Tuition at the University of California (1970)
thebackbench.blogspot.com
thebackbench.blogspot.com
This is obviously still a lot of money, but it's far cheaper than comparable options in most other states. Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, Montana, and Wyoming are the only other states that have similar options at that price.
[1] https://www2.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for-college/Document...
For example, say school A charges $5000 per year. A low-income student is accepted and maxes out their government grants, the school can get a check for up to $5000.
School B charges $50,000 per year. For that same student, they can get $23k per year (or something like that), plus the student now qualifies for subsidized loans to pay for room and board. The school can then give that student a scholarship for the remaining $27k.
For this student, the higher tuition school is much cheaper.
This isn't a theoretical exercise, this is exactly what Universities have been doing for over 20 years.
This makes me doubt the theory that government loans are behind high tuition.
I think there are just too many counterpoints for the student loan thing to be accurate outside of a vacuum.
Loans help increase the cost of schools with lower social economic status (middle class) schools like state schools.
Loans allowed many schools to charge private costs for public education. Professor salaried have risen, cost structures are too high to support unloaned demand.
This is untrue. If anything, the rapidly growing pool of poorly paid adjuncts has lowered the median salary. Perhaps you could take a look at this book for a deeper understanding of the issue.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/16/herb-childres...
No other metric matters.
The cost has to come down, and that includes the cost of instruction etc.
That’s simply not true. The vast majority of the increase in cost is due to the explosive growth of non-teaching administrative staff.
When wealthy donors earmark their gift for a new library or sports complex, it’s the students who end up paying for all of the staff to maintain the building and run the programs.
That said, its not really the only metric that matters, but it does matter a lot. And it matters a lot more than all other metrics around cost because you can easily reduce those other metrics if they are truly bloat.
Professor salaries cannot easily come down, and you cannot easily add more kids per class.
Good professors pay for themselves by bringing in grant money.
With a positional good, demand can never be really satisfied, because everyone always wants something further up the chain, so prices expand to whatever people can possibly pay.
The economic effects will be more indirect than the last one. Folks will delay homebuying, they will have fewer children later in life. Schools and Colleges will be competing for fewer people. Many small liberal arts colleges will close.
But I think the trend to keep an eye on isn't the price of an undergraduate degree, but a graduate degree, as an undergraduate degree won't be nearly as useful as today, which already isn't as useful as 20 years ago in many fields. Indeed, both my wife and I have graduate degrees.
My wife came from a middle-class family that was college oriented. I came from a working-class/poor environment. My mom sent me off to college with $200 and a suitcase, and I subsequently paid for everything else, including housing and tuition, myself. But I barely made it through; I just wasn't culturally or academically equipped to do college. For example, my first week of school I was preoccupied with finding a job, I always prioritized working over school even when, financially, I didn't need to, and I didn't appreciate the value in developing relationships with professors (that felt more like cheating, reflecting not enough time spent studying). So what concerns me more than college right now is primary and secondary school--preparing my kids so the transition to college is seamless and natural. Fortunately, San Francisco has many excellent public and private schools. The public school district has language immersion programs in several different languages in addition to non-immersion early language programs, as well as other enrichment programs; and the parochial private schools in particular are relatively affordable--cheaper than daycare, even. (Though daycare can be crushingly expensive--whether run out of a garage or attached to a fancy private school, rates are similar--so I guess that doesn't say much.)
So the price of college? Meh. That's poor people thinking. My goal is to put my kids on a college trajectory and let that carry them through--hopefully to graduate school. Of course we'll save as much as we can, but that's not something I'm concerned about. In my hometown middle school and high school counselors often discouraged kids from college because the costs were presumed insurmountable for most families. In truth 1) they were ridiculously misinformed and misleading about the options and alternatives, and 2) setting kids up for failure whether or not they ended up going to college. Nope... worrying about cost right now is counterproductive.
Amazing. Land of the free seems to be quite keen to come up with innovative ways to enslave its citizens...
This was the entire point of even including that anecdote. You can pay insane prices for very good education in any developed nation, regardless of their political system.
The real stick is law school. If you don't end up in a top program, you better end up at the top of your class unless you like starting salaries of 45k after a >200k education.
