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Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

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Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#41

Post by godelski »

laGrenouille wrote: post #38
godelski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if…

I see a lot of confusion about college endowments on HN. It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. Annual university budgets make use of the returns off of the endowment, often covering more than half of their expenses. Their long-term plan is to never tap into the principal. In fact, the hope is to increase the principal with new donations to expand the annual returns to fight agai…

> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments.

I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is to be like dividend investors, it does not appear (at least from what I'm seeing) that they are actually acting like someone with a goal to live off of dividends. There's more growth than that. Or there's something missing that I don't understand (more likely).

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#42

Post by [deleted] »

godelski wrote: post #41
laGrenouille wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of confusion about college endowments on HN. It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. Annual university budgets make use of the returns off of the endowment, often covering more than half of their expenses. Their long-term plan is to never tap into the principal. In fact, the hope is to increase the principal with new donations to expand the annual returns to fight agai…

> It's best to think of them not as saving accounts but financial instruments. I mean I get that (not that a bank isn't a financial instrument...) but to what ends? The example I gave is should be clear, because of the large wealth of money that is. $54bn is no laughing matter. Stanford has $30bn. These are sums that completely pay for the operating costs of the universities and students. On interest. If the point is…

[deleted]

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#43

Post by godelski »

supernova87a wrote: post #39
godelski wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This should be unsurprising since most colleges/universities already have student workers. From places in admin, campus guides, working odd jobs like the cafeteria or library, or many other places. The two schools I've been to limit these workers to 20 hrs/wk (so it is part time and they can be "full time" students). But this is nowhere near enough to pay for tuition. It is really just "beer money" (about $300/wk if…

Harvard, or other universities, are not too different from other corporations. Why would they offer to pay for something that their customers themselves would pay for? After all, a Harvard degree is quite valuable, and who's reaping the benefit of it? They want to make as much money off their endowments (savings) as they can, and spend as little of it as possible on things that they don't need to pay for. Note that w…

Maybe Harvard isn't the best example since it is private. But to me this seems a bit different when we're talking about public universities. It seems odd to run an academic facility like a company trying to turn a large profit. It is weird to me to compare them to corporate organizations, just like it is weird to compare government to corporations. I know it happens and there are some similarities, but just because apples and oranges are both spherical fruits doesn't mean we're comparing equal things.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#44

Post by supernova87a »

thereisnospork wrote: post #30
supernova87a wrote: post #27

Sorry to depart from the feel-good narrative, but this kind of student labor is token or symbolic at best. The kinds of jobs that students can perform are not nearly the kind of jobs that a college with a physical plant to maintain, professors to pay, finances to administer, etc. can make a meaningful dent in. (By and large), students are not going to be doing electrical work, maintenance, financial accounting, admin…

That does beg an interesting thought experiment though: what would that school look like if everything had to be done by the students. Less professoring and upper managerial responsibilities? Make the business students hash out contracts with vendors, IT students handle the networking, mechanical engineers the boilers, hospitality management majors dorm maintenance, and so on and so forth. Something like 15-20 hrs/we…

As you hint at, I think you would quickly find that the university would look like it's run by a bunch of slumlords, with things falling apart, and no one responding when the toilet gets clogged or the wifi goes down.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#45

Post by himinlomax »

supernova87a wrote: post #29
loquation wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Living in a country, where there basically is no college tuition in the US sense and scale, this sounds all so alien to me. There's nothing "utopian" about it. From my perspective, it's more of an ideological problem than anything else.

You're just confused over who's paying for it. Someone is, I can guarantee you that. And it's not student labor. I'm not differing on the point that free tuition might be a good thing. The (unspoken) point of this story was to suggest that student labor might be enough to make a college solvent.

> You're just confused over who's paying for it.

He's not.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#46

Post by lawschwimmer »

mahdi7d1 wrote: post #33

A college where everybody eats free dinner and lunch (We pay 1/10 of the actual cost of the food), pays no tuition, can take student loans with really low interest rates (the amount they loan is not much and it's not same as student loan in Western countries where you take loans to pay for tuition fees rather here students take loan to buy stuff they need like laptops and such.) is supposed to result in prolific peop…

I respectfully disagree, as a person who probably grew less than 100 miles from you. While it is not the worst place in the world to grow up by economic standards, and may as a matter of fact be not a bad place at all, the "free college" comes with the cost of literally no job guarantee after you graduate. Most importantly, even leaving the country isn't a garden of roses, on account of the fact that most countries see the passport and deport you on account of your country of origin being a state sponsor of terrorism.

