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Your Turn / Re: LCMS Inc 2020 Report
« on: December 28, 2020, 09:17:00 PM »
There is a whole lot of untested assumptions in the most recent two post, Rev. Brown. You may have been on campus at the time, but seem to be tying facts together in a way that a historian could rip apart when that day comes.
For example, tuition didn't go up because of CBC. Tuition rates went up because the Synod in Convention passed a resolution - pushed by some at the seminaries - that tuition should truthfully reflect the real cost per student of the education was, and that the members of the Synod should rally to provide the funds needed to cover that tuition. That was easy to do at a place where enrollment was low enough for existing endowment and financial aid gifts were pretty much doing that already, but no one thought about what would happen if and when enrollment would balloon under a "free tuition" message. (Side rant: it was never FREE.) There should have been a RESOLVED or a caveat that capped enrollment when the financial aid ran out. But no one thought of that. And when enrollment ballooned, the specter of running out of space made an appearance.
When the "free tuition" bubble burst - the FIRST time - it was because the Synod got the first half of that resolution; It didn't rally to uphold the second at the same rate. The bubble bursting pointed out the ludicrousness of a financial model based primarily on tuition and financial aid as the source of operating revenue. That led to the push to diversify revenue streams, and one of those streams was/is endowment. The CBC property held the spectre of rental revenue as well. Mixed into all this was the demographic shift away from single students living in dormitories and eating in dining halls, and the perceived need to build married student apartments back in the early 1990s.
Is the solution to sell the St. Louis semianry because it's worth a gazillion dollars? No. It's not worth a gazillion dollars. Washington Universtiy has zero interest in it. Just building the chapel required dynamite to bust through the layers of rock that lie below all that green grass.
The problem of professors, presidents, boards and bureaucrats (like me) can be solved very easily and inexpensively. Take us all out to a wall and shoot us for all the incompetence we apparently put to work. Let seminarians run the LCMS.
For example, tuition didn't go up because of CBC. Tuition rates went up because the Synod in Convention passed a resolution - pushed by some at the seminaries - that tuition should truthfully reflect the real cost per student of the education was, and that the members of the Synod should rally to provide the funds needed to cover that tuition. That was easy to do at a place where enrollment was low enough for existing endowment and financial aid gifts were pretty much doing that already, but no one thought about what would happen if and when enrollment would balloon under a "free tuition" message. (Side rant: it was never FREE.) There should have been a RESOLVED or a caveat that capped enrollment when the financial aid ran out. But no one thought of that. And when enrollment ballooned, the specter of running out of space made an appearance.
When the "free tuition" bubble burst - the FIRST time - it was because the Synod got the first half of that resolution; It didn't rally to uphold the second at the same rate. The bubble bursting pointed out the ludicrousness of a financial model based primarily on tuition and financial aid as the source of operating revenue. That led to the push to diversify revenue streams, and one of those streams was/is endowment. The CBC property held the spectre of rental revenue as well. Mixed into all this was the demographic shift away from single students living in dormitories and eating in dining halls, and the perceived need to build married student apartments back in the early 1990s.
Is the solution to sell the St. Louis semianry because it's worth a gazillion dollars? No. It's not worth a gazillion dollars. Washington Universtiy has zero interest in it. Just building the chapel required dynamite to bust through the layers of rock that lie below all that green grass.
The problem of professors, presidents, boards and bureaucrats (like me) can be solved very easily and inexpensively. Take us all out to a wall and shoot us for all the incompetence we apparently put to work. Let seminarians run the LCMS.