Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.
There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
(Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).
The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.
It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.
(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).
NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm
[0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.
As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)
That's just one example. I could go on ....
Typically property taxes go towards education at the local level, and as property taxes were reduced there would be a shortfall in the budget somewhere. This typically fell on education, which then forced colleges to start raising tuition as there is still a non-zero cost to education.
There was a "print" article about this in the 70's or 80's in a local newspaper in California urging residents to vote NO on lowering property taxes citing the increase in future college education as the main reason. But the vote went through, property taxes were slashed, and then of course ten years later and so forth, tuition had sky rocketed.
Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back. Hard to imagine any real states or large communities raising property taxes significantly to actually reinvest in the local community.
> Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back.
Well some voters see the taxes as an investment in their city and community. My city passed a referendum to back a bond to pay for climate change projects and education programs. The state passed a constitutional change that has made it virtually impossible to raise taxes.
When I look at the midwest and the hollowing out of their cities I have to imagine the tax cuts partially contributed. But at the time they passed the politicians believed they would be a net positive.
It's a delicate balance. Taxes too high will drive businesses away. Taxes too low will reduce communal investment and drive people away.
The price of an education (regardless of cost structures, public funding, or whatever) is going to dominated by demand, since supply is relatively fixed. It takes years or decades to increase the supply of qualified instruction following typical university models.
In this case Federal dollars guarantee a massive surplus of demand, while Federal accreditation limits supply (rightly or wrongly).
"Public" schools are paid by students, just like private, as a fee-for-service product. For most educations at most universities, this service is largely indistinguishable. Some of the University income comes from tax offsets, but the product they provide is the same service and on the same market as private universities - fee-based educational services.
The price is therefor entirely determined by the amount of supply (relatively fixed) and the amount of demand for fee-based education. Demand has risen dramatically since WW2 due to a bevvy of Federal programs designed to underwrite and promote post-secondary education.
No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions.
The actual oddity is not that public education pricing keeps rising to private institutional pricing, but that it is not already at the same price.
Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
For extra credit, this is largely the same process that drives healthcare pricing in the US. A relatively fixed supply of a specialized service and a price-insensitive buyer pool largely underwritten by massive Federal programs.
Also, real estate
This is an interesting claim, because tax-offsets of tuition have been going down over the last 30 years, not up. Look at the percentage of educational costs covered by state general funds in the late 60s compared to today. It's night and day different.
> Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
This is a interesting point, but the data doesn't back it up. We have data from the Department of Education on expenditures by universities. It doesn't show dramatic expenditure increases. The prices went up because state legislatures cut higher ed funding, and universities had to raise tuition to balance the books. Here's that data: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
If you have data showing that universities are spending dramatically more in expenditures on a per-student constant-dollar basis, I'd love to see it.
In the case of a state university, it's odd that we don't see at least one example of this approach. Why isn't there an example of a state university with fixed admissions capacity, poor dorm/ student life quality, low cost, but with good academics?
We generally see the same set of tradeoffs across the entire industry with no student cost considerations in university planning to speak of.
One is that increased demand for employers for "certification" of ability pushes demand for degrees among students. Every recession there's articles showing that those with a college degree fare better than those without. We can argue about why that is, but that's what the average 17 yo sees, along with their parents, and they don't want to be left behind, regardless of the details.
Another is that loans basically prop that up and facilitate it. So schools don't lose money on people who say "I can't afford it" because they find a way.
Another is the increasing administrative bloat at universities, which are now largely run like for-profit institutions even when they are not on paper. I think this is similar to a lot of fields, but my sense is that (based on personal experience) things are much more hierarchical now, with more of a focus on exploiting the university for personal gain than anything else. So administrative salary costs, and administrative costs in general, drive up the need for costs.
The public colleges have to compete for private colleges for faculty, administrators, etc. which then increases their costs, which then drives them to bigger need for more tuition.
At the same time, states have been cutting their funding. If they cut funding and unis have all these fixed costs, where else are they supposed to get money from?
A major dynamic between public universities in the US and political circles in the last couple of decades has been an increasing pressure for them to operate as revenue generating, profit-making institutions in every aspect. At the state level, the idea is that their role is to bring in money, at less cost (an alternative is to see them as providing a service to the state and country -- can you imagine wanting K-12 schools to be treated as profit-making ??? ). As a result, what we've ended up with are institutions with a lot of profit-seeking administrators, pyramid schemes, taking advantage of federal funding loopholes at every chance to bring in money, etc.
Public universities should be able to offer a good value to students, but they're being run as profit centers. If you think of it that way, it's no surprise tuition isn't competitive.
Just today there was a story I read about a Georgia Tech professor who is under federal investigation for misrepresentation on her continuing NSF grant. And the money involved was $40,000. And one of her defenses is that Georgia Tech provided very little secretarial services to her. Which may very well be true.
Everyone cribs about increased administrative bloat at universities, but given how massively paperwork requirements have ballooned, nobody is willing to point the figure also at that. Universities are hiring more admin because professors are often overwhelmed with paperwork nowadays.
And how much more help would she need?
Georgia Tech has really high admin costs with fees per semester above $1000. That’s just the explicit fees and doesn’t include the admin costs that are included in tuition.