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But this misses the fact that a huge, huge percent of the cost is going to luxuries and things that have no benefit to 99% of students.

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.

Well according to the article, at least half of the funding goes to paying people. Even if we eliminated everything else and tuition was cut in half, it would still be too expensive imo.

Here's a simple solution- nix all the crazy administration bloat.

I could never understand how colleges employ hundreds or thousands of non-teachers and still fail so hard at every a student actually needs. Actually becoming antagonistic to the students.

Until I realized the administration is only there so service and increase the administration.

Sounds almost like an inefficient system employing way more people than is economically sustainable – not unlike that other vital system that almost every other country in the world manages to make available to its citizens with much less overhead.

> Perfectly good buildings are torn down and rebuilt so that a new donor can put their name on the building.

This is either extremely stupid or not a problem at all, depending on how much of that new building is paid for by the donor.

Not at all.

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.

> live on a big, expensive, beautiful campus and have massive efforts in student lifestyle. Sport facilities, museums, academic support, actual office hours...

Interesting how you mention things actually relevant to academic quality towards the end of that enumeration!

> They might both be called universities, but it's completely different goods.

It almost sounds like one of them bundles a lot of things with education that are more of a lifestyle than an education.

I really don't doubt the academic quality of US colleges, and being able to actually talk to somebody that knows your name and is somewhat incentivized to care about your progress is something I'd love to see at European universities.

But all the other stuff... Are people in the US really happy with only getting all of that as a bundle deal, often resulting in crushing, non-bankruptable debt?

> Are people in the US really happy

i mean, they're doing it, so it must mean they're happy. Otherwise, they won't do it. It's not like someone forced these people to go into debt.

It's just that those students who do go into debt is doing so thinking they getting a prestigious degree would get them a good job and an easy life afterwards - a marketing tactic sold to a generation of young people that is not actually true any more (even if it was once true).

I don’t agree with this logic at all. We didn’t have any other options. If you want a desk job, you need to go to a four year college.

The amenities and the prestige of the college are also not the same thing. Stanford was just as prestigious 50 years ago when it was a fraction of the cost.

In the same way that they are happy with the health care system, because otherwise why would anyone go to a doctor?

The healthcare system is not optional, unlike the tertiary education system.

Graduating high school is also optional I suppose. Not everyone does.

The question in my mind shouldn’t be “why didn’t people think harder about getting an advanced education” but rather “why is the US the only country in the world that accepts punishing debt for its brightest youth?”

Yes, at an individual level there is always the option to become a plumber rather than an accountant. But America cannot be a nation of plumbers.

> In 1970 tuition at University of California schools was about $1000

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.

The increased attendance rate of college and price don't have to be (and I would argue, aren't) related at all.

In other words, I have no idea what point you're trying to make

The point is it's much easier to subsidize college when 10% of the cohort goes to college than it is when 60% of the cohort goes to college. That seems obvious to me and I'm not sure how it doesn't make sense to you.

I believe a number of states trimmed state-run college and university funding during the 2008 housing crisis to help balance the books.