Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

salon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 106 posts

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#31

Post by bullfight »

This has very little to do with some conspiracy between bankers and universities to indebt students and raise massive capital by massively expanding the university far beyond it's means.

Deep into this article the author hits on what is really at the core of steep tuition inclines. A rapidly reducing share of university funding coming from state governments turning once public institutions into defacto privatized universities.[1]

In this chart [2] UWashington lays out in 2013 dollars that total tuition per student has been around 17,000 for 25 years, however during that period the state contribution was reduced from $14,000 to $5000, while student tuition rose from $3,000 to $12,000

> "This is an important shift in who pays for higher education. In 1990, the state provided nearly 80% of the funding per student and UW students paid 20% of the funds. In 2011, the state will pay around 30% and UW students will pay 70%." [3]

[1]: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/10/private#sthash...

[2]: http://imgur.com/HqVVc0P

[3]: http://www.washington.edu/externalaffairs/files/2012/10/tuit...

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#32

Post by jcalvinowens »

withdavidli wrote: post #4

I'm very opinionated about colleges / tuition. Many people find value in it, or they justify it somehow like they couldn't get the education / experience some other, more affordable, way. My thoughts on the solution is the same for housing increases. Get rid of the government loans. In this situation also make student loans able to discharge by bankruptcy, that way banks will think twice about it as well. The easier…

> Get rid of the government loans.

I'm going to make an argument I imagine many here will disagree with: perhaps the solution to the cost problem is to have publicly financed post-secondary education?

Imagine this: the US government tells colleges it will pay $N per semester on behalf of any student who meets certain qualifications to attend that college. Colleges would be free to refuse to accept this, but with the exception of the Harvard/Yale type schools, any college that did refuse the public tuition would cease to exist because nobody would go there. As long as we can come up with a value for $N that keeps colleges funded without making them rich, it would work. I would submit that the ideal value for $N is much lower than the current average tuition.

How do you pay for this? Take it all out of military spending. There would be plenty left over, I assure you.

> Another side of effect with less graduates is that maybe we can get rid of the college degree requirements

I would argue that there are definite benefits to a more educated population. Just because a certain group of people are going to end up with jobs in a field that don't really require post-secondary education doesn't mean that society as a whole isn't better off when those people are more educated.

I'm of the opinion that many of the problems the US faces right now are more or less the direct result of an uneducated body of voters.

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#33

Post by evan_ »

wcummings wrote: post #8
withdavidli wrote: post #4

I'm very opinionated about colleges / tuition. Many people find value in it, or they justify it somehow like they couldn't get the education / experience some other, more affordable, way. My thoughts on the solution is the same for housing increases. Get rid of the government loans. In this situation also make student loans able to discharge by bankruptcy, that way banks will think twice about it as well. The easier…

What positions require "BA in any field"?

I've heard this about substitute teaching.

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#35

Post by forrestthewoods »

adminprof wrote: post #19

I'm a professor at an ivy league university who has gotten some insight into the budgets. There's a few things that are often not reported in the media: 1) The tuition sticker price is going up, but the actual price paid remains about the same due to increasing financial aid given to students. 2) The largest cost driven in the past decade is partially due to a successful increase in recruiting+admitting underrepresen…

Can you break down the numbers for #1? If Stanford is $60,000 how much if that is the actual sticker price? How much of that is being given to other students in free financial aid? As a follow-up, how fucking INSANE is it for someone who can't afford a school to take out a loan to pay for that school and a portion of that loan pay for someone else who also can't afford to go? For me to take out a loan to pay for someone else is fucking ludicrous.

On you third point, that's true but in theory those costs should not have increased 12x in 30 years. That would be remarkably hard to justify.

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#36

Post by guelo »

adminprof wrote: post #19

I'm a professor at an ivy league university who has gotten some insight into the budgets. There's a few things that are often not reported in the media: 1) The tuition sticker price is going up, but the actual price paid remains about the same due to increasing financial aid given to students. 2) The largest cost driven in the past decade is partially due to a successful increase in recruiting+admitting underrepresen…

This comment is like a bad parody of the excuses in the article.

