ot boards made in house, wouldn't it be cheaper to get them done externally?
When I was at university (a relatively small one with ~3500 undergraduates) the university had about 4 student machine shops (excluding the specialist ones for metallurgy and materials science) and two prototype scale PCB shops. How do you expect people to learn if they don't get hands-on experience? If you don't, you end up with people who design things that can't be efficiently manufactured, or even can't be manufactured at all.
If you've got the size to have frequent need of some facility it's often cheaper to have it in house; after all, you're not paying someone's profit. Let alone the usefulness of having experienced staff on hand whose job it is to help you get the best, cheapest job done, not the most profitable or easiest to sell. Even if the economic benefits are marginal or even slightly negative, the convenience, access to processes for teaching and access to experienced technicians can make up for the economic angle with those intangible benefits.
Aside from teaching related facilities as above, the university also had one main and two satellite professional print rooms as it just made commercial sense to have that much printing capacity. Heck, even the student union had its own print room, that kept an ageing Rotaprint 30/90 in daily use.