I don't think it's that unfathomable when you look at how governments spend the money. E.g. a public Czech university spent 80k euros to change their logo from this:
Why does a public university, one of the most popular in the country, need a new logo? And if it needs a new logo, why don't they assign it as a project to the students of arts/marketing faculty?
80K euro might sound like a lot until you realise it is around the combined annual salary for two mid-level employees in Western Europe, and for about a team of four to five in Eastern Europe.
To ask a team of designers to do brand and marketing research and design a new logo for a big organisation that will use said logo everywhere is not a 1K euro freelancer job.
To be fair, the new logo is a bit crap, but in the grand scheme of things, 80K is not a lot at all.
You assume that the salary is what it costs for the company to have an employee. You need to at least double that.
There is overhead for the person itself (employer subsidized healthcare, office space, equipment) and there is overhead within the organization. Like a secretary and accounting departments who cannot be billed to a client. And management layers of course…
Most likely the 80k are enough to cover one person-year for a consulting agency in Eastern Europe.
The point is that a public university doesn't gain anything from a good logo, so really anything over $0 is too much. And that $80K doesn't take into account the probably much larger expense of updating that logo throughout the university.
Universities, cities, regions and countries do have PR departments.
Arguably the public image of a university is its most important asset. Because that attracts the best students, researchers and third party funding (public and private).
I personally despise it, but at least it's a cute gesture of love (I hope...) for a billionaire living in SF. Probably one of the more human gestures from Zuck.
80k Euros is not even a rounding error in the budget of the Czech government. The last thing you want is them micromanaging that kind of decision because it would end up costing a lot more and make everyone's life terrible.
>why don't they assign it as a project to the students
Damn straight, and they should do the same thing with their website. And while we are at it, they could use the students to design and engineer their buildings and do their accounting and lawyering and administration.
Hell, while we are at it, why not get them to do the teaching as well?
There may be problems in the implementation details depending on the university, but the general idea of TAs is a good one, for two primary reasons.
One, in many fields, the more advanced you are, the harder it becomes to remember or even understand why or how one may struggle with understanding the basic material of the field. TAs are still closer to the experience of having learned the basics themselves.
Two, teaching material is a great way to deepen one's understanding of the material.
It also happens to provide a nice balance of giving students a way to earn some money while working in the subject, while still being quite cheap for the university. (That last part does have a smell especially in US universities with their insanely high tuition fees. But that feels like a larger and largely separate issue.)
And frequently equally bad results, such as picking a logo almost exactly the same as another company in the same sector. For instance, the NBC TV network in 1975 hired consultants to make a logo almost exactly the same as Nebraska Educational Television:
I worked as a webdev for the Cornell University Library (more than 70 web sites) at the time when Cornell changed their logo from a nice little square that looked like the J.C. Penny logo except it said "Cornell" on it and then they made everybody doing any kind of visual communication change their logo including hiring a friend of mine as a consultant for almost two years to change all the letterheads and similar things for suborganizations that didn't have graphic design talent in house.
which I think is OK graphically on its own but unlike the square it is demanding on the environment that it is in and might force you to change things around it to look good whereas I liked the square because you could just put the square near an edge or a corner and it always looked OK.
This doesn't seem to be a large spend on branding and everyone that does spend on that thinks rightly or wrongly that they are going to get their money back and more due to attracting additional customers.
Also this is pure after the fact justification with no meaning. Most people who are rich became and remained so by maximizing their monetary position and needs to excuse nor reason to actually continue doing so. They do so because it perceptibly makes them more rich and more successful even if ultimately is just points on a score board with no real meaning for their life.
Nobody minimizes their taxes in order to ensure their money is better spent. They spend the excess on themselves like everyone else. On bigger and better castles to demonstrate their wealth, on planes, on another bigger boat.
Thats dreadful, but 80k is a blip in terms of the billions collected per year. As mentioned, this would barely be 2 full time salaries, and more likely it's a small team spending part of their time redesigning it.
Sad part is the US would have spent millions on a "consultant" who would barely do any work and instead be a yes man to accept accountability for some admin who just wanted to play political theater for a promotion in another campus. That's where Atlus shrugs.
https://cdn.xsd.cz/resize/21404adf37a83977870fe87fe0eb4ea6_r...
to this:
https://www.em.muni.cz/cache-thumbs/logo_muni_web-1580x790-2...
Why does a public university, one of the most popular in the country, need a new logo? And if it needs a new logo, why don't they assign it as a project to the students of arts/marketing faculty?