Well, the price of a Penn education is getting even pricier. Two semesters of red and blue madness will now cost you[r parents] $46,124–a 4.9 percent increase since last year.

Will my education really be 4.9 percent more spectacular than it was last year? I doubt it (I’d say 3.6 percent more awesome, tops). The price-raising madness must end somewhere. Since Penn doesn’t face the same incentives to cut costs as the private sector, all sorts of wacky ways of spending money are devised, but rarely revised to see if they are being anywhere close to cost-effective. Here are some ways Penn can raise revenues, cut costs, and stop the endless upward spiral of tuition.

• Revert to powering Penn with dead dinosaurs: Sure, we get a warm and fuzzy feeling from windmills and press releases heralding a “carbon-neutral campus” (massive amounts of official hot air not notwithstanding) But the marginal difference Penn’s energy consumption makes when compared to, say, China, pales in comparison to the marginal difference in our cost.
• Fire whoever bought
  designer chairs for the High Rises.
• Then, sell the chairs.
• Put toll booths on Walnut and Spruce Streets. Man them with work-study students.
• Dump Microsoft everything and switch to Macs and Linux. It would take 50 percent fewer IT staff to manage (and 100 percent fewer antivirus subscriptions to pay for) (Disclaimer: I shill for Apple).
• Would anybody notice if, say, the School of Social Work Social Policy & Practice was replaced with a Starbucks?
• How many free condoms does the university buy every year? Let’s see some competitive bidding between Lifestyles and the Trojan Man.
• Facilities & Conference Services should join the rest of the university in stealing silverware from 1920 Commons.
• Corporate sponsorship. Nike University sounds nice. So does iPenn.
• “Diversity” groups should be funded by their members and alumni, not me. Hillel pays its own way (and how!)
• Speaking of which, why does an avowedly secular institution pay for a University Chaplain?
• Start a record label for all of Penn’s crappy singing groups. Penn parents would buy CDs of their precious babies farting and call it art (and buy 50 copies for relatives).
• Cut Penn transit. Penn’s fatties could stand the extra exercise. And then we could cut Pottruck funding, too! That’s two flabby birds with one stone.
• Replace SpectaGuards with a student militia. “Fight on, Pennsylvania,” indeed.
• This Penn People’s Army could also take a jaunt up to Princeton and pillage it, bringing home billions in endowment booty. Our battle-hardened ghetto warriors would make quick work of the pampered pansies of Princeton (to be renamed Vichy University).
• Rent the campus to Drexel during Spring break. We’re not using it, and they may as well have a real school for two weeks.
• Open up a University-owned liquor store.
• Ask Harvard’s new President Drew Gilpin Faust (Penn GS ‘75) to slip a few billion our away. Harvard probably won’t notice.
• As Penn is already essentially a sovereign campus-state in Philadelphia, we should secede from and declare war on the United States, get liberated, get $87 billion in quagmire reconstruction funding.
• The last time I checked, we had a well-respected business school. If my ideas are simply too forward-looking, let’s just put the wizards at Wharton in charge of cost-cutting and see what happens!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 27th, 2007 at 8:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.