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> The thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.

I feel a better question is what entities that are in continuous operation since the 1630s do not resemble a real estate holding company? If you analyze only the extremes of any distribution you'll find weirdness.

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This is true! I hadn't thought about it like this to be totally honest. It's hard to point fingers at old institutions, especially given they're mostly located in prime real estate locations across the country (Cambridge, Palo Alto, etc.), and it's not really their fault that they need land to operate.

Many of them are prime real estate locations in large part -because- the old institutions are there.

Yeah, this is a silly argument. Go walk around the neighborhoods near MIT and you’ll see company after company that intentionally positioned themselves in proximity to the campus. Many of those companies are also MIT spinoffs.

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