> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants.
I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.
Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
one conspiracy theory i have been stewing on for years is that the luxuriousness of modern colleges was an intentional move to neuter the political power of the youth following the student unrest of the 60s and 70s.
somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change.
and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades
Modern uni has a strong cruise-ship aesthetic.
I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?
my youngest son visited a handful of "fancy" schools near the end of highschool and he thought the whole process was nuts.
he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."