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The looming college-enrollment death spiral

theatlantic.com

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Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#131

Post by secabeen »

gottorf wrote: post #125
erelong wrote: post #114

Deregulation is the simple fix: quality of education and cost has predictably gone up due to regulation, as well as costs of doing business

I don't know if "regulation" is the right word. In the end, what happened was that the foremost power in the world, the US federal government, having observed that college grads earn more than non-college grads, flipped cause and effect on its head and decided that everyone must go to college for better life outcomes. A tremendous amount of time, money, and resources went into making that happen. Against this backdro…

Do you have data to support this claim?

The data I have shows that expenditures have gone up, but no where near what the nameplate tuition has or what detractors claim:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...

College Board data shows that Tuition and Fees net of financial aid has fallen by significant amounts over the past 20 years (see page 18). Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities:

https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends-in-Colleg...

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#132

Post by secabeen »

colechristensen wrote: post #42
semiquaver wrote: post #33

It seems that the entire higher education space is in dire need of some creative destruction. College expenses have been subject to cost disease for years and a reckoning is long due. I’m not sure if demographic change will produce this reckoning but something has to.

You just have to fire 80% of the administration, kill all of the "programs" which are trying to do this or that, and focus on A) providing the basic resources for academics to study and B) providing the basic resources for teaching. Universities need to do very much less that isn't directly related to research or teaching and stop pretending the lead administrator of a university is an important position. The preside…

If you do this, you will destroy half of the top 20 hospital systems in the US, as they are run by Universities. Now maybe separating medical systems from universities is a good idea, but it's not simple by any means.

Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a...

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#133

Post by potsandpans »

jasode wrote: post #16
ks2048 wrote: post #3

Right in the headline is a word choice I've notice lately that irks me, "democratization". "democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it. In voting, "more access" means "more governing power" (in principle), but in other things, it does not. If you want to use "democratized" applied to higher-ed, it would mean more people are involved in the decision-making, leadership, or ownership.

>"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it. > I just don't like it and think it is relatively new usage and a change in the older meaning of the word. People have been using "democratize" to describe "more accessible to the masses" for a long time. Here's an example from 106 years ago in 1920 : https://www.google.com/books/edition/Soviet_Russia/qflaAAAAM... And 40 years ago a 1986 article of "micro…

Right. But it's not my favorite nerd snipe interpretation that allows me to post low effort comments on hackernews about the headline instead of engaging in a meaningful discussion about the article.

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#134

Post by [deleted] »

gottorf wrote: post #121
Spooky23 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Im not denigrating anyone. I worked dairy farms from age 7 to 23. It’s a brutal lifestyle and I’ve seen my share of hardworking, broken 50 year olds trying to make it mostly on the lesser paying job their wife is left with because raising kids with a dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm is brutal.

I think the notion that's being challenged is that a college degree is an automatic way out of "dad who’s out the door at 5am and home at 7pm", no matter what the degree is for and who is getting the degree; or that being credentialed and unemployed is better than that.

[deleted]

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#135

Post by verteu »

gottorf wrote: post #125
erelong wrote: post #114

Deregulation is the simple fix: quality of education and cost has predictably gone up due to regulation, as well as costs of doing business

I don't know if "regulation" is the right word. In the end, what happened was that the foremost power in the world, the US federal government, having observed that college grads earn more than non-college grads, flipped cause and effect on its head and decided that everyone must go to college for better life outcomes. A tremendous amount of time, money, and resources went into making that happen. Against this backdro…

They did not "flip cause and effect on its head" - There is strong evidence for positive causal returns to education: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073805932...

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#136

Post by pandaman »

PearlRiver wrote: post #115
pandaman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"democratization" doesn't mean more people have access to it It literally does, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democratic 3: relating, appealing, or available to the broad masses of the people : designed for or liked by most people

I do not know how it worked in the US but in my country until the 1960s university was for the upper class. No son or daughter of a butcher could ever hope to study law.

