Yes, but Harvard duplicates existing services. e.g. when Harvard runs a dining org, that service is already provided by local restaurants and grocery stores. The only things Harvard needs to provide are things that you can't already get in Boston. Classrooms, libraries, labs, etc. It's just like engineering. Anything that can easily be offloaded to a third party tool should be.
Dining services for students make sense to me. Students are generally young folks with a lot going on. They might be on their own for the first time. It is helpful to have a place where they can just go grab some food without too much thought. Dining services might be priced into the student’s tuition, so parents can be confident that their kids will get meals, rather than spending their budget on partying, haha.
Plus, actually this is probably a more practical reason and I should have lead with it: dorms usually have limited cooking facilities. And imagine the messes which would be created in the shared kitchen, if everyone was using it. Eating out is nice, but most people don’t do it every day. Dining services handle the unexciting daily meals well — so really, this isn’t a redundant service to local restaurants.
Both student meals and healthcare are managed by independent student organizations, which have grown quite wealthy during the two hundred years they have existed. The company running the dozens of cafeterias, Unicafe, is entirely owned by the student organization HYY, which also owns several valuable properties in the city center of Helsinki. The healthcare is organized around the Finnish Student Health Service, which is a foundation managed by the students themselves. At least during my time the almost free healthcare and the affordable lunches were a significant benefit for the poor but hard-working students.
Both of these branches are totally independent of the actual university and are basically independent societies founded and run by the students themselves.
In any case, I’m certainly not going to pretend that US students aren’t coddled a bit. School here has a been a little bit infected with the customer-service mentality… like pretty much everything else. It is what it is I guess.
Also, opinion.
You seem to be missing that harvard attracts exceptional (and well connected) people. Expanding the business to suit their skills is a natural evolution.
>...dining...
Uh, Harvard throws a huge number of fund raising events that have to be catered and no one cares about the name of the catering company if the food is trash. It's in the best interest of Harvard to set their own standards for their events