Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983 • Hacker News Board

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#601

Post by randcraw » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:06 PM UTC

My preferred solution is to establish an open university in the US (or make it borderless), through which anyone can earn a degree remotely for as little cost as possible -- like $5000 per year or $20k per degree.

Georgia Tech and others have shown this is possible (see their 13 MS degree programs in engineering). Certainly by enlisting the growing set of tools used for remote professional collaboration, it should be possible to cover a wide variety of subjects, especially if the staff is also remote (and not overpriced).

Compared to the $240K of almost all private colleges in the US, a viable alternative that costs only $20k should quickly reset the cost of advanced education to be a LOT more reasonable.

In addition, a cheap remote-only college system be a great resource for many people who want to take college courses but live nowhere near a full-time school, or who need retraining as they change careers or advance professionally.

Really, this solution is long overdue.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#602

Post by peanuty1 » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

fleshdaddy wrote: post #576

sudobash1 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There goes philosophy, music, and many other liberal arts degrees.

Yeah if we did that I think we’d need to build some systems for these things. We need artists and writers and what not and precluding anyone who can’t afford it would probably suck for society. We’d need some good scholarship type programs to help out there. Honestly we could probably use those now, I don’t know how realistic a lot of these things are under our current system.

We have far, far too many liberal arts graduates. There is a huge labor shortage that we need those people to fill in fields like restaurants, plumbing, nursing, construction, farming, etc.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#603

Post by uoaei » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

boeingUH60 wrote: post #238

za3faran wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope to see the day where interest bearing loans are recognized by the rest of the world as the evil they are. Muslims and Jews know this fact quite well.

This seems good in theory but hard in reality. The modern economy is built on debt being used for new investments. The problem is high interest rates, not interest rates in general.

Something never asked is whether what the modern economy is built on makes sense for longer than a couple hundred years. It seems premature to assume that the modern economy is sustainable ad infinitum.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#604

Post by zztop44 » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:08 PM UTC

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #594

sudobash1 wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There goes philosophy, music, and many other liberal arts degrees.

Universities have long tried to argue that education isn't 'vocational' that their entire focus should be on producing a well rounded individual. That dog don't hunt when that 'well rounded education' costs tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars and will burden the students for the rest of their lives. Once the student is on the hook for that debt, it becomes a strict return on investment calculation. Want to…

I have a philosophy degree (and a good career in a different field). It’s a good thing I didn’t wish to teach it, otherwise modern academia being what it is, that would be a life of serfdom!

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#605

Post by recursive » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

naijaboiler wrote: post #322

yardie wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just make it free? Kids from not-ideal backgrounds can compete on merit alone. The way this Supreme Court intended?

there's nothing like pure merit if you are talking about not-ideal backgrounds. those folks are already heavily disadvantaged. Making it "merit" is just compounding their disadvantage while advantaging those already with advantages. The myth of pure meritocracy lives on usually perpetuated by those blind to their own privileges.

Meritocracy really is the worst system. Except for all the other ones we've tried.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#606

Post by jurassic » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:10 PM UTC

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #274

jurassic wrote: post #44

Government lending and a lack of price controls are the ultimate root cause. The government extends near-unlimited credit to student borrowers that goes way beyond their credit-worthiness, academic performance, graduation rates for the school, prospects for employment based on field of study, etc. And universities have clued into the fact that students who can pay any price, will pay any price. The ceiling of what st…

> Think rent control for tuition. The only thing economists from every politic view can agree is horrible?

There's no direct comparison to be made with housing shortages. The only scarce educational resources are those that convey high prestige, and there's no way to manufacture more of that through higher tuition payments because it's the scarcity that makes it prestigious. Harvard would be just as prestigious if it were free to attend as if it were $100k/yr to attend. Whereas in housing, if you had people lining up to pay $100k/yr, you'd be throwing up new buildings as quickly as possible.

In general there is a an oversupply of higher education capacity due to demographic downturn and a decline in enrollments since 2010. Smaller colleges have been closing because they cannot attract enough students.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#607

Post by gitfan86 » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:13 PM UTC

My favorite idea that I have seen is allowed students to return their degrees for a 70% refund within 12 months of graduation. If the school is confident that the degree will be a great asset throughout the person's career it will be no problem.

