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Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

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Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#241

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#242

Post by WalterBright »

Eisenstein wrote: post #205
WalterBright wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it any surprise that the more the government gets involved in a particular industry, the more expensive it gets?

They aren't getting involved in an industry. When they do, it is to build public schools, which seems to be a great idea. What they are doing is submitting to public demand that education be accessible to everyone by paying for it, or by lending people the money for it. It is like saying that food stamps are 'government getting involved in the grocery industry'. If one counts subsidies, then the government is involve…

It's not ideological. All you have to do is look at the results. Lending people money for college led to huge increases in tuition.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#243

Post by light_hue_1 »

brnaftr361 wrote: post #222
AuthorizedCust wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I have a pretty strong feeling you're being sarcastic. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/01/10/fede...

Did you even read your own story? What does this have to do with them being a cartel or not?

The story doesn't even claim they collude on pricing! It just says that admissions is not needs blind, the way that these universities claim it is.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#245

Post by csa »

biztos wrote: post #233
hailwren wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median earned income 10 years after enrolling at an Ivy is about 2x the all schools average. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/09/14/this-...

I don’t know how you’d track this statistically, but my experience has been that not just the pay but the quality of job is much higher for graduates of elite universities, and like pay this just feeds back into itself. All the people I know who went to Stanford got very nice, “cushy” jobs straight out of college. Most of the people I know who went to state schools had to bust their asses for years at much less pleas…

> The head start you get from an elite school in the US, in things that have nothing to do with education per se, can not be overstated.

Yes it can be, and you just did.

The people who routinely get the best jobs and keep them into their 30s and beyond are well connected people. It doesn’t matter whether they go to Ivies or other schools.

If connectedness could be controlled for, I think you would find that the most connected people at Ivies, Stanford, UMich, UTexas, NYU, etc. (let’s call it top 10%) are much more similar in terms of steep career trajectory than less connected top graduates (e.g., top 10% in gpa) even from the most prestigious schools. This is doubly true if you control for SES in addition to connectedness.

For folks who are not natively from these well-connected classes of people, it is possible to make a big jump in “opportunities”, but in practice that means socially integrating oneself into the elite class as an outsider (tough to do and rare) or finding work in a handful of places that facilitate social climbing (e.g., Goldman, also relatively rare).

Your median elite school grad will find it slightly easier to end up on the higher end of the SES class that they were already in, although even that is not a guarantee.

This is not nearly as life-changing as you make it out it be.

> All the people I know who went to Stanford got very nice, “cushy” jobs straight out of college. Most of the people I know who went to state schools had to bust their asses for years at much less pleasant work before they worked their way up to the nicer jobs.

I’m pretty sure that there are a large number of SJSU grads (a CSU school, of all things!) who would like to say hello. Plenty of them got and get “cushy” jobs straight out of school, with the folks who were already connected and/or worked on their connections taking the lead.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#246

Post by md_ »

strix_varius wrote: post #112
md_ wrote: post #38

There are compelling alternative explanations for the rising cost of education ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease#Educ... ). If the underlying cause were primarily administrative overhead, that should be readily apparent in the (public) budget of any public university. I’m not going to go do Silvergate’s research for him, but I’m surprised he doesn’t cite such a readily available piece of compe…

> I’m not going to go do Silvergate’s research for him, but I’m surprised he doesn’t cite such a readily available piece of compelling evidence, which at best suggests he’s too lazy to track it down, and at worst that reality does not support his hypothesis. Why do you assume these influences to be mutually exclusive? Upward price pressure for unnecessary bureaucratic positions does not invalidate the problems with t…

I agree they’re not mutually exclusive. But each additional real dollar cost is attributable to one cause or the other. Silver gate seems to only entertain one explanation for all inflation in education, despite very well known alternative hypotheses.

That was my point: not addressing alternative theories, while failing to furnish seemingly readily available supporting evidence, seems on its face dishonest.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#247

Post by Cupertino95014 »

ohnonotyouagain wrote: post #173
Cupertino95014 wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Per Harvard's page linked above: "Foreign students have the same access to financial aid funding as U.S. citizens."

well, good thing I added the AFAIK. It's not as simple as I thought.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...

https://www.collegexpress.com/interests/international-studen...

Tax-funded universities are less generous, though.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#248

Post by notjulianjaynes »

kbenson wrote: post #141
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…

From what I'm seeing online Stanford has about 22k students in 2022. 2700 does seem like a large number compared to the student population, and given it seems like it isn't meant to house all the administrative staff, that does seem like a lot. That said, Stanford is private, so I'm not sure they're a good example. Various state universities seem like they would be a more apt target to look at to see what this is lik…

Anecdotally I just looked up the number of municipal employees for 2 random towns with populations of about 28,000 people. 1500 employees. I believe that's including teachers, police, etc. not just administrators.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#250

Post by robomartin »

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.

> Obamacare also has a huge positive impact besides just access to healthcare.

Sure. On my back, and that of countless others. It's fucking highway robbery.

Before Obamacare we had excellent health insurance with excellent coverage, doctors and low deductibles for $650 per month.

When we were shoved into Obamacare, our rate TRIPLED to $1,800 per month. Today we are paying nearly $2,300 per month. This is equivalent to a mortgage payment or non-trivial savings either for personal use or to help your kids with college.

There is no other way to put it: We are being robbed.

Put some numbers to it for context:

Over ten years the increase amounts to about TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS. Money taken from us, by law. This doesn't even include a calculation of what this would be if invested in a low risk mutual fund or real estate.

The concept that a family has to pay so much PER MONTH for health insurance should make everyone take pause. This kind of thing is why I have always had a strong negative reaction to anything government-driven. It never ends well.

Even worse, Obama lied to all of us. His promise to the nation, easily found on countless videos, was that families would save in the order of $2,500 per year on health insurance. Right.

How do these people get a free pass on shit like that? Why?

I don't know if this is even possible. I wish someone could organize a massive class action lawsuit against all who forced this on us. I am happy for those for whom things improved. I truly am. However, doing it by causing serious financial harm to likely millions of families is not right, at all.

We (my family) are burning --quite literally-- tens of thousands of dollars per year on healthcare because of Obamacare. The other part people don't understand is that deductibles have gone up and insurance does not trigger until you spent a certain amount per person per year. In our case my entire family would have to be run over by a semi truck before we actually start to see significant benefits. In other words, the cost isn't just the premiums, but the expenses we have to incur before benefits actually kick in.

Here's an example: One of my kids ended-up in the hospital with myocarditis due to the Covid vaccine. That cost us over TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS, cash.

Needless to say, every time I see Obama, Pelosi and the bunch I have to try very hard not to launch into projectile vomiting. I know many people idolize them. Sorry, you have chosen to admire liars and criminals.

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