After all, the reason people can't pay back their debts is 1) even state colleges are expensive, and 2) the job market doesn't reward degrees. It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues.
1 - There are an amazingly large number of well compensated overhead positions and offices compared to the 90s.
My alma mater, a large state university literally had to buy a 9 story office building to house administration.
2 - They spend money like water.
Example: The student internet network was run when I was there in 1996 by three telecom/network guys and a little army of student helpers who did installs and support for $4.25/hr. Now the costs are 25x, and the contractor has also built a small office building next door to house their people.
Example: Capital costs run amok. My alma mater has built a Tier-4 data center that is 15% occupied, a football stadium, a monumental second library that doesn't contain many books but does contain a lot of marble, a business school building, an art building, a bunch of extra dorms, and a gas fired power plant.
Example: New dorms are hotel like, with multiple fitness centers, TVs approximately every 10 linear feet, and associated parking structures.
The school I'm thinking about is doing well, but they've probably bonded nearly a half billion worth of capital projects alone that are not research funded. If you had 0% 30 year bonds that's over $1500 a student alone for 30 years assuming 10,000 students.
Drive around any town. The colleges and hospitals are wrapping up an orgy of construction in most places. The root causes are very similar
I'd say that we're getting less productivity gains out of degrees these days likely because a lot of people get a degree, then get a job that uses absolutely nothing they learned from that degree.
In that case, the degree is more or less worthless, and only proves to the employer that you can jump through the hoops. And between a known hoop-jumper and some random person, most companies would rather take the hoop-jumper.
sounds suspiciously like the advertising landscape, where it's a zero sum game. You pay $X to advertise to obtain Y% marketshare gain, but if your competitor also spends $X, it nullifies your Y% marketshare gain.
Replace the above with a college degree and job, and it seems the same.
In the case of raising the bar for a basic education across the board, at least in theory, we would expect to increase national/global GDP.
I'm not saying the increase in either case warrants the respective cost, but dismissing improvements in education on the grounds that life is just one big zero sum rat race seems overly simplistic.
I would not see many of the quality TV productions, because I don't have pay TV and I don't pirate. (Survivor etc).
Advertising spend paid for instant search, voice search, knowledge graph, Chrome and even Android.
On one hand, you really need to get a basic grasp of the fundamentals of a lot of areas. Even if you forget it, I like to think it's all in there somewhere, and would at least require less time to re-study it.
On the other hand, when you are actually working on a project, or at a job, typically you zoom in on one area of focus. For example, I have a Comp E degree from UIUC, and I had to take analog signal processing. Got a C, and never used it in my professional career.
But subjects that I have used, the course material was such a survey over the problems that it's only the very beginning of what you might need for the work. Therefore much study is required anyway on the job.
Then the practical experience, with test equipment, devices, best practices, isn't even usually taught in college.
If your best shot of getting a decent job requires you to first get a 40k piece of paper, many people will do this and they will put in the minimum amount of work to get what they want. I mean, it's efficient after all isn't it? Why work more for the same result?
When I started college in 2000, in-state tuition at my alma mater (a major state university) was $3,021 for 2 semesters. I just looked and it's now $10,968 for the same 2 semesters. In 17 years, tuition went up 263%. From what I can tell, inflation over the same period was 42%.
At this rate, I'm scared that I will literally never be able to save enough to put my daughter through college without taking out loans, assuming tuition continues this trend. Something has got to give.
Now I have two kids in elementary school, and I'm socking away $2k/month for college savings, wondering if that will be enough. I figure $80k/kid.
Oh, it does. The schools and banks have just positioned themselves to capture as much of the added value as they can - which might take away a lot of the financial upside, but the difference in unemployment rate is still quite significant.
I was expecting significant to mean more than 1.3 percentage points[1] over the entire population of the same age[2], especially given those who have certain difficulties will most likely never attend college, and will struggle in the workplace because of those difficulties (think mental disabilities as an example). Handing a degree on a silver platter to someone in that position isn't really going to help them.
Knowing that such people exist and need to be accounted for, while seeing how close the numbers really are, I'm even less convinced that the market rewards degrees than I was before I read these comments.
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000048
( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662 and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01327660 ) -- edited to fix links
More interesting would be to narrow our criteria down to ages 25-34 to see how the rise in postsecondary schooling has changed the employment landscape over time. My opinion is that the unemployment rate is on trend[1], and while participation is unfortunately skewed from the 60s to the 90s due to rising of women coming into the workplace, since the 1990s there is little change in participation despite rising rates of postsecondary attainment[2]. If the workplace valued college, shouldn't we see a more obvious change over time corresponding with rising rates of postsecondary attainment?
Facilities have also improved quite a bit at many schools.
Over the same period, the ratio of adjunct faculty to permanent faculty has also increased. Meanwhile, the permanent faculty are burdened with even more administrative duties (e.g., committees).
The administrators learned that they could eat high on the hog on the government's dime, and they have done so with a frightening degree of efficiency.
That's not true at all. When I was in school, I used the state's public employee salary lookup to checkout how much my professors made. Almost all of professors (all of the professors and associate professors, and several of the assistant professors) in my department were making more than 100k. In addition, I was in a low cost of living area compared to most of the US.
I looked outside of CS as well. Humanities departments weren't paying that much, but most 100k pretty normal in most of the hard science departments, and the business school professors were making even more than the CS department.
Sure the adjuncts and grad students weren't making anything, and there are too many of them.
Also no one has ever asked if I had a degree either, but that's because it was on my resume. Without a degree you're going to get screened out before you even talk to someone a lot of the time.
There are different strata of academic. The adjuncts make peanuts and are either people who are stuck with a vision of being in academia or outside professionals earning a buck.
Tenure track professors end up making good money, which imo is well deserved.
Now you also have this middle tier of professors who are wandering nomads on 2-3 year contracts. They have a professor title, make better money than adjuncts, but tend to get dropped at the end of the contract. My neighbors boarder is one of these folks -- she commutes about 200 miles from her home and stays in my town for 2-3 days. This is her third contract like this.
Professors get big grants? They get nice salaries.
This is easy its because the government increased the amount students are allowed to borrow. It's a 1:1 ratio
That is 8 full time employees plus space & equipment doing a BS job that should be handled by local police (who also happen to be overstaffed). Should a university really be blowing that much cash needlessly?
>It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues
Some believe the ready availability of government-backed loans is partly responsible for the dramatic tuition increases.
The data from 1920 through 1990 was only for every ten years, then it becomes yearly after, which is why the first part of the graph has more straight segments. Note the tuition axis is on a log scale.
Comparing Stanford tuition growth by decade to inflation, here is how much Stanford tuition every 10 years was above the inflation adjusted tuition from 10 years earlier:
1930: 183%
1940: 41%
1950: 13%
1960: 22%
1970: 85%
1980: 27%
1990: 39%
2000: 29%
2010: 23%
I'd like to see similar data for other schools.
It's not an easy task to reduce the cost of something... this is even more so when the government is the one doing it.
Kind of like how Canada uses this one simple trick to cut their health care expenses.
A great example of laws purposefully foot binding & hobbling organizations is USPS, who is not allowed to up the ante and offer any modern services, and has to severely overfund their pension obligations, to the point that they are funding pensions for people they haven't hired.