This is how lemon laws work with cars.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#608

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:16 PM UTC

kjkjadksj wrote: post #308

clusterhacks wrote: post #262

I am beginning to believe that the root cause of tuition costs in the US exceeding inflation is based much more on FOMO on the benefits of college education rather than federal government guarantees on student loans. My claim is that buyers (parents+children) of college degrees are maybe not behaving rationally with respect to cost. High-cost schools position themselves as offering a "better" outcome or opportunity t…

The advantage of the larger school in my experience, is that its like going to a dozen small schools at once. Plenty of people I know where able to transfer from one good program to another in a completely opposite field once they learned what they actually liked (usually quite different than what you imagined as a highscooler especially if your parents have no concept of the field), because the school was large enou…

[deleted]

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#609

Post by ke88y » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

hoosieree wrote: post #512

imtringued wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally all they have to do is limit the maximum loan size. Max $50k per year. Anything beyond that is not subsidized or requires proof of academic performance or ability to repay.

How about a tuition capped at the median salaries of its graduates?

1. Over what time frame? Med school takes 4 years and Residency takes 4+. JDs+bar take a few years and earnings take some time to ramp up. PhDs take half a decade (Even if we don't need more faculty, we do have a shortage of PhD supply in industry for fields like CS, Chem E, Biotech-ad, etc. and the median salary for those graduates is quite high with unemployment basically as low as you can go.)

2. Even without graduate education requirements, other fields have loooong ramp-up times but eventually end up doing well.

3. There are also jobs that are extremely valuable to society despite the expense of education (nursing comes to mind, as does teaching).

4. We would end up with stupid boom-bust cycles in labor supply and demand, even worse than what we have now. Reducing labor supply by making loans unavailable increases labor prices eventually, which eventually results in loans becoming available, which saturates supply, and then repeat the cycle every couple decades. Constant idiotic predicable crises. Welcome to myopic financial capitalism, where trust fund kids who never needed to pass their delay differential equations unit have all the power.

So to make this work you need some form of central planning of supply and demand -- by DECADES at a time. Who knew we'd need so many Python programmers in 1980 or even 2000? Which, if that predictive function works, why the FUCK are we using markets anyway?! Cut out the middle man if central planning works. (It doesn't.)

How about we just lose the cold war brain-rot and stop trying to use markets -- a legal fiction and policy tool!!! -- where they make no fucking sense. Markets are an incoherent solution to allocation problems where price signals are EXTREMELY delayed (education) or EXTREMELY coercive (health). Just fund it with tax dollars instead.

The market religion zombie from the red scare era needs to die. The amount of absolute brain rot in the American public caused by the inability to understand that markets are just fucking tools that depend on government coercion anyways is sending our entire society into a death spiral.

It's somehow unsurprising that the one true American religion of the 21st century -- deference to The Troops -- is the place where we're completely okay with socialism in higher education (the military academies).

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#610

Post by Broken_Hippo » Mon, Jul 10, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

ecshafer wrote: post #334

mrguyorama wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is better off as a whole with a well educated populace. We shouldn't optimize for college only for kids who can learn to program or whatever. Most other developed nations manage to send every smart kid to college for ten thousand dollars per kid or less. Once again, it is only the US that thinks it is a special butterfly that can't somehow manage to give kids college. Sure, most European colleges don't spend…

Define well educated populace. Does this mean ability to read, write, and do arithmetic? Does this mean the ability to speak and read Latin with an understanding of the classics and the Bible? The ability to fix a car and build an engine? Program a computer? One could argue that a university does very little to make a populace more educated, since they can already read, write and do basic math (or should be able to)…

Well educated isn't so clearly defined: In general, though, it is having been exposed to a varying number of subjects, be able to read a varying amount of things, have enough general knowledge that they can understand the reason there are "chemicals" in food and the reasons not to mix some household chemicals together. In addition, the person has been able to dive into a particular subject more deeply than the other ones, and understand that other folks have different specialties. While doing this, you are generally exposed to an array of people and if your institutions are fair, they come from mixed backgrounds.

Realistically, the basic information will be similar (basic science, health, reading, history, and so on) but we'll have different areas of interest and skill, so the exact subjects will be individualized to an extent and will definitely change over time as the world changes. You can't say for certain that psychology will make you better educated, but an introduction to the basic field might open someone's mind to being educated in that field, which helps society at large. Other things will be more esoteric: Go to art school, work in retail, and happily make art doesn't have the same sort of immediate payback - but chances are, they are more likely to be a bit compassionate just by having the education.