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No, having funding priorities does not imply that you have budget problems. (I hope you’re not in business school, sakky, with that attitude.) It implies - no, by flat-out definition, it means - that there are things you’d rather spend your money on than others. Caltech could afford to start a competitive ballet academy, but it won’t.</p>
<p>Per capita be damned - Caltech’s endowment is five times smaller than MIT’s. That doesn’t mean we can afford to have a 1/5-scale version of every program that MIT has. An endowment of $5N billion earns well more than five times the interest that an endowment of $N billion earns. In addition, Caltech is trying to rapidly grow its endowment ([press</a> release](<a href=“News - www.caltech.edu”>News - www.caltech.edu)) which means that it is spending less than five percent of its returns. I bet that MIT is spending a larger (5.5%?) portion of their already larger interest revenue on the endowment. Bottom line: proportional to student body size, Caltech does not have as much money to put into new buildings, faculty, and programs.</p>
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Why should we worry about this? Because it’s an indication of program quality. Caltech didn’t earn a reputation by educating half-assedly. It’s up to the students to earn a diploma that has meaning - why should we have an easy track* for them to “get that all-important bachelor’s degree?” Come on. We’re not going to issue sheepskin consolation prizes so that failing students feel better. As hard as it is to transfer to Stanford or Harvard from Caltech if you have bad grades, you can always go back to Compass-Direction State University and get your humanities diploma there instead. Cry me a river.</p>
<p>*I’m not saying English is inherently easier, but it certainly is here at Caltech, because we don’t have the faculty or the resources to make it a rigorous major.</p>
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I dunno…which of these jobs sounds more fulfilling to you? ISU has 3900 business majors; UCF has 8200; Caltech’s last graduating class had 29 BEM majors and every one of them had a primary major in an actual science. At ISU and UCF you, the BEM instructor, would have many colleagues; at Caltech there are two dozen social science professors total. (But odds are good you’d be hired as an adjunct - “non-professorial faculty” - anyway.) Assuming you were conducting research, Caltech would not have the literary resources (library, journal subscriptions) and industry connections you’d probably appreciate. At ISU and UCF many students probably plan on pursuing business as a career. Many Caltech students double-major in BEM because the courses are just as easy as any other social science that you might take to meet your HSS requirements, and with just seven non-HSS requirement courses (six of which can be taken P/F, some of which can be in applied math or even the retardedly easy intro to psychology courses) you have an extra major. You wouldn’t be teaching much; you wouldn’t be researching effectively. Why would you choose Caltech over those other schools? Because of its US News rank? ;)</p>