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The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

nytimes.com

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Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#31

Post by [deleted] »

HeavenFox wrote: post #20
snogglethorpe wrote: post #3

One thing I've noticed about American universities compared with universities in other countries (Japan, Korea, UK), is that almost every decent American university I've seen seems to be really well-maintained, in that the campus is very clean, in good repair, frequently renovated, etc, even the out-of-the-public-eye spaces (grad student offices and the like). Japanese and Korean universities, on the other hand, are…

This. It basically holds true for any product: price doesn't increase linearly as quality goes up. I go to college in U.S., and a lot friends of mine attend one of the best universities in China. I have the freedom to take practically any course in the university, and my friends basically know what their four years look like before freshman year. I never worry about finding seats in the library, and my friends someti…

[deleted]

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#32

Post by dikaiosune »

mdasen wrote: post #17
snogglethorpe wrote: post #3

One thing I've noticed about American universities compared with universities in other countries (Japan, Korea, UK), is that almost every decent American university I've seen seems to be really well-maintained, in that the campus is very clean, in good repair, frequently renovated, etc, even the out-of-the-public-eye spaces (grad student offices and the like). Japanese and Korean universities, on the other hand, are…

Economists sometimes talk about different types of quality: actual quality and perceived quality. There has been a lot of spending that has been directed toward perceived quality at American Universities. That includes a lot of new buildings, a lot of maintenance, etc. In a certain way, it becomes a race to spend more. The more you spend, the better students you can attract, the better your status is and your alumni…

Rose-colored version: Competition! Freedom! Murrica!

On a more serious note, it's also worth noting that 16/17 year-old students aren't making their decisions in a vacuum. Parents may be on the actual campus once (if at all) before the student attends, and I think that perceived quality measures are as much targeted at winning parental approval via first impressions as they are targeted at winning over high school kids on cool factor.

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#33

Post by dikaiosune »

ollebro wrote: post #27
HeavenFox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It basically holds true for any product: price doesn't increase linearly as quality goes up. I go to college in U.S., and a lot friends of mine attend one of the best universities in China. I have the freedom to take practically any course in the university, and my friends basically know what their four years look like before freshman year. I never worry about finding seats in the library, and my friends someti…

I went to college in Sweden and had all that you had, I didn't pay anything. I received about 1000-1500$ a month for attending school from the government.

I like the way Sweden does many things, but:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3d/Tax...

It's political suicide in the US to raise taxes in any significant way, and so we suffer through the nonsense we've got.

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#34

Post by adventured »

ollebro wrote: post #27
HeavenFox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It basically holds true for any product: price doesn't increase linearly as quality goes up. I go to college in U.S., and a lot friends of mine attend one of the best universities in China. I have the freedom to take practically any course in the university, and my friends basically know what their four years look like before freshman year. I never worry about finding seats in the library, and my friends someti…

I went to college in Sweden and had all that you had, I didn't pay anything. I received about 1000-1500$ a month for attending school from the government.

Sweden also doesn't have universities that match up to the US when it comes to a ~$50k tuition tier. $50,000 per year is a lot, and buys you access to the best universities on earth, most of which are in the US. Harvard's tuition is around $44,000 for example.

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#35

Post by swimfar »

ollebro wrote: post #27
HeavenFox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It basically holds true for any product: price doesn't increase linearly as quality goes up. I go to college in U.S., and a lot friends of mine attend one of the best universities in China. I have the freedom to take practically any course in the university, and my friends basically know what their four years look like before freshman year. I never worry about finding seats in the library, and my friends someti…

I went to college in Sweden and had all that you had, I didn't pay anything. I received about 1000-1500$ a month for attending school from the government.

I know Europe is a diverse place, but I've studied at three universities in Europe (Germany and France) and at each of them I often had problems with computer access due to the labs being used for classes. This was an issue even as a graduate student.

Access to professors outside of class was also difficult. Where I was at in Germany, the professors would have about 4 hours per week scheduled where they were available for help or questions. At the end of each open-hours block they would go out into the hall and tell the 5-10 people waiting in line to see them that they would have to come back in a couple days. Compare this to the university I was at in the US where professors would practically beg students to come talk to them about homework assignments, lectures, etc.

I also had much greater autonomy in the US when it came to lab work (and course selection as well). They trusted us to use the equipment. As an undergrad in the US we were shown how to use an SEM and then left alone with it to play around with it and try different options, scan different objects, etc. For the SEM lab I had as a graduate student in France we watched a technician use the machine and tell us about what you can do with it and that was it. I felt like we were being treated like little kids. There weren't even any machine shops, 3d printers, soldering irons, etc. available for students to use.

In the experience that I had, the US university had much higher quality facilities than the ones I was at in Europe (I'm not talking about the lecture quality here). Certainly, one could argue that the increased cost isn't worth the increased quality, but I did notice a big difference between those four schools.

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#36

Post by nickysielicki »

MCRed wrote: post #21

I think a more interesting question is, how has the ROI of college changed over the past 40 years? The cost has gone up much faster than inflation. The number of people going to college has also risen dramatically. This means there are a lot more college educated peers competing with you in the workplace. This means that the college degree is not as rare, and thus has lower scarcity value. Finally, I think it's quite…

One criticism I have of education systems is that they structurally encourage only superficially studying content.

Let's take my compilers class as an example. I go to a 75 minute lecture 2 times a week and I do about 4 hours of homework a week. I do this over 18 weeks.