1) So are all the stats that say that students are paying more, and are graduating with more debt, lies?

2) Blaming poor people is the latest trend in elite apologias. Same with the real estate bubble, it's the poor people that blew up the economy!

3) Student orgs, TAs and tutors are a totally new thing that didn't exist before tuition exploded, oh wait.

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#37

Post by hga »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #15
thetruthishard wrote: post #10

It's a free market -- tuition keeps going up because you, your neighbors, and every other American, is willing to pay for it. Prices will keep going up until people are so strained that they're not willing or able to pay anymore.

But it's not a free market. It's a market artificially inflated by the government via Federal loans, guaranteed pay back to the banks, and debt that's non-dismissable via bankruptcy. Those may or may not better than the alternative, but they sure as hell mean it's not a free market.

"guaranteed pay back to the banks"

Not as of June 30, 2010: part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare was using the profits from those student loans to fund it, the government is originating all "guaranteed" loans after that date.

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#38

Post by JumpCrisscross »

OldSchool wrote: post #34

It comes down to at least two things: 1. Easy (to acquire) debt drives demand 2. Education is still "Made in America" thus it cannot hide from the real devaluation of the dollar

> thus it cannot hide from the real devaluation of the dollar

The trade-weighted U.S. dollar index [1], published by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, shows a 1.2% annualised decline in the U.S. dollar over the past 10 years. This is sufficiently low and hedge-able as to not be a key determinant in this pricing process.

Your broader point stands, however. Education is a non-tradable good. This amplifies the effect of local idiosyncrasies, e.g. non-dischargeable federally-backed education loans, in a way which would be arbitraged away for a tradable good.

[1] http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/TWEXBp

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#39

Post by ivystudent »

adminprof wrote: post #19

I'm a professor at an ivy league university who has gotten some insight into the budgets. There's a few things that are often not reported in the media: 1) The tuition sticker price is going up, but the actual price paid remains about the same due to increasing financial aid given to students. 2) The largest cost driven in the past decade is partially due to a successful increase in recruiting+admitting underrepresen…

Thanks for your comment - it's great to get some real insight here.

#1 and #2 raise a lot of questions and I'd love to hammer it out a bit more.

Total financial aid is increasing (#1), but that makes sense given that the number of low-income students is also increasing (#2).

The better metric is financial aid per low-income student (not just per student, since that is also expected to increase given that low-income is a higher percentage of the class each year). Is that number increasing year over year? If so, shouldn't that lead to a decrease in tuition, not an increase?

---

At my university, I'm convinced #3 is the real driver of tuition increase. The number of administrators and staff is increasing spectacularly, but from the student perspective, it's not helping anyone but instead increasing frustration (e.g. if there's a problem, we're stuck escalating through more people until we reach a Dean who can actually do something). Thoughts?

Re: Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition

#40

Post by watwut »

parennoob wrote: post #14

"Administrators...blamed students, who were supposedly demanding all manner of luxuries and would not be denied. “Students today want carpeting, they want furniture, they want voice mail,” an administrator at a Nevada university told USA Today for a 1997 story about the tuition spiral. " I believe this is one of the biggest generally unaddressed aspects of this problems. The large public university near me has near-l…

Any analysis that assumes that whole generation of students and their parents are stupid is suspect. So, two remarks:

* Wealthy students are probably choosing more comfort over price. Less wealthy but good student might have different preferences. Wealthy and good student are not synonyms.

* All things being equal, I would find it rational to choose school with better tv. All things being equal is important there.

You school, or schools in general, seem to be trying to attract the most wealthy students. Whether they are proxy for good student or not does not matter. Even if they would be the best students ever, it would still be just a coincidence. If it would be about quality of attracted people and quality of graduating people, schools would not be so eager to save on professors, adjuncts and so on.

I think the whole thing has less to do with students and more to do with administrators incentives. They seem to choose short term grow over long term whatever all too often. Preferring quality of tv over quality of staff is preferring visible effect now over hard-to-see effects in long term.

Post reply on HN