“This is true in particular to UCLA and probably UCSD. UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center and Geffen SOM are just a stone’s throw from the Life and Physical Sciences Departments as well as Engineering. The latter three sets of undergrads indeed do benefit, synergistically, instructionally, and with respect to facilities.”
firmament2x, you are absolutely correct. Undergraduate students benefit a great deal from medical schools and complexes, as well as large engineering programs, such as the ones present at universities like Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, JHU, MIT, Michigan, Northwestern, UCLA etc…That is especially true of premed, life science and Engineering majors.
In most cases, universities include medical and hospital costs, as well as engineering and medical research in their calculations, but they are not supposed to because they are only supposed to include instructional costs directly relevant to undergraduate students. Michigan, for example, clearly does not include medical school and hospital costs or engineering research in its calculation. Perhaps it should in order to boost its standing in the rankings.
Economies of scale also play a big role in the instructional spending per student statistic. Including medical complex expenses and research expenditure at a mid-sized university with a large medical complex and/or engineering program (like Caltech, Chicago, Columbia, Duke, JHU, Stanford, WUSTL, Yale etc…) will obviously be significantly more pronounced on a per student basis at larger universities.
Regardless, instructional spending data are not telling because of they are not consistently calculated, and they do not adjust for economies of scale.