Fancy Dorms Aren’t the Main Reason Tuition Is Skyrocketing | Hacker News Reader

Fancy Dorms Aren’t the Main Reason Tuition Is Skyrocketing

fivethirtyeight.com

75 pointscurtis112 comments

This has been studied in other places. It appears to have a lot more to do with the subsidy of student loans: http://www.nber.org/papers/w21967

I.e., more dollars chasing the same amount of education. A bit more explanation here: https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost...

I have a hard time believing this. I teach at a community college in Minnesota. Our state funding per student has been halved in the last 20 years. Salaries are not exorbitant. We went almost 5 years without a pay raise. We aren't frivolously spending money. We raise tuition because the bills have to be paid. The money isn't coming from the state. There's really only one way to raise the needed money and that is tuition increases.

I wonder how it can be determined that tuition wouldn't have increased as much as it has in the absence of eussidized loans. Would salaries be even lower than what they are? Would administration not have increased as much?

Have you considered that state funding has been lowered due to the fact that federal loans to students have increased?

We aren't frivolously spending money. We raise tuition because the bills have to be paid.

The ballooning of the 'administration' staff at my wife's university over the last 20 or so years is the same type of staff explosion seen at larger public companies. Except that those companies are responsible to share holders, and thus constrict when profits cannot be maintained. Whereas the University can forgo layoffs by increasing tuition, and know that the federal (and private) loan system will fill the gap. I cannot remember there ever being even a 2% layoff of staff at the university, let alone something you'd see from MS/IBM/etc.

Universities do it more softly. They don't lay off tenured faculty, but they do fill more open positions with adjuncts and grad students rather than tenure-track professors.

I think you have cause/effect backwards. Funding per student decreases because it's easy for politicians to say we increased funding by x% without mentioning that the number of credit hours has increased by (x+y)%. The politicians can then claim that universities are being wasteful and bloated because despite increases in funding tuition is going up.

it's not just one thing. here's like 5 different factors that all result in tuition increases

1. state budgets for universities are cut for political reasons not having much of anything to do with the university itself. budget shortfalls must be made up from other sources, primarily from tuition increases.

2. increased student enrollment due to increasing economic and social pressure for people to get a college degree. more students requires more facilities and more staff, which requires more funding.

3. natural aging of physical plant of university facilities, combined with other long-term maintenance costs (pensions, for example) that have historically been underfunded and now need more funding.

4. a price spiral relationship between availability of student lending and tuition costs. tuition costs increase so student lending amounts increase so tuition costs increase etc.

5. real actual greed. this isn't universally true but it can't be dismissed. some universities will just raise tuition simply because they can.

State support of Colleges GOES DOWN per student as the number of students increase..the actual number to watch is the increases in enrollment...

Increasing Fed subsidies tends to de-fund Colleges at the State budget level..its very counter-in-thinking as the more Fed subsidies the greater the student enrollments..

Thus if the Fed decreases student subsidies student enrollments will decrease and thus serve to reverse de-funding colleges at the State level..

ITS NOT ANY INDIVIDUAL BUDGET ITEM FOLKS..that is an illusion

I attended both state school and community college. The federal money available to me while attending both places was considerably different, e.g. while I was at state school easily double the money was available.

> community college

Community colleges are not representative of bigger colleges. They aren't supported as much (as you say), and tuition is drastically cheaper.

State funding decreases (or lack of necessary increases) are easy for legislators to justify, because the students can just get loans.

This was pretty obvious over the past 10 years in the University of California system -- every time state funding was cut or tuition was raised, the availability of financial aid, including loans, was used to defend the decision.

A lot of the bloat in the 4 year colleges comes specifically from administrative bloat on the dorms and student-life side. Not so much the luxury dorms, though they are a problem, but the sheer number of deans and vice deans getting hired.

At a community college, you won't see any of this.

How much of it is due to things like the Health Insurance costs skyrocketing at a rate considerably faster than inflation? Or pension liabilities becoming a burden as more of the older staff retire? These kinds of insidious costs can really eat out the foundation of any business, even when they previously weren't a big deal (when the workforce was young and healthy).

In my experience working at a community college 20-25 years ago, no one got a pension, so no long-term liability. This may be different at universities.

Salaries are not exorbitant. We went almost 5 years without a pay raise.

How many qualified people - currently working as PTLs or postdocs - would happily take your place for 10% less money? [1]

If the answer is 10+ (from what I recall of the academic job market, that seems accurate within STEM, outside of STEM it might be 100+) then you are frivolously spending money.

[1] Gerald Epstein elaborates on this argument, though he of course applies it to finance rather than education. https://promarket.org/rents-high-cost-high-finance-qa-gerald...

It depends on your philosophy of morality and what constitutes frivolity. If one considers lowest cost the end all and be all then perhaps my college system is being frivolous. Fortunately there are enough people who do not have such a crude view.

Certain cocoa farms in Africa have decided to do away with frivolous salaries by using slave labor. I am certainly not a slave but the point ought to be clear nonetheless. That we can find someone willing to do a job for x% less is not evidence that the current wage us frivolous. Woe would be the lives of most of humanity if your view were widely accepted. We don't need a race to the bottom in this area.

