[comp.edu] Questions on NeXT machine

bzs@xenna (Barry Shein) (10/23/88)

>>[Steve Jobs says that] Any of the top 100 universities in this country
>>would be a Fortune 500 company if it were not in the education business.
>
>Which claim I question.  I doubt there are quite 100.  Did Steve name
>the schools he had in mind?  I wouldn't want to send my kid to a school
>that couldn't make the Fortune 500 :-)
>
>-- Jon

You're probably right, it's probably quite a bit less than 100. What
does it take to be "Fortune 500" these days? I believe Sun just
recently slipped in with about $1B in revenues. Then again, how does
one measure "revenues" for a university comparable to a business?  I'd
guess expenditures/budget since inflow had better match outflow pretty
well if the University is to stay in business. It's pretty safe to say
that the ivy league schools and the other non-northeast obvious big
names (Stanford, UCB, UCLA etc) would be in that range. BU was
probably around $350M/yr, fortune 1000 anyhow. I'd guess that there's
around 50 anyhow, around one per state.

At any rate, his facts may have been a little hyperbolic but his point
is probably basically correct, there's quite a bit of cash spent on
computing equipment by major universities, and the potential is very
good (ie. for them to increase their gross percentage of expenditures
on computing equipment.)

	-Barry Shein, ||Encore||