Originally posted by: Jerry Ice 33
Did you ask to look at the balance sheet to obtain that information you called about?
I said I obtained that information when I was attending that university, not now. At the time, we got hit with a 20% tuition increase, and I wanted to know why. So I asked the bursar's office for the financial disclosures. I was fairly confident that I could get that information, since I had a direct financial stake and was enrolled there. I was somewhat surprised to learn that as this was a public university, anyone could request and obtain that information. I got the documents emailed to me within 48 hours.
It helped quite a bit that I had a fair amount of accounting experience. There was stuff buried in there like the "amortization" of the new $185 million basketball arena, which is just a way of spreading an expense over multiple years instead of when it was actually incurred (the university paid cash, not bonds, for the arena).
The worst part was that a 400-unit student housing complex had been shelved indefinitely in order to pay for the fucking basketball arena. So I wondered if at least, the goddman thing had made money in its first year of operation. The answer was, "fuck, no."