<p>marite, it sounds like UMass is trying to accommodate the echo-boom, and Michigan is adding to a stadium.
The Ivy schools seem like they are trying to stay on the cutting edge and retain their status as the most attractive and competitive in the world.</p>
<p>So you think the Ivies should stop doing the very thing public universities are doing? Item: Princeton is admitting more students. Where should they be housed if not in a new dorm? Item: Harvard is investing in cutting-edge research? should it be willing to be non-cutting edge and leave it to UWIsc?</p>
<p>What's wrong with wanting to be on the cutting edge and remaining competitive? Has the US turned into a communist state overnight? You know, poverty and mediocrity for all?</p>
<p>UCBChemEGrad,</p>
<p>To be fair to USC, however, it's not just money. UCLA and USC have similar endowments, but I think it's the non-financial issues that also help USC. I imagine that USC professors are far less encumbered by stupid regulations than UCLA profs are.</p>
<p>UW gets few to no profs from the other schools in the state. They typically prefer to hire directly at the assistant prof level. When they do hire away from other schools it is often people from some of the top LAC's and smaller research U's like Rochester and Case Western who want to have more research support, people from underpaying school in England such as Cambridge and Oxford, and some Ivy types who may not get a real shot at tenure at place like Harvard. The Poli Sci dept which lost about 5 people in the last couple of years just hired four young profs from H's dept.</p>
<p>marite, how in the world could you read post #21 as a criticism of what the Ivy schools are doing?
The best argument for the kind of wealth HYP have is the recognition that their competitors are, and increasingly will be, international. What will the world be like 20 years from now? Already, each undergraduate class at Harvard and Princeton contains larger percentages of international students.</p>
<p>"there is something to be said when Berkeley's endowment is on the order of $3 billion and Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford endowments are ~ $15-30 billion"</p>
<p>But NO ONE's endowment can compare to HYPS. Berkeley is in the same boat as Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Vandy, etc. ... they're all trying to be great research universities without HYPS money. Business Week is apparently not concerned that HYPS are spending their way to the top relative to Hopkins and Chicago, since those are private schools. But outspending Berkeley is bad because Berkeley is public? The argument doesn't hold up in light of the fact that Berkeley is just as elite and just as inaccessible to the masses as any private school. If it's outrageous that HYPS outspend Wisconsin, then it's equally outrageous that they outspend Syracuse and NYU. In other words, not outrageous at all.</p>
<p>The UW Madison current building plan is nearly $1 Billion in approved projects. The good news is they don't have to use endowment $$$ for buildings. Double or triple that to get the equivalent in Ivy spending (we don't do granite and gargoyles with slate roofs but nice solid functional buildings with lots of light). While they are concerned with the competition I don't think they are afraid. The UW research budget is over 20% higher than the nearest private school and grew at a faster rate than that school (Stanford) from 1999-2006. Total new grants in FY 2007 exceeded $1 Billion</p>
<p>Research Award Statistics FY2007 </p>
<p>Total awards: $1,028.6M
Fed awards: $565.4M
Non Fed awards: $463.2M </p>
<p>
[quote]
If it's outrageous that HYPS outspend Wisconsin, then it's equally outrageous that they outspend Syracuse and NYU. In other words, not outrageous at all.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Agreed. But it sure does help sell magazines. :)</p>
<p>Danas:</p>
<p>thanks for the clarification. Clearly, I misread your post.</p>
<p>The thing that would be worse than spending the $$billions would be not spending them.</p>
<p>Like I like to say, The Ivy League schools are one step ahead in scamming you.</p>
<p>newmassdad is correct, BW wants to sell magazines and does not care what the cost is to institutions (universities or otherwise). BW's ranking of MBA programs has not provided better information (many have argued the ratings are very flawed on many grounds) but rather driven deans to chase after the rankings (both private and public U's) for bragging rights and "proof" they are good at their jobs. Having sold a lot magazines on these rankings, BW recently moved to part time MBA program and Exec Ed programs under the guise of providing the reader with more information. These rankings are seriously flawed and have huge biases in them. Unfortunately, the news media in this country seems to have moved to hype to sell itself rather than to inform. From a marketing standpoint you have to admire the title of the BW article, it sucks people in. On the other hand BW has seemed to ignore the recent item on big time coaches (not ivy coaches) who are averaging salaries of $1,000,000, particularly when college sports are big business.</p>
<p>I agree with others that the Public institutions are in the same race and that the population, e.g, tax payers, is generally unaware of it. They they also have endowments and capital campaigns for building. An advantage the top state school has over an Ivy is that the taxpayer pays for say 1/2 the building, then the school raises the rest from donations and businesses (why are virtually all new building named?</p>
<p>I, for one, am a lot more outraged that football coaches are paid $2-4 million a year at "leading" public universities (I know a lot of these dollars come from boosters, but they still are a diversion from other state u functions such as professors' salaries, research costs, etc.) than that private universities (such as the Ivies) spend private, voluntarily provided funds for (mostly important) research, teaching and facilities, while their coaches are paid about 5-10% of what the coaches receive at Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, UCLA, etc. </p>
<p>I write this as a sports fan, but if you want to see out of control spending at the taxpayers' expense, check out your local state university. To paraphrase James Thurber's own satirical take on Robert Harper's dictum, millions for athletics, pennies for what should be the function of the academy.</p>
<p>^ I don't think state money is being used to prop up big-time football programs. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, this is the way the world works these days. Money is needed to bring in a coach, who'll deliver championships and elevate the football program...the football program brings in the most revenue thru TV, sponsors, donors, ticket sales, etc. This money is then used to subsidize other athletics. So, the large salary is considered an investment.</p>
<p>U Florida athletics runs at a profit, and has donated some $40 million back to the university. That can be considered a win-win.</p>
<p>Wisconsin does not use a dime of state or student fee money for the sports program. Yes boosters etc supply substantial funds but it is only maybe $20,000,000 out of the $300,000,000 the UW raises privately each year.</p>
<p>They have also started giving athletic dept generated money to the academic side.</p>
<p>Big</a> Ten Network deal funds financial aid, libraries, athletics (Nov. 16, 2007)</p>
<p>So UF and UWisc do not use taxpayers money for their sports programs. Neither do Ivies. So why the fuss about Ivies? Beats me.</p>
<p>Non-Ivies, too, spend billions:</p>
<p>
[quote]
Strategic, Master Plans announced</p>
<p>Boston College will invest $1.6 billion in academics and facilities through a 10-year Strategic Plan, supported by an Institutional Master Plan that will allocate $800 million for construction and renovation, the University has announced.
