This is exactly right. Just like it's better to think of McDonald's as a real estate company with a food business on the side, these days it's better to think of big state schools as mechanisms for ingesting federal research dollars, with an education business on the side. (Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)
As an example, MIT spends about 16% of its revenue on undergraduates; undergrad tuition is about 14% of revenue.* Remarkably those percentages were about the same when I was an undergraduate there 40 years ago.
Basically MIT is an enormous government research lab with a small school bolted on the side. This was a deliberate structure thanks to James Conant and Karl Taylor Compton working for the government in WWII.
* honestly I’m astonished they are willing to run that minor (and by a lot of faculty reviled) operation at a small loss.
Interesting that you bring up WWII. There's a theory that says that US's big research funding agencies are deliberately set up the way that they are because the US government freaked the _fuck_ out upon realizing that a bunch of nerds could go from zero to nuclear bombs in ~10 years. So, these big bureaucracies were set up to, in effect, keep tabs on physicists. (I first heard of this from a talk from Kim Stanley Robinson of Red Mars fame, and more recently Ministry for the Future. It's on YouTube somewhere but it's a bit hard to find, it was a seminar he gave at Duke University some 15 years ago.)
Then, some 35 years later came the Bayh-Dole act, which however well-meaning it might have been, really provided the incentives for universities to turn into fed money capturing enterprises. The rest is history.
You don’t need a conspiracy theory — Compton and especially Conant were clear about the model they wanted to set up and why. It was well documented in memos, planning, and position papers.
This was before the Manhattan project was authorized.
Do you have a source for that cost attribution? Based on my time there (slightly more recent than yours), that breakdown feels roughly correct. However, I've been trying to find similar information and have found it difficult even for public universities.
The institution publishes its budget. 10 seconds of DDG search found this page: https://vpf.mit.edu/about-vpf/publications Looks like tuition is becoming less important over the Covid period and grad+ug is down to 9% of revenue.
They have a nice presentation with various charts and such which is where I get this info myself. I don’t know if it’s online. I forget how I got it when I was in school but now the people who come visit from the development office bring it with them because they know I’m interested.
This is exactly right. Just like it's better to think of McDonald's as a real estate company with a food business on the side, these days it's better to think of big state schools as mechanisms for ingesting federal research dollars, with an education business on the side. (Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)