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Most Bothersome Wake Forest Development in the last 12 months? Pit/Tunnels Adjace

Haros said:
I’d be curious as to Wake’s financials. How much does it cost to run the school in a given year, including all salaries, etc?

Here’s a blind outline coming at it from the revenue side - the numbers are almost assuredly off, but let’s highlight a few things:
5.4k undergrads * $50k net average = $270M
3.5k grad students * $50k net = $175M
Annual Donations/Endowment Gift Contribution = $20M?
Grants + Other = $30M
Endowment Contribution = $1.86B * 4% spending ratio) = ~$75M

Total Revenue = Total Costs = $570 Million

Assume that $50k for undergrads and grad students alike is the net amount paid to the school for tuition/room/board after scholarships/aid (feel free to chime in if you know better).

Observation 1: the endowment contribution to the total at just 13% limits the options on things like need-blind admissions. Harvard et al can do that because they have endowment sizes that cover most of the operating budget of the school.

Just taking the average net payment to $40k from $50k from no changes other than endowment size covering more of the cost via scholarships/aid would require the endowment to be ~$4 Billion.

For the endowment to cover the entire operating budget in perpetuity, you’d be looking at a $14 Billion endowment.

Observation 2: another option is increasing the student body size and class size. You could do this (with some incremental costs for housing/food/etc) without meaningfully increasing faculty size.

What does this do to the experience (unknown)?

The number and quality of applicants isn’t likely to increase given the upcoming demographic cliff and the now lower ranking, so increasing the size of the student body without further diluting the average quality of students starts to get much more difficult.

Option 3: you could increase the number of faculty devoted to research by expanding the size of the overall faculty without increasingly class sizes given many qualified applicants looking for jobs. The offset here is the increase in cost, which would have to be covered by…tuition.

Options 4-10: choose your own adventure below.

It all comes back to the size of the endowment - at 10x the size we could do whatever we wanted. Now we can do anything we want, but not everything we want, with much more stark trade offs.
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Yeah to go back to your first paragraph, I kind of flippantly said that in another post but that “cost to run the school” side has me a little baffled. I’m curious as to how much different it should be now vs when we were in school and tuition was not what it is now.
 
WFU8184 said:
You have free falled. WF sports and academics are fine. Btw, it must have been tough growing up working in McDonald’s and on a farm as a Dentist’s son. Did you also work while on school at WF and Duke. Dude, you were born on third base. Cut the crap.
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My dad was a handicap dentist who worked part time and made 80k/year. I borrowed the money to go to college. And yes I had jobs all through college and law school which helped.

Why don’t you come right over and let’s pull our tax returns and measure now.
 
What, specifically, should our administration have done this last year to ward off a fall in a formulaic metric where the formula changed with little notice?
 
Don’t worry WFU8184 an automatic 10 million bonus points if your tax return says married filing jointly, another 10 million points for every dependent claimed.
 
In 1972 James Ralph Scales told us and our parents we don't exist to get your child a job. We exist to teach them how to think. Fast forward to today and we see the replacement of IQ with Computational Thinking as a measure of future success. Those who have implemented that are seeing dynamic success in K thru 12. You are smart enough to investigate these new ideas. And as far as how we judge people and their money I'd just say why judge anybody? Live your life in a no judgement zone. Cuz in the end they don't put luggage racks on hearses.
 
donaldross said:
My dad was a handicap dentist who worked part time and made 80k/year. I borrowed the money to go to college. And yes I had jobs all through college and law school which helped.

Why don’t you come right over and let’s pull our tax returns and measure now.
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Your dad made about 3x the median household income working part time.
 
Why judge our school? It doesn’t matter if Elon passes us. We all should just sit around and pray and be happy.

Pro Humanitate. Join the peace corp or teach Russian literature.

Parents around the country can’t wait to send their kids to wake forest for that!
 
Rafi said:
I'm not certain, but I don't think the decision is up to Wake. I think the determination is based on the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Learning. And looking at the schools on the Liberal Arts ranking, I don't see any with a med school and law school.
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This is correct
 
Liquid Karma said:
What, specifically, should our administration have done this last year to ward off a fall in a formulaic metric where the formula changed with little notice?
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This is a very good question.