By "frivolity", I mean spending which is not necessary to provide satisfactory service. Bringing up slavery is a bit confusing. Why not just bring up Hitler?

I understand that you want to keep collecting your paycheck while the next guy on the totem pole makes $12,000/year as a PTL. Similarly, the Donald wants to build a giant wall of ice guarded by rapers, bastards, criminals and political exhiles to prevent unskilled white men from losing their rents (while keeping the Mexicans in poverty).

I guess that in my morality, rent seekers are evil and Trump is a bad person for appealing to them. You seem to disagree.

I don't know what PTL is. In my system adjuncts (there are no postdocs) are paid pro-rata wages. That is, on a per credit basis, they are paid the same as me. They also get pro-rata insurance and retirement benefits.

I'm sure there are qualified people who would do my job for less. And there will likely be qualified people who would do the job less than my replacement. Eventually we can find a local minimum. Great. We saved a buck or two. There are costs (non-financial) to society for creating a system in which the race to the bottom is the norm. I do not wish to live in a such a society. If conditions are bad enough you'll find someone willing to work for less. But this incentivizes creating a situation in which times are tough for most people. I do not wish to live in such a society.

Considering my salary to be frivolous because a local min on my wage has not been achieved is not in line with how most people use the term as it relates to wages.

I didn't bring up Hitler because it wasn't relevant. Slavery is given your apparent view that anything greater than the local min for wages is a frivolous expenditure. It does not require much thought to see that the pursuit of the local min for wages can, and does, lead to slavery in some cases.

When I was in academia (or perhaps just at the universities I attended) PTL referred to "part time lecturer" - it's the same as adjunct, I think.

I'm sure there are qualified people who would do my job for less...Eventually we can find a local minimum. Great. We saved a buck or two.

More students can now attend college (since costs are lower) and those that do have less debt. But I guess that's less important than keeping the rents flowing to yourself.

Trump 2016! Yeaaah! Don't want no Mexicans to take our jorbs!

But this incentivizes creating a situation in which times are tough for most people.

This is exactly the situation we have in the software industry. What does "times are tough" mean to you? People with six figure salaries and indoor jobs forced to endure the indignities of a 20 minute standup?

...the pursuit of the local min for wages can, and does, lead to slavery in some cases.

By "slavery", do you refer to the normal definition (namely people involuntarily working under threat of violence)? Or do you have some less common definition?

The rent is not flowing to myself. Universal education is the way to go. My dad fought in WW2. He got to go to college for free (mostly free) because of the GI Bill. Younger siblings didn't. They were poor. He ended up much better off than the younger siblings. It's called the greatest generation but the only reason I can see for th8s is because they had the greatest opportunities presented to them.

His professors weren't rent seekers and they got paid better than me. See it's possible to live in a system in which people make a reasonable wage without being rent seekers or others getting screwed. I'm using rent seeker in the pejorative sense that term denotes in colloquial speech. It's not a zero sum game. Society was better for the GI Bill. Even those who didn't directly use it. My uncles, while not being as well off as my dad, were better off overall. They got out of poverty as the economy got better.

We had a system in which college didn't put people in penury, didn't keep rents flowing to teachers, and was an overall benefit to dociety.

I grew up in Panama. During Noriega times were tough. People did things for far less than they normally would have. After all, the value of a glass of water to someone dying of thirst is far greater than it is to me in my present condition. There's a point where the race to the bottom becomes dehumanizing. There's more than maximizing/minimizing dollars. I feel sorry for people who can't see that. I've never met you personally but from posts I've seen of yours you appear to be a libertarian with a reverence to market forces. In a world of 7 billion people I think most libertarian ideas don't scale well.

I used slavery in the normal sense of the word. Think hard enough and you'll see that man in desperation can volunteer to be indentured but when the situation isn't so bleak he will try to leave. Of course his desire to increase his wages may lead to a violent response from the employer. Especially if the practice has become normative.

Of course rent is flowing to you. You are capturing $rent = $your_salary - $market_salary. On many past occasions I've also captured rents; I've captured wages that are higher than they would be absent Trumpian forces that protected me from economic competition by folks born outside the US.

Perhaps you think that rent is good, but that's a different statement. I'm sure that most Trump supporters also feel they deserve rents at the expense of Mexicans/those who might otherwise employ Mexicans.

I'm not sure what "colloquial speech" you refer to or what you mean by "pejorative sense". As far as I know "rent seeker" is a technical term used primarily by economists to refer to people who take actions to seek/preserve their rent. If you feel it's pejorative, that's only because on some level you recognize that harming others for personal gain is not a good thing.

Clearly you are being deliberately obtuse. It is quite hard to believe you don't understand colloquial speech as it pertains to the phrase "rent seeking". You missed, entirely, the point I made. I can't imagine this is anything but deliberate on your part.

I'd never heard the term rent-seeking until I started reading HN and learned it was a term used by economists.

while keeping the Mexicans in poverty

How would an American wall keep Mexicans in poverty?

Mexicans are free to create wealth themselves or by trading with the entire remaining world. They could even still sell to the US or work for US companies, just without moving there.

If Trump was going to cordon Mexico off, there would be something to that argument. But they have access to two oceans.

