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Comment by geargrinder | Hacker News Reader

Higher education has figured out how to mortgage the future earnings of their students through the federally-subsidized student loan program. All while greatly increasing the number of administrators and squeezing real professors.

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That’s a simplistic take, targetting favorite scapegoats. At most 25% of tuition costs can be attributed to administration and faculty. The remaining 75% is attributed to cuts in government funding of public universities. Ironically, cuts that are often justified as targetting college administrators.

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...

Even taking that article completely at face value, it applies to public universities only. Quote from a later paragraph:

"At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades."

This article only addresses public schools. States have had to reduce funding to those schools because of rising healthcare and entitlement costs, along with lack of public will to spend more on them. We all can see there is a giant marketing machine at these universities and private schools which have convinced many students and parents that the only way to a successful life is to enter into a long-term debt commitment. The article you link to was written by one of these marketers. It is nearly impossible to be denied one of these parent-student loans. And these loans can never be dismissed by bankruptcy, unlike other loans (I am not advocating not paying your debts, but use this as a further illustration of the way education and government have conspired to create this situation).

>The article you link to was written by one of these marketers.

You’re just trolling now.

If only they could just get rid of the administrators. Oh wait, they could. Universities did just fine without them before so they could again. Fire 90% of current administrators after repealing whatever laws and regulations are necessary to make that possible, increase faculty numbers by 30% and make service a mandatory part of the job and tenure process.

Modern universities are basically creches for 20 something year olds. Some learning may happen but most efforts are toward food, entertainment and nursing hurt feelings.

How can expenses be explained by cuts? Increases can, but unless the government is actually taking money, you can't explain tuition costs in terms of decrease expenses.

Sure you can. The money has to come from somewhere. If the government contributes less, either salaries go down or tuition goes up.

That is explaining changes in expenses, not the expenses themselves. In this simplified case, salaries are 100% of the expenses, while government funding covers X% and tuition has to cover 100-X%. If X goes down, 100-X% goes up, but the minimal of X is 0, and as such at minimum government funding, 100% of tuition would be due to salaries and 0% due to government.

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