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U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

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Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#311

Post by DuskStar »

Ancalagon wrote: post #170
o09rdk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Former tenured professor. I think your impression is generally spot-on although there's nuances and it's more complicated than that. In general, universities are suffering from many of the same pressures as other fields. Nonprofits are being run as profit-generating centers, and the implicit promotion track goes from faculty to senior faculty to administration, if you're even on tenure track. The administration salar…

Can you expand on the broken employment system in the US? Honestly just curious.

If I had to complain about things, it would be these:

1. Lack of workplace training - very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience, partly because there's nothing preventing someone from jumping ship for better pay once the training is complete

2. Credentialism - the things that actually matter in hiring are either difficult or illegal to test for (conscientiousness, knowledge, intelligence), and so degrees are used as proxies instead

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#312

Post by [deleted] »

chimi wrote: post #290
mhb wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even the amortization schedule is weighted to benefit the banks. Can you explain this or say what the alternative amortization schedule might be? In a normal mortgage, the initial payments are more interest because you're paying interest on more principal.

You got it already! Imagine if most of that first payment went to the buyer's equity instead of interest.

[deleted]

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#313

Post by wolco »

t0mas88 wrote: post #179
mc3 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used to do this in the UK probably until the 90s but then they'd start charging "tuition fees" although to be fair I think they were standardised, so the same fees for any university, and fairly small, with support for poorer families. I think having so many people go to university is a big burden to pay for. Part of the solution is not so many people going to university.

But that's a very short term solution. Because with low cost labor globalizing and moving out of the EU and US, you will either need more highly educated knowledge workers to be competitive or accept a bigger group in society get very low wages or unemployment.

He did say UK so those low cost labour issues will not be a concern post them leaving the EU.

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#314

Post by tzs »

chrischattin wrote: post #104
slg wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally incompatible with the idea that everyone should be able to afford to go to college and private institutions need to foot the bill for the costs. We as a society prioritized availability of college education over costs. In order to get both you would likely have to change to some income percentage based repayment system instead of traditional loan repayments and that probably wouldn't be possible…

College was dirt cheap before student loans became non-dischargeable and the government started backing them.

I looked for tuition costs over time, but didn't find much online. I did find Stanford tuition data going back about 100 years. Here's a graph of the log of Stanford tuition over time [1]. The log of tuition has grown pretty much linearly.

There doesn't seem to be much difference between how it grew before government backed loans and after them. Somewhere I've got a spreadsheet where I compared the growth rate to the inflation rate. I can't find that right now, but if I remember correctly the tuition growth rate was about twice the inflation rate.

It would be interesting to get this kind of data for a variety of schools, but I couldn't find it.

[1] https://imgur.com/fXnjDNn

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#315

Post by buboard »

misiti3780 wrote: post #71

As a US citizen, I see the US debt bomb ending it two different ways 1. Sanders/Warren get elected and somehow forgive 1.5 trillion in student loans and make education free going forward. 2. 2008 level crisis with (2) is the more probable I think universities tuition is way too expensive in our country, but I'm against (1) currently because I don't think retroactively forgiving debt is a good policy. The students too…

if (2) is possible, what's the difference if (1) happens? Someone will have to pay that debt eventually (the taxpayer).

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#316

Post by turc1656 »

stefano wrote: post #154

What I find funny in these discussions on HN is how most people seem to be completely oblivious to the obvious solution, proven to work in many developed countries around the world: have the state directly fund universities and don't charge tuition to students (or charge them a small amount). Why is the assumption "universities are private endeavours that should make a profit" something that goes unchallenged on HN?

"Why is the assumption "universities are private endeavours that should make a profit" something that goes unchallenged on HN?"

Because:

1) that's a true statement - private institutions are free to be for or not for profit and charge whatever they like.