Very simple: the Wall prevents some Mexicans from working for willing employers who would pay them a wage above the poverty level.

I'm not claiming that Mexico is a middle income country solely because of US immigration restrictions - far from it. Pointing out their trade opportunities would be a valid counterpoint to that claim. I think most of Mexico's economic problems are entirely self inflicted (same as for the US, Venezuela, or most other countries).

The Wall doesn't even prevent Mexicans from working for a US employer. Any willing employer can invest in Mexico.

And if Mexico's economic problems are self-inflicted then it makes perfect sense not to invite people who inflict such problems.

From what I can tell, the vast majority of harms that Mexicans inflict is done at the ballot box rather than the workplace.

Note that I never advocated allowing Mexicans to vote; on the contrary, I'd like to disenfranchise bad American voters rather than enfranchising bad Mexican ones.

Among many ideas for improving democracy, disenfranchisement is probably the one most often tried and history clearly shows that it's unmaintainable. Sooner or later it always gives in and nearly everyone gets to vote. In modern US it will be sooner.

There's simply no realistic path where people move into a large, modern European* country and remain second class residents with limited influence over the government. This state won't last a single generation.

* USA included by heritage if not by geography

> This state won't last a single generation.

Well yeah, of course their kids would get to vote.

Salaries are not exorbitant.

Given that this is a global audience, and that even within the US the salary disparity across regions and industries is tremendous, could you be more specific than "not exorbitant"? My guess, from having a parent who taught at a likely even lower paying institution in rural Wisconsin, is that real numbers would make your case better than a euphemism to which people will attach their own expectations.

It is absolutely this.

When an 18-year old can take on tens of thousands in loans with mostly no strings attached (well, no bankruptcy) so that they can attend a big college which is little more than a summer camp with some classes thrown in, you've got a problem.

I'm a phd student at a state school. As a graduate student I am allowed to take on up to 240k(!). I love learning and I enjoy school, but anyone who has been in academia for any length of time at all and doesn't realize it's largely a scam with good intentions which is designed to pass money around baffles me.

Any education reform that doesn't cut back on loans and rethink how we do it is broken. The amount of money that gets poured into my school combined with the incompetence I've seen at so many levels is astounding.

The education system in America is largely broken. Many high schools are worthless because it's expected everyone's going to go to college and take remedial classes in order to get a piece of paper which they probably won't use for their job and they'll spend the rest of their 20s and 30s paying off.

"no strings attached (well, no bankruptcy)"

Yeah, because it's worse than bankruptcy. You can't even get rid of the student loan debt if you go bankrupt. I'd say that's a bigger string attached than any other type of loan available. This is the ultimate string of death and why we're in this crisis right now!

The no bankruptcy thing still boggles my mind. Schooling is far from a sure return, so cutting out the final safety net seems just plain insane.

I mean these are people who largely aren't qualified for the debt otherwise having either no job or a low paying job and little credit history and are given the money on the promise that their degree will get them a career when they graduate, even thought that's far from a guarantee.

It's the kind of outrageous overreach some fat cat banker would put in the contract to reduce his liabilities but then the person in the government who's job is protecting the general public was asleep at the wheel and failed to have it struck from the contract. Did the clause pass because the kids don't put up any collateral? The college loan business is so screwed up.

The problem is that the fat cat banker is the federal government in this case. They write the rules, they make the profits. And they do not give a shit about students, the economy, or anyone else because the government is a separate entity. By the people, for the people is just a nice saying but not one that exists in reality.

The paper even admits that it probably exaggerates the effects of grants and loans since their model doesn't incorporate private and public schools with different funding characteristics or competition[1].

[1]: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13711.pdf

100%, and we have seen it in other areas. Remember the housing bubble caused by anyone and everyone being able to get loans for insane amounts of money that could never be paid back? Same thing.

When lots of money is loaned out with artificially low rates (because they are not able to be discharged and are backed by the gov.) this is exactly what happens.

Generally, anytime the federal government aims the money fire hose at something the price goes up. You remove the cost of a thing from the thing and demand naturally increases.

See it everywhere from student loans to housing to health insurance. When people don't feel the cost of something, they have no reason to say no to a price increase.

When state and federal governments provided more funding, tuition was lower. When they cut funding, tuition increased.

That's false. The Federal Government has massively increased its funding via guaranteed loans. What changed is how the government is doing the funding: now the Feds are printing huge profits - more than Wells Fargo and JP Morgan's annual profits combined - via the interest. The net result is a very large increase in the amount of dollars flowing toward universities over the last 15 years courtesy of the Federal Government's guarantees. Further, the Federal Government increasingly owns most of the student loans that exist.

Federal funding didn't decrease, the nature of the money being made available shifted into a very easy to get loan that the Feds now make money off of. Not only do they print huge profits on it, they also ensure the laws remain such that you can't discharge the debt, to their own benefit. This has helped replace the red ink that Social Security is now generating, as previously the Feds were stealing from SS funding instead of actually safe-guarding the inbound revenue flows. Now they can't steal from the positive SS flows, so they had to come up with a 'revenue replacement' - what better way than to hitch young workers to massive debt they can't get rid of, yielding a perpetual interest bonanza for Federal spending. It will generate over half a trillion dollars in interest for the Feds in the next ten years.

