[2006alum]

I dunno about your time at Stanford, but when I attended there were no general-use facilities I can think of that were useless frippery the same way that OF's link is. The physics buildings, even the new ones, are nowhere near as posh as the athletics facilities, or even the alumni building. Undergraduates don't bring in real money, so they don't get real spending.

Of course not, because no one will turn down Stanford because of Stern concrete cinder block freshman dorms. When I visited my best friend at Yale, I showered in the functional equivalent of a tin can from the 1950s. My friends who went to state schools and regional liberal arts schools, by contrast, had far, far better dining halls and recreational facilities than anything I saw at Stanford or Yale.

15 seconds of googling came up with a number of stories about this epidemic of competing on amenities:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/caranewlon/...7bcb354883

"A free movie theater. A 25 person hot tub and spa with a lazy river and whirlpool. A leisure pool with biometric hand scanners for secure entry. A 50 foot climbing wall to make exercise interesting. And a top-of-the-line steak restaurant with free five course meals.

This isn’t a list of items from a resort brochure. They’re facilities you can find on a college campus. And with college construction costs rising, it could be the best four-year getaway you've ever had."

Here's a few more stories along those lines: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/learn...olous.html

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/do-co...ce-or-both

ETA: Here's a research paper on this very subject: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18745

Summary:  “We found that the lower ability students and higher income students have a greater willingness to pay for these amenities,” says Brian Jacob, a researcher from the University of Michigan. “The more academic, high achieving students cared about intellectual achievement.”

In sum, I think 76 had the right first take.

[2006alum]

I dunno about your time at Stanford, but when I attended there were no general-use facilities I can think of that were useless frippery the same way that OF's link is. The physics buildings, even the new ones, are nowhere near as posh as the athletics facilities, or even the alumni building. Undergraduates don't bring in real money, so they don't get real spending.

Of course not, because no one will turn down Stanford because of Stern concrete cinder block freshman dorms. When I visited my best friend at Yale, I showered in the functional equivalent of a tin can from the 1950s. My friends who went to state schools and regional liberal arts schools, by contrast, had far, far better dining halls and recreational facilities than anything I saw at Stanford or Yale.

15 seconds of googling came up with a number of stories about this epidemic of competing on amenities:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/caranewlon/...7bcb354883

"A free movie theater. A 25 person hot tub and spa with a lazy river and whirlpool. A leisure pool with biometric hand scanners for secure entry. A 50 foot climbing wall to make exercise interesting. And a top-of-the-line steak restaurant with free five course meals.

This isn’t a list of items from a resort brochure. They’re facilities you can find on a college campus. And with college construction costs rising, it could be the best four-year getaway you've ever had."

Here's a few more stories along those lines: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/18/learn...olous.html

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/do-co...ce-or-both

ETA: Here's a research paper on this very subject: https://www.nber.org/papers/w18745

Summary:  “We found that the lower ability students and higher income students have a greater willingness to pay for these amenities,” says Brian Jacob, a researcher from the University of Michigan. “The more academic, high achieving students cared about intellectual achievement.”

In sum, I think 76 had the right first take.