Guys and gals, I am making ABSOLUTELY NO value judgement on this difference. I just find it amusing. Please do not draw any outlandish inference from these numbers.
As a comparison, Harvard gets more or less the same amount of money as Bunker Hill Community College in Boston.
COD and Bunker Hill Community College are community colleges, and don’t have super wealthy alumni donors, or parents who donate to get their kids accepted, like Harvard or UChicago do.
They don’t gain fame and fortune by educating kids who are both wealthy and accomplished. They don’t educate people who would almost certainly succeed no matter which college they attend. they don’t “succeed” in educating people who are highly skilled at academics.
Community colleges provide education to people who are too poor to afford a four years school. they provide education for kids who had a crappy K-12 education, and are therefore not trained to learn. they provide education to people who are working full time to support themselves. they educate people who have managed to survive terrible lives, people who have managed to turn their lives around, and are now trying to make something of themselves.
One of the reasons that these people attend CCs is because they are cheap. That means that their income from tuition is far far less than places like Harvard which charge $50,000 for tuition a year. CCs also do not have billions in endowments which they take draw upon for support during hard times.
Community colleges are one of the greatest things that the USA has created, and they deserve to be supported always, and they deserve every penny they are getting and more.
Columbia College in Chicago has approximately the same number of undergraduates as does UChicago, and 35% of Columbia students are on Pell grants, as opposed to 11% at UChicago students.
College of DUPage also has 31,000 undergraduate students to UChicago’s 6,600. So yes, they deserve to get more money than UChicago.
While there are some screwed up things there, and some colleges which should not be getting as much money as they are, this particular set of colleges look good to me.