Federal funding generally comes in the form of grants and lending, not budget disbursement. So the states making budget cuts to schools (which may or may not be politically justified by increased lending and grants) is not the federal government changing the mechanism for funding schools.

This is one of those things that gets tricky because of the number of factors involved. I've watched this debate at my alma mater for a decade or so and its boiled down to this:

As state funding decreased, lottery scholarship funding increased almost in parallel.

As lottery scholarships increased, tuition increased.

Administrative costs skyrocketed.

Lastly and most importantly though, when people in high school take out student loans they have no concept of what debt repayment looks like or feels like. They have no idea what taxes coming out of your paycheck looks like in terms of cash flow. They have no concept of housing costs in that cash flow. Job loss or gaining employment is not factored in and what THAT does to cash flow and debt payments.

When students graduate all they know is that they got into school X and they need to pay for it.

The one true check on prices going up despite ALL other factors is the number of people who will say "not for that price" which thanks to student loans is virtually nonexistent because even if you say that somebody else will just slide into your spot.

Pure supply and demand. If cost is not a check on demand, cost will increase.

The fact that Colorado cut per student spending by $7.8k and tuition went up by $7.7k is pretty convincing. Complex economic models that make unsupported assumptions about the cause and effect of increased availability of loans, much less so.

I suppose we could also add sports to the reason of rising student tuition. Students are paying more for education to pay the salaries of sport staff and the other supporting costs.

http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/ncaa/sports-at-any-cost

When Football coaches earn more than any of the other faculty there is a serious problem.

My sons high school and every other high school in my county has spent more on sports facilities than on any other aspect of education. Football stadiums, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, several football fields, a parking lot the size of a football field for band marching practice, At least 3 massive indoor gyms, wight rooms. Everything is watered and manicured all year around and I would say about 30 - 40 % of the schools students actually use these facilities.

I wonder why my property taxes are 14k a year.

This just carries on to post secondary education but instead of property taxes it's student tuition that is paying for it.

Like this list of Highest Paid Employee by State.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/the-highes...

(A slide show of uni coaches.)

A pet peeve of mine is when an article displays data to bolster an argument but then cites the source to something extraordinarily large and generic (e.g. "SOURCE: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION") which makes actually finding the primary data nearly impossible.

Missing from the title: ...at public schools. Which, if you've been following the amount of funding cut from state schools at all, hopefully isn't too surprising.

Agreed, after the Great Recession state funding to universities (and K-12, colleges) dropped dramatically. Arizona leads the way with almost a -50% drop in funding, of course tuition goes up by almost 90% [1]. The article has this data from 2000-2014 but most of the damage was 2008-present.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/pf/college/public-university...

Aren't they able to cut funding like that, because there's a willing supplier of loan money for the students?

Tuition is rising at San Jose State to: get us "great partnership deals" on new equipment like expensive teleconference TVs or smartboards that are rarely used.

I have had CS professors who struggle to get their computers on the projector because of old worn-out bulbs while math professors get rooms with smartboards they don't even use, and similar.

Tuition rises because of bogus costs and needs that aren't needs at all or because of overspending on poorly used/misused equipment that is sorely mismanaged.

I could ramble on and on about problems I've seen first-hand, but rising tuition is a serious issue not only because of costs being higher but also because schools are just plain casually misusing/abusing the money in the first place, some even carelessly.

For any endeavor, including education, if we shift the source of funding from democratic government to private individuals, then those needing funding will shift their focus from pleasing the public to pleasing wealthy parties.

For example, there was a new park being designed in NY. Lacking traditional public funding, they sought private funding. As a result, instead of a design that serves the public, the park is designed according to the desires of a wealthy donor.[0] In higher education, instead of making progress and giving more and more people a better education, as prior generations did, we are going the wrong way (AFAIK). I believe it's fundamentally undemocratic, which is an American ideal much more than small government, which is a partisan ideology.

To me, the adherence to ideology (in this case, smaller government) over practical good results (educating people and opportunity), always is a terrible idea and can lead to dangerous results.

The free market allocates goods to those willing and able to pay most for them. That's efficient for many things such as soda and cars, but undesirable for basic human needs and societal goods such as education and healthcare, which we don't want to deny to people because they are poor. Funding by the public (via taxes) is a good solution for some things.

[0] That was the story as I read it maybe 1-2 years ago; it's possible the situation changed since then.

EDIT: added sentence, reworded another

I don't see how your comment is relevant to the topic. This isn't a public vs private debate. If anything it's a debate between federal loans and state appropriations, or an issue of administrative mismanagement.

There is another kind of ideology, however, which may be at play here: an automatic reaction to pour public money on problems. Public institutions can be irrational actors that cator to narrow interests just as private ones can. The public sector needs to be regulated as well, and it largely is not.

> This isn't a public vs private debate

We might be referring to different forms of "private". The article says that as public funding was pulled back, tuition was increased to fill the gap. Tuition is private funding, though by many (mostly) wealthy people rather than a few uber-wealthy. With funding coming from that private source, wealthy customers, educational institutions need to focus on pleasing them and invest in fancy amenities rather than educational resources.

> The public sector needs to be regulated as well, and it largely is not.

