Our Universities: The Outrageous Reality

I wonder if there'd be room for a true alternative to an elite college. I've always felt that the value of such institutions was that it is the premier place to meet and befriend other smart students, not in the facilities or instructors who make up the bulk of the cost.

Imagine: thousands of applicants from around the world vie for a spot in Nollege, a new kind of edtech startup. Admitted students are flown to the "campus", an exotic site, rotating yearly and chosen for its cheap room and board. Instruction that can be automated a la Khan Academy, is; more experienced students also tutor newcomers as needed. Students spend half their time on work-study/internship programs, which cover all costs of attendance. They're encouraged to leave whenever they feel ready, be it one semester or 10; no arbitrary rules about which courses to take. When they do, they emerge with the same bonds of friendship and learned knowledge as their college-attending peers, but are years ahead in working experience and also debt free.

Perhaps this would be most feasible for cs, where the only materials needed are a laptop and WiFi, but I could see it working for English, art, mathematics, and many other disciplines.

I'm onboard with your utopian ideas, especially enabling students to be apprenticed to a future employer. A lot of what you describe is already being done at The Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/, formerly Hacker School).

I find it amazing that someone can write so much about the cost of college, and yet treat tuition bills as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai, rather than something colleges themselves might have any responsibility for. Colleges have become giant money-sucking machines, similar to Scientology. In fact, they're so similar that I made a handy comparison chart (http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/06/15/universities-vs-sci...).

The author here insinuates that the increased cost comes from paying for teaching and research. But this is wrong for at least five reasons:

1. Research is not a cost center for colleges. It is a profit center. Usually, research is not funded by the college itself; rather, professors get grants from outside agencies, which the college then takes a large, juicy cut of for itself. (Ask any professor.)

2. At most colleges, the number of faculty members per student has remained stagnant for the last thirty years. The author waves their hands about "new areas of knowledge", but these new areas aren't leading to more hiring.

3. Wages for tenured faculty have also remained stagnant, adjusted for inflation.

4. Colleges are rapidly replacing their tenured faculty with adjuncts, who are given heavy courseloads, and paid peanuts even compared to tenured faculty (barely minimum wage, in a lot of cases).

5. Most of the actual work of research and teaching is done by grad students, of whom there are far more than tenured faculty. Grad students are, again, a profit center rather than a cost center, since the university gets to charge them "tuition" (despite most of them taking few or no classes). This "tuition" is either paid by an outside research agency, or "generously" waived in exchange for the grad student doing teaching and grading, again at very low wages.

prestige is a combination of fame and selectivity I recall a debate on the value of college( Peter Thiel vs some college admins) and Thiel asking his opponent (a university administrator) if Harvard is providing such a great value to the world why are they making it so hard to obtain for people? Good question.

I'd like to echo drjesusphd and ask if you could point us to any good information you've found on increasing per-student expenditures. My university likes to justify increasing tuition by pointing to a decrease in the proportion of a student's education that is funded by the state. The implication, is that per-student state funding has gone down and that's why tuition is going up, but state funding per student has remained relatively steady in inflation-adjusted terms for decades. It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on.

I have yet to look into the numbers in greater detail but if you could point me toward some good sources it would be much appreciated.