We’ve entered an era of colleges as country clubs:
Princeton’s dormitories were the brainchild of Woodrow Wilson, who was president of the university before he entered politics. Wilson worried about campus elitism and felt that too many students were housed in off-campus “eating clubs,” which divided students from one another and diverted them from the life of the mind. So he reconfigured the campus as “a walled city against materialism and all of its works,” as one architect wrote, built around solid but austere student residences.
At all-female Smith College, meanwhile, modest living quarters would illustrate “what the human spirit can do when unhampered either by deprivation or by excess,” as one dean of the college wrote.
After World War II, when the GI Bill allowed millions of returning veterans to attend college, they lived in hastily constructed Quonset huts or trailer parks. And when postwar prosperity and federal loans sparked another enrollment boom in the 1960s and 1970s, universities built drab cinder-block and concrete buildings to house newcomers.
Only in recent years did colleges start to resemble country clubs, with a few classrooms thrown in. Competing for students, universities also competed to see who could build the nicest dorms, gyms and stadiums. The expenses were passed on to students, of course, who met rising tuition costs by taking out more loans. Student debt has doubled in the last decade, topping $1 trillion, which is more than the total amount that Americans owe on their credit cards.
To be sure, some of the new college construction is bankrolled by individual donors, who often prefer to fund buildings that can bear their names rather than scholarships or research. But private gifts to universities plummeted after the 2008 recession, while construction picked up. Between 2010 and 2012, colleges and universities spent $22 billion on new facilities, or twice as much as they were spending a decade earlier. And with fewer private donations, some colleges are taking on debt to fund construction, debt that is likely to be passed on to students and their families.