It is regulated by voters and their representatives - very imperfectly, and we should improve it and not be satisfied, but I've yet to find a large human endeavor for which that wasn't the case.

> There is another kind of ideology, however, which may be at play here: an automatic reaction to pour public money on problems

Given the radical cuts in government budgets on the federal and local level, I don't see that approach having much influence currently so I'm not worried about it. Also, spending public money is a strategy, not an ideology. Democratic socialism is an ideology, and I do dread dogmatic ideologues of all stripes, but that one also isn't a threat right now.

You can also see this in aspects of the university that are supported by research funds instead of tuition. States slashed their support under the assumption that the Federal government would pick up the tab with faculty writing more grants.

That site managed a breakthough in bad behavior with tracking blocked. The page turns black every five seconds, then reloads.

In 2004 or so, right after I started college, the state of Texas repealed their laws that capped tuition at public universities at a very low amount. After that, tuition at my university, UT Dallas, utterly skyrocketed. It rose far more than the other public universities: we very quickly became one of the most expensive public universities in the state, possibly the most expensive, and on par with private universities.

I was insulated from that because I had a scholarship, but if I didn't, I might have had to drop out.

So, if the article is to be believed, the tuition costs were already high, but hidden by financing them through taxes, and now they are coming out for all to see by explicitly stating them as tuition costs and putting them on those who consumes the service instead of distributing them between all taxpayers.

If so, then despite the obvious negative impact on students, I think by itself such restructuring is a good thing - if the costs are hidden, they'd never be discussed and evaluated and subjected to both public and market scrutiny. If nobody knows how much tuition really costs, it's virtually impossible to have meaningful discussion about it. If the public thinks tuition should be subsidized, these subsidies should be out there in the open, so the public knows how much it costs per student, and experiences it openly, not has to dig it up from the piles of budget allocations.

One question, though, is if it was state financing drop that causes tuition to raise in public schools, wouldn't that effect be much less in private schools? So far I don't think the data confirms this.

It's worth asking what drove the states to cut aid. Some states have certainly had lower tax revenues than expected. But some states (probably) felt safe moving the funding problem onto loans and/or sources such as lottery proceeds.

Illinois it's been a pension time bomb building for 30 years. "Luxuries" like higher education are way down the line from legally mandated payments to retires teachers and policemen

Is Illinois one of the states that's made a habit of raiding their pension programs over the decades, promising to pay back in later[1], and now later has come?

[1] (although they never mention the interest that would have accrued if the principal hadn't been stolen...)

It's more like Illinois pensions are second to the Ten Commandments in terms of universal truths that must not be questioned under any circumstances.

It's one thing to make a promise and intend to keep it. It's another thing to stick to the promise until it's beyond the realm of possibility to fix it, and a lot of people end up getting hurt.

I do not know it super deep, but I feel like it was more a gradual thing.

"Well the models predict we need to pay 5 billion into it this year, but the law says we only need to pay in 2 billion, so we will just pay in the 2 billion and deal with the shortfall later"

And then repeat that 20 times.

I don't THINK it was ever raided per say.

Certainly part of it is the ideological belief in reducing the size of government, and one party's dogmatic adherence to never increasing any tax, only reducing them. We get what we pay for.

As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the degree with which we have allowed it to become the universal gatekeeper of professional careers.

I think college is a great experience, and I do hope for a day where everyone can experience higher education in their life, but the basic mechanisms of college are NOT necessary to work in a professional field. It is only our culture that prevents it from happening.

The nucleus of this problem is our obsession with pedigree. We want everything to be awesome and perfect and follow a neat little narrative where we all end up rich and famous and successful because we attended the right schools and worked with other people who attended the right schools. But life is never that clear cut, and this narrative ignores the reality that most of your ability to do a job is learned on that job. I didn't know a lick of ColdFusion or even more than a few lines of JavaScript when I graduated college, and within just a few months I could handle anything my employer threw at me.

A good amount of that success was because of my education, but most of it was because they were willing to take on the risk of someone that had to learn and grow, instead of insisting on a ColdFusion expert that could have done everything from day one.

College is great, but it's not for everyone. My GI Bill-aided grandfather didn't need the college he dropped out of to teach him how to run a successful restaurant and support a family. And most of us understand that a lot of what we get tested on from the age of 5 is bullshit.

The way forward is not fixing education, it's fixing employment. We need employers willing to take risks with people who aren't perfect by default. To do this we need to encourage and maybe even subsidize paid apprenticeships. Real, paid work experience is better than any welfare or job retraining or $80k degree. It shows what you are worth and what you are capable of doing.

As Ronald Reagan said, on one of the few occasions that he actually managed to make a damn good point:

"The best social program is a job."

> As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the degree with which we have allowed it to become the universal gatekeeper of professional careers.

Blame Griggs vs. Duke Power Company[1], which is the reason employers are afraid to use proficiency tests in hiring (and hence are forced to rely on proxies like an applicant possessing a four-year degree).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.

Interesting, didn't know about this case. Not sure how a degree would be any less discriminatory given the makeup of college graduates, and if I can cite this case the next time I'm asked to whiteboard FizzBuzz, but either way, I still believe it would be better than a purely educational focus to instead subsidize apprenticeships so that employers see if someone is simply incompetent for lacking the right skills or if they have a lot of potential and are worth investing in.