It might have been the same until 1960s in the US. It doesn't matter in 2020s, when people who graduated before 1960s are in their 80s if still alive.

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#137

Post by gottorf »

secabeen wrote: post #131
gottorf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if "regulation" is the right word. In the end, what happened was that the foremost power in the world, the US federal government, having observed that college grads earn more than non-college grads, flipped cause and effect on its head and decided that everyone must go to college for better life outcomes. A tremendous amount of time, money, and resources went into making that happen. Against this backdro…

Do you have data to support this claim? The data I have shows that expenditures have gone up, but no where near what the nameplate tuition has or what detractors claim: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_334.10.a... College Board data shows that Tuition and Fees net of financial aid has fallen by significant amounts over the past 20 years (see page 18). Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly…

My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.

CPI component calculations done by the BLS shows "College tuition and fees", including adjustments for scholarships and grants, had a 63% increase from 2009 (to match the CB data baseline) to now, which outpaces overall inflation of 56% over the same timeframe. I'm not sure what methodology CB uses to show falling inflation-adjusted prices.

Granted, it's not a massive difference in those percentages[0], but because college is a large single-ticket item, that difference is probably felt more acutely.

> Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities

In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.

[0]: As an aside, it's incredible that everyone half of their purchasing power in ~15 years, and a quarter in just the past 5 years alone.

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#139

Post by gottorf »

verteu wrote: post #135
gottorf wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if "regulation" is the right word. In the end, what happened was that the foremost power in the world, the US federal government, having observed that college grads earn more than non-college grads, flipped cause and effect on its head and decided that everyone must go to college for better life outcomes. A tremendous amount of time, money, and resources went into making that happen. Against this backdro…

They did not "flip cause and effect on its head" - There is strong evidence for positive causal returns to education: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S073805932...

> Under simplifying assumptions, including competitive labor markets, no direct schooling costs, and constant proportional returns, this specification yields an interpretable estimate of the average percentage increase in earnings associated with an additional year of schooling.

So, an individual student will be expected to have higher earnings with more schooling. But as a matter of public policy that involves taxpayer funding of higher education, I cannot accurately base those decisions on a methodology that assumes a cost of zero ("no direct schooling costs").

Your source also identifies that higher marginal returns are found in lower-income, lower-educated countries, which makes sense. How much marginal return (for the taxpayer dollar) can we expect in a high-income country with a service-based economy and a third of the population already having a bachelor's degree?

Re: The looming college-enrollment death spiral

#140

Post by akramachamarei »

munificent wrote: post #103
akramachamarei wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso. The tough pill to swallow, if we are to follow in e.g. Sweden's footsteps, is that you need to tax the middle class a lot more if you want the government to provide more services. By the way, this whole discussion completely ignores that the country is BROKE. Why are we contemplating building a new patio…

> The US tax system is substantially more progressive than you might think.¹ It seems unwise to make it even moreso. I disagree, and I don't think linking to a conservative think tank a particularly compelling counterargument. My metric for whether a tax system is progressive enough is pretty simple: is inequality high and getting higher? Then the tax system should be more progressive. Some amount of inequality is he…

I shouldn't have to tell you that "but it's a conservative think tank" is merely ad hominem. If you think Jessica Riedl is misrepresenting the facts, I and many others would appreciate your elaborating. I'm afraid you haven't even read it.

Nonetheless, our ideas about social justice clearly differ. You abhor inequality in itself, I abhor poverty. So perhaps it won't make sense to argue the facts.

I do want to point out also that while it would certainly be good to eliminate unnecessary "defense" spend, it won't be close to enough. By far the biggest sources of deficit are entitlements: social security, Medicare, Medicaid. No one seriously proposes cutting taxes on the wealthy. It might be nice for the sake of fairness (you'd disagree) but unfortunately we will need a painful period of increased tax on everyone paired with serious cost-cutting if we intend to balance the budget... without just printing more dollars, which is basically another tax.

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