Please file under: reasons to be utterly disgusted with the state of higher education in the US

Aethele, in a recent post, linked to this article in the New York Times about how the University of Houston has just built a 53 million dollar wellness center complete with hot tubs. According to the director of campus recreation "Everyone says it looks like a resort."

Because I think we all agree that's what college is about.

Here are some high lights from the article:

Students now get massages, pedicures and manicures at the University of Wisconsin in Oshkosh, while Washington State University boasts of having the largest Jacuzzi on the West Coast. It holds 53 people.


Play one of 52 golf courses from around the world on the room-sized golf simulators at Indiana University of Pennsylvania

On the drawing board at the University of Southern Mississippi are plans for a full-fledged water park, complete with water slides, a meandering river and something called a wet deck — a flat, moving sheet of water so that students can lie back and stay cool while sunbathing.

"An arms race," said Clare Cotton, president of the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts. "It's exactly the psychology of an arms race. From the outside it seems totally crazy, but from the inside it feels necessary and compelling."

In the meanwhile adjuncts, who carry the majority of the course load, barely make anything. The universities do not make these facilities available to adjuncts, only full time faculty. For example, NYU charges its adjuncts if they wish to use the sports center. It would be simple enough for NYU to throw in that little amenity to make up for perhaps the disgraceful pay and utter lack of benefits, but they don't.

But then, that would make sense.

Furthermore, students tend to see these facilities and promotional events as "free." NYU holds an autumnal festival and a spring strawberry festival. Each year the events are more lavish. They started simply as little stalls of popcorn and soda. Students had to go to certain booths about alcohol poisoning or safe sex to get tokens in order to receive the popcorn or whatever. To some extent it made sense, the university was trying to get information to the students in a "fun" way.

Now such festivals boast live performers, balloon animals, a variety of foods and drinks, free give aways including hats and t-shirts. Students load up on these treats thinking of them as "free" and even more so thinking that considering the tuition they pay that NYU owes them events such as these.

What they fail to recognize is that these events just make the university raise the tuition even more. Students indulging in these festivals leads the universities believe that the students are willing to "pay" for these events through tuition ( the very claim on expert makes in the Times article).

Unfortunately, they don't have the same gimme attitude towards their profs.

For example, although the university requires me to have an hour in my office for every hour I teach my students rarely come. Although I promise to help them with papers and answer questions, students rarely bother to ask these questions. I end up sitting in an empty office for hours.

In the few cases students do bother me, it is usually with something that they could have learned simply by opening up their textbooks and doing the assigned reading or looking at the syllabus (for example when I started talking about the midterm-students asked me when it was-I have been reviewing these dates since the first day of classes).

This is what becomes of treating students like consumers.