The analysis here is pretty insipid. If primary sources of funding get cut, and your reaction is to go out on a capital projects spree, what do you expect to happen?

I went to a big state school where most classrooms weren't painted since 1969. Now there's a 50" tv ok every flat surface and, the dorms are very fancy, and the mystery meat and hamburger vending machine has been replaced with better food and 24x7 cafeterias.

Guess what? This shit costs more.

This article fails to mention the exploding student population size.

Over time the per-student funding from states has gone down significantly. But that doesn't mean the state slashed funding for higher education! For University of Washington the budget from the state is almost entirely flat. Up about 3%.

Student Size: +100% State Tax Revenue: +40% State Higher Education Funding: +15%

What would you consider the "dominant factor" here? It's several factors. But I would not consider, and I quote, "a steady decrease in support for higher education on the part of state legislatures" to be the dominant factor. In fact, that statement is flat out wrong. The state legislature hasn't decreased support at all. They're providing more support than they were! The state, and the state's coffers, have no way to keep up with the growing number of students.

http://f2.washington.edu/fm/financial-report-archive

(I did a little digging last night specific to the University of Washington. Numbers from memory and a little fuzzy. But within the ballpark.)

It depends on how you look at it. There has been a decrease in funding per student.

But it is presented as a state government action to cut funds, when the actual events were that action was to increase funds but not enough to catch up with increasing student numbers. Given that student numbers are not under control of the state government, describing it as a state action to cut funds in misleading.

It is misleading in the same way as to say that the company substantially raised the average salary of employees when in fact what happened is that CEO salary was doubled. Technically yes, that means average salary has increased too. But such statement omits important details that make it misleading.

Oh, see what you're saying now. You're right. It has been "slanted" as a funding "cut".

That said, I think you'd agree that the government has failed to fund the education of its citizens to the level it used to. I got my college education when it was "cheap" so if I was selfish [OK, more selfish than I am] I would be inclined to go with the "I got mine, tough for you. I had to walk uphill both ways to school, blah, blah. Thanks for paying for my retirement."

why doesn't tax revenue rise at the same pace as student population?

50 years ago 10% of kids went to college.

Now it's 50%.

That is just a change in participant behavior. No reason tax revenue would go up 5x without some big hikes.

We aren't just taking a 5% increase because people had more kids (which as you said, should be dealt with by natural tax increases)

Let's consider the distributional effects of giving college aid to 10% of the population vs. 50%. If the 10% were people who would not have otherwise gone to college, it looks like a good move to create income mobility and increase economic growth which will ultimately create more even tax revenue. If the 10% would have gone to college anyway and taken loans (and easily paid them back with their top 10% earnings), the aid starts to looks regressive instead. But when we are talking about 50% of the population, things seem different.

So is college a basic right of society?

I think it makes people as a whole make better choices. If we could get 100% of people to go to college (or even 90% or 70%), I don't think we would be worse off as a nation... but obviously it needs to be free or near free, not burdening everyone with 10 billion dollars in debt.

It seems like the high spending per student is a bigger issue than who is paying. If 100% of people go to college, a massive amount of money will be spent on college at current US rates (20 million people aged 20-23 * $20,000/year = $400 billion/year as an estimate). I'm not against income redistribution at all, I'm a big fan of it. I don't mind if the government takes half my Bay Area engineer salary. It would just make rents lower and I will end up with the same quality of life. However, I care about the ROI of that redistribution. If the government takes $100,000 from me I would much rather it pay for college for ten people than five people. But if college only cost $10,000/year total [0], the debt incurred by the student's contributions would be more manageable. And the $100,000 could go toward building a subway or something.

[0] the US spends twice as much per student on average (including all sources of funding, government and tuition). http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

Nate Silver totally fails to note the enormous financial transfer from professors (all new professors are cheap adjuncts) to administrators. I know adjunct professors that are on food stamps. Academia is a hellhole and college administrators should be ashamed.

Often the administrators are former or current faculty themselves. I've seen a professor hold a position as head of the university technology department(a non-academic support role) and teach classes. VPs, Deans, department heads, leaders of various "Centers of Excellence", leaders of various initiatives, Provosts, and even Presidents can be former faculty.

The former professors just view their role as administrator as another step up the academic ladder. There's even a website poking fun at university titles:

http://universitytitlegenerator.com/

This article is largely on point, but I get the feeling they are playing games with Tuition v. Total cost. At my state university Tuition is separate from dorm costs, so fancy dorms effect loan amounts but not "tuition".

What's the enrollment change? Is this the same amount of money spread over more students?

One university decided to change signs on toilets. Single label costs $400, it has to be in brail and match various regulations.

I think education is ripe for disruption. We will see rise of bootcamps and online education. Also university in foreign country costs peanuts.

That's right, but the missing element would be a set of widely-respected testing firms. An "A" from the "Harvard of test companies" might be as impressive as attending Harvard itself, which would benefit autodidacts.

Harvard isn't Harvard because it's exceptionally hard to get an A. It's Harvard because it's exceptionally hard to get in.

