Student debt is a major issue in the US and the ever increasing costs of tuition are a MAJOR culprit in pushing this crisis. Where are these costs coming from? How can you politically espouse free college while ratcheting up tuition costs?
I think your impression is generally spot-on although there's nuances and it's more complicated than that.
In general, universities are suffering from many of the same pressures as other fields. Nonprofits are being run as profit-generating centers, and the implicit promotion track goes from faculty to senior faculty to administration, if you're even on tenure track. The administration salaries are increasing, as are the number of administrative positions (deans, associate deans, vice associate deans, assistant deans, etc.), and the structures are becoming increasingly hierarchical. Things are very top-heavy and expensive to run because the salary budget is so disproportionately distributed.
I don't think that's all of it, though. The rest of it is harder to quantify, but is the flip side of the educational bubble coin. Students are rushing to go to college in record numbers, which then puts pressure on colleges to stand out to attract more students and more high-paying students who become high-donating alumni. Institutions that should be getting public funding are not, which then trickles down to students; other private institutions then benefit from the increased tuition norms etc.
It's a complicated problem that involves HR and administrative practices and norms, economic incentives within university funding structures, incentives coming from a broken employment system in the US, problematic incentives coming from federal grant structures, etc. etc. etc. etc.
1. Lack of workplace training - very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience, partly because there's nothing preventing someone from jumping ship for better pay once the training is complete
2. Credentialism - the things that actually matter in hiring are either difficult or illegal to test for (conscientiousness, knowledge, intelligence), and so degrees are used as proxies instead
Yes and no.
Most HVAC shops will pay for technician's training.
Most dev shops pay for technical conferences.
Most managers have access to management seminars and training.
Expecting an employers to pay tens of thousands of dollars seems weird, but many employers do pay on a smaller scale for skills training.
> degrees are used as proxies instead
Though conventional wisdom is that a degree doesn't matter 5 years after graduation.
Nor does it seem that prestigious positions are even that picky in practice. Yes, there are a number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale alumni in Congress, but other seven of the top 10 colleges for Congress members are public state schools. [1]
[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/slideshows/the-top-10-colleges-f...
It's why you see so many forums talking about sending out applications to hundreds of places for months when searching for their first job, then never having a problem again after.
I've also noticed that Canada and Australia place far more emphasis on formal credentials than US colleges. US Uni's will take you if you can demonstrate competency and can pay; Uni Melbourne won't talk to you unless you have the exact, specific kind of degree. Ditto for UBC, U Sydney, etc.
I've often thought it would be amazing if you could do the equivalent of professional football (soccer) lending of players. Lend a developer to another company for a few years with the expectation that they will come back. If they decide to stay then the borrowing company give some compensation. But it would mean having very strict contracts that limit the freedom of workers, so it's almost certainly a no go. I wish there was a way to make it work, though...
HR gets a million applications, people are evaluated on what boxes can be checked off rather than their skillset, etc.
With regard to the educational system, the problem is that degrees are seen as signals or credentials (to use the language of the article) rather than as a background. That's admittedly a fuzzy distinction, but it really reduces the degree to the degree per se rather than the host of courses and experiences the person during college. So, we talk about "useless degrees" without recognizing that someone might have had equivalent coursework and experience without majoring in something else per se. In the end it doesn't matter.
It never felt like a plan or conspiracy to make administration costs bigger. It's just very easy to do when you have more money coming in, year after year. In another economic environment, you'd get a "hard no" because the money isn't there. But when there is, expenditures become just another bargaining chip. Maybe you get your seventh librarian this year, and I get my fifth network guy next year.
New buildings (as you stated) aren't as big of a contributor as expected due to the convoluted role of donations, grants, etc. But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. And even then we were getting projections of our "debt capacity" and always riding that line, so it's debt on top of debt all the way down.
I don't know about big schools, but for a smaller one like ours, there was no visible bad faith. These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors.
Harvard got spectacularly burned by the genius planning of Larry Summers in that regard.
I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so.
And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side.
But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.
My personal internet with Comcast is ~$60/month, so assuming universities have greater bargaining power due to scale that shouldn't make much of a dent in tuition. And my college email interface was clunky but I just set it up to forward everything to Gmail, which is free.
Yep. If appetite and available funding grow year after year, even the most honest of colleges will have a hard time not expanding costs.
Fortunately, it's still pretty easy to get a 4-year degree from a solid school for < $40,000 tuition not including scholarships.
Pricy, but still far less than the $1m extra lifetime earnings.
I lived at home, with my parents, and went to a state school and paid in-state tuition. Found online PDFs of all my textbooks, and I'm still just barely scraping in at under 40,000. This is from 2016 to 2020 (finishing up my last few courses over the next 6 months.) And the administration is still considering (aka going to pass) an 11% tuition increase, after a 9% increase just 2 years ago.
