Students foot the bill for flagship state universities
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The federal government need to force these universities to take the risk and loan out money directly.
The expected value of the degree, the cost of the degree program, chance of graduation, chance of employment, student risk factors (grades, attendance), etc. are important, yet not considered.
When pricing is artificially kept independent of the underlying risk model, it leads to the kind of huge distortion we see today.
All of this is immediately obvious, of course. But the counter argument has weight too -- that putting risk into the equation isn't equitable. Poor and underserved students won't receive the same access.
A healthy medium might be to allow federal loans to continue for only programs with an expected value in four years that exceeds that of the degree program cost plus loan interest plus double the cost of living. Basically, just STEM, nursing, radiology, etc. at mostly community colleges and state universities. If you want an art school history major, you need a real loan.
So "Basically, STEM or STEM-adjacent"? (depending how consider nursing)
> The expected value of the degree
To society or the individual? Calculated how?
> If you want an art school history major, you need a real loan.
So only rich people are allowed to be educated in the humanities unless you're willing to get what will be a very expensive and likely cost-prohibitive private loan? This seems like a step backwards.
> A healthy medium might be to allow federal loans to continue for only programs with an expected value in four years that exceeds that of the degree program cost plus loan interest plus double the cost of living
So basically only engineers? This wouldn't apply to anyone getting a graduate degree or even most other professions. A mathematician from MIT entering academia wouldn't meet this calculation. Neither would almost all physicians, even if you ignore years spent in residency, unless they're moving somewhere with a very low COL.
Respectfully, as someone with a humanities undergraduate and two graduate STEM degrees, I find your proposition incredibly shortsighted and fails to consider the individual and societal value of non-STEM degrees beyond direct salary.
I would argue my undergraduate degree has provided me far more value, financial and otherwise, than either of my other degrees.
It’s a pricing issue.
If we don’t agree it’s a pricing issue, then let’s pay everyone the same salary regardless of profession. There’s ideological value in everything, but we’re talking business here.
The colleges CHARGE you something. They don’t gift you anything out of virtue. So talk money.
I’d be willing to even accept a Nicotine warning label of sorts that colleges tell an English major at the start (and the parents).
“hazardous warning label: hey, we are going to charge you 15k a year for this. you won’t likely make more than X in the real world with this degree. You cool with it? No refunds.”
All undergraduate degrees in the US have a pricing issue. I don't believe anyone should be paying 30-60k/year for one.
> There’s ideological value in everything, but we’re talking business here.
No, we're talking about university education which should not be a business. I don't consider an undergraduate degree training for a specific job, that's what technical colleges are for. If you want to argue we shouldn't subsidize university in general I could understand that but think it's a bad idea.
I don't agree that STEM degrees are inherently more valuable than the humanities from a general education perspective which is what I view undergraduate degrees as.
If we treat it as a business we should only subsidize courses essential for the workplace. Why am I subsidizing a web developer or a physician taking undergraduate calculus and physics? Having worked as both I have needed neither.
> “hazardous warning label: hey, we are going to charge you 15k a year for this. you won’t likely make more than X in the real world with this degree. You cool with it? No refunds.”
I think it's common knowledge that STEM graduates earn more, this was the case when I was in high school during the 2000s.
Money and loans are involved, people pay, and people get paid. If we go even further on the money part, many consider it an investment.
Anyways. Perhaps we should make the core liberal arts courses free of charge, and then create a pricing model for professional courses where the pricing model is more realistic about what is being offered, for what price, where the question truly becomes “is this worth it?”. That way we can finally separate the holiness of a core education away from specialized professional paths.
I find the skills I developed in my English degree have been very useful during my medical training and practice and has been commented on by my teachers during this journey. It’s certainly a better use of resources and time than a pre-med curriculum that gets repeated in the first 2 years of medical school anyway.
> What is it that humanities majors learn that can't be learned for free, or maybe a few buck on Amazon?
This statement is more easily applied to some STEM fields. Why pay for a CS degree when you can learn everything online for free?
> fine art, media, journalism or literature
And for these you also don't even need a degree, so why pay for them out of my taxes? Universities are a money grab.
You don't even have to think hard about it. The market prices it accordingly.
Market wages.
I know people hate this, but I also think it would be reasonable if you weren't eligible to receive federal student loans until you had filed your own taxes without being anyone's dependent, or been out of high school for 2 years, or _something_. What if we still agreed that federal programs can help make college accessible and affordable -- but we should want students to have some perspective on what they want their life to look like, and what it will mean to pay off a giant pile of debt over years, and what kind of education might give them a chance at balancing those concerns.
The federal government already has the bureaucracy for this in say the DCAA (https://www.dcaa.mil/).
I would very much like any universities accepting student loans to be audited and publish audited financial statements detailing where the money goes.
However, the cynical reality is that university is as much about signalling competence relative to the rest of the population as it is about learning. Fun fact: Stanford's computer science program is not accredited. The department explained that it's a mountain of paperwork to get accredited and it wouldn't benefit Stanford at all because it's already so prestigious.
