US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning
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It’s a story similar to Healthcare in the US. It’s so expensive because so little is actually spent on healthcare vs paperwork and administration.
https://www.thefire.org/administrative-bloat-and-academic-fr...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...
Universities used to look like high schools, and still do in many parts of Europe (and at community colleges).
The university can save some money because it use less soap and bleach, but I hope they are still paying the cleaning crew.
Example: At the college I went to, the food service company that handled the cafeteria had some interesting clauses in their contract that gave them a lot of control over who else could cook food for an 'on campus/university sanctioned' event. It's been a long time so I can't remember the specifics, but I think we had to switch some fraternity events from cooking hotdogs/hamburgers outside to just bringing some Carry Out pizza.
On top of that, the workers for that company weren't paid well, the food was typically about what you'd expect from, say, bulk purchases from Gordon Food Service, and very expensive for students.
Speaking of that, IIRC if you lived on campus you had to have some form of meal plan (I assume that was also in the contract.)
You can't buy insurance for something that cripples everyone. Math isn't magic.
All-in-market-rate-no-discount-no-subsidies-international-student tuition was ~100,000 CAD/4 years.
It's true, though, we did not have a stadium that could sit 60,000 people, or two olympic-sized swimming pools, or four-star-hotel-accomodation dorms that we were for some reason forced to live in, but we also weren't paying $100,000/year in tuition.
The simple answer is to get rid of government backed student loans and have the schools back the loans and aid themselves. That way, they will be incentivized to not indebt 18 year olds when it is unlikely they'll be able to pay back the loan. It will also incentivize them to focus on more important things.
Look at this great deal! Now we’ll just add on the winterization fee, rust prevention package, delivery fee, admin fee, admin recovery fee, tag fee, boat payment fee, tire rotation fee, coolant flush and closing costs and we’ll get you on the road in a jiffy!
In my country, universities that offer remote degrees (well before covid) all charges additional fees for it. It’s usually not much (something like 200€ on top of the ~500€ typical fee), but some charge per module so it can add up quickly. A few have a dedicated remote learning center, with is own workers.
“accessibility surcharge”
“e-xpense”
“we just want more money payment”
Kids want to go to college. It's an exciting time in everyone's life, you get to go away somewhere, meet knew people, all while earning a degree, which because of the corporate worship of our nation, is now required to get a job.
And you wonder why fees are so high? And tuition skyrocketed?
No one shows anger towards the corporations which don't train anymore for their BS job in their BS department which doesn't do much of anything. We ignore the corporate bloat and regulatory capture across the entire spectrum for the select few corporations that have our politicians in their back pocket.
Harvard/MIT/Stanford can get away with it because they can get you into Google/Goldman/McK purely based on their screening. The market pays a high price for that.
Schools with more open admissions policies can’t expect to charge much more than Coursera for similar offerings.
They need to get their degree and graduate.
What a time to be alive when a functioning educational system with universal access and financial support is spoken about as “a pet political cause.” Some of us consider it a foundational component of a developed country, and the pandemic has laid bare the need.
1. No more government-backed Student Loans. (Tuition would drop like a rock.)
2. Build many more free/cheap community colleges and make that much more accessible to everyone.
3. Student loans no longer survive bankruptcy.
They're already cheap, accessible to everyone, and ubiquitous. What would change?
$6000 tuition per year is high enough to be prohibitive for some people. But those people are the focus of intensive recruitment and financial aid efforts by universities all up and down the hierarchy of status. That isn't the first place I'd look if I were seeking to answer "why aren't more poor people going to college?"
The value of a college degree is networking and the brand name recognition that the university has, which opens doors when your resume is churning through automated recruiting systems.
Nobody expects that you exit college with training, skill or knowledge to be an effective employee, beyond basic life skills and vague understanding of how to comply with professional standards.
Using college to actually learn stuff is down to a personal preference. You absolutely don’t need to spend time that way, but you can get extra value if you choose to.
But the bulk of the intended value is to give yourself branding and signaling for marketability in employment.