1) These changes have been in the works for years. We long ago should have been encouraging a culture that it is just fine to go get a high paying job. Rather than continue the culture of "go volunteer for the Red Cross" or do Teach for America. Pro Humanitate. Business folks are greedy pigs. That culture still permeates our administration.

2) We need to encourage our doctorate professors to do research--rather than teach at all costs. If we want to be a major University, we have to be that.

3) We needed significant raises to hire these folks to do research. We have long had the money.

4) Get teachers who can teach and let them teach -- not doctorate folks. No one cares and hasn't for decades if their professor has a doctorate. They care if they can speak English. Dr. Broyles was so qualified. He also couldn't teach and frankly could barely speak--like so many of these tenured folks we let sit around and drool all over kids in Tribble. We need young and hungry.

5) We should have let in low income folks for years. We knew that change was on the horizon. And quite frankly it was good for diversity.

6) Despite the years of notice, we failed to get out in front of this story by months. We knew it was coming and waited to discuss it until way, way too late--damage control now--and horrible damage control at that.

But the worst thing of all??? We say we are sticking to our guns. We are sticking with small classes taught by our main tenured Doctorate Professors. Our press release doubles down and rather than try and reduce the damage the next few years -- we are perfectly fine just dismissing the rankings and spending decades continuing to drop. By not announcing NOW we are making massive adjustments, the cycle of our student body's credentials will deteriorate--and quickly. We are just not an appetizing choice for those folks who just miss out on the Ivies anymore. Those students shot us up the rankings the last few decades. Now we are saying "only apply here if you share our small class and doctorate professor" mentality. I don't know who is in the pool of wanted to pay 300K to go to Wake Forest to be a teacher or a preacher or a government worker--but I can assure you that pool is not the one who got wait listed at Harvard or Duke.
 
donaldross said:
This is a very good question.

1) These changes have been in the works for years. We long ago should have been encouraging a culture that it is just fine to go get a high paying job. Rather than continue the culture of "go volunteer for the Red Cross" or do Teach for America. Pro Humanitate. Business folks are greedy pigs. That culture still permeates our administration.

2) We need to encourage our doctorate professors to do research--rather than teach at all costs. If we want to be a major University, we have to be that.

3) We needed significant raises to hire these folks to do research. We have long had the money.

4) Get teachers who can teach and let them teach -- not doctorate folks. No one cares and hasn't for decades if their professor has a doctorate. They care if they can speak English. Dr. Broyles was so qualified. He also couldn't teach and frankly could barely speak--like so many of these tenured folks we let sit around and drool all over kids in Tribble. We need young and hungry.

5) We should have let in low income folks for years. We knew that change was on the horizon. And quite frankly it was good for diversity.

6) Despite the years of notice, we failed to get out in front of this story by months. We knew it was coming and waited to discuss it until way, way too late--damage control now--and horrible damage control at that.

But the worst thing of all??? We say we are sticking to our guns. We are sticking with small classes taught by our main tenured Doctorate Professors. Our press release doubles down and rather than try and reduce the damage the next few years -- we are perfectly fine just dismissing the rankings and spending decades continuing to drop. By not announcing NOW we are making massive adjustments, the cycle of our student body's credentials will deteriorate--and quickly. We are just not an appetizing choice for those folks who just miss out on the Ivies anymore. Those students shot us up the rankings the last few decades. Now we are saying "only apply here if you share our small class and doctorate professor" mentality. I don't know who is in the pool of wanted to pay 300K to go to Wake Forest to be a teacher or a preacher or a government worker--but I can assure you that pool is not the one who got wait listed at Harvard or Duke.
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Quite possibly the worst post in this iteration of the boards. Just a guy flailing for attention and relevance in a sea of Greensboro mediocrity. Damn. No wonder we’re 47 now with this as a (self proclaimed) prominent alumnus.
 
Sco Deac said:
I want the best across diverse socio-economic backgrounds. I do not want a bipolar student enrollment populated by just the wealthiest students and the most needy.
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Honestly, this approach has really worked out for Brown.
 
donaldross said:
My dad was a handicap dentist who worked part time and made 80k/year. I borrowed the money to go to college. And yes I had jobs all through college and law school which helped.

Why don’t you come right over and let’s pull our tax returns and measure now.
Click to expand...
Amazing you had to take out loans, presumably go to law school and yet had money to buy investment property in your 20s. What the hell is wrong with the kids these days?
 
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