It's even worse for people who don't live near a university and need to live on campus, pay for meal plans, etc.
Rent, food, clothing, etc. will of course be more than that. $10,000/yr doesn't even clear the poverty line, college or otherwise. [1]
My number might have been a bit low, but average in-state public college is $10k/yr for tuition and fees. [2]
I went to college in Florida and Utah. Their top ranked public universities right now cost $6k/yr and $8k/yr respectively.
[1] https://www.thebalance.com/federal-poverty-level-definition-...
[2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co...
Colleges need dramatic, across the board cost cutting including professors, admins etc.
Colleges are in for a world of pain in the next 50 years.
For example if the salary is 100% from NIH grants and the prof makes 500k, more power to them.
If the prof makes 100k and all their salary is funded by student loans, then they should decide whether their livelihood is worth the externalities they are creating.
Its a moral choice
Average course load for a student is like 6 units a semester so using the back-of-the napkin math above it should cost roughly $6k/per semester for students to have a full course load of $150k professors. $12k/year + other expenses is a far cry away from $100k that is being charged.
Other costs are also unacceptable. Colleges charge $500+/month for shared rooms. And require freshman to stay in them.
Nevermind the fact that your math misses several major cost categories like building maintenance, fringe benefits for professors (+30% of salaries at least).
In your hypothetical example, students are paying $20k/year before getting ripped off on the cost of the dorm and meal plan.
If a prof is making 150k, class sizes need to be 300+ and they need to teach 1,000 kids a semester
Also, how much of your funding comes from unsavory sources like Jeffrey Epstein and the Saudi government.
> But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds.
In the past I've felt quite motivated to give to scholarship funds. It resonates a lot if you yourself relied on scholarships to go to college. But I feel somewhat more cynical about this since I've seen costs spiraling out of control. The actual price of college can have anything bundled in there. I want to support students, but I feel less good about supporting ballooning costs that are twice inflation when I haven't heard a good reason for this.
Private Uni's are, well, private. They can charge what they want, and if the average Pell Grant or other DoE loans aren't enough that's not the Uni's problem.
And besides, no one wants to rely on the generosity of paternalistic college administrators. That's not safe. You don't want to wake up and suddenly find due to some technicality you again owe more money than both of your parents make in a year. And you don't want to feel like a charity case.
(If you think that's a remote possibility, think of the people who went into teaching with the promise of debt forgiveness, and found it revoked. They don't have any choice in the matter -- they're totally screwed.)
Better to go to the local city college. Your cousin went there and a few other people from your school go there, too. It's a safe choice, and there are people like you there.
It's weird you chose to make this comment on an article about the University of Chicago, the home of Milton Friedman, Supply-side economics, "no safe spaces"[1] and so on.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/08/...
It is effectively a sliding scale fee [1].
I don't consider a loan "aid". Especially since that loan has interest.
If its about the claim that this is an example of price discrimination: that is an opinion I formed while I was at the University and spoke with some folks in the economics department about it. There is a class offered in econ about the economics of education, and that certainly hit the point home that financial aid is a type of price discrimination. I couldn't have paid for the tuition in full, so I myself received significant financial aid and supplemented with some student loans, so I got to see a bit of it first hand.
Everyone thinks they're in the middle class.
Seems generous for middle class. (the median US household income is only 61k)
>With over $159 million in financial aid distributed this year, UChicago is committed to ensuring that its students graduate debt-free and prepared for lifelong success, no matter their chosen major or background prior to enrolling in The College. UChicago is a need-blind institution, which means we make admissions decisions independent of a family’s financial circumstances[0]
That seems like a hallmark move of progressivism, no?
No, especially at well-funded not-for-profit private universities, “financial aid” often includes generous need-based grants (not scholarships, which are merit-based) that reduce the amount that must be met from student/family resources (including loans) substantially for non-wealthy students (not unheard of for it to be down to $0 for the poorest who manage to get admitted, and that's not just tuition but sometimes housing, books, etc.).
I guess it depends on the school.
At many of the high-stocker-price elite schools, grants are also a very real part of financial aid.
Grants effectively look like a scholarship but are typically need-based rather than merit-based.
Looked at another way, grants can be used as a discount on the tuition sticker price.
These schools are price discriminating, which means only the richest families are paying the full price. This kind of heavily graduated pricing where the wealthy pay for most of the cost of the school is very much in line with their principles.
Consider also that a large amount of student loans are already from the government, so in a default...
There are plenty of liberal schools whose sticker price is going sky high.
Eh...the UChicago economics department and the people of Chile would like a word with you on that.
- Building architecturally impressive (but questionably prudent) faculty buildings/dorms/libraries/etc. in hopes of luring prospective students, many funded by alumni looking to stroke their ego via their name on the structure (reminds me of that scene from House of Cards when Kevin Spacey's character does this very thing)
- Federal government showing no signs of abating the giving out free money to attend college, which enables the entire cycle to continue