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High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

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Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#81

Post by ClumsyPilot »

balefrost wrote: post #32
judge2020 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plus, usually they don't offer anything more than an associate's degree. Can't remember the last time I saw anything less than "bachelor's degree or equivalent experience" on a job listing.

One strategy is to go to community college for your gen ed requirements, transfer those credits to a more prestigious university, then finish your degree there. The piece of paper will have the university's name on it, but you will have saved money in the process. You have to do some due diligence to figure out what credits you can transfer. You don't want to waste your time and money on a class that doesn't count. B…

That's more hacking the system than using the system as intended

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#82

Post by snarf21 »

Loughla wrote: post #16

I mean, yeah. But also, the expectations placed on colleges have grown exponentially. Retention staff, student life staff, counseling staff, new innovative (read: Expensive) programs, the 'experience'. These all cost money. My experience of expectations of college in the 90's - can I drink? Do the faculty let me miss if I need to? My experience of expectations of college now - is my child safe? Can s/he access approp…

Quite true. Additionally, there are raised expectations around wanting a perfect experience. My college in the 90s was block wall room with bunk beds and communal bathroom on the floor. Today everyone wants a private bedroom, shared kitchen and hang out area in their quad. This costs money and space too. At the same time, we now refuse to give deserving teachers tenure and everything is adjunct and basically gig work. Universities are no longer interested in education. They only want to create the largest possible funnel for endowments in the future. We do need to adjust how student loans work. The government should only guarantee a much lower amount and the rest should be dischargeable. And I personally would like to see it tied to the average 5 year income of students of that school's graduate per degree. We need to stop letting people sign up for $100K degrees in marketing when the average graduate ends up as a barista.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#83

Post by ClumsyPilot »

mgamache wrote: post #17
throw93232 wrote: post #11

College today has way more responsibilities. It has to fix rape culture, dismantle patriarchy, fix diversity, organize protests... All that costs money. In 1990ties 20% of students got raped, nobody wants to go back to that dark times!

Is this meant as parody? I can't tell sometimes.

Life and parody is indistinguishable now. Like it's difficult for me to cone up with any ridiculous statement that I could publish, and someone online would not take it seriously

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#84

Post by drewcoo »

hackererror404 wrote: post #28

Might be an unpopular opinion... but this is exactly why we shouldn't do student loan debt forgiveness. The root core of the issue wouldn't at all be addressed and it would actually be a signal to universities and students alike, that Universities can charge more, and students can continue to take out larger loans because... they might be forgiven at some future point in time.

If we were dealing with the victims of a school shooting, first we'd make sure none of them were going to bleed out. Then they'd be prioritized for dealing with their root cause injuries.

We can apply similar tactics to these school financial injuries. We don't need to choose one or the other.

And the core problem with people taking on debt to pay for college in the US is individual people having to pay for college, unlike many other countries. How much it costs is a secondary issue. If it can cost anything, market forces will boost the price until it passes a fairness threshold.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#85

Post by thawaya3113 »

I’m not sure I understand.

What’s the difference in incentives colleges in lowering tuitions whether the government pays them directly or indirectly through the students?

They are getting paid either way. Unless there was a cap that was removed that I missed.

And the students are picking up the same loan amounts whether it was originally backed by the government, or originated from the government.

The chart in the figure also doesn’t line up with the claims, with college inflation deviating from before the law was passed, and then a further increase in growth starting over a decade after it passed.

Anecdotally, having been heavily involved in the student govt affairs of a major state university at the time a lot of these tuition increases happened, what we saw was:

1) A huge pullback in state govt tuition support. 2) Coinciding with a massive increase in spending on athletics and buildings 3) leading to my otherwise extremely price competitive state college becoming as expensive as the equivalent private college a few streets down the road. 4) Followed a few years later by an increase in tuition at the private college.

