Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?

If I donated $20k to a university, I'd get to write that off as a charitable contribution in my taxes. If I pay full tuition and 1/3 of that goes to a student needing aid, I get no deduction.

What exactly is unfair about the process?

1. The colleges which most heavily implement price discrimination are the most desirable to attend and also tend to accept large portions of their student body through Early Decision applications that don't allow apply to most (not all) of the other most desirable colleges. This means that accepted ED applicants have no recourse beyond either accepting or rejecting the proposed "aid package".

2. Highly desirable colleges aim for high applicant "yield" for rankings/planning, which in aggregate makes it so most of their accepted students only get into one highly desirable college. Even outside of early decision applicants, this puts applicants in a bad bargaining position - they must choose between either paying more for the ~single highly desirable college they got into or less for a less desirable college.

3. You cannot generally bid between colleges even if you got into comparably desirable/expensive desirable colleges (you can't tell Dartmouth and Brown that each is proposing a cost of $40k/y and have them bid against each other). This is because they essentially operate as a cartel. This limits downward pressure on prices.

4. The application process operates in rounds with fixed dates, there aren't really do-overs within a given year, and waiting for the next year changes the process (you're either a transfer or gap year applicant). This puts a lot of pressure on applicants to accept the least-worst option and doesn't give them the ability to react to a bad outcome by eg applying to more places after the fact.

5. The acceptance criteria are opaque and in many cases subjective (eg your application essays). Applicants need to hedge their bets and deal with a lot of uncertainty. Any accepted offer from a highly desirable college then feels like a gift and not worth squandering/negotiating.

6. As you mention, colleges know exactly how well you'll be able to pay, and because they act as a cartel that disallows bidding wars or negotiation + all the other forced scarcity/time pressure I mentioned, they can essentially extract as much from applicants as they want, up to their sticker price.

It's worth mentioning that not all competitive colleges participate in the cartel to the same degree as the Ivy League. When I was applying to colleges, I remember MIT and Caltech had Early Application (not Early Decision) processes, didn't make applying in those rounds as beneficial as ED colleges, and didn't have as many athlete/legacy "backdoors" as the Ivy League.

I also remember that Duke and Vanderbilt offered full merit scholarships to some students who might've received no need-based aid, which I was fortunate enough to benefit from and am extremely grateful for, even if it was probably a self-serving policy to poach applicants away from the Ivy League/improve yield.

When the marginal cost of each student is probably $20K, anything over that is awesome. So even if you give a $30k "merit scholarship" to a full pay student you are making bank, as you are still clearing $50K+ as a university.

Perverse outcome of this is that the richer students will get more "merit aid."

Also, Ivy leagues + Stanford and MIT are a cartel, and don't give merit aid. So they use the "need based" aid system to even more increase their price realization from the richest folks.

(Ask me how I know: parent who went way too deep on this, and is now stroking a $85K check to an ivy.... lol.)

Income-based billing is rife for abuse!

College shouldn't be structured like a punitive sacrifice for poor behavior

  Imagine any other service where they demanded your bank statements

It’s just being sucked into bullshit administration and infrastructure costs.

A university could be a few dozen professors, zero admin besides secretaries for the professors, and having the professors share whatever small organizational tasks are actually necessary.

Like think of how you would run a startup university. Do as little as possible outside of actual teaching and research, charge tuition to cover costs which would be much lower.

There’s not any competition though. So it’s not happening.

"Eliminate 80% of administrators" would also help with #3 but there's no incentive to do that, especially without the more direct answer to #3 happening first.

If a school doubled tuition, it would be less competitive and fewer of the best students would choose to apply and enroll there. That would make that school less elite.

> What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition?

Increased supply and/or lowered demand.

Decoupling education from certification would work. Most people are willing to pay so much for college because they need certification; they're forced to pay for the education, whether or not they actually learn anything.

The Federal government could mandate that any school that's eligible for funds has to make the certification open to anyone, and also make sure that the certifications themselves around coupled together (you don't need a certification in Art History to get certified in Biochemistry). If people can pass the Harvard certification for, say, Harvard Astrophysics, then they get a Harvard Astrophysics degree the same as someone who took classes at Harvard and passed the certification.

It's known that bundling items together is usually a good way to force people to buy things they don't want. People talk about this all the time when it comes to cable bundles. But our higher education system is based on bundling a lot of things together, so when people are trying to acquire what they need, they're forced to pay for many things they don't.

in theory, because of a few factors

1) more kids doing online, or community college, degrees

2) more people opting to go into the trades, as AI eats knowledge workers and the cost-benefit doesn't make sense; or else skipping and going straight to certifications for things like IT

3) legal or structural changes impacting how many international and out-of-state students are allowed. many public universities operate at a loss for locals, but subsidize those costs with higher fees for out of state and international students.

4) the gub'mnt finally gets around to rejecting or capping a lot of student loan applications

Been seeing a lot of chat about #1 and #2, but until the last two get changed I don't think anything will drastically improve

The only answer I can think of is strong and swift government regulation, and there's no appetite for that, so...I dunno man.

