My current theory is that administrators have figured out a way to get money out of the school in some form and are squeezing it like cash cows. Or they're just horribly mismanaging schools.
My current theory is that administrators have figured out a way to get money out of the school in some form and are squeezing it like cash cows. Or they're just horribly mismanaging schools.
Nowadays mostly to pay for a huge class of administrators that mainly manage other administrators and monitor the violation of rules whose creation they themselves promote.
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Oh yea, who else is going to create that "PDF" that only opens on MS running Adobe?
The amount of bloat I saw in US universities was unreal. Software that no one used apart from a couple of features, services that served no one in particular, classes that no one wants, and so on.
Of course, the infrastructure was markedly better. But I can't say that for quality. Most of my classes were taught by TAs, while my classes in my university back home were often taught by associate or even full professors, several of whom had PhDs from top US/UK universities.
And this was at a cheap public university. I can't imagine the kind of bloat a large private US school would have
Administrators are filtering applications, organizing the events, marketing the brand, enabling recreation, looking for better food, etc.
I'm actually ok with a barebones education, but that's obviously not what people want to see when they're going on campus tours. They judge the value of schools directly by the work of its admin, rather than the teaching staff who they only meet on the first day of class.
Colleges didn't have excellent athletic facilities (for non-athletes especially), study spaces, counselors, job guidance, tutoring services, academic mentors (the list goes on) 50-100 years ago.
A lot of colleges 50-100 years ago look like what (some) community colleges look like now. Minimal services not dedicated to their cause. The only difference is the cause is different- education vs. research.
It's sort of this perfect storm that is shifting the increasing cost of expanding education on to 18yos. The upside: college degree holders have a 50% plus wage premium, the downside, in 2026, 18 years after the great recession, there will be a 15-20% drop in enrollment of full pay college students which might just burst the bubble. (Fingers crossed here)
https://thebestschools.org/magazine/highest-paid-college-coa...
That's not true for all athletic departments. But it is for the big name one where coaches get paid millions.
https://thebestschools.org/features/richest-universities-end...
http://thebullelephant.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Doctor...
Patients get charged $1000 for an ibuprofen based on a particular hospital's calculation at distributing costs across a variety of procedures, staff, and settings. However they distribute those costs, the costs must bear the expenses of physicians (who had to figure out whether you needed an ibuprofen or a cardiac catheterization for that "chest pain" and whose complexity of decision-making and time-cost is not diminished because the answer turned out to be muscle pain rather than cardiac), nurses (who administer the drug, and who aren't one cent cheaper because they were giving you ibuprofen rather than rituximab), attributed cost of auxiliary staff, and facility maintenance costs (it's a lot more expensive per square foot to get your ibuprofen in an emergency room than in a primary care center.) The result is that line-item billing usually looks wonky. That we offer line-item billing is a weirdness from our fee-for-service structure, not an actual recounting of the cost of giving someone ibuprofen. If the ibuprofen was listed as a buck, the 999$ would still have to be shifted onto another line-item. The costs have to be attributed somewhere.
And you know what? Everyone should kind of know this already. If you didn't think it required the urgency, staff, equipment etc. of an emergency room, you should've gone to a primary care physician. They would've gotten you that ibuprofen for pennies. That you go to an emergency room indicates there's something else you're paying for besides the ibuprofen.
(( On top of that, the expensive price is usually a chargemaster price for negotiating with insurers, not a price intended for human beings to actually pay. The uninsured get fucked by being input into a system that takes for granted that they are a highly uncommon component. ))
The real sucking force is all of the administrative positions that now outnumber educators.
https://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2014/dec/22/j...
> There are 346 Division I schools. Of them, 123 are classified as members of the Football Bowl Subdivision, the top tier of sports competition. These are colleges and universities that are eligible to compete in bowl games and have average attendance of at least 15,000 at their home games. [...] "A total of 20 athletics programs in the FBS reported positive net revenues for the 2013 fiscal year."