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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

#421

Post by wespiser_2018 »

bawana wrote: post #89
jimhefferon wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Colleges are now awash in money It is not possible for me to overstate how very much this is not true at the college where I work, and at all colleges with which I have a personal connection.

Of course not. They ARE AWASH in income. They just figure out how to spend it fast. Fancy buildings, fancy retirement plans, outrageous administrative salaries.... For example the Chairman of UMASS Medical Center makes 2.3 million. The CEO of Harvard makes 9.25 million. How are these jobs an order of magnitude harder than the governor of Massachusetts. (salary 150K) Or harder than the US President (salary 400K). I ca…

Haha, I had lunch with Dr. Collins a few times in grad school at Umass: he's not a bad guy, just a medical executive that could go make that money elsewhere. He is pretty talented as well :)

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

#422

Post by twblalock »

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…

> 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.

A lot of countries have been able to maintain high-quality, low-cost university systems. They all do it with a significant degree of government intervention. I can't think of a single one that has succeeded by letting the market solve this problem.

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

#424

Post by DreamScatter »

xmprt wrote: post #228
bawana wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course not. They ARE AWASH in income. They just figure out how to spend it fast. Fancy buildings, fancy retirement plans, outrageous administrative salaries.... For example the Chairman of UMASS Medical Center makes 2.3 million. The CEO of Harvard makes 9.25 million. How are these jobs an order of magnitude harder than the governor of Massachusetts. (salary 150K) Or harder than the US President (salary 400K). I ca…

I have never heard this argument ("captains of industry take huge risks and therefore deserve handsome reimbursement"). What I have heard is that these people are paid market rate for their management skills because they could easily get a similar salary in other endeavors.

Then let those administration be hired elsewhere by the market. A university should not pay such a huge salary to administrators, somebody who is paid a lot less can do the same job. If it takes millions of dollars to hire an administrator at a university, you probably don't need that person. You could just as well hire a person who is willing to accept a smaller salary for the same job. We are talking about administrators who get paid millions for hardly doing anything... let them be hired by industry where they get more salary and hire someone cheaper.

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

#425

Post by JamesBarney »

x86_64Ubuntu wrote: post #338
JamesBarney wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans are over 300 million people, and like Europe we are not homogenous. And many Americans believe European healthcare, education, and infrastructure are far superior to the U.S. The problem is that despite Europe being far more efficient at health, education, and infrastructure spending it also has a wide range of policies. So it's difficult to determine which policies are driving the increase in efficiency an…

What does homogeneity have to do with anything?

>Americans are absolutely, utterly, unable to imagine that the way they do things is not the best. It's incredible to watch from outside.

Treats Americans like they all have the same beliefs, i.e. homogenous.

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

#426

Post by sudosysgen »

ericmay wrote: post #362
sudosysgen wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait. You're comparing total cost in France, to cost at the point of use excluding taxes in the US. Education in public in-state universities is also highly subsidized.

Is it highly subsidized? Any reason to think that is the case?

It is indeed highly subsidized, to the tune of billions a year. You can read the Financials online.

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

#427

Post by jldugger »

ampdepolymerase wrote: post #385
jldugger wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If it's in the same city, can students just keep living with their parents? The uni I worked for eventually rolled out that policy after the initial "all freshmen live in dorms now" backlash, but it's a tiny fraction of the student population whose parents live in town. State unis are deliberately located away from the population centers, for obscure reasons involving a mistrust of European politics.

Can you elaborate on the last point?

US states generally have not placed their capitals in their population centers. I'm told some of it is a fear of big city corruption might have on democracy (not without reason, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine#In_the_Unite...).

The logic seemed to play out in land grant unis as well, but looking at some history articles about my alma mater, it seems more complicated than "big city bad" -- the big city was on the opposite side of the state boundary river, and on the opposite side of the Slavery issue. Instead as best I can tell, the decision was driven by local legislature party politics of the time, with accusations of voter fraud, vote buying, and bad faith negotiations.

Perhaps the reason most of the state unis I can think of are in small towns is simply that without a crossroads or river confluence driving trade, landowners in those areas were most eager to get a state institution to prop up property values?

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

#428

Post by wbillingsley »

What the article proposes (the government setting the maximum level of loan it will provide for a course) is essentially the Australian system.

The other aspects in the Australian system, though, are a "Commonwealth contribution" (part that the student does not have to pay back), an institutional maximum on how much the government will fund / underwrite that's dependent on institutional performance metrics (e.g. student employment rate on graduation), and that they alter how much students can be charged and how much the government will contribute depending on the subject area.

It gets very political and there are perverse incentives hidden in the detail.

(There's a couple of controversies in Aus higher ed at the moment. One is a lot of downsizing due to Covid affecting the international market. The other is proposed changes to the fee structure for particular courses and universities from the government.)

However, it does get universities to respond to government strategy, so I expect the people in government who run it are probably very happy.

Within government, I think they see university funding as also being one of the levers the government has to influence economic growth. For example, directing student places to a particular institution brings university jobs, students, and the students' living expenses into that university's town to grow it. By giving incentives for particular courses, they can feed particular industries with graduates, etc.

So you'll hear universities and government talk about "creating job ready graduates" (they've always talked about this), but also "creating graduate ready jobs" (universities as a mechanism for growing parts of the economy in an area)

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

#429

Post by brownbat »

The roi was also high during that period.

The price of services relative to goods has also trended strongly upwards during that period due to increased trade.

Urbanization and increased cost of living in some areas could be pushing up averages in costs.

Nobody pays the sticker price. A lot of colleges are subsidized by a small slice of wealthy and/or foreign students, so to maximize differential pricing, universities raise prices, and simultaneously offer larger tuition grants for need or merit.

There are a dozen reasons. Student aid is probably one of them too, absolutely.

I just worry about someone saying 'x' is the reason for some complex social or economic changes decades in the making. The interesting question to me is how to weight all these influences.

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

#430

Post by dropofwill »

throwawaygh wrote: post #288
lordnacho wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issue with the rankings is how they emphasise research. Why would it matter to an undergraduate how highly decorated his prof is? We used to joke that the more titles a guy had, the worse he was at teaching. I think this is true because the guys with the titles have moved on to managing research and finding funding, rather than having daily tasks to do with the research. I went to a very well known university that…

Well, a few things: 1. Research is part of the pedagogy. Getting involved in a research lab as an undergraduate is a great way to land in the top 5-10 percentile. 2. I think what you're saying is roughly correct, but would warn that you can very easily go way too far in the other direction. For example, check out some of the smaller colleges and state branch campuses launching data science departments staffed entirel…

Your chances of landing a job in a research lab in undergrad probably doesn’t correlate with top research output. People who have armies of phds and post docs don’t have time for undergrads.

I spent my last 2 years of uni in a research lab and got some stuff published. Im pretty sure i got this opportunity because i went to a school with a dearth of grad students and i showed some initiative in an intro class for what became my minor.

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