<p>Northstarmom, the not having any place to study because the dorm is too loud is a good point. I'm surprised that there are no study lounges, no quiet areas? If quiet study space is the issue, I'd think that could be budgeted more cheaply than keeping the entire library open. </p>
<p>newmassdad, I explicitly mentioned the reserve room as an exception. I still believe that having 24 hour access (instead of, say, 16 hour access) to these materials is a frill. You said that "Not all schools do this, so I suppose for them, a library at any hour is a frill." That would include Oxford's Bodleian. It also looks like it includes Harvard's library system. And St. John's College. Just to pick a few examples. If U of C chooses and can afford to have a 24/7 library, that's great, truly, especially as it's a school that offers a lot of merit aid. If my choice as an (eventually) tuition-paying parent is between the nice frills and saving $$$ off of full-pay, I'll take the savings. </p>
<p>Scholarly journals are online; I would expect that any rigorous school would provide subscription access for its students. In some disciplines, it's far more efficient to do scholarly research at a computer instead of going into the stacks and pulling out journal after journal, or volume after volume. That's obviously not the case for all departments and all classes. Still, I don't buy the argument that if you don't have a 24/7 library that you aren't really serious about scholarly rigor and research.</p>
<p>Colleges here in the US have veered from their original purpose when they are spending the big bucks on living quarters, gyms, recreational programs. The money should be going for more students to have the opportunity to go to college and to promote academics.</p>
<p>One person's frill is another person's neccessity. When I was in college (back in the dark ages) the University had one clinical psychologist at health services. You could wait months for a counseling appointment; for emergencies you were sent to the ER of the local hospital. This would not be acceptable nowadays... first of all, because so many students show up at college with complex pyschiatric histories (eating disorders, depression, etc....) there would be mutiny in the dorms, and second, because Risk Management is such a huge issue for colleges, it's more cost effective to put a bunch of MD's in the clinic than to have a law suit over a suicide or perceived negligence by the school.</p>
<p>Is this a bad thing? a good thing? It sure runs up costs pretty quickly. So does having an officer for EEOC, an ombudsman for disgruntled employees, an entire legal department to work on slip and falls and all the other litigation, a staff to deal with legal and ethical requirments if your med school or psych department uses animals in research, etc.</p>
<p>You can't stick this genie back in the bottle- there would be riots in the streets. But we live in a litigious society, colleges are huge and tempting targets, and so they need to maintain huge and costly infrastructures to deal with that reality. One PETA protest on a campus when some lunatic decides that lab rats or dogs shouldn't be kept in cages for research (how else do you test new drugs? On the family pet?) and all the good and wonderful things that a particular college may be doing for society goes out the window with the attendant noise.</p>
<p>And let's not forget the consumer mentality of both parents and students.... again, back in the dark ages, career counseling consisted of a small room with a xerox machine (I think you could make 10 copies of your resume for no charge, after that it was 10 cents each), one full time staff member, and a big binder in which work/study students would put new "job listings". What parent would sent their kid to a college which didn't offer a whole staff of counselors, a battery of occupational testing, a team of "industry reps" who teach kids how to network, interview, maintain eye contact, eat a fancy meal in a restaurant, etc.</p>
<p>This stuff costs real money, people. Of course the colleges provide it- the parents would have a hissy fit if they didn't. Why should a parent teach their kid how to shake hands and wear appropriate business attire on a job interview if they can pay the college to do it????</p>
<p>Harvard's undergraduate library, Lamont, is open 24/7. It's a fairly recent and very popular innovation. Some of the other libraries have limited opening times and some are non-circulating. Lamont is where materials are put on reserve (and not everything is available online).</p>
<p>As for "frills" I repeat what I posted earlier. Parents and students demand most of the frills decried here.</p>
<p>I don't know whether it is funny or sad that some parents consider academically related resources like libraries to be a frill, and equate them to gyms!</p>
<p>24-hour library service a frill? We had that 40+ years ago when I attended my small LAC in Portland, OR. But it was really just a "dim light-bulb" version in which students couldn't check out books, etc., but they could work at all hours in their thesis carrel; they could leave the library, but not return after closing hours. </p>
<p>Still, the library had more than 100 scheduled open hours per week. But this is all because this college valued studying and access to the library extremely highly. It wasn't a frill.</p>
<p>Nowadays, as someone who does a lot of research in libraries even today, I have to admit that I rarely "go" to the library any more. The vast majority of my usage takes the form of electronic access to journals and other online materials. But I've been conditioned in one way: There's nothing like the smell of library stacks in the afternoon!</p>
<p>newmassdad, no one is saying that libraries are a frill. They are saying that 24/7 libraries are a frill. Just because something is a great academic resource doesn't mean that it's a necessity, especially if there are budget problems. </p>
<p>This thread has made me think about my undergrad experience (public Ivy), and what I'd now "demand" as a parent, even at higher COA. More housing--there wasn't, and isn't, enough on-campus housing to accomodate everyone who wants it, and finding off-campus options is a lot of work. More financial aid, so that people don't finish massively in debt. I had little debt because I got all sorts of subsidized loans, some merit money, and a really great work-study job. That wouldn't be the case for a student today with my undergrad FAFSA. I have no insight into the state of mental health resources at the school back then, though I believe they were decent and counselors were available. </p>
