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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

#391

Post by galaxyLogic »

3131s wrote: post #360
bonoboTP wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the cost of American college doesn't go towards education but things like sports stadiums and teams, various non-academic events, administrators, various other non-academic staff, uniquely-expensive American legal costs and insurance, on-campus police (a big wtf for Europeans), and then there are also those people who decide which Halloween costumes are appropriate for students, investigate various misconduc…

I attended a small but well-known liberal arts school that increased tuition about 20k in well under a decade. In a single year the tuition increased 5k, and yet the department of my major was downsized and classes that I needed to complete my degree were full. At the same time though they built a new $42 million "cultural exchange" building and began adding an enormous sports facility. It turned out that actually th…

It seems to me the appeal of the expensive colleges is at least partly that you get to hang out with other rich kids, making connections that can benefit you later financially.

It's like Donald Trump's golf-club you pay lot mostly for the chance of being part of the club

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

#392

Post by galaxyLogic »

BurningFrog wrote: post #237
Dannymetconan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> You do not need a degree 30 years ago to do lots of jobs that now require one This is part of the problem. Stop demanding a formal degree for jobs, allow anyone who can do the job to do it, and much/some of these problems will go away.

It's hard to know what exactly the job will be in a few years. But if a person has successfully completed years of study you know they have a lot of background knowledge which MIGHT become useful in the job as circumstances change.

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

#393

Post by p1necone »

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…

Maybe that's true in the political climate of the USA, but there's plenty of other countries that have either free University or interest free student loans while still having high quality Universities.

E.g. New Zealand has interest free loans, and Auckland university is ranked 81st in the world (although I have no idea whether these rankings are meaningful for bachelors students)

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

#394

Post by paxys »

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…

Making student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy is a terrible idea. A much better way to help young graduates/professionals is to enforce sensible forgiveness programs for private loans.

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

#395

Post by tinco »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #149
georgeecollins wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Universities in Europe really that high quality? Certainly some are, but as a parent researching schools I have been really surprised by how many European colleges are a bit mediocre by the criteria I was evaluating. For example, Spain and Italy have some of the oldest colleges in the world. But in many ways there are four or five colleges in California that are better, four or five colleges in Texas, and across…

> Are Universities in Europe really that high quality? Anecdote from a friend studying biochemistry in Milan, but mind-blowing. Apparently, he was the only one in his graduate class to know how to use a pipette and other basic lab equipment. Until that point, their training had been purely theoretical. There are a lot of other problems in a similar vein. But the quality of American high-access, high-quality higher ed…

That's weird, basic glassware use including pipette is part of the national final grading in The Netherlands, I guess there's differences across the EU.

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

#396

Post by hakfoo »

7thaccount wrote: post #340
srtjstjsj wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US college isn't longer because it's remedial, it's because it has more out of major liberal arts required courses. There are a lot of remedial classes at US colleges, but those students wouldn't be in college at all in Europe.

This is true. There are a lot of pointless liberal arts classes for a STEM degree in the US. For example, my engineering degree required 3 English classes, psychology, fine arts, and sociology. These were all incredibly easy and I found the course material was what I was used to as a freshman in highschool (no I'm not exaggerating). So those classes weren't even remedial, but felt like a joke. Please note that I'm no…

The one that got under my craw was when I went to see an academic advisor with one or two semesters left.

I had been fastidious about covering all the specified requirements, and my proposed course-load covered the remainder. Except apparently you needed 128 total hours, and actually covering the requirements of the programme left you six short. They designed the timetable assuming that people would bounce between majors or otherwise load up on go-nowhere electives, and the advisor basically said I could take underwater basket weaving and it would count for the gap.

I ended up taking a CLEP exam a few weeks later to claim the equivalent credits of several semesters worth of Spanish classes.

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

#397

Post by Nimitz14 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #247
pa7x1 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top European universities provide pretty good education pre-PhD level, in many cases the first 3-5 years in European schools is superior and more focused than the equivalent US curriculum. The first 1 or 2 years in US universities seem spent filling the gaps left by a mediocre High School education. US universities are then miles ahead of most European schools in their PhD programs bare a few exceptions (Oxford, Camb…

PhD programs in the US and elsewhere are often not directly comparable. Doing a PhD in the US typically involves 1-3 years still taking classes. Doing one in the UK means starting thesis-forming research immediately. Not really the same thing at all.

Uk is the outlier here.

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

#398

Post by galaxyLogic »

georgeecollins wrote: post #127
Dannymetconan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Are Universities in Europe really that high quality? Certainly some are, but as a parent researching schools I have been really surprised by how many European colleges are a bit mediocre by the criteria I was evaluating. For example, Spain and Italy have some of the oldest colleges in the world. But in many ways there are four or five colleges in California that are better, four or five colleges in Texas, and across…

It may very well be the that the 10 best universities are in the USA so if you want your kid in the best university rather than sending them to Europe that might be the way to go.

That doesn't mean that in general the quality of education, for the general public in Europe would not be higher.

It's a bit like the US healthcare system, the best in the world, but only for those who can afford it.

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

#399

Post by galaxyLogic »

7thaccount wrote: post #340
srtjstjsj wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US college isn't longer because it's remedial, it's because it has more out of major liberal arts required courses. There are a lot of remedial classes at US colleges, but those students wouldn't be in college at all in Europe.

This is true. There are a lot of pointless liberal arts classes for a STEM degree in the US. For example, my engineering degree required 3 English classes, psychology, fine arts, and sociology. These were all incredibly easy and I found the course material was what I was used to as a freshman in highschool (no I'm not exaggerating). So those classes weren't even remedial, but felt like a joke. Please note that I'm no…

I had a colleague who told me he went to a university in Florida. I asked him what did he study there, and he said "Golf".

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

#400

Post by secabeen »

throwawaygh wrote: post #331
secabeen wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this is a great summary, and exactly what is going on. Interestingly, it hasn't seemed to have much change on the spending side. Colleges are charging more to the median student, but are using a lot of it to subsidize less well-off students. It's not showing up in huge increases in faculty salaries, or administrative costs.

> It's not showing up in huge increases in faculty salaries, or administrative costs. Not in faculty salaries, but often in faculty headcount. Lots of colleges and universities have added a lot of faculty while keeping student headcount constant. Mostly because they can't fire their tenured humanities faculty but need to hire people who can prepare students for something other than the Barista life. IMO: tenure shoul…

> Not in faculty salaries, but often in faculty headcount. Lots of colleges and universities have added a lot of faculty while keeping student headcount constant.

Do you have a citation for that? The message in the industry is that colleges have been reducing faculty headcounts, and relying on adjuncts to cover class loads, not that there are too many faculty.

> tenure should be used very sparingly and should be viewed as part of a competitive compensation package.

I don't think you're going to get very far with this argument in most universities, where faculty see themselves as part of the governance of the university. There's quite a bit of collective action between faculty, and I think even if you could get faculty in some departments without tenure, the STEM faculty would not want to create a two tiered system.

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