<p>What non-education services should colleges offer or provide?</p>
<p>People here complain about colleges having fancy climbing walls, resort-like landscaping and architecture, expensive dorms and meal plans, etc. as reasons that colleges cost too much. But others who visit colleges complain here about the lack of amenities, ugly campus, and tiny cinder block dorms or lack of dorms, etc…</p>
<p>So what should colleges offer or provide to students besides education? Examples of non-education services:</p>
<ul>
<li>Housing</li>
<li>Food service</li>
<li>Career center</li>
<li>Professional school (pre-med, pre-law, etc.) advising</li>
<li>Shuttle buses around campus</li>
<li>Gym and recreational sports fields</li>
<li>Management or support of student extracurricular activities (e.g. directory of such groups, preference for such groups wanting to meet in campus classrooms, management and recognition of fraternities and sororities or disallowing them, etc.)</li>
<li>Disability services beyond minimum requirements</li>
<li>Non-academic counseling</li>
<li>On-campus medical services (at schools without medical schools)</li>
<li>Computing facilities beyond those needed for classes (e.g. wifi on campus)</li>
</ul>
<p>The extent of such services is another matter. If the college provides housing, there is a difference between offering an old cramped dorm with minimal amenities versus building a new $600,000 per bed dedicated dorm with lots of amenities.</p>
<p>Another service that is the subject of a long thread here: trying to figure out what happened when there is an accusation of rape or sexual assault, rather than sending it to the police and courts. (The long thread is about whether college administrations should be doing this, and how likely they are to get the correct answer if/when they do.)</p>
<p>@Madboutx, are you saying those things SHOULD be provided? The current NCAA/OBannon lawsuit may determine the first to a degree. I’m surprised to see religious services on the list (and rock walls for that matter). I’m just asking about your rationale. Thanks</p>
<p>It does look like there is little interest in discussing the specifics of what non-education services colleges should or should not be including, despite the sometimes vehement complaints about colleges being too expensive because they include too many unspecified frills (with a few trivial examples like climbing walls given).</p>
<p>And, yes, some complain about administrative bloat, but that exists at least in part because of the bundled non-education services that colleges have added.</p>
<p>First a rathole comment. I’d bet 90% of the posters on CC could describe a coherent budget for the federal government that is both balanced and much smaller than the current budget. The catch … everyone’s budget would prioritize different things … there would be nothing close to consensus about what should stay and what should go.</p>
<p>I think this topic falls into the same space. We could all name things that should stay and what should go … and we’d all have very different lists. So a college trying to be very customer focused will end up with the super set of all those requests. </p>
<p>And THAT is why colleges offer so many diverse services many think are superfluous by others. btw- education is not just academics so much of what is offered outside the classroom can, and should, be considered education.</p>
<p>I believe much of the increase in admin costs relate to improving advising, career services and med/psychological services and counseling. Another group handle all the increased “accountability” reports and paperwork colleges have to report to all levels of government that provide money to colleges. </p>
<p>Most services have started because of the perception of endless pools of free money. Interestingly, many students leave homes with less frills and can only afford even worse conditions after earning their degrees. </p>
<p>On the expenses side, the problem is not that services are offered, but how poorly controlled the final costs are because of excessive compensation, horrendous accounting, and the typical lack of concern for spending restraints. Education is the perfect landing strip for spendthrifts and profiteers. </p>
<p>The inflation in all education costs has been unfettered for years. Administrative bloat, financial support of academic divas, small workloads, poor use of resources, and the list goes on. In the meantime, the return on education is dwindling fast. </p>
<p>We simply prefer to bury our heads and look at the issues with romantic lenses. It is even worse than we think. Wait until the true costs of the pension obligations of baby boomers start to reach their apex. </p>
I’d been thinking that title went to interior decorating or landscape architecture. </p>
<p>I think there is a misperception that creature comforts = better educational outputs. It isn’t so. The best educational outputs come from getting the best inputs, and having the best faculty. I went to a school with 100 year old dormitories with bad insulation (pre-energy crisis), and the smartest guys in the country stood in front of the class with a piece of chalk and a blackboard.</p>
<p>Of course, creature comforts may well translate to more affluent students who can afford higher tuition. In that sense, they may make a lot of sense for the institutions’ budgets. </p>
<p>At least some of these services come in response to something else. For example, before Virginia Tech, colleges really didn’t have behavioral response teams/threat assessment teams to deal with students who potentially posed a risk of harm to self or others (note the “self” part–I’d wager that these teams probably deal with potential suicidality and non-violent mental health issues more than potential homicidality). Now, most of them do. While they’re made up of existing employees, they do take time and administration to run. Also, others are mandated to exist in some form–for example, colleges have to provide accommodations to students with disabilities under Section 504/ADA. Smaller colleges may lump that in with other student services offices, but at larger schools, you often need multiple full time employees to handle the workload (by which I mean “limiting” caseloads to 300 students per counselor).</p>
<p>i’ll bite: LEED-certified buildings. (which will never recoup the massive additional construction costs in energy savings, but the look pretty.)</p>
<p>I would heartily disagree with some of the supposedly necessary things included above (not listing which on purpose). I work at a very small school that lacks some of these things, and our students get an excellent education. </p>