Taj Mahal on t he Hudson

One of my regrets in life is taking only two economics courses in college, which has left me with far more questions than answers about money.

After today, I have even more questions.

One of the more perplexing parts of this money puzzle to me is the economics of higher education, where it seems to me students are paying more but getting less (no Saturday classes, only four courses a semester, shorter academic year, etc) than back when dinasaurs roamed the earth and I was a college student.

The contradictions were brought home to me today when Janice and I went to see the Rensselaer Poly Tech football team battle those pesky Yellowjackets from the University of Rochester, who beat the home team 16-10.

It was a fun day, with the sun occasionally peeking out and alums helping to nearly fill the snazzy new 5,200-seat football stadium. For 10 bucks, we got seats in the third row - nicely elevated - on the 45-yard line. Those are the kind of seats that cost thousands at an NFL game.

It is part of a new $114 million - that's $114,000,000 - athletic complex at the Troy university, which has a big-time hockey program but plays with the little boys and girls in all other sports.

For that money, the school got the new football stadium with a Jumbotron screen (not as big as the one in the new Cowboys stadium outside Dallas but pretty big) plus an expanded hockey facility, a new basketball arena, a hydrotherapy pool, cubicles for all the athletes, an atrium, cafe and lots of other bells and whistles.

We were duly impressed as we strolled around after the game. "They really are spoiling us,'' one of the football players was quoted as saying in the game program.

In case you were wondering, this is the same school where many staff and faculty got no raise this year because of the recession and shrinkage of the endowment, and the board of trustees voted to increase tuition (that doesn't include room and board) by 3.1 percent to $38,100 annually to balance the budget.

The school president, Shirley Ann Jackson, flipped a coin before the game to decide which team would get the ball. For that and other duties, the school pays her more than $1.2 million a year (she took a $65,000 cut this year because of the economic problems). But she is still the fourth-highest paid prez of any research university in the country, according to an Albany Times Union story that quoted figures from a survey done by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Must admit many other uses for $114 million popped into my mind, from cancer research (that keeps occurring to me more and more often when I think about money) to AIDS prevention to more Habitat for Humanity homes to restocking the shelves of depleted food banks.

Maybe if I'd taken a couple of more economics courses, all of this would make more sense to me.