It also subsidizes the tuition you have to pay.
Source: I worked at a top 5 US university as an employee, on both the business and academic sides, for 7 years.
The key difference is: our universities do not run expensive world-class sports teams (while there are amateur things such as racing, these do have an educational focus as they tend to be a side gig of the mechanics courses) and at the same time are properly financed by the state.
On the other hand, college educated citizens are less likely to enter the army out of desperation (so no more cheap replaceable cannon fodder for the endless wars) or to agree to usurious 20%+ APR payday loans or end up in private prisons or work as replaceable cogs in Amazon warehouses, "gig economy", farming, meatpacking or whatever else exploitative labor market. This costs the rich elite donating to politicians actual money in profits.
Incentives for politicians are not aligned with the targets for a better society, that is the core issue.
Academia should be academia and only dedicated to further scientific knowledge and teaching, not to spend boatloads of time and resources to hunt for half year grant money or sports revenue. Just imagine all the management time of what is consumed by sports go to helping the professors deal with grants/funding issues - that would be a major boost for science if scientists could actually do science things instead of management things!
Are they actually, when all's said and done? (Genuinely asking, I've no idea). In particular, after the facilities are paid for? Non-education-related sports facilities (stadiums and such) are notoriously nearly always net costs to the government who subsidise them.
Stadiums can sometimes look for public subsidy when being replaced or re-built, but they can equally make a claim that their presence brings in millions of dollars of revenue to the local area over the course of a season and that the cost of the stadium can easily be amortized over decades (something that is actually easier for a collegiate program in a mid-sized city to claim than a pro team in a major urban center.) The ancillary facilities like practice space, offices for coaching staff and other infrastructure are almost always paid for by the athletic programs to the best of my knowledge.
https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athle...
Most universities have some form of dorms, however they're usually wildly inadequate in numbers - but as most students come from the town or nearer region of the university and don't move across half the country they can live at their parents' houses.
As for amenities: who needs special "college amenities" here? Sports is provided by the town (public sports training grounds), its clubs (for team sports) and for really niche stuff sometimes by the universities themselves, drinking is allowed both in public and in a number of bars, discos and other venues... so what is missing? (Honest question, my knowledge about US campus culture is based upon more or less shitty comedy movies)
As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.
> As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.
Neither of those are called TAs. The first kind is a graduate student lecturer, the second is called an RA (research assistant). One or more TAs for a large course typically helps the professor in running sections and grading homework, those two things being missing from most German courses (from my understand being told by my friend about his college experience in Germany; they might have homework, but it wasn't graded).
Running a college is expensive. Everything costs more, including the blue-collar work force, so tuition correspondingly costs more. Public schools must also deal with drastic cuts in state support--the UC system, for example, only receives 10% of its budget from the state of CA (but used to receive more than 90% of its budget from the state).
I don't know how the numbers work out but I suspect you could run a private college in the US for less than the mid to high 5-figure $ per student per year they seem to charge.
My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half.
This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.