Hogwarts Upkeep (or Hogwarts, a Financial History)

[abigailnus]

No: HPFGUIDX 36455

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "alhewison" <Ali at z...> wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Felicia Rickmann" <felicia.rickmann at d...> 
> wrote:
> > >> Where does Hogwarts get its
> > >> funds to continue running at all, let alone at the level of 
> decadence that it apparently does?

> I'm English, and I've always assumed that Hogwarts is not a fee-
> paying school!
> 
> I think that Hogwarts has to be "state" funded as it seems to be the 
> only wizarding school in the UK. I can't believe that it would be in 
> the interest of either the wizarding community - or the Muggle 
> community - to have untrained wizards going about blowing up aunts 
> etc. The community needs a school to ensure that the wizarding powers 
> that these children possess are trained and directed. There is no 
> canon evidence to support the theory that fees change hands (ok, so 
> there's nothing to contradict it either).

Well, you'd think after flying directly in the face of canon (see my not-yet-
12-hours-old post on whether Lucius Malfoy was at school with LV) I'd be 
a bit timid about posting.  Luckily, this question has almost no grounding in 
canon and so the potential for embarassing myself is low (ah! A challenge!).  
Nevertheless, any person reading this post does so at his or her own risk 
and with the full understanding that the information contained herein may 
be (1) wrong (2) silly (3) very wrong and very silly or (4) the secret to life, 
the universe and everything which will make your brain shut down and ooze 
out of your ears.  You have been warned.

Now, the only mention of money changing hands for the purpose of *attending* 
Hogwarts (I'm not talking about supplies such as books and uniforms but strictly 
tuition) is made in PS when Uncle Vernon announces that "[he] is not paying 
any money for some crack-pot old fool to teach [Harry] magic tricks!"  However, 
I subscribe to the school of thought that hold that Uncle Vernon Doesn't Know 
Jack and taking any opinion of his with regards to the magic community at any 
level of seriousness is not unlike assuming that all dark wizards came from 
Slytherin because Hagrid said so.  There has been no other mention of tuition, period.

Ali makes some good points for Hogwarts being a "state" school and therefore
 not requiring an attendance fee.  My only problem with this is that Hogwarts 
is *old*.  The sorting hat song from GoF states that it was created "a thousand 
years or more ago" and Professor Binns says something to that effect in CoS.  
There wasn't even an England a thousand years ago, much less a national 
government - are we to assume that wizards were so ahead of muggles in the 
field of centralized government that they were able to arrange for public 
education for their children?  I suppose it's not out of the realm of possibility, 
but it doesn't make much sense (although I suppose it is possible that Hogwarts 
was "nationalised" at some point in the past 1000 years.)

The impression I got of the formation of Hogwarts was that it was a private venture 
by four wizards.  The very idea of a centralised place of learning would have been 
very new in the 9th-10th centuries (I'm on shaky ground here - I believe Oxford and 
the Sorbonne didn't exist yet, yes?)  Education was the privilege of the rich, who 
hired tutors for their children, and the centers of learning were the religious centers.  
Since there is no religion to speak of in Potterverse, it makes sense that a center 
of magical learning would be formed by gifted wizards.  The four founders apparently 
sought out gifted youngsters and instructed them in the magical arts - an indication 
that prior to the school's creation, young wizards were either taught by their families, 
or in the apprentice-journeyman-master system, or perhaps never learned properly 
how to control their power.

Hogwarts is therefore more than an institution - it's a small city.  From its very 
founding it would have to be a self-sufficient community, capable of providing its 
inhabitants with housing, food, health care and security on top of giving them an 
education.  This is well before banks - if money is needed, there had better be 
gold in your coffers.

All this leads me to wonder what Hogwarts' expenses are, anyway.  The castle is 
paid for - it would have to be as it was constructed by the four founders who 
presumably had no backers - and it was probably magically constructed.  Upkeep 
and security (all those anti-apparating, anti-muggle, unplottability spells) are probably 
taken care of  by magic.  The needs of the students are seen to by a crew of 
house-elves, who are loyal, work tirelessly and without breaks, will not of their own 
volition leave their job, and with one very recent and apparently not very well paid 
exception, do not receive wages.  This is a major expense neatly eliminated, and what 
is left (unless I've forgotten something) is only perishable supplies of all kinds (anything 
from furniture to food to potion supplies to Professor Trelawney's teacups) and the 
(human) staff's wages.

