The Cost of College is Probably Going to Keep Going Up
motherjones.com
motherjones.com
The bar to gain accreditation is so high that only large universities and (relatively) dishonest private corporations can get accredited. This puts an artificially high barrier to entry for competition.
If we made one simple change and accredited testing facilities instead of Universities the cost of education would plummet. What I mean by this is we as a society say...
"This is what a [Insert Major Here] should know. We don't care how you get the knowledge. At University, Online, Divine Intervention, whatever. Anything is acceptable as long as you can prove you have the knowledge at an accredited testing facility."
So the tests would be the same because they would be the tests students take at University now and testing facilities would have to prove they can administer those tests properly. But you could get the knowledge wherever you choose. So if you can pass the tests for a BS in Mathematics by watching Khan Academy videos that's fine.
I can't even imagine how fast the cost of an education would fall if that happened.
What stops an honest private corporation from getting accredited?
The web lets us assemble large-scale portfolios of our actual work and transmit them to potential employers with a link. As an employer, would you rather see:
a) A transcript showing that the person got an A in his CS senior design project (or got some specified score on a test). b) A link to github which lets you see the actual code that the person wrote for the project.
I know which one I'd rather see.
There's no real reason why a student couldn't deposit all of his work in an archive (with perhaps some sort of vetting/certification by the professor or institution), then grant access to the archive (or selected parts of the archive) to potential employers.
Given that you have a position to fill, and a deadline for when you need it filled, and a large number of applicants, and other everyday work you need to keep doing... how many minutes each are you able to spend on a first-pass review of the applicants?
There's nothing wrong with picking someone that way, but you're essentially selecting someone based on random chance. You'll probably find someone who is adequate at the job, and if that is what you want, who am I to judge?
But the recurring theme on HN is that people want to hire the best of the best. The best people are 10 times more productive, they say. It may be conjecture, maybe businesses don't want that kind of person at all, but selecting someone from a sorted list is almost never going to find you that person. For that, you're going to have to put in some effort.
Anyway, it doesn't matter how you do it. The benefit of the open market is that the one who does it right will find greater success with their hire.
So, you need some function that provides at least a partial ordering of your candidates (ie, a sort key).
Computing these sort keys is expensive. It can be optimized by (partial) precomputation. Maybe this is a letter grade from a school, or having/not having a degree, or a summary prepared by the candidate (a resume), or whatever.
You probably don't entirely trust whoever did that precomputation. So you'll want to check their work. You can't do this for every candidate since you still want time to sleep at night. So, you need to use that pre-computed sort key as a filter to throw out at least some portion of the applicants. But the ones that you don't throw out, you'll want to investigate further.
This could be reviewing their past work (github portfolio, etc). Or it could be in-person interviews, or phone interviews, or whatever.
If looking over a portfolio is less expensive than doing an interview, does it let you filter out enough candidates to be cost-effective?
But the recurring theme on HN is that people want to hire the best of the best. The best people are 10 times more productive, they say. It may be conjecture, maybe businesses don't want that kind of person at all, but selecting someone from a sorted list is almost never going to find you that person. For that, you're going to have to put in some effort.
The only way to find the best (or the "good enough") is from a (at least partially) sorted list. What varies is the quality of the sorting, and of the contents of the list. Given limited resources, how do you maximize the quality of the sorting (assuming somebody else is handling maximizing the quality of the list contents)?
So long as enough people are willing to pay a high price (thru whatever means conceivable, including compelling taxpayers to foot the bill) the price will keep rising. When enough people stop agreeing to such high costs, it will stop.
One would expect that as prices rise, fewer people would attend college. However, as Americans wail that college costs are too high, the government attempts to "help" by subsidizing the costs through various means. But given the number of applicants, colleges still need to limit enrollment to their actual capacity, and the way to keep some people out is by raising prices, allowing those at the lower margin (in terms of their desire to attend) to drop out of the running.
