Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable • Hacker News Board

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#161

Post by pclmulqdq » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:23 AM UTC

paulpauper wrote: post #122

testfoobar wrote: post #110

In the US, both college education and healthcare have become enormous taxpayer wealth extraction schemes. Everyone has a "right" to education and healthcare, therefore we should subsidize it with taxpayer money. That is as far as the politics go. We have stupidly funded the demand side of the equation to where both education and healthcare are incredibly bloated behemoths capable of absorbing all the money thrown at…

5. And we wonder why tuition keeps increasing? 1) Demand increases with population increase. 2) Demand increase with more people seeking 4 yr degrees. 3) Demand increases with the US subsidizing the ever living shit out of college tuition. 4) Supply stays relatively constant. Demand is increasing due to the college wage premium, which keeps widening with no end in sight even despite Covid and online learning. The col…

The college wage premium is either reversing or pretty much gone by now. Plumbers and landscapers out-earn English and History majors now. It's only degrees that prepare you for specialized fields that still have an edge.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#162

Post by EricE » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:23 AM UTC

They can only get away with this crap due to government subsidized student loans. Remove the artificial inflation of cheap government money and this crap would self-correct overnight.

Even better - make colleges guarantee loans. If people can't get a job after 2 years of graduation make the schools start making the loan payments until they do get a job. BS degrees would dry up overnight too.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#163

Post by Animats » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:27 AM UTC

Hermitian909 wrote: post #146

Animats wrote: post #119

Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators. [1] This is completely separate from the main campus and miles away. "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human res…

Stanford and other top institutions can't really be compared to other schools, students fees are not how these institutions make money. There are massive business arms tying in to fortune 500s, political think tanks, government institutions, etc. It's a whole different game for schools at this level. To understand administrative bloat in the US it's much more instructive to look somewhere like University of Idaho whe…

Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital and real estate firm which operates a school on the side for the tax exemption. Back in the early 1990s, Stanford split off their endowment and land operations into a separate company, the Stanford Management Company. That worked out very well. They had startup money in Cisco, Yahoo, Google... Over time, the SMC tail came to wag the SU dog.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#164

Post by ohnonotyouagain » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:27 AM UTC

CameronNemo wrote: post #158

bluedino wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to the internet: Stanford University has 24,916 employees.Jul 11, 2022

Does that include TAs and faculty?

Yes, and note that the clinical staff who instruct students are also counted in the employee numbers. I can't find a number for Stanford but Yale has 1,729 "continuing" medical faculty: https://www.yale.edu/about-yale/yale-facts I would not be surprised if Stanford had the same or more.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#165

Post by impossiblefork » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

EMIRELADERO wrote: post #132

Here's an idea: Public, government-owned (but not operated) colleges. Fueled by taxpayers and completely free for students. Students who wish to pursue higher education shouldn't even have to think about finances for that education, aside from maybe the travel and food expenses (although now with remote work/learning that also is going down)

I think many Americans imagine the above to be infeasible and that university is somehow inherently expensive.

However, university can be very cheap. Here in Sweden university education, which is here funded in the way proposed above (i.e. the government pays for it all, for those students who get in) costs the state less than high school education costs the state (72 000 SEK/a for university, 124 300 SEK/a for high school).

I imagine that it could be the same way in the US.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#166

Post by paulpauper » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:32 AM UTC

pclmulqdq wrote: post #161

paulpauper wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. And we wonder why tuition keeps increasing? 1) Demand increases with population increase. 2) Demand increase with more people seeking 4 yr degrees. 3) Demand increases with the US subsidizing the ever living shit out of college tuition. 4) Supply stays relatively constant. Demand is increasing due to the college wage premium, which keeps widening with no end in sight even despite Covid and online learning. The col…

The college wage premium is either reversing or pretty much gone by now. Plumbers and landscapers out-earn English and History majors now. It's only degrees that prepare you for specialized fields that still have an edge.

It's fallacious to compare the lowest paying college degrees to the highest paying of trades work as evidence of the premium reversing. Someone could just as easily compare an engineer, lawyer, or doctor who makes $250k/year to someone who works at McDonald's and makes $25k/year. A plumber with many years of experience on average makes $50-53k/year. This is respectable, but this is after many years. College grads by comparison on average make $55k out of college, whereas an apprentice makes $30k .

