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Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

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Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#41

Post by debacle »

CincinnatiMan wrote: post #8
disown wrote: post #7

No, the real reason was that country wasn't producing enough jobs for the expanding labor force so we artificially created a new requirement to keep young people out of the job market for an additional 4+ years. Credentialism is a tool governments/businesses use keep control of the labor situation. The college tuition fiasco is a private/public creation. Now who wears the pants in the private/public relationship, tha…

I don’t know that there’s any groups deciding on something but rather individuals acting in their best interest, getting a degree, that ruins it for everybody else. An arms race among individuals.

Look at the quickly expanding credential requirements for nursing staff. Over the last decade or so in my state, the requirement has gone from no degree, to associates degree, to bachelors degree, and now there is talk of requiring a masters degree or a 5 year degree.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#42

Post by sokoloff »

noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

What does the choice of "High Quality, Low Cost" look like in practice? (Because I'm not seeing how to make that happen, other than "burying the actually high cost someplace where it's spread out and hard to see, so it looks like low cost".)

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#43

Post by fatnoah »

vonmoltke wrote: post #18
fatnoah wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Private Engineering-focused college in the Northeast. All-in annual cost was listed at $24k for tuition, room, board, fees, etc.

That's about what Rose-Hulman quoted me before aid. I would have had to borrow or work for about $12k/year if I had gone there.

Ironically, my state's University ended up being my most expensive option since it was the only school I was accepted to that offered zero scholarships.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#44

Post by btilly »

The problem with the government regulation solution is that the universities will be motivated to get their people into the position of being regulators, so that they can have the government guarantee them as much money as possible.

A much simpler solution is to say that every year the most expensive 10% of schools are denied federal loans, with a sliding cap on loans over the next 30% down to unlimited loans to 60% of schools. Students will have access to loans based on the status of the school when the student started. And let students know what that status will be before the school is chosen.

Create a market incentive to deliver school more cheaply than its competitors, and see how long it takes them to figure out what a doable price point is.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#45

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

Dannymetconan wrote: post #40
noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

Universities in Europe are generally high quality and low cost. It does have it's problems but it is not one or the other. You do not need a degree 30 years ago to do lots of jobs that now require one. Higher education for a lot of organizations is just an easy way to cut the application stack down

>Universities in Europe are generally high quality and low cost.

The cost is low for the student but it's pretty high for the taxpayers. Not US high but still, it's not free, there's lots of bloat in the system that thrives on volume of students not on quality so they try to push forward legislation and programs to increase the number of students, especially from abroad and build more faculties/universities with more staff to hire regardless if the jobs market has need for more students or not.

It's not super expensive for the taxpayers but because it's mostly free for the students, lots of them treat it like Highschool 2.0, bouncing in and out, not bothering to finish it or prolonging it till their thirties, etc. which turns into of a waste of public resources at some point.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#46

Post by jacobr1 »

veilrap wrote: post #24
dnautics wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t know that there’s any groups deciding on something Credentialism is exactly that. If in the pre-covid era you went to Washington, DC, you will see huge illuminated ads in the metro stations for companies, for example "graduate school" (literally the name of one company I saw) which offer super sketchy master's degrees. This is because if you have a master's degree, you get a mandated pay bump in your salary…

That sounds like bad regulations and bureaucracy more than credential-ism, but I agree that is horrifying. A blanket pay bump for "Master's" degrees written into the code? Clearly that's going to be gamed. If any auditing actually went into the source and value of the credentials then they could be appropriately valued or ignored, depending on the case.

> If any auditing actually went into the source and value of the credentials

Except that already is case. You need a degree by an accredited institution. The Department of Education regulates the accreditors, which audit the universities.

So we could have better or more aggressive regulation here, either at the DoE or the accreditors. Or even have the department accredit directly, but I suspect these institutions will still likely game the system.

Usually the bargin-basement universities do actually have worthwhile material, the poor ones just don't provide you with the full support to succeed, and often overstate the value of their program relative to alternatives (or cost). I mean, you could just buy textbooks on Amazon and do self-study. And for some folks, that might even be a good program! Good universities provide a lot more than just the lectures and textbooks, but I suspect setting standards to assess those properties is difficult. Even going to a well-respected state school, I had a few classes that were very poorly run. In one case, my dorm-mates and I created a study-group and basically taught ourselves the material. But I shudder to think of a whole university consisting of classes like that, though I suspect they would meet baseline audits of the curriculum. An alternative approach would be to assess the outcomes of students, but looking at the can worms that raises in primary eduction, I don't think that is a good approach either.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#47

Post by jacobr1 »

pnutjam wrote: post #15
CincinnatiMan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know that there’s any groups deciding on something but rather individuals acting in their best interest, getting a degree, that ruins it for everybody else. An arms race among individuals.

Kind of like what's been happening with housing in the places with jobs. It's too bad there isn't some sort of system where we could all have a voice to regulate these sort of things. Kind of like the US had before the Managementism replaced Capitalism and Corprotocrocy replaced deomocracy.

What would you describe as the key differences between Managementism and Capitalism?

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#48

Post by throwawaygh »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

What does the choice of "High Quality, Low Cost" look like in practice? (Because I'm not seeing how to make that happen, other than "burying the actually high cost someplace where it's spread out and hard to see, so it looks like low cost".)

> burying the actually high cost someplace where it's spread out and hard to see, so it looks like low cost

"spread out" implies taxation, but something similar can be done via endowment.

For example, a college with an existing $100MM endowment can educate at least a few hundred students for free in perpetuity.

With a billion dollar endowment, a college can educate a couple thousand for free.

In fact, Berea College does exactly this: 1600 students, 1.2 billion endowment, and provides effectively free college to nearly every student. Ranks alongside places like Denison University. So, Low Cost (to consumer), High Quality, but definitely not Universal (there are only so many billion dollar endowments to go around).

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#49

Post by btilly »

jefftk wrote: post #10

> the feds should handle student loans the same way they handle medicaid/medicare reimbursement. I'm not sure how anyone looks at our health care reimbursement system and the decides that's the approach to apply to fix anything else? Personally, I'd like to see: * Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where. * Make student loan de…

Employers are allowed to test students to see what they can do, but not evaluate them based on whether they went to school or where.

For those who are unaware, these tests are considered a violation of the Civil Rights Act because they result in hiring blacks at a much lower rate than whites.

A big underlying cause of that is that schools with lots of blacks are underfunded relative to schools with lots of whites.

Make student loan debt dischargeable in bankruptcy.

I support this. I thought that the 2005 change to the law that made it not dischargeable was a bad idea then, and we are seeing the predictable consequences now.

Re: Why has college gotten so expensive in the last 30 years? A blank check in 1993

#50

Post by Justsignedup »

sokoloff wrote: post #42
noetic_techy wrote: post #34

"The question then becomes a matter of how we fix this without diminishing access to a college education." This is the crux of it that everyone needs to get over. Universality, High Quality, Low Cost. Pick two. By letting the government meddle you have guaranteed no one can afford college and will be long in debt to a loan they cannot discharge in bankruptcy. I'd rather have cheap college then universal access for ev…

What does the choice of "High Quality, Low Cost" look like in practice? (Because I'm not seeing how to make that happen, other than "burying the actually high cost someplace where it's spread out and hard to see, so it looks like low cost".)

Low cost, available to everyone: the quality goes down as they need more capacity for less pay.

High Quality, Available to everyone: Will cost a lot because we'd need a lot of high quality teachers, and attracting them will be expensive.

Low Cost, High Quality: Only the best will get accepted, and the colleges will make their money in other ways using the work the students provide (like how medical school research departments are big money-makers)

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