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Comment by mnm1 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. This is why I refuse to donate to my alma mater anymore. Tuition has nearly tripled in in fourteen years while they are still teaching the same number of students with roughly the same or fewer full time faculty. There's something seriously wrong with that and this is a huge symptom of it. Until they get their shit together, they need less money coming in, not more. This is supposed to be a nonprofit institution but clearly many people are making big money in this business at the expense of students. The federal loan programs certainly don't help either. Allowing student loans to be discharged in bankruptcy would also lessen this money feast for universities. Alas, no solution looks in sight so I do my part in keeping money away from these money furnaces.

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> donate to my alma mater

I've heard of people doing this but why would you ever have donated your money to someone you have already paid? I wouldn't donate to my pizza place, my doctor, or my barber. Why would a college be different?

I donate to my university, I do it to fund scholarships and programs that I benefited from when attending. I don't donate to the 'general fund'. Although the bulk of my donations to my alma mater go to cancer treatment center at the university medical center which relies on fundraising for research and other programs which I believe will benefit all. I would never donate to revamp a student union as I believe that should be paid for by the University.

Money is fungible. Every dollar donated to the medical center is a dollar freed up from the general fund (until the medical center is totally funded with earmarked donations, of course).

Donating to your Alma Matter signals that (1) you succeeded and (2) that your Alma Matter helped you succeed. Given enough donations, this boosts your own prestige.

Or, reverse this: if I go to a school and that school suddenly starts to suck, then I will be tainted with the school sucking.

Either way, it's a problem of credentialism.

My college did a lot of good for me, and the staff I interacted with seemed to be working below-market because they believed in what they were doing. It's a non-profit institution so I expect they would spend donations on something that they thought (rightly or wrongly) furthered education rather than just giving them to someone. And what I paid at the time was subsidised by previous donors and the government, at a time when I couldn't've afforded to pay much more; now that I've done well in life, in a way that seems at least partly off the back of that education, it seems fair to contribute something back.

Is tuition actually going up by that much? Most schools raise prices to raise scholarships to raise rankings, leaving revenue virtually flat.

There is a coordinated effort to temporarily exempt schools from antitrust rules so they can collectively coordinate a tuition drop, and stop the fake scholarship arms race.

Yes, tuition is actually going up by that much (20k vs 50k). Even inflation adjusted it's still almost double. Room and board has also almost tripled (5k vs 15k). At this rate, in fifteen years or so, I'd expect to pay 100k a year just in tuition or almost half a million per child. Luckily I have no kids, but if I do they're going to learn prefect German or other language that gets them free tuition in Europe. Fuck these prices. Even for a software engineer making good money, they are simply not achievable.

Where are you seeing tuition of $20k or $50k? Public universities in state are closer to $10k a year, even out of state isn't usually anywhere near $50k.

My alma mater, a northeast, private university ranked in the top 50. It was actually ranked higher when I was there and cost $20k. Now tuition alone is just shy of $50k.

Sounds familiar. I went to a highly ranked private college where tuition went from 35k in 2007, to about 50k only 4 years later, and now it's around 60k I believe. The professors were mostly excellent and well known in their fields, but at the same time many departments were understaffed while the university spent 42 million dollars on an "Institute for Global Citizenship" that ended up being mostly unused, though it is pretty:

https://img.apmcdn.org/c1675e4ec7a7aec84a32edbfe93999b018c70...

That may be true, but the average net price paid by Macalester students has been flat at $28k for the past three years. The increase in the nameplate cost is meaningless.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=macalester&s=all&id=...

I am surprised it's that low, but it's not meaningless if you're one of the ones paying full price. I / my parents paid the full amount of tuition all four years (minus 20,000$ or so for a national merit scholarship), in part because they had actually saved up.

There are private high schools that cost tens of thousands of dollars too. The OP was talking as if this was normal. The average student is going going to a state school and paying somewhere near $10k a year for tuition.

If you can't get a scholarship and it's not a top 10 school $50k per year probably isn't worth paying.

Most of the public schools around me are ~$10k a semester, not a year.

And then with 10-15k for overpriced student housing since most colleges make mandatory for Freshmen and sometimes even Sophomores. Then you might have to pay 1k a year to pay for a parking spot. 2-5k for cafeteria access. Add it all up and you've got 80k-100k(at 4%-9% interest) for four years at a state school. Its not impossible to get out from under but it represents a large delay, especially for degrees with low ROI

>most colleges

That's not even close to true.

Most public schools don't have residency requirements. The ones that do normally have waivers that are easy to get.

I've also never heard of a school with a residency requirement for sophomores.

Random googling turns up 87 colleges that have residency requirements[1]. So you're right that it isn't "most" but it is also not super rare. I'm just saying its a sneaky way for colleges to bump up costs. Most college students won't go through the work to get a waiver and will just go with the flow. Its like the difference between opt-in and opt-out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/freshman-resi...

The article you posted says that "the vast majority" of those 87 schools are private.

I said most public schools.