2) public universities are already funded (in part) by the government and the problem exists there as well, just not to the same extent

I agree entirely with the OP that the source of the problem is in what I will refer to as the "financialization" of college. As OP mentioned, we saw the same thing with the housing bubble. We see it anywhere this type of "easy" money is offered because most people are not long term thinkers or don't fully grasp the details of the terms of the contract or the impact. Put simply, if you offer people money (even with interest attached) as a loan - especially when they are young and broke and want to pay for something expensive - they are going to take it.

The same thing happened with housing. People's incomes didn't magically do up. Rates went down and so the banks said "hey, we'll loan you more money now" and people did exactly what people do - most of them took out the most that the banks would offer them to buy the biggest houses they could afford. This drove up prices across the board.

The same thing has happened here. The actual cost of educating a person hasn't gone up dramatically. Faculty to student ratios are largely the same as well. Yes, the colleges added a bunch of non-teaching staff that increased cost, but they didn't actually need that money to function (in the beginning). They were just suddenly able to charge a lot more because the government guaranteed a bunch of loans to people who otherwise couldn't get them or at least could get them at reasonable rates. So now there was more money chasing after the same amount of services. Unsurprisingly prices went up (a lot). The colleges then spent money on building new dorms and offering all types of new programs and things. And they hired a lot of administrative staff. Now they need that money to function because they got bloated with all that easy money.

It's just the same process we see over and over. With the federal, state, and local budgets - it's not a tax problem, it's a spending problem. Similar story here. There is far too much bloat and debt within these universities. But it all started with the same shitty easy money crap that we've seen before. Same scam, different industry.

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#317

Post by munificent »

AcerbicZero wrote: post #275

The vast majority of jobs/careers/professions do not require sitting in a classroom for 4 years to learn enough to do them. Even less require sitting in an extremely expensive classroom for 4 years. At the same time learning has never been more accessible. I can study Python, mechanical engineering, calculus, aviation ground school, etc all without leaving the house if I wanted. So how does a commodity like education…

You're assuming the entire point of college is to make you a worker. But a lberal arts education has always been about making you a complete human. If nothing else, it's important for citizens to be well-rounded enough to be informed voters.

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#318

Post by Ididntdothis »

kansface wrote: post #171
stefano wrote: post #154

What I find funny in these discussions on HN is how most people seem to be completely oblivious to the obvious solution, proven to work in many developed countries around the world: have the state directly fund universities and don't charge tuition to students (or charge them a small amount). Why is the assumption "universities are private endeavours that should make a profit" something that goes unchallenged on HN?

Most colleges/universities are nonprofits and they still charge tens of thousands per semester. I will also point out that the European model is not free, universal college degrees for all - access is restricted behind rigorous entrance exams. Such a system would be politically untenable in the US wherein a growing movement wants to do away with all entry tests. What would actually happen in practice is that we would…

Don’t confuse “nonprofit” with “no profits”. There are plenty of people making a lot of money in nonprofits.

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#319

Post by fifityyp »

afarrell wrote: post #219
JBorrow wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point about entrance exams is, in general, not true. University applications in Europe are very similar to those in the USA.

What is the European version of SAT/ACT scores and AP tests?

In France there are two systems. Competitive and non competitive. Competitive is for med school and high end schools of engineering or economics / management. The entry tests are nation-wide and standardized. The non-competitive may have an entry test but non standardized. Both further tests are up to the discretion of the teachers.

There used to be public graduation rankings, but they are no more.

Re: U of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100k per year

#320

Post by wolco »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #198
stefano wrote: post #154

What I find funny in these discussions on HN is how most people seem to be completely oblivious to the obvious solution, proven to work in many developed countries around the world: have the state directly fund universities and don't charge tuition to students (or charge them a small amount). Why is the assumption "universities are private endeavours that should make a profit" something that goes unchallenged on HN?

The US has state funded universities that charge an order of magnitude less than 100k. In fact there are 3 of them in Chicago. Generally, anyone with acceptable high school grades can find a spot in a state university if they want. Students attending U of Chicago would have specifically decided not to attend a state university, typically because their local state university is less prestigious.

U of Chicago doesn't have the prestigious rep that other schools who are charging less do. Is this a way of increasing their prestige?
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