{"id":603,"date":"2004-11-15T19:20:26","date_gmt":"2004-11-15T19:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:53","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:53","slug":"a_hundred_thous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=603","title":{"rendered":"A Hundred Thousand Here, A Hundred Thousand There"},"content":{"rendered":"

Middle Guy is doing his college applications right now, and mostly plans on going to a University of California campus, probably Berkeley or San Diego. So I’m watching news from the university system with some interest; particularly as it comes to student fees – which increased 14% this year<\/a>.<\/p>\n

They’re still good value, as U.C. runs one of the best university systems in the world. It should be better, and public policy would be served by making it better and adding to the social capital of our state, except for two problems: the state government is too broke to spend the money it should on improving the quality of the education there and broadening the availability of that education to students whose parents – unlike me – don’t have the means to send them there.<\/p>\n

That’s the liberal argument.
\nThen there’s a conservative argument: that the university bleeds the money it does get through bureaucratic waste and inefficiency.<\/p>\n

Go check out the home page for UCLA<\/a>. Note the logo in the upper left corner? The one that says “UCLA?” That’s the new campus-wide logo.<\/p>\n

The university administration spent $98,000 to get that logo – a slightly italicized Helvetica font “UCLA.” They paid this sum to Keith Bright Strategic Design.<\/p>\n

The Daily Bruin, the student newspaper, has a good column on it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“We did about 1,500 different explorations on UCLA,” said Keith Bright, a UCLA alumnus. “Out of that, we did probably 20 or 30 different identities and we picked out of those. Then we put them on various things and that got it down to six to four (designs) and this is the one that survived.”<\/p>\n

\nUCLA could have paid me $50 and I could have typed out “UCLA” in Helvetica font, italicized it and it would’ve been a done deal. Here, I’ll try it: UCLA.<\/p>\n

\nThat looks pretty good, doesn’t it?<\/p>\n

\nThe logo will find its way onto the letterhead of every piece of UCLA stationary, though the athletic department will continue to use its famed cursive script. The logo, in conjunction with the university’s new commercial and the redesign of the UCLA Web site, signifies a push to re-image UCLA.<\/p>\n

\nAt a total cost of about $168,000. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah, $168,000 is a drop in the bucket, and ‘branding’ UCLA isn’t a bad thing to do.<\/p>\n

But UCLA has a strong brand, and right now, in an era when student aid, research grants, and budgets for facilities and personnel are so tight – is this really what we need to be spending $100,000 on? <\/p>\n

That’s basically the full cost of sending one student to school for four years. Or tuition waivers for 40 students for a year.<\/p>\n

One thing that defines liberals is a willingness to spend public money to build social capital – through infrastructure, better education, or other means.<\/p>\n

But one thing that defines smart liberals is an insistence that the money be spent wisely, and in pursuit of the actual goals being sought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UCLA just spent $98,000 on a new logo – the letters “UCLA” in italicized Helvetica. <\/p>\n

Student fees were raised 14% this year.<\/p>\n

Armed Liberal wonders if there’s a connection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/603\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}