This was once again further entrenched after the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#86

Post by mcv »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #69
lapcat wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> this is exactly why we shouldn't do student loan debt forgiveness. The root core of the issue wouldn't at all be addressed This is a false dichotomy. The root core of the issue should be addressed. However, that would require an act of Congress, whereas federal student loan forgiveness can be accomplished immediately via executive action. This is why people are calling for it now, because it can be done right now.…

>"However, that would require an act of Congress, whereas federal student loan forgiveness can be accomplished immediately via executive action. This is why people are calling for it now, because it can be done right now. Also, the President promised to do so multiple times during his campaign." I can't be the only one who feels like this is simply 'buying votes' in an attempt to try and salvage some seats for the up…

By that argument, everything is "buying votes". There are far more blatant examples of vote buying, like creating jobs in the production of weapon systems for the military, tax cuts for specific groups (mostly the rich, though that's more "buying campaign donations"), and plenty of other examples.

The fact of the matter is that these loans are unsustainable. They saddle people with life-long debt that they can never get rid of, dooming them to a life of poverty because of a choice they made when they were young, which everybody at the time told them was the right choice.

That particular debt forgiveness is simply the right thing to do. It will free a lot of people from poverty.

But clearly there are also measures necessary to prevent this from happening again, like a reasonable maximum to how much can be lend.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#87

Post by suture »

readthenotes1 wrote: post #47
suture wrote: post #30

State funding per student has steadily declined since 1987. Tuition rates have risen in response. I don’t claim all of the tuition increases have come from the decline in funding but the decline in public funding contributes to the increase. Public colleges are more and more being run like businesses. According to this research, public funding for higher education has declined in response to increased welfare and Med…

"State funding for higher education has declined by roughly a quarter, to $7,152 per student enrolled in a public two- or four-year school in 2015, down from $9,489 per student in 1987." The article is not in disagreement with the thought that Free Federal Money displaces other sources. Also, the article does not show why tuition has risen 1200% instead of 30%.

Tuition in the University of California system increased by an infinite percent from 1960 to 1980. It used to be tuition free. Had it remained tuition free it would have been cheaper and better overall for society.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#88

Post by HKH2 »

timeimp wrote: post #9

Why not penalise tertiary institutions by stating that if students don’t find employment using those credentials, within 2 yard, their alumni fund / endowment fund gets raided the cost the degree?

There goes any degrees considered useless. That's probably not what you want.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#89

Post by BitwiseFool »

lapcat wrote: post #80
BitwiseFool wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"However, that would require an act of Congress, whereas federal student loan forgiveness can be accomplished immediately via executive action. This is why people are calling for it now, because it can be done right now. Also, the President promised to do so multiple times during his campaign." I can't be the only one who feels like this is simply 'buying votes' in an attempt to try and salvage some seats for the up…

> I can't be the only one who feels like this is "buying votes". Votes are already bought by wealthy campaign contributors. Anyway, aren't politicians supposed to help the public financially? If a politician campaigns on tax cuts, tax credits, and tax incentives, isn't that also "buying votes"? Which politician is not buying votes with their stated economic policies?

I sense there is a difference between passing policy which broadly affects future actions (tax rates, credits, etc.) and making a campaign promise to directly pay (or in this case forgive) a lump sum of money to a certain contingent of the electorate.

Re: High tuition costs mostly stem from the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act 1993

#90

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

nicoburns wrote: post #26
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you reason from the premise that it's only the diploma that matters, I'm not sure it makes sense to talk about "transitioning" college from one model to another in the first place. We can't just decide by administrative fiat to transfer a bit of prestige from Harvard to the local 2-year school, even if we all agree it'd be better that way.

No, but we can decide by administrative fiat that Harvard can’t charge more than the community college does, and must transition its business model to be similar to that of the community college.

It's not obvious to me that we can. Harvard Community College seems like it would just end up in the same place as Harvard Extension School currently is, where everyone understands that it's not "really" Harvard and if you want the associated prestige you need to go to the 4 year residential program with competitive admissions.
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