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The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

nytimes.com

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Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#71

Post by trentbigelow »

trentbigelow wrote: post #70

If you're looking for a legit degree for around or under $10,000 check out International Programmes at University of London. There's even some undergraduate degrees from the LSE you can take remotely. http://www.londoninternational.ac.uk/courses/search/?solrsor...

I should add that I'm sharing this because I wish I knew about this before I took on a oil tanker full of student debt to go to a "prestigious" US school only to leave before graduating to do a startup. Startupers, consider this option on your own time for (relative) cheap from a prestigious uni.

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#72

Post by gohrt »

ewindisch wrote: post #26

Parents pay more than this per child today for daycare[1]. [1] https://www.care.com/a/how-much-does-child-care-cost-1406091...

Day care is far more labor-intensive than college. The student:staff ratio in daycare is at most 6:1, for 40 hr/wk attention to students.

At a college, the ration is 10:1 or 20:1, for <20 hrs/wk attention to students

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#73

Post by akgerber »

crabasa wrote: post #56
slg wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it is much harder to get other forms of unsecured debt. An 18 year old with no job and no credit history is going to have a hard time getting a credit card with a $5k limit let alone a $100k loan. The lack of being able to discharge the loan in bankruptcy needs to go hand in hand with the guaranteed availability of the loan. Instead of changing one of those things, we are are better off coming up with a new syste…

> An 18 year old with no job and no credit history is going to have a hard time getting a credit card with a $5k limit Wow, citation please? Credit card companies set up pop-up stands and give away free t-shirts to students who apply for their credit cards. The VAST majority of the applications are happily approved. Update: excellent citation kileywm. I guess my perception was a bit dated.

As an anecdote, after intentionally avoiding credit cards through college, I was rejected from several when I applied for my first after graduating in 2010— and was only approved for a 'student' card (despite having graduated) at a bank where I had a savings account.

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#74

Post by gohrt »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #15
jofer wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, the majority of public US institutions are similar in cost. The outlandish prices are either private schools or out-of-state tuition rates. It's been ten years, but my undergraduate tuition at a modestly well respected engineering-focused university was ~$2000-year. I think the rates at tech are now about $4000-year, but it's not too outrageous.

Honestly saying "just look at instate costs" is just as misleading. Restricting access to a quality education / future job options (depending on your field, etc) based on geography is one of the most telling failures of American Federalism. The sooner state schools are re-bundled into a federal program for affordable access to all Americans the better.

A US state is pretty similar to a EU nation, in terms of population and economy size.

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#75

Post by gohrt »

lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #60
Amezarak wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not aware of major educational problems with in-state schools. I've compared my curriculum at a nobody southern in state school with the CS curriculum at MIT and I don't see any major differences and I don't feel shortchanged. I'm pretty sure the only your school matters in the real world is at the most elite levels of a few fields and even then its mostly just about hiring people who went to the same school as y…

My ancedote here is that it's more about opportunity than educational quality. The "secret sauce" of higher education isn't the course work, or even the individual lecturers (although there is a certain minimum bar there) as evidenced by the growing trend to offer those for free. It is rather a case of brand recognition and access to a given network. The graduate of MIT has pull in pretty much anywhere of her choosin…

You can't just send EVERYONE to Berkeley/SUNY/UW. "Prestigious" is inherently anti-universal-access. The only solution is to crush the power of these prestigious universities.

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#76

Post by lordCarbonFiber »

gohrt wrote: post #75
lordCarbonFiber wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ancedote here is that it's more about opportunity than educational quality. The "secret sauce" of higher education isn't the course work, or even the individual lecturers (although there is a certain minimum bar there) as evidenced by the growing trend to offer those for free. It is rather a case of brand recognition and access to a given network. The graduate of MIT has pull in pretty much anywhere of her choosin…

You can't just send EVERYONE to Berkeley/SUNY/UW. "Prestigious" is inherently anti-universal-access. The only solution is to crush the power of these prestigious universities.

I think you're missing the point. The issue isn't that every student can't go to Berkeley, it's that identically qualified students students can be charged 500% more for the opportunity purely because of geography. I suspect this disparity might actually be weakening the "prestigious" nature of many schools given there is now a monetary incentive to accept unqualified students if they are out of state (or even out of country for even more fees).

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#77

Post by crabasa »

tzs wrote: post #68
cassieramen wrote: post #5

This article hints at schools inability to justify their ever increasing prices. Why is tuition continuing to rise so much faster than inflation? Is this simple supply and demand? Government backed loans create infinite supply to anyone who wants them? How can not for profit schools justify gauging their students?

> Why is tuition continuing to rise so much faster than inflation? Is this simple supply and demand? Government backed loans create infinite supply to anyone who wants them? I'm not convinced government backed loans have much to do with it. Here's a table comparing Stanford tuition growth to inflation over periods of 10 years. Each row represents the 10 years ending in the year given in the first column. Second colum…

You've picked a very unfair data set. Stanford is one of the top universities in the country and has a $22B endowment [1]. The could choose to simply make tuition free if they really wanted to. Stanford optimizes everything they do (including pricing) to attract the best and brightest.

You're also only looking at cost, which is only half of the equation. You also need to scrutinize lifetime earnings of graduates. For Stanford, this metric would obviously be excellent (see: endowment). For many of the mediocre to bad universities in the United States, this metric is likely terrible.

[1]: http://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#78

Post by crabasa »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #59
CyberDildonics wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What evidence do you have for your assertion that public schools would cost $50k a year?

I've edited it down to $25K. I was thinking of 25 year estimates I've read, rather than 10 year estimates. In-state public 4-year tuition averages $9K or so right now, plus housing. In ten years this number will likely double or at least grow 150%, if the 5% growth rate continues to hold. If the Fed's monetary policy continues to push up interest rates, though, who knows how much more it might increase during that ti…

Why did you edit it? The total cost of attending the University of Washington today is $27k. Virginia is $29k. Texas is $26k. If you're child is going to college in 6 years, $40-50k sounds completely possible.

Re: The $10,000-a-year college education has arrived (1981)

#80

Post by benbreen »

kevindeasis wrote: post #39

I'm still waiting for a dramatic disruption of the college/post-secondary industry. I hope it comes really soon, but I'm starting to doubt if it'll come within the next 5 years. I think it's going to take lots of people to disrupt education especially since the government will get involve. I'm starting to feel that some courses in college/university isn't worth that much money. Like a 50,000 degree that has lectures…

One thing that I think gets lost in these debates is that those college professors who do amazing research and are terrible teachers are still important for society and shouldn't be kicked to the curb. In my experience, these are the type of people who wouldn't be able to land on their feet particularly well outside the academic system - the unorthodox, unsociable weirdos who work on some obscure problem for years. These are also the types of people who occasionally make fundamental breakthroughs, or the ones whose dogged pursuit of a seemingly impractical goal ends up reaping unexpected rewards in terms of new discoveries. I wouldn't want to take a class with the versions of this type that I know, but I'm still glad they exist and have a home in academia.

I just finished my first semester as a history professor and based on my experiences I very much agree that the current system of university education and especially administration would benefit from some kind of fundamental change. But university research is a separate issue, and I worry that trying to "disrupt universities" without thinking through the societal implications might end up harming this amazing apparatus for pursuing advanced research that the US has built up over the past century. I'd argue that those professors who are terrible teachers but amazing researchers have a real value and that we need to keep in mind that universities have always been about more than teaching. (The ultimate case in point is Oxford's All Souls College, which literally doesn't allow any students onto their campus without a letter of reference - but is nonetheless an amazing institution which has given the world real benefits).

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