[/quote]
<p>Overall endowment numbers don't always tell the full story. Like the federal research funding numbers mentioned earlier, there are other interesting twists in the whole Ivy vs. public wealth issue. Here's an article from a Princeton alumni magazine lamenting its library doesn't have the funds to keep up with other major libraries (at schools less wealthy overall), with the primary example being the University of Texas at Austin. </p>
<p>
[quote=]
Increasingly, Princeton curators have found themselves standing glumly on the sidelines. “Because we don’t have a lot of money, dealers don’t even bother to come,” says Primer.
...
Horowitz confirms that. He did not call Princeton about the Mailer papers. Why bother? He knew that Princeton almost certainly would not match the kind of money he could expect to get from the Ransom Center [at Texas-Austin].
[/quote]
PAW</a> November 16, 2005: Features</p>
<p>Someone mentioned public university spending for athletics... here's another article that mentions how public UT-Austin is even able to outspend Harvard and Yale in the literary paper chase, with an analogy to sports teams, no less.</p>
<p>
Letter</a> from Austin: Final Destination: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker</p>
<p>Sometimes people tend to forget that competitiveness in sports does not preclude an overall competitive drive in academics. Texas is another public school where the athletic program is completely self-supporting, so the exhorbitant coaches' salaries don't come from taxpayer or student funds.</p>
<p>UT also recently opened the largest art museum on ANY university campus, in its Blanton Museum of Art. So while there is indeed a long-term threat from private universities, I think the combination of existing top faculty, resources, and large scale federal research experience, coupled with moderate endowments, supplemental state funds (however dwindling), as well as larger alumni pools to draw financial support from, will help publics (top ones at least) to remain competitive.</p>
<p>JWT96,</p>
<p>I would argue that your sports analogy is more appropriate than you seem to think. Bidding for these papers is too often a vanity exercise on the part of the U., having little to do with education, much like having a winning team. </p>
<p>The same is true for the "largest" art museum. Let me take targeted quality over plain volume any day. After all, for good art education, you don't need huge numbers of objects.</p>
<p>That's why UT does this. Remember that it appeals to a different constituency, including the public who pays the taxes that funds the place, the legislature and other political groups as well as the traditional ones. </p>
<p>So actions like this give the appearance of quality even if they don't lead to true quality. And as long as texas can claim the "best" it is good for them.</p>
<p>But on the broader issue of competition, why do the top privates and the top publics need to compete head to head? Just consider that, with the exception of Stanford, Cornell and Penn (maybe Duke?), none of the elites have the breadth of faculty or physical resources that a good state university has. There is great value in theis breadth. It is too bad state U's don't bould from it more.</p>
<p>I can understand the quality vs. quantity argument in general but I don't think this is a case where it applies. Many sources, including the New York Times, London Independent, as well as scholars at the British Library, and Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris have said since 70s that UT-Austin has one of the greatest library collections in the world. In fact, in the respected survey "Great Libraries" (Hobson), UT, along with only Harvard, Yale, the New York Public Library, and Huntington were the only libraries in the US to make the listing of the top 32 libraries in the world. In UT's case it is not a size issue, since it is smaller overall than Harvard and Yale's library, yet ranked above them in cultural significance by these sources.<br>
Most importantly - UT maintains one of the most OPEN collections in terms of access from the public. Try requesting to look at something at the Houghton without a serious research justification.</p>
<p>Indiana U's Lilly library is much smaller than Harvard, Yale, or UT, but is also a very respected literary archive.</p>
<p>Regarding UT's art museum, again, of course size in itself is just a silly and meaningless bragging argument. However, it does possess some very significant collections including one of the largest Italian Renaissance collections in the world outside of Italy, one of the largest and most important Latin American collections in the world, a respected Contemporary American collection, and one of the most important print and drawing collections in the US (a primary reason the noted art historian Leo Steinberg donated his collection to UT rather than a NE school).</p>
<p>I completely agree with your last point.</p>
<p>The UW Historical Library does not spend big bucks on single items but it collects nearly everything that may be useful to future historians and is one of the two largest such libraries in the US. For example:</p>
<p>Top</a> Stories</p>
<p>I have to say looking at the floor plans it doesn't look that generous: Princeton</a> University Residential Colleges - Partial Floor Plans Lots of hall bathrooms. Three room quads. The renderings are nice, but they don't look to me like they have any more wood paneling than the old houses at Harvard. (Though I think we had oak not mahagony.)</p>