Not Good News

modestmelody
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:04:01 +0000

MiPerson, if you read this forum a bit more you’ll find I already posted where our president stated we’re losing 60million from our budget this year, and 2billion is a safety estimation.

Price of Admissions crap is from three presidents ago and lasted for about 3 years. That’s precisely in that period where I said our presidents weren’t looking at fund raising from the right angle.

I don’t know what you mean by “be heard” but as a tour guide with over 125 tours under his belt and who has trained tour guides in the past I can say that many of our tour guides are excellent-- but there are 65 tour guides filled by 180 students who want spots and we can’t observe all of those guides all of the time. Sometimes you get a bad guide-- it’s hardly representative of a school and if you really want to be a well-informed parent you’d be asking for a lot more than one students 1 hour schtick of which 85% is usually straight from a script.

Our “low endowment” still puts us high on a list of very rich schools. Our alumni giving rate is top notch.

I know exactly what cuts are looking to be made, not just from President’s Simmons letters but from conversations with higher ups around campus. If you think that Brown is the only one, look around-- practically all of the top schools are recording 25-30% losses (and Brown’s gains over the last 3-5 years outpaces most of our peers). Changes are definitely going to be made, but don’t make it out to be the apocalypse because you’ve read one book, saw a single Brown student on a tour, and went into List Art for an info session (which we use because it’s big and no professors wnat to teach in there, so we put our real classes in nicer rooms). Manning Chapel is sometimes used which is much nicer.