In a new post at his blog, Walter Russell Mead points out that some colleges are incorrectly spending too much money on things to attract new students.

Colleges Paying the Price for Expensive Facilities

By now everyone has heard the statistic that American students and graduates owe more than $1 trillion on student loans. But while everyone knows what these students did with their loans, it’s far less clear what the colleges are doing with all this money.

In his new book College (Un)bound, Jeffrey Selingo took a closer look at college spending and found that while some of the money is being spent on academics, a good deal of it goes toward massively expensive yet completely unnecessary facilities meant to lure students. In an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition, he said:

“College now, today, has many jobs, right, and one of the jobs is maturing students and giving them kind of a comfortable place to live while they’re going to school for four years. And so now we see, you know, these palatial dorms that have been built on many campuses — they have their own private bedroom and they share a kitchen and, you know, you go into a dining hall now and you have sushi in the dining hall. You have climbing walls, which I think everybody has, but now you even have these lazy rivers where you can get in an inner tube and go down. […]

“Well, they … [improved facilities] in the last decade when enrollment was going up, when money was free-flowing, you know. Most parents were using their homes as ATMs to pay for college, because of the housing market. And now suddenly those bills are coming due, and the problem is that the students are either not there or they’re unwilling to pay the money to fund those things.”