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Comment by GigabyteCoin | Hacker News Reader

If what I'm reading is true, I am absolutely disgusted and appalled.

This article reinforces the fact that post secondary academic institutions are 100% business oriented and makes me glad that they didn't get more than a year's worth of tuition money out of me.

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NYU is more a real estate company than a post-secondary academic institution. Lacking an Ivy-level endowment, a lot of their efforts are centered around (and much of their revenue comes from) acquiring and redeveloping real estate in downtown Manhattan and renting it out as dorm space to sheltered undergraduates at exorbitant rates. What recognition they may have cultivated in recent years is also largely due to the name and the location, which they try to bolster with their ever-expanding array of purple-flagged dorm buildings around the city. Now that they have similar interests in Shanghai, how is any of this surprising?

If you think what NYU charges for dorm accommodations is ridiculous, wait until you see how expensive the rest of Manhattan is.

When I was shopping for apartments before my Masters program, NYU charged more for dorms than many available apartments in South Village.

included in dorms are water, heat, cable, internet and even toilet paper, light bulbs, furniture.

How much?

I live in the Village. NYU charges above-market prices per sq.ft. compared to Craig's List room rates. They can, because parents are willing to pay for the security of a school dorm vs. a random building with random roommates in the big city.

A market consists of identical goods. If what NYU provides isn't identical to the surrounding housing, it's unfair to compare its pricing to that of the surrounding housing. It's like saying that oranges are "above market" compared to apples.

> NYU charges above-market prices per sq.ft. compared to Craig's List room rates

Of course, every university I've ever seen the prices for does the same thing. Dorms (and other university housing) are not cheap.

It's a fairly captive market (in many cases students are required to live in dorms when they're freshmen, and when not, they often aren't in a good position to search for housing) and they have a premium product by many measures (typically because dorms are much closer to the rest of the university, and most people you know also live there...).

Most people I knew who moved off-campus when I was in university did so to save money; despite sometimes roomier accommodation, it's almost always much farther away, and often quite a bit nastier (slumlords catering to poor students are legion)...

The problem is that NYU does so under the guise of a "not for profit educational institution".

A nonprofit organization "is an organization that uses surplus revenues to achieve its goals rather than distributing them as profit or dividends". If they're using the money earned from charging exorbitant rent to expand the University, extend scholarships, fund research, or keep the buildings cleaner, they're acting within the charter. "Nonprofit" doesn't mean they can't make money, it just means they don't give the excess money back to investors.

It's really not that simple. There's a lot of money to be made in the upper levels of a university and nationwide administration has been growing relentlessly. They may not officially pay dividends to "shareholders" but they are nevertheless very politicized institutions with the same grab for power and money, just on a scale smaller than Goldman Sachs, the US gov't, etc.

Edit: For example: http://www.hawaiireporter.com/university-of-hawaii-procureme... http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/business-it/university-it-manag...

Isolated cases but as with all systems with twisted incentives, I'd bet there's a lot more subtle corruption going in universities than we think.

What's become a little more clear from this article to me, is that many big US schools are actively pursuing expansion because of all the students from China willing to pay full tuition and still value having a degree. Who knows what kinds of deals they are going to need to make with China to keep these relationships up. I also wonder, are Americans making these deals directly, or do they hire people in China who are used to dealing with the Chinese gov't?

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