<p>For the rest, I'd be perfectly happy for my kids to have the level of services I had back in the day. No career counseling per se, though there were some orientation sessions telling you to do things like leave the backpack somewhere else because it ruins the effect of a business suit, and also some examples of how to write a resume. Escort service from campus to your dorm or apartment at all hours of the night. No 24 hour libraries, but grad students and some undergrads might be putting in late hours in department reading rooms or labs. I managed to exercise when the gym was open, or went running when it wasn't. The dorm food was adequate. No computers, hence no need for 24 hour IT support, but again that's not something I'd be willing to pay a premium for for my kids. There were computer labs even back then; a modern-day combo of public terminals and keeping a spare copy of work on a thumb drive should be enough. There were a ton of student organizations back then, and yes, we could start our own--but you had to present your case to the undergrad student government to see if they would be willing to give you start-up funds. Not everyone got them. Workaday dorms, no private rooms, though there were quiet study halls in each dorm complex. </p>
<p>I'd also love to have the same level of state support for the university's funding, which is really the main reason that COA has soared.</p>
<p>Do you really think it costs very much to keep a library open a few more hours per day? You might need one or two staffers, and a few more lights - most of the stacks in decent libraries are automatically controlled, and only on when needed. </p>
<p>Mackinaw, it is true that in the sciences, things have migrated to online sources. This is far less true in the social sciences and hardly true at all in humanities, where many resources are still, gasp, books!</p>
<p>Heck, I guess we should just tell the students to not study "after hours" so we can save a few bucks on electricity.</p>
<p>What's been largely left out of the discussion so far is the impact of our laws and legal culture on costs, especially in research universities. More generally, as colleges and universities have grown larger, what may be an economy of scale in terms of class size, has also led to greater differentiation of administrative functions.</p>
<p>Our administrative structures have been bloated with offices for this and that. I'm not going to argue against most of these, but consider that there are offices for intellectual integrity; institutional review boards for research on human subjects and vertebrate animals; office for handicapper services (and oversight of ADA); contract & grant administration (including compliance with federal and state laws); human resource management (partly to ensure nondiscrimination in employment); office for student-athlete support services (also enforcement of Title IX); study abroad programs (monitoring and oversight); libraries, computing and technology (I can't tell you how much it costs to manage just the file and email services in a large university -- including the war on spam and spyware); legal services (contracts, employment, financial management, lawsuits, etc.). These are some of the main central services -- not including here the core ones of academic management (registration and student records, financial aid, academic planning, and academic administration [chairs, deans, provosts, vp's], campus maintenance (building and grounds; safety and policing; health services), etc.].</p>
<p>Yes, professors' salaries have gone up (thank you), but the size and cost of the admistrative staff -- the overhead of a college or university -- have increased even more.</p>
<p>@Newmassdad: Books. Yes! Even in the sciences. But this doesn't mean you have to be able to check them out 24/7 or that all in-building services have to be available. And in my small college, perhaps because of the peculiar culture there, there were no staff there at night to monitor the seniors who were staying in all night to work on their theses -- the honor system worked.</p>
<p>
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I get a good laugh every time my S's private college calls to hit me up for more $. Since he's still a student there, they already have all of my $<em>#)</em>$ money!!!
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</p>
<p>Actually, try grad school! Where I work on work-study in an organization, they called up my dad and asked for money. His response was, "My daughter is working there, don't you think you should be paying her more??" </p>
<p>Actually, 24/7 libraries during finals week (maybe the week before too) is really a necessity. I couldn't really study in my sorority house because sometimes the girls would just get loud and I didn't like the idea of being confined into my small room for 8 hours straight while working on my papers. So I'd go to a coffee shop until it closed at 11 PM and then I would just go to the library and worked until I was too tired. That was a blessing. </p>
<p>Colgate came up with an interesting thought when they built their new (amazing) library. They made the 5th floor cafe open 24/7 and students could enter with their ID cards as keys. But the rest of the library would only stay open until 2 AM and the staff encouraged the students to go up to the cafe if they wanted to stay in the building (and not venture out in a 15 degree weather). Admittedly, it's a bit weird to be in there when the cafe itself wasn't open but admittedly, I really got my work done.</p>
<p>However... the Campus Safety hit up one of my sorority sisters just recently for staying in another library (not meant to be open past 2 AM) just because she wasn't <em>supposed</em> to be there. $50 for a chair and a table to sleep on per night without supervision.</p>
<p>I'll admit that it's tough to justify whether Michigan is a no-frills school or not... people are shocked when I tell them that for a D1/Big Ten school, their "fitness centers" are just horrible. They couldn't be bothered to group all the machines together in one room, rather than spead them out through the rec buildings: in the hallways, random rooms, and racquetball courts. I'm not kidding. I'm just grateful that the quality of my department and professors, and the health services are putting my tutition dollars at work!</p>
<p>newmassdad, I think you've figured out the 24/7 library thing is a PR move and not a real cost. How many people just HAVE to be able to study AT THE LIBRARY between 4 and 6 AM?
I've spent half my life at the U of C, and believe me, there are precious few places on campus where your studying is going to be disturbed even from 11PM on a Saturday night.
If it makes you feel that your money was well spent at the U of C, I guess that's okay. But come up with a better reason than the library hours.</p>
<p>Good grief, Danas. Your diatribe does not even merit a reply. "I think you've figured out the 24/7 library thing is a PR move"? I think no such thing, and feel embarrassed for UofC that someone even remotely connected with the place would have such a view. </p>
<p>You may be faculty or staff there, but I dounbt you understand the student perspective.</p>