Opinion: Questions About Billion-Dollar Capital Drives

As colleges and universities continue to announce capital campaigns to raise $1-billion or more, new questions need to be asked about how that money is used, what motivates such fund-raising drives, and the unintended effects of interuniversity competition, says Joe Nocera in an column for The New York Times.

Mr. Nocera says that elite universities, despite endowments of several billion dollars, often spend capital-campaign money on relatively superficial projects simply to keep up with other elite institutions, and tuition goes up.

“Competition actually causes prices and costs to rise because the ever-upward spiral of bigger salaries and better facilities and all the rest of it makes the running of the university that much more expensive,” he writes.

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