- Why would college tuition decrease?
- What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year?
- What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition?
It's unfortunately really hard to find good answers here IMO with the layout of the current "market conditions" for colleges that we've setup in America.
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.
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.
Because the selling point of prestigious schools is the filtering and networking.
A lot of US schools require you to live on campus and pay for campus food, which is a perfect example of bundling if there ever was one. As a European, the fact this is legal seems absurd and ridiculous to me.
But will it? No. Back to the drawing board.
"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.
The workforce is not even doing that good, the competition for few permanent positions is fierce and the compensation outside of management is low compared to other industries.
To take away student loans then is a form of evil.
First, you would have to ban discrimination against people without college degrees.
You can't discriminate against people without college degrees and then complain college degrees are expensive lol.
- 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.
Basically, people think non-profit means the organization works for the public or puts the public first. Unfortunately, what it often means is money goes to employees and insiders instead of shareholders. For colleges, it means the students (and the Federal Government which issued the student loads) comes last and the college's employees come first. Not great public policy.
If college is expensive, students should choose not to go, or find a cheaper one. Choosing an expensive college, whether the outcomes are good for said student or not, is the choice of said student and therefore, subject to their rational utilitarian calculations. Choosing badly is always possible, just like any other life decisions.
We need to collectively choose to structure education for the benefit of society because we want people to be educated.
It's not about consumer choices or utility functions. That type of thinking has zero place here.
so it is done already with k-12 education. Not everybody agrees that tertiary education should be paid for by the state, but do agree that the state should help subsidize a bit.
This is the education loan system that is the collective decision.
A majority of people get a college degree these days. It isn't some effete luxury of the literati in country club colleges. If someone is willing to do the hard work of educating themselves we should support it without burdening them with a lifetime of debt.
You want a doctorate and are willing to put in the years of effort? Good, we need more. It should be free. It's not like information is a scarce resource these days. Spending years of your life to defend a dissertation is a big enough sacrifice.
* see https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reaga... or https://www.washingtonpost.com/made-by-history/2022/12/29/hi... . The same people who whine about h1-b workers also don't want to fund education to get more domestic ones. We need to stop pretending people with such incoherent policies deserve a seat at the table.
New buildings can house new students and academics which is good and also helps bring in more money in future.
New buildings also preserve the status of the university as a top institution - there is some level of competition for students and talented academics and if Harvard fell behind other universities it would be harder to bring in grants. Of course this is a good thing for the university but it's also good for any administrator who wants to preserve their pay.
Https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview
"The University ended fiscal year 2023 with an operating surplus of $186 million compared to $406 million in fiscal year 2022, on an operating revenue base that increased 5% or $262 million, to $6.1 billion. The reduced surplus was not unexpected and was driven primarily by expenses associated with renewed return to campus activity and strategic investments in our workforce, with increased compensation for faculty and staff, a decrease in vacancy rates, and overall growth in new workers across campus."
It literally is. "Non-profit" is a particular way of doing accounting, categorizing funds, filing taxes, but the incentives and interests are no different.
If you wanted to justify further pay increases this would be the best strategy - if you have an operating deficit you'll be under pressure to cut staff or pay.
Again I'm being very cynical here and I have no idea if this is actually happening. Just speculation.
People want to be more important.
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.
Not every finance professor can manage a multi-billion dollar budget, not every Political Science professor can manage a campaign or run for office, not every Comp Sci professor can maintain a university network, etc. Not to mention the fact that not every college will even have a professor for every discipline that you could theoretically use to replace an administrator.
There were assistants to the professors (1 assistant per 3 professors), the bigger research groups had post docs and lab technicians, there was an IT team (3 people), there was one person responsible for the sign up formalities of the students, a director of the institute, his assistant, one HR person, 3 or 4 people in the cafeteria, cleaning staff, head of microscopy lab, some scientific support technicians, people feeding rats and mice in the life science facility, a few people in the machine shop, a librarian (library was digital only; still took a dedicated person who made sure everyone got access to the literature they need), and those are just the people I met and remember.
That university only offered PhD programs, so there were only few lectures. If you wanted to do undergraduate courses as well, you'd need a lot more people than that.
Universities just need a lot of staff.
Why research? Why not go further and cut that bit out and just leave teaching?
I'm not convinced that the best place to teach student is necessarily the best place to do research at, and I'm pretty sure that your competence at being a good researcher has very little to do with your competence at being a good teacher.
> 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...
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 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.
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.
Anyone applying from a family making 400k a year (top 2%) would still be sensitive to an 80k vs 240k/year sticker price change.
There are just the people who got caught!
The only answer I can think of is strong and swift government regulation, and there's no appetite for that, so...I dunno man.