Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

Aren't universities charging exorbitant prices because of higly available cheap student credit subsidized by the Government?

I continue to be very curious where all that "administration staff" spending is going. I grew up in the higher education sphere (both parents professors), and I work as a staff member at a university now. What I see here, at least, is a near-crippling lack of care for the staff, such that morale is constantly low and turnover is high.

So where, exactly, is all that extra spending really going? Is it going to six or seven extra deans and associate deans? (We have a bunch of people with "associate dean" or similar in their titles, but some of them are actually fairly junior staff members, and my understanding, incomplete as it is, is that their pay reflects that, rather than being what you'd expect for someone with that title.) Is it going to people who are managing the ever-growing presence of technology in the classroom and throughout the institution? That would actually make some sense, as it's a thing that's been growing at around the same time as the apparent increase in spending on staff/admin.

But in general, based on the limited breakdowns I've seen, I'm still puzzled as to where all this extra money is going, as it seems like most of it is not, in fact, going to inflated salaries for the top administrators (though some of it is), and most of what I've actually seen doesn't support the idea that there are massively more people in administration than are actually needed to support the students. The only way that could be true, based on my experience, is if a huge percentage of them (many more than in previous generations) are utterly incompetent, and pulling their weight so poorly that it takes half the time from the competent people just to keep everything moving. While that's not impossible, it seems implausible that such a significant shift could have occurred so quickly.

> ...we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.

I think that calling it elitist is jumping on a bandwagon of derision for that term, when what it should really be called is "unrealistic," "impractical," or just "stupid." In fact, if anything, it's as anti-elitist as anything can be—it's trying to spread the education to everyone, rather than reserving it to the elite purely based on the inconvenient fact that we don't have enough money in our economy to spend that much on everyone.

>In 2016, the average Brown student graduated with a debt of $23,810...

Considering the sticker price for an undergrad at Brown in 2013-2016 is approximately $250K, along with the higher median debt loads we're seeing from graduates of less prestigious, cheaper universities, it leads me to believe that these types of elite schools are comprised of two very specific types of students:

1. Wealthy privileged students whose parents pick up the majority of the cost out of pocket.

2. Students from low-income families who receive almost a full ride via government subsidies, private money (scholarships / grants), and the school itself.

Similar to federal and state tax burdens, health care costs, etc., the middle class continues to carry the ever-increasing burden of both the very wealthy and the disenfranchised, while they themselves continue sinking.

According to Bain between 1995 and 2010 universities are proportionately spending significantly less on instruction and more on admin and support, and many of the universities spending is unsustainable. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11337193

I am a graduate student at Brown. The deadline for raising one quarter of the funds is December, so I expect we will be updated on this by next week. I have not received any recent emails on this.