Comment by gregw2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gregw2 | Hacker News Reader

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I think the points made in the article are fine, there is something to the way colleges facilitate community and their physical design encourages walkability and enables that... but I would offer one caveat to this which cities should avoid when considering what to imitate and what not to.

I have noticed a correlation between excessive building costs and campaigns and the two industries whose prices have most outpaced inflation the last 20 years: healthcare/hospitals and education/colleges.

Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day. (This also manifests in a lot more time-consuming walking to get around due to the lower density of usable space.)

This trend is neither wise nor sustainable nor just. And college administrators should be held accountable for it, not given a pat on the back for raising money and spending it (despite the nice line on their resume). Alternate metrics of success should be culturally encouraged and measured.

How could this be done? I don't know if LEED certification (which is an award given to buildings meeting various sustainability/efficiency criteria and has Gold/silver/bronze-type ratings which are thus indirectly a bragging right mentioned by anyone in academia who gets buildings built) measures actual building utilization... I suspect not. Typically LEED covers initial construction and is awarded at the end of construction, and thus could not include use-after-buildout metrics/grading, but LEED or something like it should attempt to measure something like that, and that should be a sign of true administrative competence (and also efficient use of donor funds by the way.)

I wonder if the very sensors which are used to shut off lights when people aren't around and any "energy/CO2 savings metrics" from those sensors could be cheaply repurposed and inverted to also measure the creation of just such a building utilization metric (look how much carbon we wasted and continue to waste heating/cooling a building people aren't using?)

Part of the problem is that rich people want to leave behind a lasting legacy, and what better way than buy a building for the campus. At my alma mater, someone got a building named after them despite only donating a fraction of its construction costs, let alone maintenance. No doubt the ballooning tuition costs are subsidizing this man's legacy.

Would that building have gotten built anyway, absent the contribution and naming? If so, the university still got a subsidy from that donor.

This is exactly where a lot of “cost” comes from.

Coddling legacy builders sense of value.

Paraphrasing James Madison, he wrote the future owed a debt to the past for their achievements.

I disagree, and align more with Thomas Jefferson; the dead do not rule the living.

Having to shoulder the burden of war and industrial debt on a “generational distributed ledger”, which is so clearly biased to favor entrenched power is unsustainable.

Indeed, that’s is, IMO, why most empires fail, and revolutions take place.

I think we should end all charitable tax deductions for people above a certain net worth. They use that tax advantage either for their vanity or else to convert their money into influence.

Think of Bill Gates in the 90’s vs now. He has far more influence than he ever had, and a large part of it is because of the money he was able to put at a huge tax advantage into his foundation. He probably has a direct line to dozens of heads of state. He probably influences policy across many countries. True, he has used that influence for good, but he got a lot of it at a massive tax advantage.

Unless you know of some secret section in the tax code, it's not a "2 for 1 deal" - if Bill Gates donates a billion dollars to a charity, it makes sense that it wouldn't be taxable; it's no longer his money. Typically the tax code reduces your income by money for which you don't actually have constructive use.

There are certainly other things like 'in-kind' donations which may reduce tax obligations without necessarily providing a commensurate value, but putting money into bona fide charitable works are not among them.

> it's no longer his money.

That is one of my contentions. Although it is technically no longer his money, he still has a significant amount of control over how it is spent, and that money increases is political power and influence.

And it is not just Bill Gates and a foundation. If I donate $50 to a charity, it is unlikely I have any influence. It is truly not my money.

If however, I donate $50,000,000 to a charity, I exert a lot of control with that money. I can have a huge influence on the direction of the charity, and even likely get somebody fired or appointed to the board of directors.

I am not saying those donations should be illegal, just that we should see that it is different qualitively from a regular donation and not give it tax advantages.

I can think of no reason to believe Bill Gates wouldn't still have a huge foundation, with the attendant influence, even if he'd been unable to take advantage of some (fairly minor in the grand scheme of things) tax savings along the way.

Before that it might be wise though to have the government actually provide the services that charities are providing at the moment. Paying off medical debt, investing in medical research, running UBI experiments, funding basic care for homeless or the poor or children - much if not all of this is left to philantropists and churches at the moment. For what it's worth, citizens are running fundraisers for essential services like police and firefighters - so many that fraud is so rampant that the FTC has its own advisory page (https://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0085-fundraisers-calli...). Or school funding, where citizens have to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in some instances to keep them open (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_fundraising).

Cutting tax deductions would likely eliminate a significant portion of that spending, leaving those depending on it pretty much screwed. And that doesn't even include outright shit like police funds coming out of "asset forfeiture", leading to heaps of abuse.

From an European point of view, so much of what I wrote above is... mind boggling.

> Alumni returning to their colleges after 20-50 years may notice the following phenomena: there are a lot more buildings (with donor names on them) but there is an incredible number of empty rooms at any one point in time... many more than when they went to school back in the day.

I will be 40 later this year, and I continue to live next to the University I started attending over 20 years ago: the University of California, Santa Barbara. I mean, right now, campus is empty due to COVID-19; but, right before the world switched to "everything from home", I am pretty sure that we had almost no free capacity... campus keeps buying and renting building as they need more classroom space, study space, and living space. Yes: there are a lot lot lot more buildings, and the footprint of the campus is much larger; but the entire campus is packed with people... the #1 thing that feels weird about it is not that the campus feels empty, but that the campus feels completely and utterly full despite all the new construction. The core areas of campus now have a ridiculous number of people swarming through them constantly, and people are now sometimes living four to a room in buildings where, when I was a student, there only had started to be rumors that someone might be in a triple somewhere (again: despite there having been a very large number of new housing projects built in the last couple decades). I just can't track anything about your point here with my lived experience.

I can tell you that despite what you might figure, buildings really do get used. I went to a massive university with 50k people, and a campus so big it took a half hour to traverse yet was packed with massive buildings the whole way. For the most part the buildings would be booked up during the regular term, but during exams, then they were absolutely maxed. All the study spaces in the 13 story main library, 6 story engineer library, and all the other scattered libraries would be full. There would be no free chairs at all. People would resort to studying in empty classrooms during finals, which usually worked better since you had a closed off room to meet with your group, space, AV hookup, whiteboards, etc.

If there wasn’t a need for more and more rooms in a college, they wouldn’t get built. It’s not some conspiracy.

The college that first triggered this observation/concern was one such 50k public state university, but the observation was alumni-based, not student-based and I recognize mileage may vary across schools and appreciate your comment.

My concern is not of a conspiracy, but of misplaced incentives that have gone awry. (And which are slated to get even worse if we start periodically forgiving loans which I have mixed feelings about.) My perception is that college/university prices have drastically outpaced inflation since inflation shrunk in the early 1980s and the quality of education provided has not concomitantly increased.

At least some analyses from the National Board of Economics Research show that from 1987-2010, "expansions in borrowing limits drive 40% of the tuition jump and represent the single most important factor [of tuition increases from 1987 to 2010]" (https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w21967/w219..., page 4.) and "We also find that increased grant aid contributes 17% to the rise in tuition"

Tuition increase is not directly related to the subject of campus design and spending on campus buildings, but is part of the origin of my skepticism and critical eye towards college/universities as a societal model, the thesis of the original article.

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