Hacker News Reader

Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

>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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com