What are the roles and motives of non-profit colleges? | Hacker News Reader

What are the roles and motives of non-profit colleges?

4 pointspixelart5 comments

I've been thinking a lot recently about how non-profit colleges fit into society.

Especially because of the current college bubble and MIT's handling of the Aaron Swartz situation (which I thought was handled very badly), I've been thinking about what the roles and motives of non-profit colleges are.

It's hard to generalize, since each college is different, but the naive view I used to hold about non-profit colleges being primarily altruistic institutions seems mistaken.

I'm especially interested in this line from patio11's essay "Quantifying the value of a college degree by major":

"There might still be some Marxists on the faculty but it is all capitalists in the administrations."

Non-profit colleges help with social development, research, and many other areas. But what are some of the other reasons they exist? Are capitalists in the administrations contributing significantly to the college bubble?

I feel like non-profit colleges should be doing a better and more compassionate job of preparing eighteen year olds for adult life, but I don't think they are.

I'm very interested in opinions and insight on this topic.

I'm a college professor. I'll try to say a little something.

Colleges certainly aren't altruistic.

For the most part colleges, and even more so, research universities, want to be "better than each other". The competition isn't for money so much as for its own sake.

It is easy to find out what colleges think is worth bragging about: visit any of their homepages.

It is important, as patio11's quote suggests, to remember that the interests of different groups -- undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, administration, alumni -- are not necessarily aligned. When I was an undergrad at Rice, in addition to the student newspaper we had "Rice News", rather similar in content to the "news" on university homepages. I regarded this as propaganda and sneered at the "faculty newspaper"; now that I am on a university faculty, I realize that the faculty don't read these newspapers either.

From an administrative level, most everything costs money. You can build new buildings, fancy new dorms, start new programs, poach famous faculty, etc. And so they think about money a lot. Departments don't have to think about where the money comes from, but they are always fighting to get a piece of it.

Professors want good students to teach, time to do research, and to be left alone by the administration. University administrators always have pet projects (at South Carolina it's the "Carolina Core") and it's rare to find a professor who gives a damn about any of them.

You mention "a compassionate job of preparing eighteen year olds for adult life". But "adult life" means very different things to different people, and many professors, certainly including myself, are extreme outliers. So I personally stick to teaching my students math, and trying to get them excited about it -- that is what I am good at.

This is a very thoughtful answer. I don't think I ever thought of a college as made up of so many different groups, though it seems more obvious now.

It's interesting that you see one of the primary motivations as competition. Is this competitiveness mostly from the administration and researchers? Who benefits from a college being better than others? Do the administrators get paid more or do the researchers get published more easily? I'm interested in how all the motives and structures break down.

With regard to your last paragraph - adult life certainly does mean very different things to different people. However, I think almost everyone agrees that financial independence and stability is important. I'm going to quote another paragraph from patio11:

"No college will actually do this (quantify the value of a degree by major) because transparency goes directly against their interests: if all degrees from a particular institution are valued at “An uncertain, but certainly large and roughly constant number”, then the standard practice of pricing them all identically makes sense."

That lack of transparency seems careless on the part of the colleges. To me, it actually seems malicious, though that might be going too far. It seems obvious that undergraduate students should be more aware of their financial prospects after graduation, but it seems like no one in the system cares.

> Who benefits from a college being better than others?

Everyone. Basically, everyone wants to be surrounded by smarter, harder-working, and more talented people.

> do the researchers get published more easily?

No, this doesn't matter. Publishing is mostly fair, and to the extent it's not, people are biased in favor of people they know more than universities.

>It seems obvious that undergraduate students should be more aware of their financial prospects after graduation, but it seems like no one in the system cares.

Perhaps so. But this depends on individual choices. Frankly, given the bleak job market here, I think that the first step motivated graduating seniors at USC should take is to leave South Carolina permanently --- but individual choices may vary. Needless to say the university administration will not recommend this to its students, and neither should I except on an individual basis.

That said, this reflects my extreme biases. Just as I was a straight-A student and don't have a very good understanding of how to do the minimal amount of work to pass, I don't really understand what is required to get and succeed in an "okay" job.

There's no such thing as 'non-profit'. Every human being has to fight for 'profit' to survive. Profit is calculated after administrator or executive compensation is subtracted from revenue, so therein lies the motive of the non-profit.

I think this is a simplification. Many non-profit groups do manage to differ from businesses by not focusing entirely on the bottom line.

There are definitely non-profits with really high administrator and executive compensation that don't spend money optimally to meet their stated goals. I'm interested in discussing the degree to which colleges resemble this type of non-profit.

What are all the high tuitions being used for, and how efficiently are they being used? To start to answer that question, I think I need to understand more about the goals of non-profit colleges and who sets most of the policy (high-paid administration? professors?).

My guess would be the high-paid administration, which definitely seems to be a problem.

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