Library or a Swimming Pool or a Parking Lot or a...
As you may know, Marietta College recieved a $10 million gift toward the construction of a new library cum learning center. The current Dawes Library will be razed and the new library built on the green space that currently lies between McDonough and Dawes. The linked article estimates that the total cost of building the library will be $20 million. My guess, though, is that this is an underestimate of the economic costs of building the library.
One of the concepts that you have read about in Chapter 1 concerns opportunity costs. Opportunity costs represent the highest valued alternative use that was sacrificed for the choice chosen. The cost of building a new library does not just include expenditures on construction, maintenance, and insurance, for example. Such costs are known as explicit costs and refer to the costs of using other people's resources. The cost of building a library also includes the cost of using our own resources--so called implicit costs. The land where the new library is to be built could be used for other purposes. Would a new parking lot be a better use of the college's resources? How about a new residence hall? or a swimming pool?
2 comments:
you do bring up an interesting point regarding the rooms available however it is important to take into account that some students who are currently placed in rooms will not return and students will be changing rooms as well. So although it appears that resources are scarce in resident housing...last year the same thing occured and by the second semester there were approximately 10 rooms that were converted to singles or became and remained vacant. With this being said to return to the main blog posted...
I feel that although the total costs of building the library are great, because the donators specifically wanted their finances to go toward a new library, one can only be grateful for such a donation. Yes our library is in okay condition but in looking at the problems our library has had one can see the benefits of a new library. Our school just had to pay a substantial amount of money because the lower level of the library was having mold problems and was ruining the books. So I feel that the decision to construct a new library was one made based on a decision at the margin: how much more money could be spent taking care of the older library we already have when the donators are willing to put money toward a brand new facility? Although there are opportunity costs to the construction: students will be without a well suited library for a year and must deal with the construction site in the middle of campus: giving that up for a year will end in a new and fantastic result.
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