Comment by tech_ken | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tech_ken | Hacker News Reader

People talk a lot about the bloat at universities, but I think that they don’t often think about that bloat as being the rational response to a system that is increasingly pushing them to (a) provide collegiate credentialling to basically the entire US workforce and (b) operate the infrastructure of a small village. Yes administrative bloat is real, yes universities are opaque morasses of money and bureaucracy. They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support, and obviously education in advanced topics across the entire breadth of human knowledge. Does this require endless “Vice Provost of X” type bullshit jobs? No, but consider the amount of cruft at a private corporation of similar size and scope. In some ways this is simply what happens when organizations grow this big, IMO

edit: I didn't even mention that they also must maintain enormous research operations, some of them performing research that is literally the bleeding edge of human knowledge. Like imagine trying to helm a corporation that is simultaneously invested in multi-billion dollar government grants for deep-tech R&D, alongside a portfolio of ~15 hotels, a minor-league football team, an urgent care, a landscaping company, and something like 10-20 high schools of students. Not to mention libraries, museums, gyms, food, etc. And god help you if your campus is more than 50 years old, because the cost of maintaining all those buildings are going to be insane. If you were able to do this all without bloat or graft honestly I think you'd a generational genius in management.

> ...also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy...

This is an all-too-valid point, especially for "young people" who really are not ready to be independent adults.

If Chris graduates from high school, gets a 3/4-time job working at Pete's Pizza Parlor, rents a little apartment to live in, and starts taking old-fashioned correspondence courses from Snail Mail University - then there is near-zero social or legal expectation that Chris' landlord, or his boss Pete, or SMU will provide Chris with much anything in the way of baby-sitting, peer advisors, medical coverage, mental health services, recreational facilities, parallel justice systems, etc., etc.

Vs. if Chris' twin sibling Pat graduates from high school and goes to Big State University...and then has a major mental health crisis? There might be an ultra-luxury resort, somewhere on this planet, which actually provides the level of mental health service which seems to be expected of any university. Might.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. Is this a US specific problem? Most universities where I live provide free mental health service's through the government, though it's a more limited than real therapy.

hmmm.... u.s. government and 'mental health' you say?

> They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support, and obviously education in advanced topics across the entire breadth of human knowledge.

No, they are not. They just have access to unlimited taxpayer money in the form of unlimited student loans. Admin gets a cut of this, so obviously the more student loan money flowing through the school, the bigger the cut.

Even 20 years ago, my college required people living in the dorms to buy a certain minimum number of meals at $20 per shitty defrosted Aramark/Sodexo meal or more. And this was in NYC, I could have walked 2min in any direction out and gotten a much more nutritious and better tasting meal for $5 to $10 back in those days.

The root cause of the problem always has and will be the tap of unlimited taxpayer money. But with the benefit of tying it to a young person’s credit, so they keep their heads down and be good little worker bees.

I mean I don’t disagree that the way we finance higher ed has led to this outcome, but also there absolutely is the demand from both state governments as well as state citizens to provide this level of service. I agree that we should not be coercing 18 year olds into 30-year loans for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but we also have decided that everyone should go to college and that college should “look like” what everyone remembers private college being like in the 70s. The result of those decisions is the system we have now. Taking hatchets to public university budgets is downstream of the problem so long as there's a crush of people who demanding that their children can have "a college experience"; we need to refresh both the purpose and form factor of higher ed from the beginning

> They are also charged with the care of tens of thousands of young people; keeping them fed, providing medical services, transit, housing, therapy, IT support

Yes. The point is they shouldn't be.

Ok sure I'm on board with it. Now convince the millions of students who vote with their wallets to stop attending these all-inclusive campuses.

If someone offered tuition at half the cost without those services, I bet plenty would vote for that with their wallets. Unfortunately, bureaucrats don't typically have that kind of courage.

Are you just not familiar with the concept of a community college or what? I’m only lightly familiar with higher ed and even at this distance the problem is clearly not that nobody’s been “daring” enough to try and float a slimmed down higher education offering.

These exist. They're community colleges or correspondence courses. The problem is that a university education is a luxury good: costing less makes it worth less, because more people have access to it. So all the students who are either gifted or well-connected go to the top tier universities, the slightly less so the second tier, allll the way down, until you reach your budget options. Since the value of the institution is largely dictated by the quality of the students it can attract, they end up offering a much worse value prospect than those more expensive institutions.

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