia is perfect, for them: a gigantic stage for demonstrating moral superiority and hiring friends, with no fundamentals that matter at all.
>That pretty much answers the question of why we don’t have teleportation devices or antigravity shoes. Common sense suggests that if you want to maximize scientific creativity, you find some bright people, give them the resources they need to pursue whatever idea comes into their heads, and then leave them alone. Most will turn up nothing, but one or two may well discover something. But if you want to minimize the possibility of unexpected breakthroughs, tell those same people they will receive no resources at all unless they spend the bulk of their time competing against each other to convince you they know in advance what they are going to discover.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declini...
And of course this becomes worse if you're using other people's money. If you're throwing your own money at an impossible task, you'll run out (or your investors will run out). If you're collecting the money as taxes and then throwing it at the impossible task, you can waste as much of it as you want. If you're telling people "do this impossible task or I shoot you", you end up doing a lot of shooting and not much teleporting.
Oh and another 14% gets invested - buildings and securities.
Often the old buildings were not that old at all! They just no longer project the kind of prestige the university thinks is needed to persuade students to enroll.
Some of the administrative bloat is for regulatory compliance, but most of it seems to be driven by the expansionist tendencies of bureaucratic organizations.
Oddly enough there actually seems to be less administrative/secretarial support for faculty, while student mental health remains a problem that doesn't seem to be addressed adequately.
There is an difference in having no incentive to keep costs down and having an incentive to keep costs up. Some professors are simply indifferent to their students' plights. As far as these professors are concerned their students are just an inconvenient bleep in their oh-so-important life. Extracting money from them is not on their radar.
The vast majority of professors don't write textbooks. In fact there are probably a lot more profs who do care, and assign open books, or no books at all, than professors who make a living writing textbooks.
My state university ethics professor published their own book, and required an extra-credit assignment be turned in from a tear out at the end of the book.
That's just marketing. For a lot of degrees it's effectively a version of child care for people out of high school. That some people manage to learn something meanwhile almost seems accidental.
I kind of think that 2/3 of university students would be better served to instead do an apprenticeship in the trades. eg: Plumber, electrician, and similar