> A poll published in 2022 asked parents if they would rather their child attended a four-year college or a three-year apprenticeship that would train them for a job and pay them while they learned. Nearly half of parents whose child had graduated from college chose the apprenticeship. [1]

> Nearly half of parents say they would prefer not to send their children to a four-year college after high school, even if there were no obstacles, financial or otherwise. Two-thirds of high-school students think they will be just fine without a college degree. [1]

When there is a large change in the demand for a product, the price often drops.

1: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/why-americans-have-los...

Presumably, competition prevents this. It would really depend on the applicants' other options. Between attending Vanderbilt at $200K per year and a moderately less prestigious state university for about an order of magnitude less a lot of students would pick the latter. The university could admit more students that are willing to pay the doubled tuition, but that'd probably result in lower graduate quality.

I'm not sure what could make elite universities lower their tuition save for legislation. As the Varsity Blues scandal demonstrated, families are willing to pay huge sums of money to get their kids into elite university. Besides laws, the only other answer I can think of is to reduce the prestige of elite universities. If an Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT diploma ceases to confer so much advantage in academia and the labor market then their ability to charge large sums would go down.

- Why would college tuition decrease?

1) College tuition would decrease if it led to increased profit for the college. This could happen for many reasons including the case that they can't find enough students willing to pay.

- What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year?

2) Mostly the fear that it would reduce profits - for example through bad publicity, increased regulation, or an inability to find students willing to pay

-What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition?

3) market forces - on the demand side a decrease in students willing to pay, or maybe on the supply side an increase in competition for students. Or maybe government/regulatory interventions. Or possibly even a reduction in the costs of providing education.

The single change that would cause the largest downward pressure on college pricing would be removing federally subsidized student loans.

It is effectively double -- the rest of the "tuition" is legacy contribution. There is an entire standard contribution schedule based on how many years out of college you are. Many legacy parents pay hoping this gets their children into the school when the time comes.

Go to one of those almost-free european colleges, and then compare the experience to a US college. The US colleges expect most students to come from far away, live on a big, expensive, beautiful campus and have massive efforts in student lifestyle. Sport facilities, museums, academic support, actual office hours... it's closer to expensive, private EU universities. Most EU universities don't do that, and they are ran to cut costs. The expense per student is low, on purpose.

They might both be called universities, but it's completely different goods. The transformations of European schools to be available to the masses just didn't happen in the US, and therefore the prices are through the roof. Give any American university the budget per student than a German or Spanish university has, and they'd have to just close, because they aren't built for it.

The dorms, gyms, cafeterias and student centers built in the last decade are luxurious spaces compared to prior decades. Perfectly good buildings are torn down and rebuilt so that a new donor can put their name on the building. Budgets for sports, clubs, and other programs have skyrocketed.

If you were to start a new school from scratch and ask the question "How can we give students the best education for a reasonable price?" you could do so with a university with 1/10th the headcount of staff and a correspondingly lower tuition.

You just wouldn't have a 15-person committee meeting weekly to decide if the company the university hired to perform an audit of the mission statements of the companies the university hired to provide consulting services to the student affairs staffers were properly recorded in the new document management system that was transferred from the homegrown IT solution to the new vendor.

And in 1970 one in five high school graduates went to college, whereas today it's nearly two thirds. And that was with a much lower high school graduation rate than today (55% vs 80%). So whatever changes have happened have had the result of getting a lot more people actually into college.

Isn't it the opposite? The tutution became increasingly inelastic. Consumers would technically be more elastic given the higher credit available.

Higher education is a large market and there are many, many forces at play. Blaming a single item is too simplistic an analysis.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.70.a...

EDIT: this response assumes a good program / department. There are absolutely subpar college programs that are a giant waste of money and time.

This is the wrong comparison IMO. All of the good engineers I've come across are autodidacts. This makes sense when you think about it. You aren't going to be among the best by learning at the pace of a class. Many of them went to college because culturally that's what smart people do in the US (hopefully this changes). They acquired their competency despite--not because of--being preoccupied with useless coursework.

Bootcamps and micro-certifications don't produce competency either, but the stakes are much lower, and it's much less time and money wasted.

> To me, the value of the university system seems to be the connections and networking that form rather than skills and acuity.

Yes some of it is networking, but it's really that universities function as rating agencies for humans. Getting into the university is the most important part. If everyone switched to putting the best school they got into on their resume instead of where they graduated from, very little would change. And it would provide roughly the same signal to employers.

However, most of the practical skills I learned in college were not good uses of time. Classes in general weren't structured to teach you the kind of skills being an actual fulltime SWE gives you. Plus the industry changes so fast, and college is so unrepresentative of what actual problems people work on in the real world, that you may learn something soon/already obsolete.