I don't really care about the cost of private schools just like I don't care about the cost of private boarding high schools.

Where are you? The average cost of tuition + fees for instate students is less than $10k per year.

Even the UC schools in California are close to that.

But does anyone but the scions of the 0.1% actually ever pay that $50k nameplate cost? For example, Brown University in Rhode Island has a nameplate cost of $49k. However, the average net cost paid by students there in 2016 was only $25k. Students with a family income under $75k paid an average of $12k. That nameplate number is just bogus, in most cases.

Source: https://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator/?q=brown&s=all&pg=3&id=...

Spaniard here. I pay around 750€ a year. If I can prove I don't make much money, not only I don't have to pay, they'll also pay part of (or the entirety of) my rent, food, etc.

100k a year is just, wow.

From my anecdotal perspective, at private institutions (especially the Ivy's) your statement seems accurate. For public universities tuitions have been skyrocketing without any increase in scholarship funding. In fact my school recently cut funding to merit-based scholarships because they no longer have the money from the state to offer them.

Sadly, big donors, the ones who can give multimillion dollar gifts, aren't really helping. They're prone to ego-driven gifts of big monuments to themselves rather than funding scholarships or research.

I do agree that admin costs are too high. However I think most of the tuition growth is due to decreases in state and federal funding.

That's true for state schools, where subsidies have been cut almost universally.

Look at any state university org chart from 30 years ago compared to today. The difference will be striking. Yes state subsidies are down, but administrative growth has also been accelerating.

This is a private school so I'm not sure how much that applies. I haven't been able to find any figures on this, however, so I suppose it's possible.

When student loans were able to be discharged in bankruptcy, it was popular to declare bankruptcy on graduation. By the time they saved up enough for a down payment on a house, the bankruptcy will have fallen off the records, so effectively they got a free education (not the ideal mechanism for doing so, better to give people free education upfront).

Maybe there is a middle ground where student debt is not easily discharged, but can be in some cases (eg: graduated 10-20yrs ago, could never find a steady job).

Ideally we as a country should decide to make trade schools/college free (or at least give people $10k/yr towards tuition). This would not be a huge increase the in budget as we already spend ~$10k/yr (depends on state) to send kids to high school.

All student loans should be subject to income-based repayment. They can still be very difficult/impossible to discharge in bankruptcy, but you shouldn't have to make significant payments on them unless you're actually making decent money.

This is how it works in Australia and it works very well IMO.

It also indexes with inflation so that there isn't a major stress if you graduate with a low paying job and work your way up to a higher salary.

This does mean its everyone's lowest priority to pay off, but you can't reasonably avoid paying it other than not making an income.

It works exactly like this in the US. People who aren't currently in college just aren't aware of it.

All federal student loans work exactly like this, and Federal loans account for 90% of all loan disbursements.

This is how it works in Germany. Tuition is (almsot) free, but you get an allowance (up to aprox €850 IIRC) every month, if you and your parents don't have a high income. In most German states you a) only have to pay back up to €10k of that and you only have to pay if you make more than a pretty high number that I forgot AND you have a graceperiod of several years before you even to start paying after you leave uni. Consequently, I know nobody who has difficulty making payments.

Really? Source?

Source for the bankruptcy: http://archive.gao.gov/f1102a/101903.pdf

Wow, 4 people in 1975-1976 made over 90k in todays dollars and still declared bankruptcy and dissolved their student loans.

The report doesn't say why those 4 specifically went bankrupt, but does talk about some issues affecting these people. Injury, large business losses. Guess we better ban anybody from dissolving student loans!

The budget of stanford pasted in this thread shows that tuition is 20% of the income alone.

Sure, tuition could be made cheaper, but i'd say the incentives got perverted because they don't need more students at all. They get their money from somewhere else.

> (or at least give people $10k/yr towards tuition)

This just means the colleges will raise their price by $10k/year. They will charge what the market will bear and capture the subsidy for themselves.

More like by 15k/yr. Administrators need to be paid too. It's the same problem as with the government. It's not their money, so they're spending it like it's about to expire.

Could you find a source with the exact numbers or statistics that made this popular? Its possible it was done, but to say it was popular makes me skeptical.

https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=66 lists it as ~$12k/student for the 2013-14 school year.

Consider donating time or money to underfunded public schools or community colleges. A lot of these programs are chronically underfunded and teach those who are most likely disadvantaged in the first place.

Allowing discharging of student debts in bankruptcy will lead to lenders tightening who they loan to, leading to the poorest of Americans not getting loans, and therefore no academic way to claw out of heavy poverty.

Why won't a poor high-SAT-score, future STEM graduate be able to get a loan? Banks will mostly take into the account the probability of loan repayment, not how poor the person is right now.

People from poor families drop out at a higher rate than non poor family peoples, as well as carry over lower average earnings and a higher likelihood of defaulting on loans even after graduation. A single generation getting a diploma will not equalize the gap between poorer and richer families.

A poor, high-SAT-score, STEM student will get scholarships, not loans.

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