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Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

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Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#361

Post by 2snakes »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #181
testfoobar wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Alright! Every vote counts! > is it legal to completely clone a curriculum? Gray area. I'm no lawyer but AFAIK professor's syllabus/tests/etc. (being written documents) are subject to automatic copyright, I imagine the university is the holder of the copyright given that the prof is an employee. That being said, how many profs clone their syllabus/coursework directly from textbooks? The content of most online univers…

Check out Minerva.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#362

Post by mattkrause »

Animats wrote: post #236
mattkrause wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 medic…

None of that is at Ark B in Redwood City. That location is entirely administration.

Some of that is administration. Medical research (legally) requires all kinds of oversight committees: DSMBs for clinical trials, IRBs for experiments involving humans and IACUCs for work with animals. The Sponsored Research folks help prepare proposals and make sure that work is done and money is spent in compliance with the sponsors' policies. I'd bet many of those forks are at Redwood City.

The rest of it takes administration. The folks at SLAC need to get paid. Someone needs to check that the doctors and nurses at Stanford Medical are appropriately licensed; once they are, someone also needs to find somewhere for them to park.

They list what's out there: https://redwoodcity.stanford.edu/about/campus-directory, which also includes Stanford University Press and the Tech Transfer Office.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#363

Post by AuthorizedCust »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #340
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.

Cartel: (noun) a combination of independent commercial or industrial enterprises designed to limit competition or fix prices. Limit competition: How many new entrants to the prestiguous university club (Ivy League, Stanford, MIT, etc.) have there been in the last 50 years? Fix prices: How do you explain tuitions growing at 5x inflation consistently since 1990, in an era where information itself has become dirt cheap…

Limiting competition is the result of actions. Your perception of a lack of competition isn’t evidence of any collusion to cause that.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#364

Post by JamesBarney »

techdragon wrote: post #271
robomartin wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

My genuinely overkill for my needs private health insurance as someone living in Australia where theres a public health care system that looks after everyone... costs less than half your pre-obamacare insurance, factoring in the exchange rate. I cant fathom why the majority of Americans are ok with their weird sociopathic Job = Health Insurance based system. While not as nearly unanimous as the metric system, well fu…

People assume because other places have public health insurance and lower health expenses that's why it's expensive in America. But there are plenty of places with private insurance in Europe that are much cheaper than the US. And our public healthcare prices are also much higher than the rest of the world.

Our medical establishment is very inefficient, pays for lots of useless shit, and subsidizes the world's medical research. All those things cost money.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#365

Post by JamesBarney »

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?

What about instead of looking at health insurance market caps which can be affected by 20x different factors besides the cost of healthcare, we look at the cost of healthcare. Which has gotten more expensive, but there's no inflection point when Obamacare passed.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#366

Post by WalterBright »

Eisenstein wrote: post #360
WalterBright wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were and are non-profits scholarships. They simply aren't big enough to have the effect that government has.

Can you describe what you think the argument I am making is? I think you are confused and I would like to be more specific so that you don't end up making completely irrelevant statements like the one above.

I anticipated the rhetorical trap you were laying, and simply cut to the chase.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#367

Post by Eisenstein »

WalterBright wrote: post #366
Eisenstein wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you describe what you think the argument I am making is? I think you are confused and I would like to be more specific so that you don't end up making completely irrelevant statements like the one above.

I anticipated the rhetorical trap you were laying, and simply cut to the chase.

You are playing some kind of rhetorical chess and contending you are not being ideological -- strange way to respond to this:

"it would be great to get off of our collective ideological horses and find them instead of blasting rhetoric at each other."

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#368

Post by etempleton »

kragen wrote: post #105
etempleton wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bonus point: What are the highest regarded colleges in the US? The Ivies(with some notable outliers). What is it that ties them together? An athletic conference.

Yeah, when you hear of someone who's been accepted to Duke deciding to pursue their studies in the NFL instead, give me a call.

Duke? One of the biggest basketball and lacrosse powerhouses in the country. That Duke?

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#369

Post by etempleton »

B1FF_PSUVM wrote: post #107
etempleton wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. It is true—prestige grants price flexibility for the college. They can charge more equivalent to their relative standing. But what leads to that reputation? How do you measure quality of education?What makes Harvard better than any other college at educating students? How much better? What percentage? Okay now prove it. At least in a succinct explainable way. No, prestige is based on awarenes…

> What makes Harvard better Even dropouts make more money after being there, not to put too fine a point on it.

Harvard accepts only the smartest, hardest working, most talented and richest 1% of society. The number of students who have a perfect SAT or are the child of a billionaire are staggering. Good input leads to good output.

Re: Bloated college administration is making education unaffordable

#370

Post by banannaise »

aaomidi wrote: post #47
etempleton wrote: post #43

Double edged sword. What the author proposes can be found. Go to some small low endowment private or public school for less money. Oh wait, you say, I don’t want to go there! The buildings aren’t as nice, the dorms are cramped and drab, there aren’t as many resources, the food sucks, the Wi-Fi is spotty, heck even the website sucks. Why is this? Because they don’t have the human or financial resources to do so. You g…

Then why is this only mainly a US problem?

This is how that argument works. You come up with a bunch of logical-sounding explanations for why it must be this way, completely ignoring the material reality that there are numerous working examples of other ways to do it. You keep everything as abstract as possible, and you hand-wave real-world counterexamples as sounding so extreme that they must be highly unusual and therefore irrelevant. And if someone presses the issue, you simply allow it to immediately devolve into bikeshedding, discussing the minutiae of that specific issue while ignoring the larger context.

I'm not sure if there's a name for this style of argument, but it happens a lot, particularly in defenses of uniquely or primarily American phenomena.

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