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Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

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Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#191

Post by thayne »

missedthecue wrote: post #115
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…

Schools compete not on price but on other factors. That's why they want to build massively expensive campuses and elaborate facilities, because that is what students base their decisions on. If schools competed on price, everyone would be going to state colleges c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶l̶e̶g̶e̶. I'm not sure how you compel schools to compete on price, because the consumers don't care about price. They'd rather get…

It's not just the experience. After graduating, where you went to school often matters more than your GPA when applying to jobs.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#192

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

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…

There's a question around whether people actually want a higher supply of quality institutions, or simply more access to the high-end ones that everybody is competing over. The latter would be self-defeating, because by definition they would no longer be elite or luxury.

What would happen if suddenly hundreds of additional institutions as good as MIT, Stanford and Harvard appeared out of thin air in the US?

Wouldn't we quickly revert back to the current state of things, once US News and marketers figured out a way of creating another "Top 100" hierarchy of schools, with parents shoving their kids into violin practice, water polo and building-orphanages-in-Nicaragua photo ops to make it into the new top 5 luxury brand name universities?

The scarcity IS the product of these institutions. This is the nature of positional goods.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#193

Post by dudeinjapan »

NotACop182 wrote: post #187
dudeinjapan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In education, "supply" itself is not the issue; there are more than enough spots at state, etc. universities. Its supply of prestigious universities, which is controlled by a cartel. Similar to diamonds, which are neither precious nor rare, yet prices are outrageous because they are controlled by a cartel. If/when I become President of the United States, I will hold back all education dollars on cartel-controlled edu…

You got my vote! Now what about the college book pricing issues. One semester I paid for my books cost more than the classes I took. It was that bad. Even worse was that the book companies ensure you need the access code to the online portal in order to do anything. This ensures the used book market is nonexistent

BaaS - books as a service. I am noticing that whenver "as a Service" is suffixed to X, it becomes far less useful and far more expensive than X was originally.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#194

Post by wernercd »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #155
treeman79 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solution. Stop government funding.

Good luck finding a politician who will kill the dream of everybody going to college. The optics of that are pretty awful.

People went to college before the guaranteed "right" to go to college. It was also more affordable then - for some strange reason.

Removing government help won't end the college dream... but it might, in time - since it took time to get this fucked up - restore some semblance of reasonable to the equation.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#195

Post by drak0n1c »

missedthecue wrote: post #115
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…

Schools compete not on price but on other factors. That's why they want to build massively expensive campuses and elaborate facilities, because that is what students base their decisions on. If schools competed on price, everyone would be going to state colleges c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶l̶e̶g̶e̶. I'm not sure how you compel schools to compete on price, because the consumers don't care about price. They'd rather get…

The reason why the consumers don't care about price is because of the federally guaranteed student loans that easily mislead decision making. The market would look very different without that compounding subsidy.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#196

Post by mjevans »

JamesBarney wrote: post #186
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…

I agree with a lot of what you're saying but the evidence that Obamacare ballooned healthcare expenses isn't there. Obamacare also has a huge positive impact besides just access to healthcare. For instance I couldn't have started a startup without it, and it's much easier to hire contract workers because of it.

I'm still so irked that they didn't go full single payer and put everyone into one coverage pool.

Still, the supply side support necessary would also be an issue. For markets where the local going rate is expensive enough it would make a ton of sense to allocate military medical units to supplant the local market until more doctors of that type were in the area. If it takes long enough the military supply might even retire from the forces to open practices in that area.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#197

Post by mdmglr »

testfoobar wrote: post #174
dudeinjapan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In education, "supply" itself is not the issue; there are more than enough spots at state, etc. universities. Its supply of prestigious universities, which is controlled by a cartel. Similar to diamonds, which are neither precious nor rare, yet prices are outrageous because they are controlled by a cartel. If/when I become President of the United States, I will hold back all education dollars on cartel-controlled edu…

This is funny and true. The competition and prices all originate from elite institutions. I wonder if it legal to completely clone a curriculum? Like could you clone an MIT EECS education? Down to the coursework? Or alternatively - force elite schools to license and manage franchisees? I'd vote for you.

Didn't everyone read Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen et al? It doesn't matter if the curriculum is the same between University of $STATE and MIT. From Amazon, Meta, Palantir, Microsoft etc will always choose candidates from the main elite schools first.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#198

Post by spfzero »

drak0n1c wrote: post #195
missedthecue wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Schools compete not on price but on other factors. That's why they want to build massively expensive campuses and elaborate facilities, because that is what students base their decisions on. If schools competed on price, everyone would be going to state colleges c̶o̶m̶m̶u̶n̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶c̶o̶l̶l̶e̶g̶e̶. I'm not sure how you compel schools to compete on price, because the consumers don't care about price. They'd rather get…

The reason why the consumers don't care about price is because of the federally guaranteed student loans that easily mislead decision making. The market would look very different without that compounding subsidy.

This is absolutely it. The "shopper" is not the payer, so why consider price?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#199

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #134
bumby wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha! As a matter of fact I’m re-reading it at the moment. But as a former reliability engineer, i bristle as Persig’s claim that quality can’t be defined.

quality generally has a broader meaning than conformance to product requirement specifications ;)

[deleted]

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#200

Post by Retric »

D13Fd wrote: post #80
Retric wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More money in the system doesn’t generally drive prices up in other areas due to supply and demand. Instead you get very expensive options for people with more money and cheap options for the cost cautious. Collage is largely an exception to that as elite schools don’t charge 100+x the average the way say watches, clothing, etc do, and most people aren’t going with the low cost options.

> More money in the system doesn’t generally drive prices up in other areas due to supply and demand. Do you have an example? Supply and demand is exactly what drives the prices up. People have a huge supply of dollars due to financial aid loans, and cannot spend those dollars on anything but education. With more money available, schools charge more. It’s the same mechanism as inflation.

Manufactured goods generally follow this trend of increasing total money being spent resulting in a lower cost per unit. Microwaves, toasters, dishwashers, flatscreen TV’s, etc are all vastly cheaper today than when they first hit the shelves. The best example bing transistors, we are dumping vastly more money into them and getting ever lower prices.

Commodities often follow a similar trend with global Steel production resulting in lower prices per pound over long stretches of time. The trend is less obvious over short periods of time but compare steel prices every 50 years say 1820, 1870, 1920, 1970, and 2020.

Some things like beachfront property are inherently in short supply, but it’s hard to argue that applies to collages across decades.

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