But I think that the accounting for the benefits (and opportunity costs) of attending college is way more complex than just looking at differences in income. There is also a person's feeling of personal accomplishment or growth; the student's (or their parents) status; signalling of group membership; and so on.
And it seems that a college education is a product whose elasticity is very low. As a society, we've come to view it as such a significant marker for job ability and for social status that we've grown increasing convinced that it's a necessity, and thus colleges must raise prices even faster to keep the enrolled population (i.e., quantity demanded) manageable.
This is the key. The day student loans are reigned in is the same day prices will fall.
I know someone who works in admissions for a small school. Oddly enough their tuition prices are almost exactly what the majority of students can qualify in a loans plus the lottery education money.
All one has to do is look at all the crappy for profit school that have popped up. There is big money in selling people on spending a lot of money on a junk degree. What's amazing to me is that many of these non-accredited schools are more expensive then the local accredited colleges. What they have though is much better marketing.
The hammer costs what supply and demand say it should cost. And with universities, you have a case of increasingly plentiful supply for most materials chasing relatively stable demand. So market reality dictates that prices will fall, if not now then eventually.
But, I am not convinced college tuitions will fall.
Demand is increasing. Just in the last 10 years enrollment has increased 30% and is still increasing. Any ranked university/college does not have trouble filling their enrollment goals with their current tuition. Although there may be some delayed price pressure from higher prices causing lower caliber students to enroll, thus decreasing the ranking of the school, and thus reducing what they can charge.
In addition, most american try to achieve a middle class lifestyle at a minimum. And culturally a middle class lifestyle entails the children having a college experience (and its associated costs).
The problem isn't that you can't get educated outside of the university education system. It's that people assume that someone with a college degree is educated, and someone without one isn't.
I consider that no more accurate as assertions that grade school students haven't learned anything unless they can pass a standardized test, but I don't think there's an easy solution. For the near future at least, college degrees will continue to be the main criteria for guessing if someone's qualified for a lot of jobs.
There was an article on here a few months ago with a graph showing the growth of administration versus faculty in the University of California system. Starting from a low (5-10%) ratio of administrators:faculty it's now reached at least parity.
Imagine being able to buy a house where you don't have to pay for it until you move. And offering that only to 18-year-olds. What kind of purchase decisions do you think they'd make?
> Now, there's some controversy about whether the college wage premium is really that high. For the time being, though, there's certainly a widespread belief that a college degree is worth about a million bucks. And as long as that belief persists, people are going to act as if the market price of a university education averages $75,000 per year.
It's not about actual opportunity costs and actual value, it's about perceived value.
If you can earn $40,000 at a job, but instead elect to take a $20,000 job and go to school at the same time, the cost for that year is tuition (let's assume that $75,000 figure) plus another $20,000 in opportunity costs, or $95,000. $115,000 for the year if you decide to not work at all during that time.
When you include opportunity costs and risks of not finishing in 4 years many collages's tuition costs are vary close to the value they provide. With some degrees being a net economic gain and other a net economic loss.
Granted all of these numbers are hard to calculate but there is simply less headroom than his analysis suggests.
Edit: It looks like there is a bug where I can up vote this post.
People have internal utility functions that provide an internal value. They can also guess how other people value a good and if that's higher than their internal value they might buy it with the intent to profit. It's the second line of thinking that can create bubbles, but it's a finite world with finite resources so over time speculators tend to run out of money at which point market price tends to go back a market price based on an internal value of people who actually use the good and the cost of production.
It's odd to think of people being more rational in the long term, but rational ideas are simply more stable.
Interestingly, I read this paper not too long ago:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7364/full/nature1...
It's just a toy model... but that does underscore how easy it is to come up with a set of assumptions that lead to irrational ideas being more stable than rational ones.
Would this not serve to reduce future demand, since obviously, graduating doesn't necessarily result in better job prospects.
Is the point of educating a populace solely added economic productivity?
http://www.princetonreview.com/college/top-ten-majors.aspx
I think there should be a major in "applied psychology" because so much of success in the white collar world is understanding and motivating co-workers.