At CMU, annual tuition is less than $24,000. There are less than 14,000 students enrolled, which means total tuition paid must be less than $336M.

If all that money were equally divided between the 1400 faculty members, they'd each get a salary of at most $240k per year, which is really high in the grand scheme of things but kind of low for these specific facebook jobs that we're talking about.

Now consider that much (most?) of that revenue must actually be spent on the 2,500 staff members supporting university operations, building maintenence, etc.

I don't think there is any great mystery to solve here.

Edit: see the replies to this post. It seems the tuition at CMU I'd double what I thought it was. I still don't think the revised numbers are any more mysterious, though.

Undergraduate tuition at CMU is $52,732 per year

https://www.cmu.edu/news/stories/archives/2017/january/tuiti...

Indeed you are right! The collegedata page that Google took me to must have been woefully out of date.

Still, a mere doubling of the faculty salaries I was describing above is likely still not sufficient to compete with these tech giants when hiring someone like a deep learning expert.

One faculty member for ten students is also incredibly high.

So if someone if getting trained for a type of job which will generate millions of future earning potential for them, should the cost be only 24k (or even 48k) per year?