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Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

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Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#751

Post by runarberg »

tekknik wrote: post #750
runarberg wrote: post #735

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t work like that. Lots of countries have free education, some even pay students in higher educations stipends (and some make you pay it back if you drop out without a degree, for better or for worse). Students are free to pursue whichever degree they want, and leave academia for whichever job they can get whenever they want. Think about free education like you think about universal income, except free educat…

Yea I don’t want to pay taxes for someone pursuing something worthless. You missed the point.

You probably already do. If you are American, you probably paid much more taxes to pursue a worthless invasion into Iraq and Afghanistan. If you live in a capitalist country, you are probably paying taxes to pursue worthless bailouts of corporations, or whatever infrastructure these corporations want the state to pay for them.

It is also a bit unfortunate that you view education that doesn’t lead directly to a career to be “worthless”. You learn a lot of skills when you get university education, including but not limited to knowledge about the field at hand. If you get education in one field and then go into industry in another area, you will take those skills with you, and the industry at whole will benefit from having a wider skillset among its workers.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#752

Post by pas »

cosmojg wrote: post #455
koube wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I generally see charts like this in relation to Baumol's cost disease, I'm surprised the linked article never mentions Baumol, but goes on to talk about government regulation and foreign competition. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect (See also section on education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect#Education ) Basically as scalable goods and services get cheaper, non-scalable goods and services bec…

Is that lack of scalability in hospital services and education completely inevitable due to the constraints of reality or is it mostly artificial? For example, would completely uncapping medical residencies increase the supply of doctors enough to significantly reduce the rate at which medical costs increase?

Hospital costs would benefit from some transparency/breakdown, but for medicine in general it's the increased complexity, more scans, more things to test for. But these tests are not cheap (nor fast enough). Manual labor is still required (to draw blood, to ship the vials, to put it into the test machine, to collect the results, upload it, review it, consult with the patient.

Then there's a lot more old people with a lot of complicated cases, which require a lot of person-hours.

And we still don't really have turnkey solutions. Sure, we have nice vaccines, but they are not 99.99%, there still are complications, there still are ridiculous inefficiencies (why do we still don't have combined yearly multivalent boosters for influenza+covid+others)?

Education also suffers from this overcomplication, but it's mostly because of credentialism. It's perfectly possible to watch lectures at home, complete coursework at home, and then go to some place fill out a test, and then do oral and practical exams. Grading can standardized (high-school exam is already done this way here in Hungary, there's a PDF booklet issued to teachers conducting the exam; and profs and TAs already do the same basically verbally).

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#753

Post by somewhat_drunk »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #341
somewhat_drunk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Price controls are one of the few things that economists on both sides of the political aisle agree do not work, and/or have unintended consequences which are worse than the problem they attempt to resolve. https://www.econlib.org/the-consensus-on-price-controls/

Sometimes it feels like economists come up with these ideas in an ivory tower, detached from reality. Any kind of price control seems to make economists very upset, rent control being another example. Reality is that there are so many other factors that it’s probably better to have some sort of price control as a form of regulation, instead of only focusing on supply/demand levers. I’m not an economist so I’m happy t…

If you as an armchair expert disagree with a broad consensus of actual experts - i.e. people who study something as a lifetime pursuit, your first thought should be that your knowledge is lacking, not that they are wrong. And if you find yourself seriously believing that they are wrong without first understanding how they are wrong, then that should be a strong indicator that your thinking is clouded by bias.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#754

Post by somewhat_drunk »

leshow wrote: post #518
pixelatedindex wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it feels like economists come up with these ideas in an ivory tower, detached from reality. Any kind of price control seems to make economists very upset, rent control being another example. Reality is that there are so many other factors that it’s probably better to have some sort of price control as a form of regulation, instead of only focusing on supply/demand levers. I’m not an economist so I’m happy t…

I'd wager econlib is cherry picking https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-library-of-economics-and-... Mainstream economists have thought very different things at different times. The current mainstream orthodoxy is largely free market fundamentalists that took over in the 80's. There are heterodox economists that disagree with this view. Practically, there are also many examples of price and rent controls and de-commod…

I'd wager they aren't.