I've heard Harvard and Harvard Extension are basically opposites. It's nearly impossible to get into Harvard, but you'll almost certainly graduate and will probably have a decent GPA. It's nearly impossible not to get into Harvard Extension but a large number of people fail out pretty quickly and spectacularly (I have no associated with either institution).

Which is hopefully motivation to move away from old models of academia, although I really don't think that's feasible in the near future. Elite schools are just as much about pre-selecting smart people for others' benefit as they are about teaching, and this effect stacks: you can get a great job largely because of a prestigious graduate degree, which was easier to get because of your prestigious undergraduate degree, which you got by being an overachiever in high school... until the person you were at 17, despite the clear differences with who you are today, becomes awfully important.

This may not be a comfortable statement, but it's no less true in the world we live in. It's as much signalling as anything else, and while you can overcome it with talent and hard work, it's going to take it.

Bootcamps in our industry are a fraud and I sure hope that such fraudulent activities aren't the answer to a classic college education.

And online courses don't work well, being effective only on adults that already have an education.

You can talk about disruption all you want, but there's no substitute for an old fashioned college education. And in many European countries this education is subsidised by the state.

Even in the US college would be affordable if you would cut the evil from its source and that would be college loans.

The web development consulting agency I work for has been hiring a good number of individuals who have been trained for development at a bootcamp. The demand for developers exceeds the supply and companies are willing to take on the burden of training.

> And online courses don't work well, being effective only on adults that already have an education.

Even in that case, I wouldn't put a coursera certificate on my resume. They are watered-down versions of good college courses and they're not really selective.

I'll proudly put my Coursera machine learning certificate on my resume next time I update it, right after my PhD and MEng. It shows I'm still seeking out ways to learn more and keep current. It would make a good impression on me if I was reviewing someone else's resume as well.

   effective only on adults that 
   already have an education.

Why is that a bad thing? It's already a sizable demographic, and one that self-selects for being interested in education.

I disagree with "self-selects for being interested in education". Most people learn by direct interaction with other people or their teacher, which is the problem of MOOCs. It would be more accurate to say that online education works for autodidacts.

And don't get me wrong, that still has a lot of value and I've enjoyed my online courses greatly. But it simply can't be a replacement for a classic college education, which was what we were talking about.

   Most people learn by direct interaction

I'll have to disagree here. I've been a university teacher for over a decade, and the number of students who interact with me is small. Most students don't actually interact with others all that much in learning. Neither did I as an undergraduate or pupil. I'm not saying that's a good thing, but that's a fact. Most learning is auto-didactic in some form or shape.

What universities offer is deadlines and penalities for missed deadlines. Those are anti-procrastionation scaffolds that most people (including myself) need for effective long-term learning. MOOCs mostly lack this, and that why MOOCs have not yet replaced conventional schools and universities.

Your comment makes an important point though: who will take care of people who are visually impaired or who need other accommodations?

The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.

I am kind of glad they spent that money to accommodate those students. Aren't you? That's not what is raising the cost of education.

EDIT: I did work on a mouse that provides haptic feedback including texture years ago, so I am aware that it is possible to provide braille like feedback over the web.

EDIT2: Many people have pointed out that MOOCs do add accessibility features. This is true, and good. I think the MOOCs are largely run by well meaning people.

Door labels in brail are useless. Just close your eyes and try it yourself. And even with brail it should cost under $40

Blind (or otherwise disabled) people should have an assistant to help them around.

Some MOOCs are already brail reader friendly. And online education in general has very little barriers.

> The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.

No, but they can (and do) add accessibility features.

> The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.

In general, putting content online makes learning more accessible. As a specific example, Khan Academy has done important work developing tools in this area: http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/tota11y.htm.

I see where you're coming from - many "dispuptive" services have (shamefully, in my opinion) resisted making their services accessible, but I don't think MOOCs really fall into that class.

I think MOOCs are run by well meaning people, but it also doesn't cost that much to make them accessible.

I suppose that is the point though: the market decides, as opposed to an entity deciding that it is in the public good.

Disclosure: I work for Uber, so I'm more than I little biased.

Tell me; How many blind or deaf people did you know who took a cab before Uber? I went to RIT, which hosts a school for the deaf, and while there wasn't really a call for cabs at the school, I knew a couple people who did co-ops in big cities and were frustrated by how hard it was to get around. When asked why they didn't take a cab, they explained how much of a pain it was to communicate with their drivers, even with the fairly advanced assistive devices (every student had a sidekick, at the time a very advanced phone, and could usually pass around notes using such). It was still too hard; the barrier of entry on the communication was too high, and taxi drivers were easily frustrated trying to communicate fares and routes to deaf students. I can't even imagine a blind person hailing a cab. How would they know where to hail? How would they know when it stopped in front of them?

Now, I see posts on the RIT subreddit from time to time from deaf students who've just taken an Uber. It's not a problem anymore. There's a distinct group of blind users of the uber app; It works, the interface is consistent, and I just tried it myself (it wasn't easy, but I called a cab, and I think it'd work decently with practice).

That's fair. I mentioned Uber because I remembered the criticism from the National Federation of the Blind [1]. However, it's tangential to my point, so I've edited my post to remove it.

