| NEWS aubrun Gets the Wall Street Journal Treatment

[It Takes Eleven]

Breaking Down the Spending at One of America’s Priciest Public Colleges

Auburn University piled money into buildings, administrators and athletics after years of raising costs for students. Among many new buildings on the Alabama campus: a $74 million recreation center, a $51 million dorm.

www.wsj.com

Wall Street Journal targets aubrun for lavish spending increases over a decade and a half. School administrators declined to answer questions or follow-ups on financials, which obviously got the reporter's claws out for them. They also stopped reporting the more detailed financials the WSJ used in 2016, and declined to provide them when requested. Honestly, they could've targeted any number of Southern schools following the same blueprint of building luxury accommodations and marketing themselves to out-of-state students to pay for it. Alabama and Ole Miss probably wouldn't have fared better in an analysis.

Still fun to see them on the hot seat, though.

 

[Rolltide24]

Read that one this morning. Highest tuition of a public university in the US considering what students pay after scholarships. All those buildings and facilities they put millions into is like polishing a turd.

On a side note, we’ve done a lot of campus tours, etc. over the last year. The volume of applications per school has increased significantly over the past 10 years. And therefore the dollar amount of merit scholarships has declined. An example, a friend’s kid was awarded full tuition, room and board with a 33 ACT score in 2015. Now it takes a 36. At UT, a friend’s son enrolled in 2022, sophomore now. If he applied for 2024, his scholarship would be around $6k less per year (not counting increases in tuition). Acceptance rates have gone down steadily. And this is while housing costs pretty much at all schools have gone up significantly. Another good article in the WSJ last week on university housing costs. And many schools only have enough housing for freshman. Some not even that much. A friend’s kid that started at UT in August they put him in an off-campus apartment complex.