When I was a manager I quickly realized that, even though I didn’t need the allocated labor hours and could still run the team with similar sales results and efficiency with less labor, there was no incentive for me to do so as that would just cause the company to cut our labor hours and force everyone (me) to just work harder and do more with less.

Businesses that get government money will ALWAYS push it to maximize what they can get, they don’t necessarily need it but it helps fuel growth, and if you do more with less your payments get cut.

Great on BYU for doing what they do, but the U of U is the premiere public institution in Utah. Honestly, besides being an undergrad institution for a lot of docs, nobody that isn’t LDS really knows anything about BYU besides that it is a weird place where college students can’t party and do what college kids do to have fun. Public colleges like Cal and the U go into debt so they can grow. Look at how much growth the U has experienced in the past 10 years. We’re about to get a new Hospital building. Frankly, the U deserves whatever money the state gives. Nobody gets transferred to BYU for higher level hospital care, BYU isn’t funded for tri-state transfers for areas like Elko who don’t have the infrastructure or specialists to deal with renal transplant patients.

The Jazz (Millers) do something similar, they make sure the Jazz is a money loser because they can write off those losses against their profitable businesses. It’s just a game.

Point being, yeah the Pac is the lower (lowest?) of the P5’s. But these public Universities still get a ton of money and the U that exists now looks nothing like the one that I graduated from, and it wasn’t even that long ago. New buildings, new stadium expansion upcoming, new hospitals, etc etc. Never set foot on BYU campus so not sure what their growth looks like, maybe it is similar, but I hoghly doubt that.

I can only speak for Utah, no these subsidies aren’t really needed, and the U can always cut staff or pull back on projects to operate at a net even, but why? Push it, get what you can from he state, and keep on growing. This is what any good business will do. Companies borrow more and more to go into further debt to push growth all the time, it’s the logical thing to do. Unless you want to stay stagnant like other Universities.