[1] https://nfb.org/groundbreaking-settlement-end-discrimination...

No they are not - you don't need braille on the internet. Their biggest expense would be to subtitle all their videos, but that is going to be a one-time fixed cost, and help them with ESL students too.

I don't know much about it, but I was browsing Apple accessories the other day, and in the accessibility section, there is this amazing device[1]. As I understand it, somehow it takes the text on screen and raises tiny dots to make braille that can be re-written very quickly. I assume blind people knew about this, but I was stunned at how difficult I assumed it was to control the hundreds of dots on even a small display.

Similarly, MOOCs with good captions plus these kinds of devices probably works at least as well as being in a classroom.

[1] http://store.humanware.com/hus/brailliant-bi-40-new-generati...

I don't think you can simply apply technology to solve something that isn't a technical problem.

Is the cost related to regulatory compliance, or are they just being taken for a ride or failing to control costs? A brief search turns up ADA-compliant bathroom signs for under $20 each. It certainly doesn't seem like the sort of thing that should cost a ton.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/27/mizzou-renames-unisex-rest...

The longer I've been on here, the more I've come to see "Disruption" mean "I truly have no idea how complex and regulated and culturally cemented an industry is, but I work in software and my only limit is imagination."

No educational system will ever supplant higher education as we know it today, as we have known it for hundreds of years. The only discussion here is about the degree of tweaks. When you grow up in a family of university administrators and scientists and faculty, and then work for a university as professional staff, you realize how laughable most outsiders' naive perspectives are, from the idea that a proper university can be run like a business (ha), or that people will rationally select a college that gives them the best bang for their buck (haha), or that educational complements like boot camps and MOOCS will ever replace what higher education offers (hahahahaha).

While we're toiling away at our degrees, we often argue that it's just "a piece of paper." But that piece of paper matters. Unless you have a lot of paid work exprience, the inexperienced Ivy grad wins out to the mildly experienced community college grad almost every time. Yes, it's a shitty system but to change it you need to change global culture, maybe even human nature.

As far as boot camps go, they're a good idea but even if you pass one with flying colors and could make an iOS app with one hand and a Rails server with another, the perception is still that you're somehow less qualified than a college graduate. Again, it sucks, but a hiring manager is going to ask themselves whether they could get blamed more for hiring a college grad that turns out to suck at their job, or a boot camp graduate that turns out to suck at their job.

Honestly, if you really want to "disrupt" education, you're barking up the wrong tree. The best education is a good job. The best people to teach you how to do your job are the ones doing it with you. I firmly believe that the best way to provide good jobs and valuable skills is to heavily promote - and perhaps even subsidize - paid apprenticeships.

Nothing says "I am worth paying $X for this job" like a resume that says "I was paid $X for this job."

But I am talking about overhead. People should not pay 10x price, while being educated by temporary postdocs.

In that sense foreign universities are already disrupting US education with much lower overhead.

Take a 4 year bootcamp which operates in semesters, and you got something very similar to university.

The only kinds of Americans I have ever known to go to college outside of the US by choice are medical students because of, wait for it, the highly regulated short supply of continental medical schools, so they study in the Bahamas.

I don't know why you'd need any more than 1 semester at a boot camp to learn the basics or enough to work with a new programming language or framework.

Again, it's not about the education, it's about the willingness for someone to hire you and pay you money. So even if a boot camp that costs 1/10th of a college is subsidized so that tons of people join it, most employers will still see boot camp graduates as inferior to university graduates, because reasons, and because they want to avoid making the wrong hiring decision as much as they want to make the right one.

> Again, it's not about the education, it's about the willingness for someone to hire you and pay you money.

But this is not true. Employers are already not willing to pay university graduates 4x salary as they did a few decades ago. Correlation between university degree and skills is decreasing.

This already happened in post-communist countries, Germany etc.. 70% of people have university degree. Everyone is overqualified for 90% jobs, and you get PhDs who work as cashiers. In that environment nobody asks for education because it is waste of time (low correlation between degree and skills).

We had disruption. It was called ITT Technical Institute.

It wound up being an exploitative nightmare, and it eventually got shut down for it.

That's like saying all internet commerce is a fraud because you got an email from a Nigerian prince and fell for it. Of course there's fraud in education, just as anywhere else. That doesn't make every innovation in education space a fraud.

What fancy dorms? You'd pay like $200/month or less for such a place in most cities...

When I was applying to college in 2006, one of the big selling points at the University of Alabama was that the honors dorms had a lazy river.

I wonder if the "fancy" dorms are only a thing in non-city universities. It would make sense that building fancy, new dorms in a downtown area in a place like Boston or New York just wouldn't be worth it.

Universities get a property tax exemption that allows them to do things with land in downtown areas that wouldn't be economically rational for typical real estate investors.

I know... I went to a school with a sticker price over 50k+, and never lived in a dorm that was built after the stock market crash in '29.

Wondered where all the money went, until I realized that six-figure salaries for deans and sub-deans and senior administrators and grand poobahs of diversity studies for every imaginable slicing and dicing of the student population doesn't come cheap, nor does effectively running a jobs program for the entire 100 mile radius, vastly overstaffing custodial and food service workers at hourly rates two or three times market rate in the area.

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