San Francisco public schools are awful.
https://californiapolicycenter.org/san-francisco-unified-dri...
>No issue has been more contentious in recent years than how the SFUSD has handled the new Common Core mathematics curriculum. Algebra has been taught in middle school for ages, but because so many San Francisco middle schoolers have done so poorly at it, it is not even taught until high school anymore. Parents whose children didn’t do well with Algebra are OK with postponing it until the 9th grade, but for families eyeing college and looking ahead, this is a complete disaster.
> One parent who toured a government school for her 4-year old who could already read was told that she could tutor other students still learning to read; she ended up in a private school because her mother felt there would be very little challenge for her with so few children at her level.
> when she toured another government school and asked about challenging her daughter with math, the teacher looked down her nose superiorly and informed her that it was wrong to give any child any opportunity all children didn’t receive and she would never let any kid do more advanced work than the others.
https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-sf-educational...
> On the most recent round of tests, 87% of San Francisco Unified’s black students performed below standards in math, as did 79% of Latino students and 78% of Pacific Islanders. Ninety-six percent of districts in California that serve black students had better reading scores for low-income black students than San Francisco did, Innovate found.
Our oldest is currently attending TK (transitional-kindergarten, for those who turn 5 between September and December) at a public school, we've toured several public and private schools for kindergarten already, and we've spoken extensively with other families in our neck of the city (north and west). There are dozens of schools in the system, but at least for primary school your kid will be just fine. The middle schools and high schools can have more problems, but again that's a reflection of larger social and economic problems that older students unfortunately bring into the classroom; you can't fix that stuff through school. The staffing and academic programs at the public schools are as good as anywhere, and in some areas unmatched.
I recently attended an informational session for kindergarten enrollment at my son's school. I arrived and followed the signs to the room and sat down. When it began the principal asked, "who here only speaks English"? I raised my hand. She said, "the english language session is in the portable building", and I ended up in a room about the size of a walk-in closet. For the first half of the session, until some stragglers arrived, I was the only person there, so basically just had a one-on-one with the school official. The 15 or so parents in the main session all spoke Chinese, even though enrollment at the school is maybe half Chinese and this was the only night such a session was offered. (Which is to say, no other white, black, or latino families showed up.) All of which goes back to family life. Many in the Chinese community in the city are poor or working-class (only very recently have rich mainland Chinese began immigrating to SF), often immigrants or first or second generation, but they're extremely engaged academically and very demanding. It matters, both for their kids and the schools more generally.
That's too much cash for an undergrad education, and the payback is often not there. Here are some other options:
* Canadian universities -- similar quality of education to most U.S. state universities at a significantly lower cost. Close to home (cheap airfares, or within driving distance for most U.S. states), culture is similar, education system is very similar to U.S.
* Continental European universities -- free or close to free in many countries, plus your kid gets to have a study abroad experience in Europe at no extra cost. Many colleges in Germany for instance have instruction in English nowadays so there's not even a need to learn a foreign language (well, one should but one doesn't have to). The downside is the style of education in Europe tends to be very hands-off and less pedagogical (sink-or-swim), so if your kid isn't that independent they're not likely to survive.
The only things to take care of:
* Make sure your kid does summer internships in the U.S. if they want to get hired in the U.S. Studying abroad means losing the U.S. network, but that is remedied by summer internships.
* FAFSA -- most Canadian schools as well as schools abroad are FAFSA eligible.
For me, a U.S. education is only worth it if you're going to a top U.S. school. Otherwise education abroad can be as good as (and in many cases, superior to) the average U.S. college.
At my university, as a Canadian citizen I pay about $7000 a year for my program (mathematics). An international student is looking at $38000 a year.
Want to do a more popular program like software engineering? As an international student, you’re looking at $55k per year, not including books, residence, or meals. Maybe not as expensive as some Ivy League schools, but those schools often have extremely generous funding available for low income families.
0: https://www.daad.de/en/study-and-research-in-germany/plan-yo...
Though people who wish to study here from outside the EU have to prove that they are financially solvent and able to support themselves before they come here. This is done by depositing about 10k euros into a German blocked bank account.
This site is a great resource for foreign students, detailing pretty much everything involved: https://www.studying-in-germany.org/how-to-study-in-germany/
No, because that wouldn't make sense as an investment. Already it often doesn't make sense. Hence the student debt crisis.
