Where is all the high college tuition going? My alma mater is losing money.

[JoeH]

Partly feature creep, but many of those amenities for students are relatively inexpensive compared to other high cost items that universities are adding. University I work at has spent around a billion over the last dozen years on construction, the new dorms and rec center were only about a quarter to a third of that. The rest was for new classroom and instructional lab buildings that were needed to replace classroom space that had been converted over the last 2-3 decades into research labs.

I doubt they ever did a full cost analysis, they just saw the money from collecting institutional overhead on all of the STEM related research grants. That currently runs around 55%, for every million dollars in grant money awarded to researchers, the university takes over half off the top. So to attract more grants, they hired professors for their ability to get them and provided space out of existing instructional space. The bonds for the replacement space will be paid out of student fees.

Money going to administrators has also been mentioned. Don't know about middle administration, but upper level positions have increased here and done quite well salary wise. The unions for the staff have been having a difficult time getting more than 1-2% raises in the contracts, several times over the last 10-15 years pay increases for the top level adminstators have been in the 10-15% range.