Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

> private college offered scholarships and financial aid

That's the thing that people don't understand about private universities' tuition prices: They're not real. The really rich kids are paying more, through donations and the like, and most students are being offered substantial discounts through both need and merit based scholarships. The inflated tuitions are all about A) signalling prestige and B) redistributing money from the rich and dumb to the smart and less wealthy.

My point is that Universities don't just teach. They also perform research, which requires staff. Yale is researched focused and has more grad students than undergrads. Grad students and research faculty require more administrative staff than undergrads. An increase in admin staff could be caused by a shift to more research rather than bloat in undergrad.

For example, a teaching university like Central Washington University has 500 faculty, 500 admin, 11.4k undergrads, and 900 post-grads. They do research at CWU, but their primary focus is teaching.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Washington_University

In comparison, UTHealth Houston is a medical university and has 2.1k faculty, 5.3k admin, and 5.2k students. UTHealth requires far more staff than CWU because it has a different focus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Texas_Health_Sci...

Finally, Stanford is a mix of the two and has 2.3k faculty, 15.3k admin!, and 17.2k students. (Stanford includes the clinic staff in their numbers. I think that clinical staff is split between Yale proper and the New Haven hospital.)

https://facts.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2021/...

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This brings me back to Yale. From the article:

> In 2003: 5,307 undergraduate students ... 3,500 administrators and managers. In 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic’s effects on student enrollment, only 600 more students were living and studying at Yale, yet the number of administrators had risen by more than 1,500 — a nearly 45 percent hike.

So the first issue is with the student number. Yale had 12,438 students in 2019, an increase of 1278. This isn't a huge issue because the % increase is the same, but leaving out grad students is a huge oversight.

> 2003-p19(21) 11,160 students; 5,307 undergraduate, and 5,853 ... Graduate [students]

https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2002-2003_annual_f...

> 2019-p7(9) 5,964 undergraduate students ... 3,032 Graduate [students] ... 3,442 [professional] students

https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/annual-report-2018...

Secondly, the admin:faculty ratio has decreased. Yale expanded their faculty from 3.2k to 4.9k, which is +1.7k (+53%). This tells me that Yale increased their research focus and are not (necessarily) bloating their undergrad program.

> 2003-p22(24) The University employs approximately 3,200 faculty, 3,500 managerial and professional staff, and 4,000 unionized clerical, technical, service, and maintenance personnel.

https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2002-2003_annual_f...

> 2021-p13(15) With 4,937 faculty, 1,428 postdoctoral associates, 5,066 managerial and professional staff, and 5,205 clerical, technical, service, and maintenance personnel

https://your.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2020-2021-yale-uni...

That would be nice, wouldn't it?

US community colleges (usually 2-year) tend to have low tuition and may offer flexible scheduling so you can pay as you go and/or work through school. Housing can still be expensive though.

US public universities may have lower fees for in-state students. UC Berkeley costs some $41K+ per year (including on-campus housing, food, etc.) for CA residents - not particularly affordable to begin with - but charges an extortionate $33K "nonresident tuition fee" on top of that for non-resident students (including any students under 24 whose parents live out of state.)

Almost none of that is true

2+2 plans are really, really questionable in my observation. Most students I know ended up doing either 2+3 or 3+3, which since as you pointed out CC are so, so, so much cheaper than university did save them money none the less. However, if you're going into a field that has any kind of improved earning potential from a degree, you have to look at the opportunity cost, taking into account the fact that if they had just gone straight to a 4 year they would have had an extra 1-2 years of making substantially higher wages than they could before they graduated.

If you have a kid who doesn't really know if they want to, say, be an engineer, then a 2+2 plan that they realize they aren't cut out for during the cheap years probably is a huge price save. But for the kid with the tools to succeed in school, a passion for a field that pays well, and the opportunity to get into a 4 year, they should absolutely just go for it off the bat.

The other problem with the 2+2 is that you're sacrificing 2 years of one of the biggest advantages of going to competitive universities: meeting other students who could get into competitive universities. I met most of my friends I made in college in the first 2 weeks, freshman year. It's probably the single easiest time in anyone's life to make new friends and acquaintances. And those friends, beyond being invaluable to me for social and romantic reasons, also have benefited me financially: one friend's dad got me an internship, which I was able to leverage into my first job. I got my second job by no small part thanks to the recommendation of another friend who already worked there. Looking back in time, the ROI on the bottle of vodka I brought to the dorm nextdoor move-in weekend is likely in the ~10,000,000% range.

Transfer students get a greatly diminished version of that opportunity. By their upper-division levels, most students are spending a lot more time on school work, and much less time randomly meeting their dorm-hall mates. It's still possible to meet people, and my high-school friends who did the transfer route did meet some people, but there's a much greater than 50% loss in networking opportunity.