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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

#171

Post by justatestttt »

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.

That makes your school an outlier.

You have to go down 502 schools on this list before you run into a leader that makes less than 200k/year.

https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensatio...

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#172

Post by asciident »

jboog wrote: post #141
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…

Why is everyone acting like every school charges Ivy League prices? Most state schools are affordable. Mine is a top school and charges $9k a year in tuition for in state. You can get all of the social, in person experience at almost any state school. You might not get a job at Google or Mckinsey but you also won't take on 6 figure debt. The problem is everyone wants to go to the private/out of state schools with sky…

Also everyone quotes Ivy League MSRP prices as if every student is paying them. In reality, Ivy League financial aid is the most generous, and the actual tuition paid over the past couple decades has been decreasing, unlike public schools where it's been increasing significantly.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#173

Post by CogitoCogito »

MattGaiser wrote: post #82
CogitoCogito wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). I think it depends on the endowment. If the University in fact has a lot of money, then I think they _should_ be operating at a loss while taking advantage of their cushion. But yeah for the majority of univ…

Endowment money is often contractually allocated to specific things to prevent this exact scenario.

I guess you're right that many large gifts are, but what about the (combination of) small gifts? And all returns on interest on such gifts? I mean if I donate money I don't know what contract would exist preventing it to be used for this sort of a purpose. Who would the contract even be with if I personally don't agree to it and I'm the one donating?

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#174

Post by klmadfejno »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #21
klmadfejno wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These companies aren’t arbitrarily choosing to educate people remotely. They’re adapting to the situation. That doesn't really matter though. Like, it sucks, but they're giving a much shittier product and charging full price. Your example about people being less productive is not relevant because there's no doubt that the quality of education is much worse.

Do you feel the same way about engineers working remotely? Is someone working remotely and communicating over Zoom delivering significantly lower quality work and therefore deserving of a lower compensation? Your assumption that there’s “no doubt” about the quality of education being worse is not a good assumption. Educators are working overtime to make the most of the remote learning situation.

You keep implying that the schools are doing their best in a trying time and deserve sympathy. Sure, that's fine. They're not acting in bad faith. But they aren't acting fairly. If the reason you went to a school was it had a cool robot building program, and you don't get to build any robots, that's clearly not what was offered to you. An online college is not worth the price of an in person college and it is very, very unfair to these students who are paying fortunes to get them. Much more unfair to the massively indebted students than the bureaucratically overbudgeted schools.

Employed engineers working remotely is a really bad analogy because engineers are paid to be available on an ongoing basis. Contract workers are a much better fit. If they were a contract worker, contracted to complete a specific task, and they don't complete the task... they don't get paid. COVID or otherwise. There is a wealth of pretty reasonable legal literature of settling disputes over partial completion of work.

> "While closing campus and transitioning to online classes was the right thing for Defendants to do, this decision deprived Plaintiff and the other members of the Classes from recognizing the benefits of in-person instruction, access to campus facilities, student activities, and other benefits and services in exchange for which they had already paid fees and tuition."

Note things like "campus facilities". Obviously 0% of that thing that they paid for was provided. And it should be reimbursed.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#175

Post by sct202 »

francis_t_catte wrote: post #76
cjmaria wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds strikingly similar to what's going on at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. President has a 5mm+ salary and took only a 5% pay cut while laying off (not furloughing!) 60 faculty members.

It's worse than that for Shirley Jackson. as of 2015 her monetary compensation was: $945,000 in salary $276,474 in bonuses $31,874 in nontaxable benefits $5.8 million in deferred compensation plus a 19,500sq.ft. mansion. :| p.s. hope you enjoy troy :)

That's pretty ridiculous considering that RPI's endowment isn't that big, so it's not like she could justify from fundraising.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#176

Post by TheGallopedHigh »

xsc wrote: post #104
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…

Name the school, no need to defend the guilty.

We can have a discussion without the pitchforks I this forum.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#177

Post by wasdfff »

asciident wrote: post #172
jboog wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is everyone acting like every school charges Ivy League prices? Most state schools are affordable. Mine is a top school and charges $9k a year in tuition for in state. You can get all of the social, in person experience at almost any state school. You might not get a job at Google or Mckinsey but you also won't take on 6 figure debt. The problem is everyone wants to go to the private/out of state schools with sky…

Also everyone quotes Ivy League MSRP prices as if every student is paying them. In reality, Ivy League financial aid is the most generous, and the actual tuition paid over the past couple decades has been decreasing, unlike public schools where it's been increasing significantly.

At USC something like over 2/3 of kids are on some form of aid.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#178

Post by malandrew »

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…

> To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.

If this were the only reason, the invisible hand of the market would address this problem most of the time. Add too many administrators that add no value and you end up with a higher cost structure than your competitors and are not able to provide the same value.

Most of the time people demand more headcount because (1) they actually need more headcount to get the work done or (2) regulatory burdens force you to hire more headcount to deal with the regulations.

We're increasingly moving to a world where (2) happens more and more.

A good example on college campuses are things like campus police and kangaroo courts that deal with issues that should have been referred directly to city/state/federal law enforcement and the justice system.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#179

Post by tlibert »

Faculty member at a top-tier CS school. For most of the faculty where I am, an hourly consulting fee in the range of $500-1000 is reasonable. If you take the low-end of that range ($500) x 3 hours of class time per week ($1500) x 12 weeks of class you get $18,000 worth of expert time. Multiply that by three classes and you get $54k of value each semester, so even with non-trivial tuition it is still a pretty good deal. Likewise, FAANG et al recruit very heavily from our school so there is additional value-add.

I personally came from modest means and have a ton of outstanding student debt and was hesitant to go the faculty route precisely because I think the higher education in the US can be financially exploitative, but there are places where the high tuition is in fact a bargain based on market rates for the expertise. Likewise, nearly all faculty at top-tier CS schools can make way more in the private sector - we do this job because we really enjoy mentoring and work hard to make sure our students get the best education possible.

Re: Colleges face student lawsuits seeking refunds after coronavirus closures

#180

Post by PeterisP »

vmchale wrote: post #22
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 anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators. I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.

The switch to online learning IMHO would lead to a 'winner-takes-all' market for professors/teachers.

To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.

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