A bachelor’s degree could cost $10,000 total. Here’s how

"So why not do it?

"Kamenetz's plan doesn't lack for details. An as-yet unpublished appendix lays out exactly where spending at Cohort Colleges and Adult Online Us would go, down to the instructor salary level. But it also would uproot thousands of workers in the higher ed sector and radically change the careers of those who remained. Kamenetz acknowledges the concern, but thinks reform is too important to not do something drastic.

"'I recognize the political pain involved, but the purpose of public higher ed is to educate people, not to employ them,' she e-mails. 'One of the travesties of the current system is the percentage of classes taught by low-paid adjuncts. I envision a system that might have fewer jobs, but they're better jobs.'"

And my comment on that is that this always requires political courage. To make a large government appropriations plan (and higher education is often the second or third largest budget category in a state budget) work, you have to keep your eye on the people who are supposed to be served by the program. But the people who are employed by the program will almost always be more organized to lobby for their benefit before the state legislature, especially because they can use purported benefits to students as a fig leaf for demands for more administrators and less checking of the effectiveness of how higher education is delivered.

Most of the suggestions in the article seem sound. They also sound rather radical compared to what is usually proposed to improve the bang for the buck of colleges in the United States. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is of any of these ideas.

Unfortunately, it'll never happen because there's simply too much money involved in the academic world. The people running the educational institutions, the people running the corporate world, and the people running government are all good friends and none of them want to do anything to screw over the other.

1. spend less on admins and have massive class sizes 2. spend less on sports, food, dorms, and other perks 5. cut most of the majors

vs.

3. oh, wait, another school reduced costs by spending more on personal instruction and having micro size classes because students actually graduated with less trouble - let's do that too! 4. offering more variety in learning methods actually proved successful, not less, so do that too!

People in NYC or California making $200K/year often pay >40% (getting close to 50% if you are in the $300K/year range) of their salary in taxes (33-35% federal, 8-13% state, and then there's sale tax. And estate tax) and get no reasonable-cost tuition nor reasonable-cost healthcare.

Every time this discussion comes up, US people are quick to quote federal tax rates but when I compared actual rates in NYC and CA, it seems like americans pay comparable taxes, and get nothing in return.

How does NZ fair in this respect? What's the real tax like (remember sales tax / vat), and what do you get for it?