The question is whether accreditation from an engineering org is worth the limits they place on your curriculum. Stanford EE and CS and Cal EECS all say no, they’d rather give their grads more flexibility than have them jump through ABET hoops.
Nobody is smart enough to write a regulation that can't be gamed.
In general (going back to basic cybernetics/control theory), it’s better to regulate outcomes (what you actually want) rather than inputs, unless you’re sure you have the correct model of the system. So it’s much better to make collages share the risk, rather than the government footing the risk and instituting regulations and processes.
I'm not sure that I would call this micromanaging.
https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-ris...
https://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-in-califor...
Many regulations work fine - not regulating is what is breaking civilization down all the world and economy right now.
But who is the Feynman of college administration? I can think of about five famous university presidents, and I'm not sure the innovations of any were that positive: Eliot and Conant at Harvard: Gilman at Johns Hopkins; Hutchins at Chicago; Kerr at California. In a purely economic view, the publicity garnered by a couple of them was a gain for their schools, I guess.
1) Have universities foot the bill, not the tax payer (shocking, I know). A literal refund.
2) Institute an audit every 5 years on their price to success rate on a per major basis. Have them refund north of 50% of the tuition if overpriced.
Cool, now run your little game.
This is literally a consumer protection issue and this industry has hid far too long under the veils of sanctity of “but tis’ but education, maaaaan”.
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Like many have already mentioned, the federal loans going toward these costs are essentially like donating to a charity that you will never get actionable data on. Did the money go to the right place? Did it work? No? Okay, stop donating to that charity, as nice as it feels to be charitable.
If a charity doesn’t work, it doesn’t work, doesn’t matter how great it sounds. Even a charity named Education.
The inadvertent economics education that came later was not the university’s doing and they take no credit nor blame for it.
Again, this is a consumer affairs issue. These universities are doing false advertising, period.
At scale this has been a failure through and through.
Shoutout out the ultimate technical school of all, MIT.
How? Who knows. Guess they know the right people.
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From my own experience, I will add that educational requirements are almost financial. You need it to be free, educationally. The same way you need money to be free.
But back on point, don’t add swindlers collecting a check on that trek, certainly not on loan, certainly not beyond affordability.
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You make this money and you are free to spend how you spend. You learn this, and you are free to learn how you learn.
Psychosocial.
That the money was spent responsibly, for some definition of responsibly. Probably this doesn't mean the sort of abuses detailed in the article.
> If a student goes to university and gets a degree in medieval French literature and then serves coffee for life as a job, the university did its job iff the student demonstrated a level of mastery of medieval French literature.
I'm unconvinced that it would be good to disband humanities departments, or to ban non-STEM degree programs and/or degrees that don't involve training for a specific career path. Last I checked, even MIT has a humanities school (though it seems to be combined with art and social sciences.)
Our society seems to have enough react programmers and could probably use more medievalists, as well as other humanities grads - people who understand the human condition, have some sense and understanding of history, know how to exercise critical thinking skills, and can read and write well. These are skills that could serve someone well in a variety of jobs.
[Moreover, as more jobs (including supposedly highly skilled tech jobs) are automated out of existence, many of us are likely to end up in low-paying service jobs - at least until the robots take those as well.]
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-free-college-a-good-id...
Students pay a maximum of N% of their income over Y years and anything above this is forgiven. The university has any forgiven amounts deducted from their actual cash payments for future student loans.
Another option available to public schools is that you can use tax as a mechanism for collecting that money.
Besides, there's no excuse for not googling "starting salaries for X" before committing to it.
Most universities are still competing for students. Many students survey a lot of universities and do campus tours to determine where they want to attend. The short campus tours don't really show them anything about the education they receive, but the state of the facilities and leaves a lasting impression.
Given the choice, undecided students tend to be drawn to universities with the nicest campus, most impressive facilities, best sports arenas, and other expensive things.
Universities know this, so they spend like it's an arms race.
If students have choice, then isn’t my job complete? I’d suspect that spending on premium faculty would have a better chance at business generation than saddling students with debt for stadiums.
However, very few colleges want to be the university that produces an adequate education with extremely low cost. They all want to be the most prestigious University, costs be damned.
If you want to get a sense of the differences, community colleges are focused on students, not prestige. Community college costs is California are $550 per semester, while UCs are in the $13-14k/yr ballpark.
Undergraduate lecturers can actually be better at a community college IMHO, because they are career teachers, not career researchers.
Have a look at the stats at https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_305.40.a...
Add up the percentages and you'll see that only 7% of American undergrad institutions accept fewer than 50% of their applications. That means half of colleges and universities take at least half of everyone who applies. Not much of a waiting list, in other words.
Anyway, as someone who has attended a California community college and a UC and an elite private brand name school, I very much agree that California community colleges have some fabulous faculty and can be both extremely supportive and cost effective for their students!
I was thinking mostly of the most competitive universities, which tend to be the ones with highest tuition. Few people are concerned the high cost of community colleges and related student debt.