Colleges will have to adapt and bring costs down as people increasingly opt for alternatives.
Even paying international student rates, their education will be much cheaper.
Meanwhile, my entire education (5 years, 144 credit hours, compared to the usual 4/120) cost me ~$32,000... In Canada. I didn't live in a dorm, didn't buy a meal plan, and paid for pretty much all of it over two summer internships, and one fall one.
I'd suggest talking to your professors in undergrad school :)
Even better, if a professor actually gets a grant, the university will “tax” the grant at around 50% to pay for the overhead of providing office space for your post docs.
> At public research institutions specifically, there has been a particularly marked rise in the number administrators. In 1990, there were approximately twice as many full-time faculty at public research institutions as administrators. In 2012, the two groups were nearly equal.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
“Three decades later... administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures”
Even if admin costs where zero in the 1980’s they went up far more than 24% over the next 30 years. What happened is fewer classes are taught by full time professors which was a minor cost savings.
One of these costs was a massive influx of new students required a huge increase in facilities. Another was the need for websites, computers, and networking infrastructure to keep up with the competition. Collages did not benefit from the computer revolution because few things could be automated and they suddenly needed websites, and networking in the student dorms etc.
Many schools lack donors and actually needed to pay for new facilities. 12.1m students in 1980 vs 21.2m in 2010 means quite a few new buildings across the full range of collages.
These are things that would have required more physical space and more personnel in the past. Schools have transitioned a lot to a more self-service model but it has not translated into savings for students or their families as far as I can tell.
Teachers actually calculate grades, but that’s again vastly less effort than grading assignments. to the point where many just use pen and paper to record results. Many attempts at automation have increased teacher workload and require support staff.
Schools are seeing benefits from these computer systems, but they rarely reduce costs.
PS: Another consideration is collages are seasonal. Reducing the effort for some task may aid the workers. However, 100 administrators twiddling their thumbs costs just as much and schools need to staff for various crunch times not average workloads.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
> an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.
> According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.
Reusing numbers from another post. 12.1 million US students in 1980 vs 21.2 million in 2010 and their instructors increased “11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008” sure that’s the full story.
PS: I can’t find C.S.U numbers but I expect your going to find similar or larger growth in student populations due to California’s higher than average population growth.
Anecdotal: When I went to undergrad, all of the student advisors were tenured faculty members doing it as part of their job responsibilities. When I went to grad school a few years later, the advisors were all full-time advisors, and all the departments had instructional designers to consult when creating courses.
With a faculty member, I found that they were more focused on their actual faculty/teaching duties, and had trouble with the more administrative side of things.
This is also probably dependent on the quality of the school
That said, our faculty used to advise incoming students as well. From what I understand, our undergraduate director (tenured faculty) would do all the advisement personally, during the summer, himself. One summer he was out of town a lot and asked me to fill in for him for a day.
I was not very happy to be asked to show up during the summer. For one thing, typically faculty are paid only during the academic year, unless it's from grants (although I happened to be getting summer salary that year).
But also, the advisees were mostly freshman who weren't ready to take math-major courses yet. They wanted general advice on how to navigate the system, which gen-ed requirements to get out of the way, whether to take "University 101", and the like. Although I did my best, I felt quite out of my element.
Can't tell if you think this is a good thing or not?
You could equally say who gives better career advice - a 26 year old academic who knows nothing but their PhD, or someone who has been guiding people into careers successfully for 3 decades.
Might be best to control for the age I think.
Thirty years ago, most senior professors had secretaries, but now secretaries are almost unheard of. Individual professors wind up spending most of their time on ridiculous administrivia required to keep their grants.
If an administrator sticks his or her head into a profrssor’s life, it’s to make it harder, not easier.
For the most part, it's not part of their job descriptions.
Some things which have grown: student services; "Student Success" centers and the like; advising; IT; compliance with various grant agency and accreditation requirements (which seem to be growing); institutional efforts to further diversity and inclusion.
As an example, my understanding is that universities are doing much more to identify, and try to help, at-risk students than they were before. The new administrators hired into these roles will cheerfully work with faculty as appropriate, but it's a much more student-facing than faculty-facing role.