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#167

Post by kmeisthax » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:33 AM UTC

lend000 wrote: post #94

D13Fd wrote: post #44

I think the article misses the root cause here. Drastically increased availability of loan-based financial aid means far more more money in the system, which means the prices go up. The article nails the cause of more administrators--the schools have more money to spend and need to spend it--but completely misses the reason schools are able to charge so much more these days.

It's unreal that most of the comments here are missing this. The government guarantees effectively infinite loans that can be put toward college, and prices rise to meet the supply. Cause and effect.

Yes, but if you control the supply, and the government was guaranteeing infinite demand via loans, wouldn't you want to scale your programs up to make more money rather than just inviting more people to share in the grift?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#168

Post by rootusrootus » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

nordsieck wrote: post #157

paulpauper wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5. And we wonder why tuition keeps increasing? 1) Demand increases with population increase. 2) Demand increase with more people seeking 4 yr degrees. 3) Demand increases with the US subsidizing the ever living shit out of college tuition. 4) Supply stays relatively constant. Demand is increasing due to the college wage premium, which keeps widening with no end in sight even despite Covid and online learning. The col…

> Demand is increasing due to the college wage premium, which keeps widening with no end in sight even despite Covid and online learning. > The college wage premium is the number one culprit for all these problems . For whatever reason, employers derive enough benefit from college grads to pay them waaaayyy more than high school grads That may be true. But there's an easy fix: any job requirements that ask for any co…

> Honestly, I don't really understand why they aren't already: they clearly violate the 4/5ths rule. And it's hard for me to believe that some enterprising lawyer hasn't already brought suit under this theory.

My guess is because 'not having a college degree' is not any kind of protected class. Not an immutable characteristic. It is a behavior choice. Do we really want to get the gov't involved in telling private companies what qualifications they can require for a particular job?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#169

Post by Cupertino95014 » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

ohnonotyouagain wrote: post #152

Hermitian909 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stanford and other top institutions can't really be compared to other schools, students fees are not how these institutions make money. There are massive business arms tying in to fortune 500s, political think tanks, government institutions, etc. It's a whole different game for schools at this level. To understand administrative bloat in the US it's much more instructive to look somewhere like University of Idaho whe…

Also, the top institutions also offer substantial need-based aid, so the top-line tuition number is really only applicable to households with income over ~$200-$250K. At Harvard a family with $150K income will pay $15K, see https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet I think this is typical across the Ivies. That's basically in-state tuition at UMass https://www.umass.edu/admissions/undergraduate-admi…

Yes, but the foreign students pay full price, AFAIK.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#170

Post by mattkrause » Mon, Nov 07, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

ip26 wrote: post #148

Animats wrote: post #119

Stanford has now reached the point that they recently built an entire 35-acre campus just for administrators. [1] This is completely separate from the main campus and miles away. "The campus provides workspace for about 2,700 employees (including three of the university’s eight vice presidents) working in critical areas such as the School of Medicine administration, libraries and archives, business affairs, human res…

25,000 employees, that seems insane. They are approaching a 1:1 staff:student ratio.

Eh, that number is misleading.

SLAC National Accelerator, a National Lab that Stanford happens to run, employs about 1,600 people. They don't necessarily need to interact with students; other national labs are run by corporations (e.g., Sandia is run by Honeywell).

Stanford has a massive medical system, including an adult and children's hospital. They are teaching hospitals, and so part of the point is to train medical students and residents, but they also need all the staff of a regular (actually, top-of-the-line) hospital: doctors, nurses, techs, porters, billing, payroll, etc.

On top of that, Stanford also has a massive research program funded by grants from (e.g.,) the NIH, NSF, and DOD This requires people to actually do the research (heavily-funded profs rarely teach, plus postdocs and research scientists) and support it (animal health techs, machinists, etc). There is also a lot of bureaucracy involved in getting, doing, and accounting for that work. It certainly depends—in part—on grad student labor, but it's also not directly linked.

All in all, big research-intensive universities do a lot more than classroom education and the staff sizes reflect that. I'm sure there's room for improvement (I work at one and purchasing is currently a nightmare), but staff/students is not a great metric.