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Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

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Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#211

Post by rr808 »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #130
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…

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…

> neither precious nor rare

The fact that most people can name the most famous schools seems to imply they are rare.

They are perceived as having better outcomes than regular state schools. Do they or dont they? If their grads do get better jobs and end up more successful - then they are genuinely better? People from state Universities end up sitting next to Ivys etc there is no difference - this is what I believe. We'll see if everyone else's perceptions change in the future as well.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#212

Post by rdtwo »

AuthorizedCust wrote: post #208
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…

“Cartel”? Nonsense! Provide evidence prestigious universities are colluding on pricing. You can’t because it’s not true.

The accrediting system is a cartel of sorts. It keeps supply low by keeping competition low. It’s not a perfect cartel but none of our modern ones are. They just seem to capture large chunks of the market enough so that most people are forced to work with em.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#214

Post by cratermoon »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #193
NotACop182 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's called rent-seeking. Like Pantone demanding $15/month to use their colors.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#215

Post by lend000 »

kmeisthax wrote: post #167
lend000 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Colleges make more money anyway, and the additional bloat does support larger programs, just not very efficiently. With all the free money floating around, I suppose they aren't very economically pressured to be efficient. They surely need large administrative departments dedicated to making sure students have an easy time securing more loans.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#216

Post by NLPlatypus »

testfoobar wrote: post #206
JamesBarney wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lets look at stock market returns from when Obamacare passed, March-2010, to today for tech and health insurance stocks: SPY: about 4X QQQ: about 6X GOOGL: about 6X CI: about 9X (Cigna health) ELV: about 10x (formerly Anthem) AAPL: about 19X UNH: about 20X (united healthcare) Health Insurance stocks in the US did better than tech stocks after Obamacare passed. Why?

Perhaps it was revenue from the tens of millions of Americans now getting healthcare?

This analysis shows the majority of health insurers becoming less profitable after Obamacare?

https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#217

Post by joe_the_user »

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…

No doubt education and health care have become corrupt feeding frenzies for bureaucrats mediating these industries. However, your cry, "competition", is exactly the rallying cry of these bureaucrats.

Neither education nor health care make sense to organize by competition - the consumer lacks the ability to make the informed choices that an effective market requires. Obama care, in fact, contained a variety of pseudo-competition schemes to bring down costs, all of which predictably failed. And we're seen the disaster of various for-profit colleges.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#218

Post by matthewdgreen »

EricE wrote: post #162

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.

Subsidized loans cap out at $23,000 for all four years. After that you're taking private loans at high rates. A relative was quoted 9.9% for most of his loans with a strong-credit adult co-signer, and that was well before the recent interest rate hikes.

https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized...

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#219

Post by csa »

testfoobar wrote: post #206
JamesBarney wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lets look at stock market returns from when Obamacare passed, March-2010, to today for tech and health insurance stocks: SPY: about 4X QQQ: about 6X GOOGL: about 6X CI: about 9X (Cigna health) ELV: about 10x (formerly Anthem) AAPL: about 19X UNH: about 20X (united healthcare) Health Insurance stocks in the US did better than tech stocks after Obamacare passed. Why?

> Health Insurance stocks in the US did better than tech stocks after Obamacare passed. Why?

Is this a genuine question or is it rhetorical? I can’t really tell these days.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5145008/

Short answer is that insurance companies were “limited” to 20% profits and 80% expenses by ACA.

Smarter insurance companies realized quickly that they not only had zero incentives to cut costs, but they were actually incentivized to let costs increase to be as high as legally possible, thereby increasing their profit cap in absolute dollars.

I don’t know if this was the idea of one party, a bilateral backroom negotiation with the insurance companies, or a comprehensive lobbying victory, but it ended up being a massive boon for insurance companies and hospitals and a complete shitshow for consumers.

If this part of the ACA doesn’t change, it will break the US healthcare system.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#220

Post by ip26 »

curious_cat_163 wrote: post #182
ip26 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remembering when I was applying to colleges, it was understood that inexpensive state colleges were probably 'sufficiently good', and cost effective, but it was impossible to grade that statement. Would it be good enough for your goals in life? How can a sixteen year old know? So, people picked the 'best' school they could get into. Not just for the 'experience', but to make sure they got the best education they coul…

This is very insightful. After having gone through it all, do you think if it matters how many doors open for a person based on the college they went? I suppose if someone went to a highly ranked school, it might matter. But being able to get into a highly ranked school is probably because of what the person had (money, life experiences) or what they did (crushed some standardized test). So, in the end, does it actua…

After reading many resumes and talking to many candidates, it can matter. Many budget state colleges simply don’t have the curriculum, faculty, or clout- at least in my field. This means their graduates are like juniors at higher ranked schools. An exceptional student can overcome that obstacle, but they are swimming against the current.

Interestingly, the renowned private universities don’t seem to have any better of a curriculum than the high-grade public research universities. So from an education point of view, there still exists a ‘good enough’, it’s just not the budget state college.

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