I recently revisited my old (private) high school, which had finished building a new >$15 million building for its football team (and misc. student activities & classes).

I suddenly remembered that when I was much younger, the lust of universities and schools in general for new buildings had always puzzled me: I knew perfectly well that I learned more or less the same whether the classroom was shiny new or grizzled gray and that this was true of just about every subject-matter*, and even then it was obvious that buildings must cost a lot to build and then maintain, and space didn't seem plausible (because I passed empty classrooms all the time and they were often the same classroom pretty much all day). So this always puzzled me as a kid - big buildings seemed like perfect white elephants. I could understand the donors' reason, but not anyone else's.

When I remembered my childhood aporia, I suddenly realized - 'Oh, this is status-seeking behavior; big buildings are unfakeable social signals of wealth and influence. I was just being narrow-minded in assuming that if it didn't have your name on it, it couldn't boost your status.'

(I don't really have any point to this anecdote, but I thought it was interesting that OB/LW reading solved a longstanding puzzle of mine.)

* Obviously a few subject-matters do require specialized facilities; it's hard to do pottery without a specialized art-room, for example. But those are a minority.