You can think of a college degree similar to a “certified organic” label on food. It doesn’t really mean anything, but you’d be a complete moron to misjudge the fact that everyone else will believe it does mean something and shift all kinds of economic facts of life around that entrenched, generational belief, and use lobbyists, regulatory capture and media to constantly reinforce that stranglehold.
>You can think of a college degree similar to a “certified organic” label on food. It doesn’t really mean anything
Not sure where you're from, but in the US this is not true at all. There are strict requirements for something to be certified organic. As of 10 years ago when I last worked on a farm, it was actually quite difficult to get certified.
My comment is only in reference to fully completing your degree and getting a diploma that goes on your resume from a community college. You’re better off skipping college and going straight to work in that scenario.
Where my family is from in the Midwest, this is very common. People who get paid more and rise to management jobs in the local blue collar workforce are the ones who just start in the stockroom or doing admin work right out of high school (or otherwise make careers in factory work, trades like welding or go to the military).
They make more money and have higher ranks than people with community college degrees working the same jobs because they have so much lead time in years of experience, while the positions rarely if ever need or care about college degrees.
Meanwhile, other than specific trades which are basically only nursing and elder care, community college grads cannot compete with state school grads for positions that do require degrees, like work in local government, upper positions in law enforcement, teaching at local schools, etc. Community college will never get you those jobs.
I’ve seen a lot of people banking on community college degrees opening doors for them thinking it’s the same as a state school degree but lets you save money & live at home. They end up still with small amounts of debt and absolutely nothing to show for it job-wise.
Really the only exception is if you transfer to a brand name school and you can ensure the degree you’ll have carries brand name signalling.
Sometimes you have to wait for those gatekeepers to retire, so it might take a generation, but it will happen over time. Sometimes it can happen much more rapidly due to innovation and new industries replacing old very quickly.
In the meantime, focusing on acquiring useful skills as cheaply and efficiently as possible is a winning proposition. Much more likely to be winning than spending a whole bunch more money on a less valuable educational product.
If they're so big and managed so well, why is there a need to charge so much in the first place?
"A typical endowment consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individual funds. In most cases, the donors who have created these funds have set restrictions on how their donations may be spent. In 2007-8, about 78 percent of endowment assets at public institutions were under such restrictions; an average of 55 percent of the resources contained in private university endowments were restricted (See National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) 2008 Endowment Study). In such cases, money restricted for research in a specific subject, for example, may not be applied toward student financial aid, and vice versa. Donations are typically restricted to fund student scholarships, conduct specific kinds of research, finance specific programs to enhance undergraduate and graduate education, create professorships in specified fields, develop or maintain teaching and research facilities, or improve a wide range of campus activities, including the arts, public service, student housing, and athletics."
However, other articles go on to note that money is fungible, making the restrictions less onerous than they appear. If, for example, a specific restricted endowment fund is restricted to providing scholarships, it still reduces the amount of scholarship money the university has to provide out of general funds by the amount the restricted endowment provides, freeing up that money to be used elsewhere.
Forcing multiple thousands of dollars is a toll for a bridge where few alternatives exist. And in a country that considers so many things a business, this is of course run like a business ergo profit is very important.
Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!
(Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.)
Thanks for the chuckle.
> Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!
I reject the framing that this system is promoted or even protected by university staff. It is of course in their interests to keep it largely intact but the true system facilitators have been in place for centuries perhaps with different names and agendas.
One thing that has been discussed here is removing government backed loans. Doing so would perhaps reduce overall population exposure to higher education. I think the trend of expanding costs of education will continue without government help via positive feedback loop from parental investment and other society wide changes happening today.
So in essence university value is being justified each day without a thought of future consequences. To that end the government may act for increasing government sponsorship loan forgiveness where you work off your loans at a discount rather than a dead stop bailout of loans that may never be repaid in a lifetime. The government could probably make a variety of optional part time/full time 'loan forgiveness' programs for the public good. Unfortunately assigning the public good would probably be too hard to decipher in a bipartisan manner.