A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

Of course, most of this goes toward research, which is probably a big part of why Berkeley hasn't really slipped much (if at all) in graduate standings (UCB actually has more PhD programs in the top 10 than any other university, according to the NSRC). The problem is, what to do with those pesky undergrads.

Stanford and Harvard solve the problem by not enrolling all that many of them, charging a sky-high tuition, and then providing very very substantial financial aid even into the middle class (Harvard will charge 10% of family income to students from families earning between $120-$180k a year). The problem on a societal level is that this doesn't scale, there just aren't enough spots. Berkeley alone enrolls more low income students than the entire ivy league combined.

I'd rather see Berkeley continue this tradition at the undergrad level than emulate an elite private college. But it isn't going to work without state funding. The state just can't demand a huge undergraduate enrollment with lots of low income students and a high (70+%) from California without also kicking in a lot of money.

There's a reason Stanford and Harvard are structured this way - this is the optimal way to run an elite private research institution - more graduate students than undergraduates, and lots of grants and private donations, along with a small but very elite and well heeled undergrad population, with extremely generous financial aid to small numbers of low income students.

Berkeley was different because it was a state supported school with a different mission - and a different and substantial source of funding. You can't keep the first without the second, it won't work.

But now we have programs like "[choose "minority" group] Studies" and we talk those students as seriously STEM.. or worse, we consider the STEM students as an afterthought.

Also, if tuition is now 8x what you paid before, I would suggest that there's a problem with the program itself and not necessarily how we're funding it.

http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76

Hell, there was a reality show that visited people doing jobs that made things in the US when they visited the San Francisco fire department's ladder factory. Yes, the SFFD manufactures it's own ladders. (http://www.sf-fire.org/index.aspx?page=1004)

I live in NY, which is similarly insane. The per-pupil costs to send a kid in my small-city school district (plus fund the gaggle of Charter schools) is over $26k/year per student. I could literally send my child to a catholic school for 50% of that, or an elite non-religious private school for about 75% of that sum.

Reminds me of the very first chapter of The E Myth book (good little book if you haven't read it).

Since California clearly didn't want me, I'm going to NY instead now, since they are very friendly to OOS students. (At my public college, tuition is basically free for me after the first year, and even the first year where I have to pay OOS tuition it's roughly the same cost as in state tuition in the crappy flyover state I'm in now.) California should really think about revising their financial aid and tuition policies if they want to be known for being anything other than someplace only the rich can afford. I guess the days of colleges being known and valued for the academic merits of their students are over.

ETA: individualism does not preclude working hard to save resources for your offspring (no strings attached at that), or anyone else you choose to assist entirely at your own discretion. Individualism does not require one start life under a rock and never accept gifted assistance. There is a profound difference between helping those you brought into this world, vs compelling strangers to give up their earnings for people they never met.

Why has tuition gone up, then? The state of California has cut its per-student funding to less than half of what it used to be, which leaves a substantial gap even after the cost improvements.

Here are some funding numbers I compiled, via the rough-estimate method of taking the state allocation to the system and dividing by its undergraduate enrollment: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt

I feel that people who pay their college on student loans don't really feel the full impact of how much their tuition cost them until it's far too late. People like me feel it all too well. Most of my friends have graduated and have nice jobs, taking vacations in Europe, and going to see the doctor (what I wouldn't give for health insurance...). They criticize me for not having graduated yet. But we'll see which plan pays off in the long run.

You don't give nearly enough credit to what you call "other contributing factors." What happened was an economic sea change. Years ago upon graduating high school you had options. You could go get a job in manufacturing and make good money right away and live a solid middle class life. For many, college was an unattractive option. Today, our manufacturing base has been destroyed. When you graduate high school today, what options do you have besides go to college? There are simply not enough good paying jobs that don't require a college degree to go around. Not even close.

I think ultimately you are mixing up cause and effect. The government is involved in the student loan business because college education has increasingly become the only path to a middle class life. Our education policy is reactive, not proactive. When the government plows the streets of snow it tends to be snowing. It doesn't mean the government caused the snow.

With that in mind, I wanted to just point out that in Australia, all student loans are done through the government and a quick search shows that the average cost of a degree ranges between about $5000 and $10000 a year. I don't know if that supports your statement about the government being "involved in the student loan business" but I figured it may be a helpful piece of data...

People argue that this would mean only rich people would be able to go to college, but I think colleges would rather keep the number of students up high, and not become an extremely privileged institution.