There certainly are countries that seemingly offer a lot, but before you sell Iran being a country of free academic opportunities, think twice about the fact that there is freedom of speech outside of it.

While respecting your opinion (despite the fact that you would not have the same freedom of speech without anonymity in Iran), I think it's naive to think that just providing you with free pseudo-education with no chance of real success or quality of life is what this thread is about.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#47

Post by supernova87a »

godelski wrote: post #43
supernova87a wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Harvard, or other universities, are not too different from other corporations. Why would they offer to pay for something that their customers themselves would pay for? After all, a Harvard degree is quite valuable, and who's reaping the benefit of it? They want to make as much money off their endowments (savings) as they can, and spend as little of it as possible on things that they don't need to pay for. Note that w…

Maybe Harvard isn't the best example since it is private. But to me this seems a bit different when we're talking about public universities. It seems odd to run an academic facility like a company trying to turn a large profit. It is weird to me to compare them to corporate organizations, just like it is weird to compare government to corporations. I know it happens and there are some similarities, but just because a…

Well, I think you've pointed out and answered part of your question.

Public universities generally have little/much smaller endowments by comparison because they rely on government for their steady stream of revenue. And because of that they can, and have pressure to, fulfill policy-based goals of educating students at little to no cost, or heavily subsidizing it.

Some public universities are acting according to the incentives they've been given, and accumulating their own endowments to insulate against political unreliability, and you can also see why college sports are such an important revenue stream for them as a result.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#48

Post by mbaytas »

One thing that strikes me from this article is a vast bureaucracy, regulation, credentialing structures, accounting, etc. that the story revolves around.

In Sweden, where I live, there are plenty of educational opportunities available to people completely free of charge. Entirely subsidized by the government. Instead of assembling elaborate bureaucratic structures, the state spends its money paying school admin and teachers.

While these are not universities per se, the opportunities they open up to students are top notch. You don't need an entire college education to "set graduates on a path towards breaking the cycle of poverty", which according to the article is what work colleges aspire to achieve.

This vocational education is also much more economically efficient than universities in the same country, mainly due to losing the weight of bureaucracy and credentialing structures. Teachers are well-paid, ops run smoothly with few personnel, and students get access to many new job opportunities completely free of charge.

Re: Colleges where everyone works and there's no tuition

#50

Post by dredmorbius »

mahdi7d1 wrote: post #33

A college where everybody eats free dinner and lunch (We pay 1/10 of the actual cost of the food), pays no tuition, can take student loans with really low interest rates (the amount they loan is not much and it's not same as student loan in Western countries where you take loans to pay for tuition fees rather here students take loan to buy stuff they need like laptops and such.) is supposed to result in prolific peop…

You're touching on a different problem, though one that emerges in international contexts. It's also evident at national levels where higher education is subsidised regionally, but employment is flexible at a national scale.

Namely: regions which support low-cost education tend not to see its benefits if they also have a low-wage or low-tech economic base. Such states are simply subsidising brain drain to more affluent regions.

This is one (of several) reasons why improved education is far less effective at increasing economic productivity than is commonly thought. (For more on this I highly recommend Ha-Joon Chang's 21 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, which has an excellent chapter on the topic.)

This turns up in India (particularly in technology), the Philippines (medicine), Eastern Europe / former Warsaw bloc (science, mathematics, computer programming), and in the US. For the latter, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has long had an excellent computer science programme. Its graduates are educated at the cost of Illinois taxpayers (both individuals and businesses), but tend overwhelmingly to leave the state. There's effectively no tech cluster near UIUC, and very little of one in Chicago itself. Tech employment in the state is ~320k vs. 1.4 million in California. And that's actually reasonably good --- 7th ranked in the US, ahead of Massachusetts, which at least has a tech tradition.

It's a bit hard to read by total employment and compensation, but my sense is that positions are less technically interesting within Illinois as well.

By position, top-10: CA, TX, NY, FL, VA, WA, IL, MA, PA, GA.

Bottom ten (starting at the bottom): WY, AK, ND, SD, MT, VT, HI, WV, DE, ME.

Top ten metros by tech employment: NYC, DC, LA, SJ, SF, Dallas, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta.

Atlanta has 40% the tech employment of NYC.

https://www.cyberstates.org/#interactiveMap?geoid=0__usa

https://www.cyberstates.org/pdf/CompTIA_Cyberstates_2022.pdf

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