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

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#755

Post by somewhat_drunk »

AngryData wrote: post #688
gottorf wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any kind of price control seems to make economists very upset, rent control being another example. They're probably upset the same way that climate scientists get upset when people dispute climate change; that is, it's a widely-studied phenomenon by economists of all political persuasions with lots of evidence to back it up. A price ceiling causes a shortage, like cars lining up at gas stations during the 70s oil c…

That is not a good comparison. Scientists that disagree with climate change are like a couple percent at max. Meanwhile nearly every economic topic, including price controls, would have double digits of economists disagreeing with it. Economics is not a hard science where you can take anything in absolutes.

Disagree. Climate science and economics are quite similar in this context, in that both an economy and a global environment are so massive and massively complex that neither can be isolated and studied in a controlled environment.

In such cases, when there does exist a consensus, it's probably correct.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#756

Post by skrtskrt »

tekknik wrote: post #748
skrtskrt wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: nevermind. Saw the rest of your comments it's all bad faith BS about how the affordable education = government coercion. But also, somehow you went to school for $5 a year. No. For 95k a year for a four-person household you certainly could not afford to send two children to universities that were $50-70k/year - which was the price of standard state universities at the time. Not without going into significant de…

Ah no, I never said it was affordable, that’s putting words in my mouth and you’re now bowing out because you found out you weren’t poor. Education isn’t affordable but I still think people should pay their loans, especially if their parents made $95k/yr Maybe start with what city you lived in yea?

I never said I was poor, that's putting words in my mouth.

I said I was mid-income (just below the median household income for our area at the time) and that it's the mid-income families that get saddled with tons of debt, and the idea that there's financial aid and scholarships to cover that gap in the middle income range is a fairy tail.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#757

Post by Shocka1 »

red-iron-pine wrote: post #721
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #641

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no labor shortage. There's only a wage shortage. Restaurants are a particularly egregious example, as someone with firsthand experience. Restaurants treat their employees like shit, work them to the bone, and then pay them as little as humanly possible. I got out and never looked back, because it turns out people are willing to shower you in cash if you can string together 3 lines of Python. Healthcare as a w…

> Healthcare as a whole baffles me. They pay well enough, sometimes, but they also just treat their employees like absolute crap. Would it really break the bank to hire 25% more staff instead of having your entire workforce getting paid overtime week after week? Them stocks gotta to up, mang. Take a look at the Fortune 500, and look at how many healthcare companies are publicly traded and in the top 100.

I think your point is valid and worth looking into - there are also many non profit hospitals in the same situation. That being said, I'm sure it's part of the equation, but I'm not 100% convinced everything can be blamed on Wall St with this one.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#758

Post by Slava_Propanei »

Auracle wrote: post #726
tekknik wrote: post #710

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason student loans aren’t dischargeable in bankruptcy is because it’s basically literally impossible to collect on them, you can’t repo a college education You can revoke the degree. Given that most people out of school don’t remember most of school anyways this should be enough for most.

It’s not like employers would suddenly say, “oh, your degree was revoked? I guess that knowledge you acquired is gone and we can’t hire you.”

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Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#759

Post by Slava_Propanei »

runarberg wrote: post #751
tekknik wrote: post #750

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea I don’t want to pay taxes for someone pursuing something worthless. You missed the point.

You probably already do. If you are American, you probably paid much more taxes to pursue a worthless invasion into Iraq and Afghanistan. If you live in a capitalist country, you are probably paying taxes to pursue worthless bailouts of corporations, or whatever infrastructure these corporations want the state to pay for them. It is also a bit unfortunate that you view education that doesn’t lead directly to a career…

[dead]

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#760

Post by leshow »

somewhat_drunk wrote: post #754
leshow wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd wager econlib is cherry picking https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-library-of-economics-and-... Mainstream economists have thought very different things at different times. The current mainstream orthodoxy is largely free market fundamentalists that took over in the 80's. There are heterodox economists that disagree with this view. Practically, there are also many examples of price and rent controls and de-commod…

I'd wager they aren't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_controls

If you actually read the rest of my comment, I acknowledge mainstream (that is to say, neoclassical) economists don't like price controls, which is almost exactly what the wiki page says.
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