It would be fascinating to see a scatter plot of college tuition vs acceptance rate.
https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/why-harvard/affordabi...
Fewer colleges mean:
1) People out of jobs. Teachers will lose their main income and the remaining colleges will have no incentive to increase their payroll because where are they gonna go?
2) Getting into a college will be even more competitive. As companies will still look for people with degrees, colleges can charge even more and candidates to study there will have less choices.
This will only change when NOT studying at a college has no impact in your future income. Or the impact is lesser than today.
For jobs that require a college degree, but the major subject of study doesn't matter, that is what they are using it for.
A High School diploma used to mean a lot more, when education was compulsory only to 8th grade. A modern high school diploma pretty much just certifies that you showed up, and the only people who don't have one are people who dropped out.
It’ll never happen. They need low effort filters.
It’s hard to defend generic standardized tests. (Whereas ASVAB is ok.)
That's true in specialized career paths. A Doctor, a pharmacist and lawyers are good examples. Don't ditch the degree requirement for those.
However I've seen "offices" jobs where they only require people that can read, write, have basic MS Office skills and specially FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. You can learn that in high school.
But companies require Degrees for those jobs and it's the most idiotic thing I can think because:
a) Companies are downsizing the pool of potential candidates and, b) People with degrees (Some of them at least) will feel that job is not fulfilling. They will leave for better opportunities.
For those jobs, just learning on the fly will suffice.
That's pretty obvious to anyone who understands that people tend to not place value on things they get for free. Like public high school education in America.
So how does one compare the "free" (tax paid) Danish universities to the US/UK ones? By citations? Nobel laureates? Amount of foreign students? Salaries of alumni? Patents? GDP per capita? Number of high value companies per capita? I think you'd find that as a whole, Danish, and other Scandinavian universities, easily compete with Anglo Saxon universities, and that the main drawback of Scandinavian universities is the language.
When I refer to "free", I mean more than just no cost in terms of money. If there is a cost in terms of the university being very difficult to get admitted to, then humans tend to value it. This sounds from your post like it may be the case here.
American public schools are valued so little that truancy laws (for 1-8) were passed to force attendance. Large numbers of high school students simply drop out and wander off.
On the other hand, becoming a Marine is free (they'll even pay you!). But the selection process is grueling, and hence the status of getting through that is valued. Even more selective services, like the Navy Seals, have correspondingly more status and value.
In the Air Force, being a fighter pilot is the hardest to achieve, and has top dog status, despite being paid to go through the process.
The French state spends 6,700 euros per public student per year, but up to thirteen thousand euros can be spent per student enrolled in Grandes Écoles, despite their only accounting for five percent of total students. Thus, though they only teach five percent of French students, these Grandes Écoles receive 30 percent of the government’s education budget.
6,700 euros is not a lot of money. It’s about $7,300. U.S. public universities and colleges spend on average over $28,000/year.
What do you think is wrong with that paragraph?
If we accept the premises as true then, depending on whether the 6700 is the overall average or the average not including grande ecole students, the % should be either 9% or 10%. No sensible calculation from those figures yields 30%.
It’s just saying that limited funding is disproportionally directed to the Grande Ecoles, leaving the other schools with much less funding.
6,700 euros is not a lot of money. It’s about $7,300. U.S. public universities and colleges spend on average over $28,000/year.
Even if I were to have a 1:1 tutoring session every single weekday (260 weekdays/year), that would only cost $26k/year, and I'd still have $2k/year to pay for books and tests.
Now, if I had only $7,300/year, I'd probably need to pay the tutors $140/hour, and have daily 5:1 group lessons.
Unfortunately the total costs - including additional fees, living expenses, health insurance, etc.) add up, so in-state costs are around $46K total (or $33K estimated for students living with relatives.) Add $30K for non-residents.
Community colleges are usually only two years, but their tuition is something like $3000 for the academic year, and there is no hefty fee if your parents live out of state.
A) the prices universities charge
B) the costs universities incur
C) the reasonable costs of providing a quality education, given current market prices of the important inputs
My comment was meant to illustrate the large gap between B and C.
You are talking about A, which changes in lockstep with B.
Colleges spend like there’s no tomorrow - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37074472 - Aug 2023 (8 comments)
I did archive the same story, but failed to include the URL. Duh.
Spending a huge fraction of your educational day on them is dumb and ripe for abuse.
This is a potential silver lining of the whole LLM thing: computers being used for writing assignments, etc, may become untenable.
Personally I agree for the most part, in general classroom instruction doesn't need them. That being said they're certainly indispensable for things like research in school libraries, running simulations for science classes, creating digital, and obviously teaching any kind of programming, so they definitely have their place. Having a dedicated computer per student is a huge benefit for less well off communities too. More than a few students won't have one of their own or even a family computer at home and having the school provide that for assignments is absolutely a boon so far as I'm concerned.
"Instructor salaries, fully loaded, and other direct costs" would be a better choice.
In fact let’s take this to the next level, automatic wage garnishing but still ensure former students have a livable income, but after 15 years if the loan isn’t paid off, the university is on the hook for the rest.