Auburn Banned TikTok, and Students Can’t Stop Talking About It
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
- You pay for a service where the amount you pay far outweighs the value of the service, by orders of magnitude. This is allowed because the amount is often obscured and deferred from the customer. The student is allowed to make this choice because they’re an “adult” and it serves the interests of the school.
- Then, instead of getting treated like the adult you are legally, you get infantilized. Like the idea of paying above what market rent would be to live in a “dorm” and have an RA conduct room checks to make sure you’re following arbitrary rules. Classes you pay obscene money for require attendance like you’re a child. Forced meal plans, etc… Schools banning the consumption of alcohol entirely.
And then they do stuff like this. It sounds like they’re just blocking it from their network, which is their choice. But based on the way these schools behave it wouldn’t surprise me if they tried to enact an actual ban on having the app installed on your phone. They seem to think they have the authority to dictate how people live their lives to an uncomfortable degree.
The amount you pay is obscured, but generally to the student's benefit, not detriment. 75% of students attend public schools, mostly in-state. Few students pay the nameplate tuition described in the media. Net tuition actually paid is much lower, and has been largely flat over the past 5 years. Some useful data points from here https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing/hig...:
> The majority of full-time undergraduate students receive grant aid that helps them pay for college.
> Since 2016-17, the average net tuition and fee price paid by first-time full-time in-state students enrolled at public four-year institutions has been declining after adjusting for inflation; it was an estimated $2,250 in 2022-23.
They also sell all of the data they acquire from students forced to take this test to colleges and universities.
This is another example of how rotten and corrupt the industry is - they have an incentive to make college seem affordable and any of their sponsored research should automatically be taken with a grain of salt. The author of the parent comment likely knew some or all of this and chose not to disclose it when posting "statistics"
I just used the "Net Price Calculator" from Georgia Tech where I said I'd be living with my parents (so no room and board cost) and eligible for in state tuition and their calculator for a year of in state tuition came out to almost $20,000:
The only fully non-biased data points I know of are from the US Education department. Their data shows that tuition and fees average across all 4-year public schools is ~$10,000/yr. The $2,500/yr number I quoted is for first-time attendees, who may get more grants and financial aid. As a comparison, the annual tuition at 2-year schools does average only $2,500/yr, and is a common path for students who then transfer to 4-year schools.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_333.10.a...
The ed.gov data also clearly shows the root problem, disinvestment in state schools by state legislatures. In 2007-08, states spent $11,049 per student, and tuition averaged $8,314. By 2016, state allocations were down to $8,218, and tuition was up to $10,526. Q.E.D.
In the images you linked, tuition is $12k, not $20k. The latter number includes transportation, personal expenses, and other items.
>In the images you linked, tuition is $12k, not $20k.
1. 12k/year is 5x more than the "average" you quoted. But you don't acknowledge that in your comment at all.
2. College always has other non optional expenses than class tuition. That's why it's included in a calculator by a college. You mentioned "personal expenses" and "transportation" to downplay it.
Other compulsory line items for going to college in the U.S.:
- Textbooks - that are obscenely overpriced.
- Parking. You have to pay for a pass if you're not living in the dorms.
- Meal plans. In many cases, you have to buy a meal plan that is several thousand dollars if you are a freshman even if you live off campus.
Your argument is like buying a car from a dealership and saying "I only paid 15k. Yeah, there was a $2000 'Paperwork fee' and a $1500 'Document fee' but the actual car was only 15k!"
You're being disingenuous. I implied it in my previous comment but now I'm stating it outright.
You're right. I give a lot more weight to sourced, comprehensive data from organizations that regularly publish said data and the US Department of Education over something clearly described as an estimate from a website of a single school.
> $12k/year is 5x more than the "average" you quoted. But you don't acknowledge that in your comment at all.
$12k/yr is quite a bit more. My guess is that the $12k/yr is the mean tuition paid, but $2.5k/yr is probably the median amount paid, but I'm not 100% sure, nor can you necessarily compare the data points from two completely different surveys.
> College always has other non optional expenses than class tuition. That's why it's included in a calculator by a college. You mentioned "personal expenses" and "transportation" to downplay it.
I fully agree, and these expenses should be included when thinking about the cost. However, we should be comparing apples to apples. Generally, the conversation around college costs are around tuition and fees, and so including non-tuition distorts the numbers. Room and Board are also important costs of going to college, but we don't usually include those either, because most people would have to pay those anyways, if they were employed instead of going to college. My primary point is that college costs for actual attendees are not as high as many people think, or as high as you are claiming them to be.
I don't understand how I'm being disingenuous, but I also think we've gotten far off of my original point. Your original argument was that college costs orders of magnitude more than it's value, and that the costs were opaque. However, we then proceeded to have a discussion based on cost data that seems relatively easy to find. Colleges clearly do price-discriminate, and try to get as much money from each student as they can. However, this is probably better than the alternative, fixed public prices, as with fixed prices, either the well-off wouldn't pay enough, or the poor would be unable to attend.
I would agree that opaque pricing is not ideal, and I wish that the public debate about college was conducted around net tuition, not a nameplate figure that few students pay. However, I can't control the public dialog, so here we are.
I don't think it makes a ton of sense from a cybersecurity perspective, but it is pretty similar to a workplace where similar rules could be in place.
Here, customers (and honestly, what they are getting vs. what they are paying for is so bad in my opinion it borders on fraud, so even using the term customer here is being generous) are treated like employees.
But the “it” you’re bothered by here is a hypothetical scenario, proposed by you, in which the university mandates that students consent to the university managing their personal devices, which nobody has suggested and which even you concede isn’t likely to happen.
Your comment above is the first I'm hearing of students being forced to live in a dorm, join a meal plan, or abstain from alcohol, excepting religious institutions. If those things are really happening at public universities I'd agree that's an overreach.
The parents, who are often the ones paying at these big universities, want this. They want their newly adult children to be treated like, and cared for as, actual children for as long as they can manage.
This attitude is due to deeply rooted issues with the way American adults view their children, and the way they view our society as inherently dangerous. The result is that we have people in their mid-20's and even 30's who are genuinely incapable of managing their own lives or thinking for themselves. And I don't just mean the ones who moved back in with Mom and Dad at 28. They are an extreme, though not uncommon, example.
That's why the eventual fall of Apple's control of the App Store concerns me. While I think it's ethically dubious for Apple to control what you install on your device, in practice getting rid of it opens the door for institutions like these with an outsized amount of influence on people's agency and autonomy to suddenly be in a position where they can force the installation of apps that don't have to follow Apple's relatively consumer friendly rules. That's very scary to me, and I think universities would be one of the first places to take full advantage. They have the perfect mix of compliant, infantilized customers who are used to being told what to do and maladaptive incentives of university administrations.
When I look at the app Life360, and how many kids (into their teens and even 20s) were forced to be tracked every single place they were by their parents for their childhood, I see a much bigger version of that happening here.
My point is in an environment like the US, removing the App Store is effectively removed any and all oversight in situations where an organization can mandate the installation of apps. The government isn’t going to protect us with legislation- the fact that there is bipartisan agreement about TikTok is very telling. It means lawmakers know how these devices can track, it just didn’t matter until that data could potentially fall into the hands to a hostile superpower.
Universities can say “hey, you have to install this app to ‘register’ your device with us” that gives us far more power and data than Apple would ever allow, even on a device with a management profile and add “unregistered devices” to the contraband that RAs search for.
They wouldn’t even have to come up with this idea themselves. I’ve no doubt multiple SaaS vendors would be hawking this to college administrations within a year or two. It’s untenable now because of Apples market share.