68% staff + faculty salaries and benefits 15% financial aid 17% equipment
From page 7, https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2019-20...
If someone knows a more detailed breakdown of the budget, I’d be curious! :)
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...
Let me add that there were some very large class sizes during the peak of the baby boom. I don't think that I ever had fewer the fifty kids in my classes until I transferred out of parochial school in sixth grade.
[edit: teach -> teaching]
[1] The people justifying these requirements, of course, spend much time hand-wringing about how important it is for students to live in their expensive dorms.
I think UC is first and foremost a research institution. A lot of these professors are barely involved in undergraduate teaching, and the massive staff employee count I think is a lot of people related to research and assisting these researchers. That's why the undergraduate student experience is going down at UCs, with worse class sizes, and less engagement.
So I'd expect the tuition increase to be associated with teaching staff or teaching administrators (either dedicated to this full time or else as a percentage of their time), not with research (which is basically self-sustaining anyway). In fact, probably one of the motivations for increasing research activities is that it naturally brings in money and that you don't need to increase tuition to do it.
I do agree that research professors don't necessarily make the best teaching professors, but that's an entirely separate issue from the financial one.
Other possibilities:
Direct funding from states to public universities has decreased. Some portion of tuition increase has gone to replace the revenue lost from reduction in subsidies.
Capital costs from new campus buildings have gone up, as universities add expensive features that are not strictly required for education, such as apartment-style dormitories, or luxurious fitness centers for faculty and students. The university's money is usually fungible, so housing and recreation fees may be higher for students using those buildings than for the palmetto-bug dorms and century-old fieldhouse, yet still subsidized out of tuition revenue.
The aforementioned swarms of useless educrats may be corrupt, diverting university revenues to their own pockets via schemes that require their academic credentials or administrative authority.
Universities may be underwriting student loan debt, trading cash now for future income streams from future repayment. In that case, the money isn't even there yet, and the students first have to graduate and start earning before there is any of that money to spend.
I know that Indiana University dumped a lot of money into its "18/20" retirement plan, to attract better quality professors. It sounds very expensive. At some point, they realized it would bankrupt the university, and stopped offering it, but current students will still be paying for it until all those old professors that got it die off. So, maybe tuition increases are going to retired employees.
Last, we have accounting fictions. Universities charge $X on paper, to receive or maximize some third-party benefit, then rebate $Y to the student in the form of grants or scholarships. The money was never there, except on paper.
It's interesting to consider how college costs have increased compared to other indexes:
US inflation : ~300% https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1980
US college costs: ~300% https://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-college-tui....
US GDP per capita: ~500% https://mgmresearch.com/us-gdp-data-and-charts-1980-2020/
Keep in mind that those college and gdp graphs have inflation removed.
The airlines say "If you want 60's service then fly first class and pay 60's level prices" And the response of virtually everyone is - No, thank you, I just want to get to wherever I'm going as cheaply as humanly possible.
It seems like the same thing in reverse happened with University. Have you seen or read about dorms in the 50's? Or all the ancillary things that went with going to a university? It was all crap. And it's like everyone went "I would like a very nice University experience. I want a nice dorm. I want a beautiful campus. I want a sports team that wins and gym to go to. I want administrators that will hold my hand." And the Universties resonse was "You go it. If you want the cheap version go to community college"
Now by bent I'm classically liberal. If you asked me why prices have gone up I'd tell you a tale of government action. Make student loans widly available. Making student debt non-dischargable in bankruptcy. You may not but I find the argument plausible.
What if that's not a root cause though? Because truelly none of that stuff happens by chance. It's everyone who votes putting people in government. It's everyone who votes saying- "These are my priorities" and then the people in government saying "this is how we're going to meet those priorities" and both walking away happy to some greater or lesser degree.
All of which indicates to me that free University for all isn't going to cut it. If it's publically financed it won't in the long run be able to afford what people seem to want to get out of University. If that's true then they'll all run to a non-free private system and get the politicians to help them to pay for it.
Blame Jack Nicholson if you want to blame someone; or rather the rash of 1970s “aren’t asylums terrible?” asylum fiction.
And yes, it was very much a global phenomenon, largely predating the 1980s.