61–70 of 77 posts
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They become advocates of better educational public policy, because they’re currently (sadly) out of luck, casualties of a broken educational system.
Yes it’s great that they’ll join your pet political cause, but what about right now ? They need to get their degree and graduate.
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Because remote classes have higher costs. It's always been that way.
That’s why Khan Academy et al are so expensive, huh?
In my country, universities that offer remote degrees (well before covid) all charges additional fees for it. It’s usually not much (something like 200€ on top of the ~500€ typical fee), but some charge per module so it can add up quickly. A few have a dedicated remote learning center, with is own workers.
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These fees aren't for bloated admin. They support resources like the library, general student use fitness facilities, techology, and other student focused items. I get why students want to stop paying these fees during the pandemic since they can't use many of the resources. The issue is that most of the costs for these resources are fixed, mainly personnel and facilities. If you cut the fees, the university would ha…
"The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures." https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
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> Bathrooms etc don’t need to be cleaned daily when not in use. The university can save some money because it use less soap and bleach, but I hope they are still paying the cleaning crew.
Most such services are contracted anyway and not on payroll.
Example: At the college I went to, the food service company that handled the cafeteria had some interesting clauses in their contract that gave them a lot of control over who else could cook food for an 'on campus/university sanctioned' event. It's been a long time so I can't remember the specifics, but I think we had to switch some fraternity events from cooking hotdogs/hamburgers outside to just bringing some Carry Out pizza.
On top of that, the workers for that company weren't paid well, the food was typically about what you'd expect from, say, bulk purchases from Gordon Food Service, and very expensive for students.
Speaking of that, IIRC if you lived on campus you had to have some form of meal plan (I assume that was also in the contract.)
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I would love to see a two-part program 1. No more government-backed Student Loans. (Tuition would drop like a rock.) 2. Build many more free/cheap community colleges and make that much more accessible to everyone.
Neither of these would be as disruptive as: 3. Student loans no longer survive bankruptcy.
We should have strict price controls on university tuition and fees. Roll them back a couple decades, and cap compensation at $250k a year for all employees and contractors.
State universities — the bulk of public universities in the nation — are already subject to control by state legislatures. The problem is that this central planning capability is not in practice used to improve education and its affordability, but rather to enrich and empower the university staff (and occasionally faculty) as they siphon off public funds, loans, fees and tuition, in a classic illustration of the prin…
Thanks for the chuckle.
> Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!
I reject the framing that this system is promoted or even protected by university staff. It is of course in their interests to keep it largely intact but the true system facilitators have been in place for centuries perhaps with different names and agendas.
One thing that has been discussed here is removing government backed loans. Doing so would perhaps reduce overall population exposure to higher education. I think the trend of expanding costs of education will continue without government help via positive feedback loop from parental investment and other society wide changes happening today.
So in essence university value is being justified each day without a thought of future consequences. To that end the government may act for increasing government sponsorship loan forgiveness where you work off your loans at a discount rather than a dead stop bailout of loans that may never be repaid in a lifetime. The government could probably make a variety of optional part time/full time 'loan forgiveness' programs for the public good. Unfortunately assigning the public good would probably be too hard to decipher in a bipartisan manner.
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How did they do it before? The fees widely outpace inflation. It’d be nice to see state schools be affordable to kids on a part time job —which used to be the case. That’s not been the case for a few decades.
That’s the thing the puzzles me. Some of these universities’ annual tuition amounts to a healthy 1 year’s salary. How did they operate when this wasn’t the case?
Universities used to look like high schools, and still do in many parts of Europe (and at community colleges).
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These fees aren't for bloated admin. They support resources like the library, general student use fitness facilities, techology, and other student focused items. I get why students want to stop paying these fees during the pandemic since they can't use many of the resources. The issue is that most of the costs for these resources are fixed, mainly personnel and facilities. If you cut the fees, the university would ha…
The easy solution is for Unis to take an L for once and to cover costs with their enormous savings from the last 30 years of exponential growth. Those fees obviously are over actual cost to cover contingencies, a pandemic was inevitable on the time scale of a university. They probably should have gotten insurance, what do those admins do anyway if not plan for things such as this?
You can't buy insurance for something that cripples everyone. Math isn't magic.
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Neither of these would be as disruptive as: 3. Student loans no longer survive bankruptcy.
I don't think we could do that without also removing the Federal government from the student loan process.
Defund higher education.
I would love to see a two-part program 1. No more government-backed Student Loans. (Tuition would drop like a rock.) 2. Build many more free/cheap community colleges and make that much more accessible to everyone.