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Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

We've beaten this to death in other threads, but that's not how it (often) works.

Grad students usually don't pay the tuition themselves, but someone often does. In the sciences, this often comes in the form of training grants from the NIH or NSF at the beginning of grad school, followed by individual grants to the student (e.g., NRSA) or advisor later on. Some people also get funded by private foundations.

These funders aren't going to pay $1M per student, but they might very well pay $40k. So...the university sets tuition at $40k, takes that money when it can, and waives it when it no one else will cover it. Clearly, some kind of funding is required to put on courses, organize seminar series, and things like that.

None of this is to deny that academia is broken in many ways, but it's not broken in the way you are claiming.

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>Clearly, some kind of funding is required to put on courses, organize seminar series, and things like that.

Other countries manage to do all of those with a fraction of the cost of US universities. Courses should be paid for by undergraduate students tuition, grad students attend only a handful of courses throughout their studies. Universities already take “overhead” money from the NIH or NSF grants, the “tuition waiver” is just another way to get even more “overhead” than they would otherwise be able to justify.

The real problem here is the cost disease, the fact that US schools spend much, much more than schools in other countries, for no apparent reason.

The US actually does reasonably well in certain sectors -- many non-flagship state schools provide a decent undergraduate education at approximately the same cost as German universities.

The in-state tuition at Missouri State University is $7,306 (yearly!), which is actually cheaper than the typical German education. Portland State is $9,030. I choose those because Missouri and Oregon subsidize less than other states, so tuition is closer to true spend, and I'm too lazy to calculate true spend.

Germany's excellent mid-range public transit and relatively dense population makes a big difference in terms of total cost (including room and board), since many more Germans can live at home during university. But those things are more attributable to infrastructure and especially geography than cost disease.

(The case of elite private universities is pathological. Call it whatever you want, they're just charging what they know they're worth. But they're also extremely atypical -- the US has A LOT of universities, and they have different sets of problems. Central Western Flyover State University does not suffer from the same problems as the Ivy League)

>>> The in-state tuition at Missouri State University is $7,306 (yearly!), which is actually cheaper than the typical German education

No it's not. $7k+ is not a "deal", it's outrageous.

If you take a typical course load (5 courses per semester, each of which meets for 3 hrs/week for 15 weeks), that works out to about $15.55 per hour of actual class time. This isn't including ancillary benefits like access to experts in a variety of fields (e.g., through office hours), access to the library, and student activities.

That seems like a pretty decent bargin!

$7k per student per year is definitely not outrageous cost -- when adjusted by purchasing power parity, it seems on par with the costs of European schools.

What is outrageous though is that unlike in most of the Europe, students actually have to pay for it themselves. There are around 20 million university students in the US. If every school charged less than $10k tuition per year (which is totally doable in principle, which can be seen by comparing European schools cost), it would require $200B to cover that. US government is already providing $80B to support students pursuing higher education, and remaining $120B is only 20% of military budget.

> No it's not

"the average cost of an undergraduate degree in Germany is $32,000, PAID FOR BY THE STATE" [1] (emphasis mine)

7306 x 4 = $29,224 < $32,000.

Math!

Notice I put some caveats in my original post -- US states do spend some money per pupil in high ed, but those numbers are relatively small and rapidly shrinking. Tracking state cash to specific schools is pretty hard, I wasn't able to do it, so instead I just chose states known for relatively low per pupil higher ed spending.

It is possible that the schools I mentioned are more expensive than universities in Germany. But not by much.

Also. Parent claimed that education in the US is expensive in absolute terms, insinuating waste. No one is disputing that students in the US have to pay a lot for their education. But I am disputing the common myth that all colleges in the US are absurdly expensive -- in absolute terms -- compared to universities in other countries.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2015/03/31/education/learning-cu...

I was required to take seventeen (10 week, 3/hour week lecture) classes during my PhD. A quick check of a comparable program requires eleven 15 week courses, just about the same. Anecdote yes, but not a handful of courses.

The first college I attended was New Mexico Tech, and that school knows how to spend money properly. As an out of state student I payed less than half of what I paid at CU for an equal or better education. Sadly, schools that do this tend to be viewed as worse than average simply because they cannot create a good enough image for people to want to come and visit from farther parts of the country.

Student goes to debt for X in order to take the classes. Someone else pays for that debt X on behalf of the student. That means the student received income X, which he or she happened to spend to extinguish his or her debt obligation. Student should pay taxes on it as income.

This is especially true since the same student is likely to be running around campus and calling his or her representatives asking them to tax the rich so his or her pet causes are funded.

The more people have skin in taxes the less stupid programs would we have.

>These funders aren't going to pay $1M per student, but they might very well pay $40k. So...the university sets tuition at $40k, takes that money when it can, and waives it when it no one else will cover it. Clearly, some kind of funding is required to put on courses, organize seminar series, and things like that.

In the article, the author claims that Yale charges 67% fees for overhead from the grant, and that this does not include the money they take for tuition. Wouldn't that pay for seminar series and courses?

In some sense, a dollar is a dollar, so sure.

However, overhead rates are supposed to cover expenses that are related to the research and difficult to parcel out. For example, ordinary janitorial work is funded by overhead because it's not obvious how much (e.g.) bathroom use is attributable to each individual research project. Similarly, the library, admin staff, etc all facilitate specific research projects, but in a fairly diffuse way.

Although you could try to make the same argument for seminar series (it improves the overall intellectual tenor of the place), I doubt it would fly because it's not essential to any specific project. There are insanely specific rules--negotiated between the government and each university--about what and how much can be charged to specific accounts.

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