If I were to offer an alternative viewpoint on the recent encomiums of the Hatch Years at Wake Forest, it would run something like this:
Like many other corporations and universities throughout the United States, Wake Forest, over the past decade, has worked hard to transform its economic model by maximizing inputs and minimizing outputs.
On the one side, working from a model that resembles the kind put in place by institutions like NYU, the university has sought to extract ever-more dollars per student during this time.
It began by forcing everyone to pay for a food plan regardless of their needs, moved on to insisting that students spend two, then three years in university housing; it then required students who do overseas study with another university to pay considerable fees to Wake Forest, maximized parking costs through registrations and fines, and so on.