Now, since we've seen that conjured objects in Potterverse are real (as in, when 
McGonagall conjures a plate of sandwiches for Ron and Harry in CoS, they are real 
food and will provide sustenance) there is no reason not to assume that all Hogwarts' 
material needs are met in just such a fasion.  There has been some discussion in this 
group and others about the limits of what one is capable of conjuring.  For the sake 
of this argument, I'm positing the temporary solution that it takes a powerful wizard 
to conjure real things out of thin air, and that the larger the object or amout of objects 
conjured, the more skill is required by the conjurer.  Since the Hogwarts staff are all 
highly skilled wizards and witches, they are capable of providing for their own needs 
without making the Potterverse too "easy" (I'm picturing a sort of duty rotation, where 
one month it's McGonagall's turn to do the food and Snape's turn to repair the furniture.)  
And for all you smart-allecks out there, much like the anti-forgery measures used in 
muggle money, wizard money has certain security measures that ensure that conjured 
money doesn't pass for real money.  (By the way, I realised canon gets in my way a 
bit here, as we've seen evidence that some of the food in Hogwarts is grown - Hagrid's 
Halloween pumpkins or the chickens Ginny kills in CoS - and for that matter, if all 
school supplies are conjured, why are the school brooms so lousy?)

So, all of Hogwarts expenses are taken care of except for the staff's wages (that is, 
assuming they don't work for room and board.  No, probably not.)  Going back to my 
earlier statement that Hogwarts had to be self-sufficient, I think it might be safe to 
say that the castle has its own means of making money.  A secret gold-mine?  The 
royalties of a particularly good potion created by a long dead potions master (in much 
the same way as universities will stake a claim in any financial venture stemming 
from research they paid for)?  Or for that matter, as someone suggested earlier, 
a large financial endowment every few decades might see the place through comfortably.
This takes care of the problem with canon mentioned in the previous paragraph.  
Some of the material needs of the castle might be met internally - either through 
conjuring or by growing stuff (for food and magical supplies) - and other, more 
specialized needs are shopped out.  The castle would therefore be on a budget, 
and we all know how the sports department is always last for new equipment.

My final reason for not believing that Hogwarts is state-run or has at some point 
been nationalised is its independance.  If the MoM are providing the dough, they would 
have a lot of control over how the school is run - instead of running in fear as he does 
at the end of GoF, Fudge would simply say something to the effect of "I pay your salary, 
Dumbledore, and if you want to be able to open the next school-year you'd better 
not repeat anything you've just told me and start being much more polite".  As things 
stand right now, Dumbledore has a great deal of freedom in setting his curriculum 
and choosing his staff (Lupin, anybody?)  The only indication we've had that he has 
anyone to answer to is the board of school governors which removes him from office 
in CoS.  This is the only action that we're aware of by this body.  I'm not sure how 
these boards work in other private schools, but this seems to indicate to me that the 
board's only power is to select a headmaster and remove him if necessary.  I don't quite 
see it as being in Hogwarts interest to be in the financial power of any group or body.

So, (pant, pant, pant...) my conclusion is that Hogwarts is neither a tuition charging 
private school nor a state-run school, but its own entity, largely self-sufficient.  It's 
been around for a thousand years, so people are used to it, it's just the way things 
are done, you know?  And anyway, how are the kids going to get anywhere in life 
without their NEWTs?  So everyone sends their kids to Hogwarts (unless they go to 
another wizarding school, as Malfoy indicated he might have done) and doesn't think 
too much about who's running the show or wonder how the school keeps itself solvent 
without charging any money.

Abigail

By the way, there are actually 10 or more references to canon in this post, including 
what I think is an accurate quote (my body is in Haifa but my Harry Potter books 
are in Tel Aviv (about 100 kilometers away)).  Assuming I got everything right, does 
this make up for my horrible lapse of a few hours ago?