[Aunche]

At my selective university, the vast majority of the value came from the students paying to attend rather than college itself. Some professors were brilliant, but others were completely useless and you basically had to learn by yourself or from your peers. Meanwhile, a large chunk of tuition dollars was going towards the construction of new buildings that end up being very underutilized.

Princeton spends roughly $270,000 per student (see footnote). I'm sure some of that goes into research as well, but it's a relatively small fraction, since Princeton prides itself as being a teaching university. I suspect that you can build a more successful university by paying students $100,000 a year, hiring grad students to teach, and paying for modest facilities.

(742,123,000/.33)/ 8,374 = 268552 https://profile.princeton.edu/finances https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Princeton_University

[lthornberry]

Princeton prides themselves on being a top-tier research university where teaching is taken seriously. That's different from being a teaching university. They spend a ton of money on research, and faculty have much lighter teaching loads than almost anywhere else.

They do take undergraduate teaching much more seriously than most of their peer institutions--much less instruction is relegated to graduate students. But they hire and promote for research, at least in the departments I'm familiar with.