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Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

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Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#291

Post by lotsofpulp »

MisterMower wrote: post #289
lotsofpulp wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sure. On my back, and that of countless others. Yes, that was the point. People who could not afford healthcare, are now receiving it. Hence people who can afford to pay for others to get healthcare, have to pay for others to get healthcare. >However, doing it by causing serious financial harm to likely millions of families is not right, at all. There was never going to be a way to redistribute wealth without taking…

> There was never going to be a way to redistribute wealth without taking to from those who have it or to give it to those who do not. Yeah, that’s why they had to resort to blatant lying to get it passed. But hey, it was for the greater good! Take one for the team and be a good sport about it. “We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it,” and all that. > And you are insured You are intentionally missing his point.…

> The same level of insurance cost at least an order of magnitude less 15 years ago.

again, because,

>There was never going to be a way to redistribute wealth without taking to from those who have it or to give it to those who do not.

Health insurance premiums are an explicit wealth transfer, from young to old, and sick to healthy. For all intents and purposes, you can consider them a tax (hence the individual mandate that was later removed).

https://www.healthcare.gov/how-plans-set-your-premiums

> Five factors can affect a plan’s monthly premium: location, age, tobacco use, plan category, and whether the plan covers dependents.

>Notice: FYI Your health, medical history, or gender can’t affect your premium.

You have more poor and more sick people getting healthcare, without commensurate increase in the supply of healthcare, so obviously costs are going to go up.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#292

Post by impossiblefork »

boppo1 wrote: post #190
impossiblefork wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

College football isn't a cultural pillar in Sweden.

Yes, but it's not like you can't just drop it.

Quite few people play it anyway.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#293

Post by paulpauper »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #179
paulpauper wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You do have to consider that the apprentice is making $30k out of high school. They will have 4-5 YoE before a college grad finishes college. If you compare them in that light, the difference reduces quite significantly.

some of this is negated by higher unemployment rate for high school grads vs college grads. High school grads earn more initially but surpassed by college grads as time goes on due to wage stagnation.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#294

Post by 2arrs2ells »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #273
ohnonotyouagain wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great find. You missed the best part: > That means for income For readers not familiar with US university system: This will not include "room & board" (housing & food).

For Harvard, that's not true – financial aid covers the cost of room and board.

(There is a student contribution of ~$3,000/year, which is fairly easily met through on campus jobs).

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#295

Post by MisterMower »

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.

It’s not a dream. It’s a nightmare for most folks. A girl I knew went to school for speech therapy. Decent grades. Good school. $80k debt for undergrad. Couldn’t get a job with a bachelor’s degree, so she racked up $100k getting a master’s degree. She’s 25 years old making $30k a year working for an agency that pairs her with kids that need help.

She has no conceivable way to pay that loan off on that salary. She will never qualify for a mortgage with that kind of debt to income ratio. The university promised this hopeful 18 year old child a dream job and a good wage to go with it and instead they basically destroyed her future.

The fraud universities are perpetuating makes the banks look like a freaking soup kitchen. The first politician who recognizes that this is modern day feudalism and has the guts to call it as such is going to be very successful.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#296

Post by thrown_22 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #284
thrown_22 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's profit, not revenue. I'm asking why their revenue for increased exponentially for having 10% more clients.

That is not profit. If an insurance business picks up 10% more clients that cost 5,000% higher expenses, they cannot just increase premiums 10%. They have to increase premiums a lot more. Not to mention that the ACA forced insurers to subsidize old people from the young (maximum age rating factor), health to sick (can only price based on age, location, and tobacco status), and imposed out of pocket maximums. All of t…

So why then are they also more profitable?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#297

Post by going_ham »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #281
biztos wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You wrote: > I have posted about this before on HN: One thing that is frequently overlooked, better schools (usually) have better/smarter students. My first uni was medium famous. My second uni was part of Cal[ifornia] State. The first was full of intelligent, highly engaging students. The second was... well, much less. The best parts of my uni education were working with other highly intelligent people on hard engin…

Why is this response being downvoted? It seems to clearly reflect the hiring bias present in the industry. Please upvote it so that people can know how to overcome the inherent bias on quality.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#298

Post by lotsofpulp »

thrown_22 wrote: post #296
lotsofpulp wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not profit. If an insurance business picks up 10% more clients that cost 5,000% higher expenses, they cannot just increase premiums 10%. They have to increase premiums a lot more. Not to mention that the ACA forced insurers to subsidize old people from the young (maximum age rating factor), health to sick (can only price based on age, location, and tobacco status), and imposed out of pocket maximums. All of t…

So why then are they also more profitable?

They are not. UHG is punching slightly above average, but they have considerable non insurance operations.

> Also, all the US health insurance company financials are public. You can see their profit margin is a steady ~5% for over a decade.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ELV/elevance-healt...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CVS/cvs-health/pro...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CI/cigna/profit-ma...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/HUM/humana/profit-...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CNC/centene/profit...

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MOH/molina-healthc...

Going back to testfoobar’s comment comparing tech companies and health insurers, I do not think any investors will be impressed by health insurance companies’ low single digit profit margins compared to tech’s 20%+ profit margins.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#299

Post by musicale »

Animats wrote: post #163
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…

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.

> Arguably, Stanford is a venture capital and real estate firm which operates a school on the side for the tax exemption

You forgot about the massive hedge fund – and the professional sports teams.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#300

Post by musicale »

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…

> students fees are not how these institutions make money

"Student income" was 15% of Stanford's $7.4B budget (excluding capital improvement and hospitals) in 2021-22.

So... only $1.11 billion or so.

source: https://facts.stanford.edu/administration/finances/

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