"Administrators...blamed students, who were supposedly demanding all manner of luxuries and would not be denied. “Students today want carpeting, they want furniture, they want voice mail,” an administrator at a Nevada university told USA Today for a 1997 story about the tuition spiral. "
I believe this is one of the biggest generally unaddressed aspects of this problems. The large public university near me has near-luxury dorms, a bunch of massive flat screen TVs in libraries and the student centers (which don't serve much of a purpose apart from broadcasting random news or campus stuff -- a couple devices would suffice) and keeps on revamping equipment / OSes in the general access computer labs (despite the fact that most students have their own laptops, and use the computer center ones for relatively mundane tasks like quickly checking facebook or typing out a Word document). The official reason given for this is, "Well, we won't be able to attract the best students if we don't offer them the best amenities."; and from all accounts, it works -- student enrollment, specially the wealthy ones, keeps going up.
As long as parents keep rewarding these lavish universities by saying, "Wow! Look how great that is. If Bobby hangs out in an expensive looking place, maybe he'll get a high-paying job by some sort of osmosis! Let's totally send him to the University of Money-Down-the-Flatscreen-Hole." instead of taking a hard-nosed look at the return on investment they are getting, this vicious cycle is going to continue.
Any analysis that assumes that whole generation of students and their parents are stupid is suspect. So, two remarks:
* Wealthy students are probably choosing more comfort over price. Less wealthy but good student might have different preferences. Wealthy and good student are not synonyms.
* All things being equal, I would find it rational to choose school with better tv. All things being equal is important there.
You school, or schools in general, seem to be trying to attract the most wealthy students. Whether they are proxy for good student or not does not matter. Even if they would be the best students ever, it would still be just a coincidence. If it would be about quality of attracted people and quality of graduating people, schools would not be so eager to save on professors, adjuncts and so on.
I think the whole thing has less to do with students and more to do with administrators incentives. They seem to choose short term grow over long term whatever all too often. Preferring quality of tv over quality of staff is preferring visible effect now over hard-to-see effects in long term.
I believe this is one of the biggest generally unaddressed aspects of this problems. The large public university near me has near-luxury dorms, a bunch of massive flat screen TVs in libraries and the student centers (which don't serve much of a purpose apart from broadcasting random news or campus stuff -- a couple devices would suffice) and keeps on revamping equipment / OSes in the general access computer labs (despite the fact that most students have their own laptops, and use the computer center ones for relatively mundane tasks like quickly checking facebook or typing out a Word document). The official reason given for this is, "Well, we won't be able to attract the best students if we don't offer them the best amenities."; and from all accounts, it works -- student enrollment, specially the wealthy ones, keeps going up.
As long as parents keep rewarding these lavish universities by saying, "Wow! Look how great that is. If Bobby hangs out in an expensive looking place, maybe he'll get a high-paying job by some sort of osmosis! Let's totally send him to the University of Money-Down-the-Flatscreen-Hole." instead of taking a hard-nosed look at the return on investment they are getting, this vicious cycle is going to continue.