That's only roughly 120 hours of study over the course of a semester. That's only as many hours as most full time employees work every 3 weeks! And the sad thing is, I imagine if I spent 3 weeks reading a compiler book, reading though the source of lex and yacc, and implementing some kind of basic compiler using them, I'd be a much better programmer than what we're doing-- implementing a C compiler for MIPS in java, using a shitty lex library and only implenting the parts the professor thinks is important.

This brings me to another point. Programmers are necessarily autodidacts because shit changes incredibly fast. You can't be a one trick pony. So if we're pushing kids through these incredibly formulaic methods of learning, what are we really preparing them for? A life of being an enterprise code monkey? The student who taught themselves anything, even if they are missing a few core details, are more equipped to fix those gaps in their understandings.

I did a hackathon a couple weeks ago that had a sort of business spin on it. There was this group of 4 guys that made a college choosing application based off your GPA, as a desktop java application with a GUI that had background images and looked like an early 2000s keygen program.

The thing is, I have absolutely no doubt that these guys are good students and they'll probably find an alright job out of school. But all they know is java development.

I think that students that want to be more than that probably shouldn't go to school.

Here's a question to you: if I handed you a résumé, without a bachelor's degree, but instead included my github profile and a list of books I've read cover to cover and some open source contributions, am I going to get the salary I am worth?

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#37

Post by Elv13 »

HeavenFox wrote: post #20
snogglethorpe wrote: post #3

One thing I've noticed about American universities compared with universities in other countries (Japan, Korea, UK), is that almost every decent American university I've seen seems to be really well-maintained, in that the campus is very clean, in good repair, frequently renovated, etc, even the out-of-the-public-eye spaces (grad student offices and the like). Japanese and Korean universities, on the other hand, are…

This. It basically holds true for any product: price doesn't increase linearly as quality goes up. I go to college in U.S., and a lot friends of mine attend one of the best universities in China. I have the freedom to take practically any course in the university, and my friends basically know what their four years look like before freshman year. I never worry about finding seats in the library, and my friends someti…

To give a comparison closer to the States, in Quebec (Canada), I paid about 5k (3 semester per year, one as paid internship) in tuition plus ~10k for a ~450ft^2 apartment. Obviously I will pay all my life in taxes, but that make higher education much more accessible and less intimidating that it could be elsewhere.

As a modern western state, the main source of GDP require college educated workforce, so it probably make sense to invest "other peoples money" into it. It is of course totally debatable if this is good or not. Not all college degree will yield a direct return on investment (/whisper social science, art, education) but those people are (mostly) required anyway to provide services to the others. This is a society choice. Some places let education be driven by the market while other see it as a public service (same for health care, electricity or running water). As this example show, there can be inefficiencies even when university are run like corporations.

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#38

Post by adventured »

ta82828 wrote: post #12
beachstartup wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

uh, what part of my post doesn't apply to state schools?

They're a government service, and are not - theoretically - supposed to charge market rates.

They still have to compete on everything from providing good enough facilities to paying professors enough to keep or acquire them. If you inflate half the market when it comes to salaries, the other half either has to compete or will lose all of its talent.

If X type of lab becomes standard at non-state schools, then all the state schools must build one too or suffer.

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#39

Post by IkmoIkmo »

morcheeba wrote: post #13
snogglethorpe wrote: post #3

One thing I've noticed about American universities compared with universities in other countries (Japan, Korea, UK), is that almost every decent American university I've seen seems to be really well-maintained, in that the campus is very clean, in good repair, frequently renovated, etc, even the out-of-the-public-eye spaces (grad student offices and the like). Japanese and Korean universities, on the other hand, are…

The author of the article is from Boulder... they just started on a $63M rec center renovation and they have a pool in the shape of a buffalo. There are only 30,000 students, so right there is $2,000 per student on a portion of the facilities that isn't involved in teaching. http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25916902/cu-boulder-bu...

It an expense, not necessarily a cost. Their property values just rose for example. Over time the equipment ages which leads to breaking, and replacement because it's not state of the art anymore. If you expect it to last 20 years, then you can write off 1/20th every year, which are your actual costs. Meaning it's $100 per student per year, which is reasonably cheap because those are essentially your costs to have state of the art equipment available to you every year. Things like heating & lighting, employees, cleaning etc is added to that, but it's mostly independent from renovation as you had to pay that anyway before you renovated. It might go up a bit, it might go down because of more sustainable engineering for example.

There's a lot more to it, of course, don't get me wrong. But $2k per student for non-teaching isn't quite the truth, either.

But I think the notion of building decent public facilities and amenities is one of the best things we ought to do. It sadly doesn't happen often. But universities do it, libraries, rec centers, I think it's great. It has to happen in a smart way, of course, I don't support some of the ridiculous over the top projects you sometimes see. A pool in the shape of a buffalo, ugh, great example right there. Sadly it's often in the pursuit of collegiate sports and not really providing awesome amenities and facilities to the general student body. Reminds me of the piece about Alabama in this great Last Week Tonight [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0

Re: The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

#40

Post by mungoman2 »

ollebro wrote: post #27
HeavenFox wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. It basically holds true for any product: price doesn't increase linearly as quality goes up. I go to college in U.S., and a lot friends of mine attend one of the best universities in China. I have the freedom to take practically any course in the university, and my friends basically know what their four years look like before freshman year. I never worry about finding seats in the library, and my friends someti…

I went to college in Sweden and had all that you had, I didn't pay anything. I received about 1000-1500$ a month for attending school from the government.

Well you get $350 "for free", the rest is a loan.
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