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Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

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Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#61

Post by wfo »

dalbasal wrote: post #16
reverend_gonzo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant. You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to…

The exploding cost of education over the last generation doesn't boil down to an increase in teaching or even research staff costs. These costs are stable, largely thanks to the very low cost of junior academics. In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more inc…

>we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education.

We most certainly can, easily, we just choose not to.

We could bomb a few less hospitals a year and pay for every single American to go to college for free. We could make our corporations pay more than zero taxes and do the same.

But you are right about the skyrocketing costs, colleges have bloated massively and for really no reason other than that they have begun to be run as businesses rather than as public-focused academic enterprises.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#62

Post by thegabez »

I don't sympathize for students graduating Brown with high levels debt as much as I do for students graduating with the same debt from University of Phoenix. Some Universities are predatory in nature and have very low return on investment. Graduating from an Ivy League University will always have a relatively high return on investment. However, this is a step in the right direction for access to higher education in general.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#63

Post by creatornator »

finolex1 wrote: post #29
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

Keep in mind that these are Ivy League universities hoping to attract the best students they can in order to boost their prestige. If Princeton for instance decided to lower tuition fees by cutting down on 'luxuries' like smaller class sizes/ unrestricted enrollments in classes, then they'd lose out on the best students to Harvard or Yale. So the only way to reduce tuition fees would be to do it across the board at o…

That seems... backwards. If the standard of admission remains the same (which is unrelated to cost of attending), lowering prices doesn't decrease the quality of the admitted student body, but _increases_ it. Lowering the cost means that additionally to the students who would be admitted and are capable of affording the school, students who are more qualified but would otherwise _not_ be able to afford attending would then be able to apply and attend. Admissions can only benefit from giving opportunities to a larger body of prospective students. The wealth of a student isn't what gives a school prestige--it's their academic prowess and likelihood of becoming successful later that gives the school a good name.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#64

Post by notfromhere »

dalbasal wrote: post #16
reverend_gonzo wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant. You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to…

The exploding cost of education over the last generation doesn't boil down to an increase in teaching or even research staff costs. These costs are stable, largely thanks to the very low cost of junior academics. In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more inc…

What's causing the explosion in education costs is that states systematically decreased their financial support for education in the last 30-40 years.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#65

Post by rdtsc »

okaram wrote: post #60
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

Actually ... they are probably NOT charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room and board, when you look at their costs; good education is expensive. Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable. Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher sa…

> High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty).

Interesting. Wonder why it's more labor intensive compared to engineering or other degrees. 7:1 teacher-student ratio seems very good. Why can't it be 14:1, would that result in a dramatically worse outcome? (Not even sure what I mean by outcome, maybe inability to find a position after graduation...)

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#66

Post by joshuamorton »

hiram112 wrote: post #55

>In 2016, the average Brown student graduated with a debt of $23,810... Considering the sticker price for an undergrad at Brown in 2013-2016 is approximately $250K, along with the higher median debt loads we're seeing from graduates of less prestigious, cheaper universities, it leads me to believe that these types of elite schools are comprised of two very specific types of students: 1. Wealthy privileged students wh…

3. The school uses a sliding scale of "need based", so middle income students are given some aid. More than very wealthy students, but less than very low income students. The end result is that middle income students pay a similar price to what they might pay in in state tuition at a state school.

Why is your first thought that middle-class students are punished, and not that an institute of higher education, full of very smart people, can figure out an equitable way to disperse need based aid?

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#67

Post by CalChris »

ben_jones wrote: post #41
onwardly wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is th…

While the process sounds good in theory there is an ever increasing gap that people fall into between parents making too much money and parents not making enough. I'm bias because I fell right into the middle of the gap - my parents inherited an illiquid share of real estate that on paper is worth about a million dollars, in reality after taxes it yields maybe 40k/yr that my parents live off of (60+, no college). Bec…

Did you explain this to the financial aid office? Generally, elite schools are in the business of finding elite students first and then dealing with FA second. But you have to make your situation clear to them. They offered you admission or you wouldn't be dealing with FA. So they wanted you. But FA is a negotiation even especially if you're in the gap and then you have to negotiate hard because otherwise you pay sticker.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#68

Post by greedo »

bmmayer1 wrote: post #47
Improvotter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently met an American here in Europe that mostly grew up here the last few years who wanted to go to NA (more specifically Toronto) for university when she could basically enrol here in a good university for a fraction of the cost. I pay less than a gran every year for my software engineering master's degree and can't fathom someone going to a different country knowing you're gonna be in debt for a large portion…

The trick is that most people don't pay full tuition[1]. It's like hospital prices: most people don't pay the sticker price and those who do are subsidizing those who don't. [1] http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2...

Or they're taking out student loans that they'll have no realistic ability to repay.

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#69

Post by okaram »

danaris wrote: post #53
dalbasal wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The exploding cost of education over the last generation doesn't boil down to an increase in teaching or even research staff costs. These costs are stable, largely thanks to the very low cost of junior academics. In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more inc…

I continue to be very curious where all that "administration staff" spending is going. I grew up in the higher education sphere (both parents professors), and I work as a staff member at a university now. What I see here, at least, is a near-crippling lack of care for the staff, such that morale is constantly low and turnover is high. So where, exactly, is all that extra spending really going? Is it going to six or s…

I was also in higher education; I think it is a problem of lumping different categories of schools, changing roles, and of people having a political axe to grind :) I'd be very surprised if admin costs at Ivy League universities, or even state schools have changed much ...

Re: Brown University raising $120M to eliminate all student loans

#70

Post by zbentley »

lerpa wrote: post #7
bmcusick wrote: post #2

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to…

The actual problem is people getting into debt without reasonable expectation of paying it, just wishful thinking.

I'm somewhat sympathetic to this position, but that's an unnecessarily extreme way of stating it. "Reasonable" is a weasel word. If I study for 4 years for a job in a lucrative, degree-requiring field with very high jobs demand when I matriculate, and I go into debt to study, is that "reasonable"? What if that field encounters a sea change on the year I graduate, or the economy crashes, leaving me with bleak prospects and debt? Does that make what I did "wishful thinking"?

It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. Like, sure, it's easy to make fun of literature students who end up $200k in the whole with no marketable skills and no job prospects. But they are just a small fraction of the whole picture. A higher ed degree is by far the highest-chance-of-success way for a lot of people to make it financially (whether or not it should be is a separate discussion), and a lot of positions require degrees for good reasons.

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