Comment by okaram | Hacker News Reader

Comment by okaram | Hacker News Reader

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Actually ... they are probably NOT charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room and board, when you look at their costs; good education is expensive.

Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable.

Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher salaries ... add benefits, offices, etc, and you're at about twice that, so 26K just for faculty; add some for facilities and management, and their cost is probably about 40K/year per student, so a 20-25% markup, doesn't sound unreasonable (and then almost no student pays the sticker price).

High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty).

BTW, other universities will do it cheaper by either paying their faculty much less (which usually leads to quality problems), or having much larger classes, or crummy facilities, or government subsidies (or all of the above). Community colleges do an amazing job for the price they charge, but it's not the same education :)

> High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty).

Interesting. Wonder why it's more labor intensive compared to engineering or other degrees. 7:1 teacher-student ratio seems very good. Why can't it be 14:1, would that result in a dramatically worse outcome? (Not even sure what I mean by outcome, maybe inability to find a position after graduation...)

I guess it depends on what you mean by outcomes ... if the outcome is finding a job after graduation, probably not; if the outcome is becoming a 'better' human being, probably yes :)

Having a 7:1 teacher/student ratio means that students will have tons of contact with the faculty outside the classroom; they can walk to their offices and chat (and a lot of learning happens that way). It means 'large' classes are 15-20 students, which means there's no 'lecturing' per se, and a lot more discussions.

Doubling that rate means larger classes (40 students means teacher cannot answer all questions, assignments are made to be graded quickly etc), less interaction with faculty inside and outside classroom

Is it worth it ? I think so, and, if needed (and able), would willingly pay it for my kids. If you don't think it's worth it, or can't afford it, good state universities cost 1/2 or 1/3 as much (tuition is probably around 10K for in-state, room and board is still probably 1K/mo). Community/technical colleges are cheap for a reason, but teachers want to teach, and good students will learn from them, and get a degree; and of course, there's tons of free learning resources

Maybe I’m understanding incorrectly: 13k in teacher salaries would be per course taught by a teacher right? Which really means cost should be 1/4th.

52k per student for a 5,000 student college is 260m per year of claimed expenditure. That is quite a lot money for a faculty of 700, even after subtracting boarding and scholarships, no? I do not know where money is going, although the Bain research does seem to support the evidence for concluding that admin is a benefactor of it.

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