It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays

A lot of them were work study program people, although on the east coast. If you Google the school he talks about, though, you can see they offer a similar program where the college pays half the student's salary: https://finaid.msu.edu/work.asp

So a work study student only costs the employer half as much, and would generally be assumed to be earning a full pay check for working half the time and studying half the time. So it seems very doable. Generally a student with such low income isn't going to be paying full price anyway, so his other number is off too.

What we need is a culture that respects people who want to just work at a factory, a big box store, a mall, whatever, without pushing them into doing something they don't want to do (school). Trade schools also help in this regard. I actually believe we need more push towards trades like plumbing, hvac, and carpentry rather than having more degrees in over-filled areas.

The solution though, as some people propose, is not to end subsidies for lower income individuals. I see several people putting forth the argument that people are the most efficient at allocating money for themselves. That is not true except in an Ayn Rand novel. If people were so rational, everyone would go to college because the expected value of college still dwarfs the cost of college. Even for those individuals who would graduate with a significant amount of debt, it is far more worth it to have a degree than not.

So, how would a society reduce the cost of college education without removing the supports that enable low income individuals to enroll? Instead of giving colleges free money, we need to re-orient our structure of providing support for students that need it so that the college has the right incentives. For example, tying the cost of college to graduate's earnings.

Right now, a university gets money merely for pursuing higher levels of enrollment. There is no financial incentive for the university to involve students in student organizations, in leadership roles in their community, in politics or in networking. There is a tenuous link between those activities and pursuing alumni programs, but from what I've seen, alumni programs are a post-hoc solution to funding. A university sees an alumnus has done very well, and seeks to share in their wealth.

Let's simplify: the cost of a college education is 3-5% of aggregate gross income for the rest of your life. People who go on to be tremendously successful will benefit their university, and the university will have an incentive to churn out more tremendously successful people. This tax could be enforced by the IRS, automatically deducted in most cases, and manually reported elsewhere.

Now no one has to worry about the stress of student loans, and universities have every incentive to provide the highest quality education possible to maximize the value of their students. No more flooding the rosters of the university with under- and unqualified adjuncts in order to support higher enrollment numbers at lower costs to pad the pockets of administration. No more cutting student involvement to pad the athletics program.

The size of IT infrastructure has grown immensely compared to 30 years back, so you need people to take care of that. My department has four IT support people, and they carry a full workload.

The amount of foreign students has grown, consequently you need people to keep track of immigration requirements that seem to get worse each passing year, and you also need cultural programs, you can't expect people from non-western countries to be thrown into an alien culture and succeed.

The number of non-traditional and first-generation college students has grown, if the student body consists only of middle-class and wealthy people you don't need support staff for the students who teach them how to study.

Then there is career services, these things are expected these days. Back when you knew the major employers, and they had a hiring pipeline at your university.

There is also this competition through facilities, gyms and really fancy dorms are the norm, and those things need looking after.

Anyone who proposes cutting back on administrative staff must give suggestions how to deal with all these issues.