311–320 of 487 posts
I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?
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Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better. College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't infl…
> If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive. ...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive. e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/in…
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>The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum. Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors an…
Im not sure what you mean by maybe not. If oxford is cutting corners, it still has the top rank in Europe, so I suppose they are the correct corners to cut. Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.
It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.
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Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better. College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't infl…
This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.
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Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige. High cost and exclusivity is the entire point. A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.
Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.
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> I met someone who had gotten into MIT but whose family could only afford to send one kid to an elite college, him or his sister. So they were rich enough that he didn't get exempt from tuition but still could only send one kid to an elite school? I wonder if the guy was just pulling your leg.
needlessly adversarial. financial aid is a best effort kind of thing, and plenty of people with unusual situations fall through the cracks.
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A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.
Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a wor…
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> This defers taxes and allows the funds to be reinvested without tax. All business funds are re-invested without tax, this is actually a good thing. Also for the majority of business owners taking a loan against your assets to pay yourself is a terrible idea, yes it may defer taxation but that tax will still come due and now you have to pay interest. > Someone who owns their own business could also easily drop their…
> most people don’t plan like this. This is a pretty naive take. It is a $85k per year cost. If you can shift some money around and avoid $85k per year, you would absolutely do that. > you could also emancipate your 17 year old. This is complicated. Emancipation is not a “sign a form” kind of thing. The kid would have to be living completely independently (no support from the parents) and would have to convince a jud…
I saw a similar headline just today (albeit on a much smaller scale) for Carnegie Mellon University: https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/carnegie-mellon-univ... I feel like the timing is too close to be a coincidence—does anyone know if there's a link?
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Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism. One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students. At the time this was quite popular as i…
A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.