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Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

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Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#131

Post by GillBates666 »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #105
ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere. The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.

Thank you for your comment. That really fixed my perspective and calmed be down a bit. I'm a sucker for ragebait lol.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#132

Post by TuringNYC »

pkaye wrote: post #115
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which college is this, if you don't mind me asking? I mean the dean of HR is making 1million ...

BTW for California state employees including the public universities, the information is public so you can actually look it up. https://transparentcalifornia.com/agencies/salaries/#univers...

Possible Lesson Learned: Skip Leetcode and CTCI, study for the Berkeley Police Department exam!

https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2018/berkeley/?&s...

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#133

Post by jboog »

mnm1 wrote: post #123
ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

> Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping. This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. T…

I agree with the thrust of your argument but my flagship state university is still affordable for anyone. It's not cheap, but in state tuition even if you pay sticker isn't so high you can't pay it off in a reasonable amount of time (in state tuition is ~$9k). It's a great university too (UNC) so part of the way they keep tuition for in state cheap is out of state students pay almost as much as private school tuition and there's a ton of OOS willing to pay it.

Schools bear a lot of responsibility but then we can't ignore the role state governments have played by drastically slashing funding over the past 10+ years. Probably only going to get cut further in the COVID environment.

Purdue University hasn't raised tuition in something like 5+ years and is also still affordable. It's not Ivy league by any means but it's a great school. You need government and administrators/boards willing to support this though, 99% won't

Something external needs to happen to stop rapid rise in tuition. Maybe it will be COVID. Maybe state governments will reign in the profligate spending of their universities. They aren't going to do it themselves (at least top Universities, schools at the bottom of the food chain could definitely go bankrupt.)

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#134

Post by coryrc »

jawns wrote: post #62
jerf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, if you're going to fall back on that perspective, Real Life (TM) has all those things too, and it will continue to do so, for essentially free. There will be clusters of that sort of thing somewhere, just as there are "retirement communities" and "bedroom communities" and such. Universities certainly aren't bringing anywhere near enough value for their marginal improvement on those matters vs. what wo…

The counterpoint to your argument is that if it is so easy to create those types of communities for much less money than what universities are charging, why hasn't it happened? I would guess that it's a combination of 1. not being as easy as it seems and 2. network effects. Because of the latter, you would basically have to persuade a large number of students to make the switch at the same time for them to feel as if…

It's illegal to create living communities for young people. You are allowed to discriminate against people younger than 55, but not against any other age criteria.

It's another example in the unending list of losses in this generational war.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#135

Post by lstodd »

enitihas wrote: post #106
ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

If you haven't watched "Yes Minister", give it a try. It is a very good satire on beaurecracy.

If only it was a satire.

It is as an accurate depiction as you might wish for.

EDIT: the reality is worse.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#136

Post by austinl »

ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

Less than half of the students from my alma mater graduate within four years. When I learned this I was dumbfounded. The incentives are just not correctly aligned. The university is able to profit off of students taking fewer credit hours and staying more semesters, and academic advisors actively encourage this!

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#137

Post by vkou »

zbrozek wrote: post #74
ben7799 wrote: post #10

This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble. My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million. Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off. The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are…

It was obvious while I was a student that the ratio of administrators to faculty was ridiculous. And the growth rate ratio between them was 3:1. At no point was it clear to me what real value they were adding. I was the captain of a more capital and real-estate intensive than average student group, and it was absolutely infuriating to try to figure out how to get anything done. There was always some new bureaucrat co…

> Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.

Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value.

When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount.

All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people.

It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#138

Post by zomglings »

delecti wrote: post #121
jawns wrote: post #28

The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service. If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the cont…

I think a lot of what you're describing ties in with the general lack of "third places" in the US. College is basically one giant third place, and that community experience is hard to find elsewhere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

It feels like this was a concept I needed a name for and didn't know it. Thank you for posting about third places.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#139

Post by at_a_remove »

Reddit's "AskReddit" subreddit had a question recently hosted with a title something along the lines of "How did your college financially screw you over in this crisis?" The answers were varied and often ... "shocking" is the wrong word, because I have come to expect a kind of compulsive money-grubbing from many universities ... perhaps "flinch-inducing." Certainly the local subreddit for my city discussed similar money-grabs, nickel-and-diming, and general high-handed behavior interspersed with a general lack of competency.

Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.

Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.

Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#140

Post by Broken_Hippo »

jawns wrote: post #28

The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service. If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the cont…

Unfortunately, online education isn't popular because folks don't want the experience, especially if you are returning to school later in life. The reality is that many colleges are geared towards a non-working, single, young adult student. This is reflected in classroom times and coursework. (I had a class require volunteer work and short-term participation in college groups). You simply cannot work a 9-5 job and attend most regular colleges.
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