EDIT: Comments below have corrected my recollection, previous discussions were mixed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13382263
EDIT: Reading a bit more through the thread, there's one or two people saying they didn't rate it and lots saying they did.
It's not fair to ask people to simply pay, and not allow them to hold the institutions accountable. Universities are packed with dead weight professors, dead weight majors, and dead weight administrators who take advantage of the blind belief that a bachelor's degree in anything is better than nothing.
The University of Florida got rid of its Computer Science program a few years ago, while expanding it's English department. Do you think that was a wise use of Florida taxpayer's dollars?
When a college degree is so expensive, the problem doesn't lie in the university's revenue.
Stop plowing tax dollars into multi-million dollar executive salaries, that do nothing to improve higher education. All of the boards of trustees in the article brazenly brag about how the compensation for these people is only based on "fund raising", not about providing quality educations at low cost.
So let them continue charging independently wealthy individuals $50,000 / year to educate their children, but it is obscene that a single dime of public money is being handed to these people.
What might explain why appropriations have such weak effect on tuition? Again, the studies discussed above do not offer much explanation, but two theories come to mind: perhaps universities look to exploit their pricing power in the market leading them to raise tuition whether appropriations rise or fall; or maybe when faced with a reduction in state funding, universities cut spending instead of raising tuition dollar for dollar. Those are excellent theories for future research to test.
To be sure, the research on the effects of state disinvestment is severely limited, and further work may yet find a stronger effect on tuition. But limitations are not a reason to continue assuming the effects are as large as many have claimed. Just the opposite.
The fact that the research is limited, and that it shows state disinvestment is not a major cause of rising tuition, are reasons to doubt the state disinvestment argument and the policy agenda attached to it. Researchers should see this as a call to action. They should be putting at least as much effort into measuring the effects of state appropriations on tuition as they do the Bennett Hypothesis—and employing the same rigorous analytical methods. They can also help determine what factors really are the primary drivers of tuition increases at public colleges if appropriations matter so little. Journalists should also change their approach in light of the evidence on state disinvestment. They should hold claims about the effects of state disinvestment on tuition to the same standards of evidence as they do claims about the Bennett Hypothesis.
Meanwhile, it is time to start calling the claim that state funding cuts are the primary driver of rising tuition what it really is: the state disinvestment hypothesis.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-disinvestment-hypothe...
State financing affects revenue, but requiring $50k per student just to operate is a problem that lies exclusively on the expenditure.
Throwing more money at this problem won't fix it. It will only make it worse.
The irony is the university still calls for alumni donations.......
The demand for funds in insatiable, regardless of whom.
We need to make MOOCs the default choice for a college education. Traditional university is a minefield of money sucking scams, from book costs to extra fees to constant tuition inflation.
The reason for all the school debt is not the loan environment. It's the cost of schools.
There is an argument that the prices charged by the schools area result of the loan environment (both a market-based argument and a political argument that loans as the main affordability tool have displaced state subsidies; the former reduces the up-front cost but only by deferring it, the latter actually reduced the total cost to students.)