So my advice, especially for people going into the software industry, is to learn as much foundational and theoretical content as you can. You may never get a better chance to learn graph algorithms, real analysis, abstract algebra, or theory of computation after college. Your professors may be experts on compilers or programming languages, and able to teach you the theory behind eg LISP better than you could teach yourself later.

Signup for the classes that will remap your brain and pay dividends for decades instead of "web dev 101", and you might find your college experience worthwhile (beyond the fun, personal growth, and networking - all important too).

1. A kinder gentler form of kicking your child out of the nest and learning to be on their own.

2. A no mac-education environment were students can participate in research and learn how to answer question that are not yet answered as opposed to regurgitation.

3. Learning to socializing as adults.

4. Meeting groups of people that spend their days thinking deeply about specific subjects. These people can then be used as resources for society as a whole to solve problems and make decisions.

5. Exposure to just about everything we know or think we know about everything.

If you do not view them as such then I would agree they are not worth the effort or expense. Industry can afford to train their own automatons. Which is one of the reasons they are salivating over AI at this very moment.

It really depends on what you sorts of jobs you're talking about. There's a bunch of work available in the vast realm of "computer jobs" that are essentially on the intellectual level of plumbing or hvac repair and indeed, college is a waste of time for those sorts of jobs and boot camps are fine. I'm not denigrating it, that's mostly what I do. I wire together systems that other people mostly developed and do a bunch of troubleshooting and most of the value I bring is on-the-job experience with the systems involved.

There's also a lot of cutting edge R&D and dev work that does indeed benefit from an academic background, and you don't really have to look any further than open ai for that. But even outside of machine learning, a lot of people have built companies on taking academic research papers and turning them into products.

The skills bootcamp graduates don't pick up are things like math, writing, and research skills. You don't use those skills as a code-slinging junior engineer, but when you start coordinating with other people and doing things like designing large-scale systems, you may find yourself doing a lot more math and writing than you think.

This is actually a fantastic test for working in a large company. I always worry that anyone who can't finish college may not be a good fit for a large organization. I'm not always right but I'm right a lot.

Also it really does teach you how to learn. The content doesn't really matter.

The only place I see this thinking is on Reddit or among people who aren’t engineers. It’s something people want to believe from the outside.

There are probably rare exceptional people who grasped all of the fundamentals without college, but I have never met one.

Most people just want jobs. Many employers are finding out that people with or without college educations can perform at their tasks, think critically and do all the same functions at most jobs. Ergo, folks will choose not to go into student debt purgatory and just dive straight into the workplace.

As long as hiring managers continue to give more weight to resumes with name brand colleges, these universities will never be threatened.

While I was attending college in the 2010s. They were always pushing “new buildings”, “new rock wall climbing”, “renovations to college housing”, “lazy river!”. Apparently funded through higher tuition and fees.

At some point, a college degree will no longer be required which will be the death knell.

This means you can still have arts education because you only need to back one Andy Warhol to pay for everybody else, but you don't know in advance who that's going to be (this should sound familiar to people on this site).

Right, by not having student loans backed by the federal government. As it stands now, if you put glasses on a dog he could get a student loan because lenders have no incentive to scrutinize the debt. The federal government collects for them.

We're pushing people with absolutely no financial experience and no financial training to sign up for debt they can never get rid of without what's effectively economic indentured servitude.

I have a hard time believing health insurance costs have driven the drastic increase in college costs. They’ve certainly played a role, but I don’t see any reason they would increase the cost of education more than they’ve increased the price of everything else.

Couldn't this just be combated using shrinkflation? I'm sure that rice, beans, ramen, and other grad student fare is still cheap yet provides enough nutrients to study.

After all, these are supposed to be institutions of the mind, not institutions of the stomach.

https://www.vanderbilt.edu/stuaccts/fees/tuition_fees_2023-2...

...Is this /s? $300k is sufficiently enough to support a family of 4 in literally any city in the U.S., including NYC & LA.

Outside of those 2 major cities, $300k/y for a family is more than enough.

The same goes for the housing market. Govt interventions has only made home prices more expensive vis a vis other items we may consume.

We shouldn't look at a school charging $400k and say "well you'll make more than that so it's a good deal." We should look at what you're actually getting. A cinder block dorm, mass-produced assembly line food, a professor making $80k a year telling you to write a paper on a book that's in the public domain. None of that is worth $400k.

Also, it's not clear that the wage premium from attending college has to do with what is learned in college. Some scholars believe that it is largely a signaling device. Others believe that it is used as a proxy for general intelligence tests, which companies try to avoid using when hiring employees (due to a SCOTUS case from several decades ago, dealing with disparate racial impact).

It may be true that the wage premium has outweighed the cost of attendance in the recent past, but this could easily change as tuition continues rising, and critically as interest rates are much higher than in recent years. The discount rate to which future earnings are subject is much larger than in the past 30 years, which means that the required wage premium has to be much larger than if the interest/discount rate were closer to zero. Basically, ZIRP was a boon for colleges, not just startups.