[2006alum]

Schools . . . compete for [students] by building these palaces that look cool, but don't meaningfully improve [academics] or add to the quality of anyone's [career opportunities]. It's absolute madness. 

Sure, it's neat to have shiny facilities. They're cool! But surely we can have high quality facilities while also providing a more meaningful benefit to student[]s.

Fixed for you. This is hardly a problem endemic only to athletic departments. Schools have been competing to attract tuition dollars with rock walls, sushi bars, and all sorts of things for several decades now. The real reason is because the 17-year-old "customer" is often neither sufficiently price-sensitive (because loans to be paid in the future and/or scholarships), nor sufficiently savvy to identify the real value-add of a school, so they go based on really noisy proxies like cool amenities. US News has made this worse by making spending-per-student relevant for rankings, but not debt/salary 1/5/10 years out.

[2006alum]

Schools . . . compete for [students] by building these palaces that look cool, but don't meaningfully improve [academics] or add to the quality of anyone's [career opportunities]. It's absolute madness. 

Sure, it's neat to have shiny facilities. They're cool! But surely we can have high quality facilities while also providing a more meaningful benefit to student[]s.

Fixed for you. This is hardly a problem endemic only to athletic departments. Schools have been competing to attract tuition dollars with rock walls, sushi bars, and all sorts of things for several decades now. The real reason is because the 17-year-old "customer" is often neither sufficiently price-sensitive (because loans to be paid in the future and/or scholarships), nor sufficiently savvy to identify the real value-add of a school, so they go based on really noisy proxies like cool amenities. US News has made this worse by making spending-per-student relevant for rankings, but not debt/salary 1/5/10 years out.