This is very commonly asserted, but no one offers data to back it. Some try to argue it on general supply and demand principles (loans increase demand, supply does not increase as fast, so price goes up), but this fails because that theory predicts prices should rise to the point where supply and demand are equal, yet in fact prices are far below that.

Now most people.of my age have a.degree that only proves you can wipe your ass with it, because most universities here have terrible quality, considering the amount of them grew much faster than we had teachers, and people.are terribly indebted. I pay for example permonth 2 times the minimum monthly wage. And most people stay stuck earning minimum wage until they retire. And I am not a exception, the only people I met that are below 28 and don't have absurd debts are dropouts or child of someone with net worth bigger than. 5 million.

EDIT: In the fields I got my degrees, every year we have more students completing their courses than the total number of employees on those fields in the country...

Or the one that is so absurd to the point of hilarity: Brazil has more law schools than the rest of the world summed, last time I checked in the justice department site, 5% of our population has a bachelor degree in law... (remember Brazil has a 200 million + population)

It might be easy to get private loans for higher education, as they are for profit and you can't bankruptcy out of them, but I was lucky enough to not need them.

We have the same upper class problem we had in the same 1920s-30s but they've replaced poverty with subordinacy. They've become more wily and would rather people fall into servitude than fail completely.

When capitalism broke down in 1929-33, people actually died of starvation. Now they go into high-interest credit card debt.

The same is happening in higher education. The need for widespread higher education is too strong for people to just not go, but the upper class isn't going to just give it away (even if there is benefit to them of an educated society). Thus, non-dischargeable loans have replaced taxpayer-funded grants, and college is just at the point of affordability where the upper class feels comfortable with the number of people who can go to school.

Its more general than that. System wide. Same scenario during the same timeframe in cost of housing, cost of day care, cost of automobiles... Anything involving loaning money from a bank and possibly paying it back, or anything where the .gov hands out money to certain favored groups.

"the rise of the ridiculous requirement to have a college degree to get anything close to a decent job"

At least in the USA there are fewer jobs every year. So its not ridiculous so much as market forces. Also note that society wide (ignoring the very narrow IT code monkey situation solely in NY and SF, I mean country-wide) we produce more college grads than we have job openings.

This is kind of an important lesson for HN startups etc. Yes is it true there is a shortage of IT folks in NY/SF. But in the rest of the country, we're rapidly moving from merely needing any bachelors degree to be a receptionist or call center script reader, to perhaps needing a STEM degree for those kind of jobs. I know experienced and productive STEM people lucky to be working in call centers. The lesson is if you intend to scale your startup outside SF/NY you need to face jobforce realities outside SF/NY. For example say you create a startup to sell to education. Don't do your marketing plan aimed at Ed degree holders (maybe a .edu discount or some kind of viral marketing via sponsorship of alumni activities or something) because most of those grads are either working in the hospitality industry as waiters / bartenders unable to get a job, or got a teaching job and burned out in a decade and are already on their next career. So most Ed degree holders are going to be unable/uninterested WRT your startup. You could aim at people actually employed in the field, which will be a pretty small subset of those educated in the field.

Its tempting, if you're in silicon valley, to try to scale, based on what works in silicon valley where you live. The rest of the country that you're trying to scale into is basically a different, failing economic model. Sometimes this is important when scaling, sometimes it isn't.

PS: In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms.

http://opb.washington.edu/sites/default/files/opb/Tuition/20...

Though not at double digits, I suspect rates went up throughout the 10 years prior (at 48, the article's author probably entered college around 1983). Rates certainly increased at the public universities I attended between 1983 and 1993.

If belief that there is benefit in funding public education makes me a liberal, then that I am. One side of my family moved into the middle class because a paratrooper attended Ohio State on the GI Bill.

Source?

If I wasn't majoring in CS (or my Grandfather hadn't died), I would not be going to the school I am. This isn't how the system should work.

A generation was told "go to college, don't worry about how much it costs, just go to college." And the colleges priced accordingly.

Make college debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and you will see real price pressure. No school will expect any student to go more than $10,000 in debt because they'll discharge and walk away.

True, most English Lit grads work as waitresses/bartenders, but the few who become tenured college profs are the new landed gentry, paid well above what their peers would get in industry. Which flows uphill, such that only in academia could the boss of a liberal arts major be making more than $9/hr. Of course the system of teaching with adjuncts who are paid less than minimum wage and indentured servant TAs is cutting into that.

There was a time, when teaching didn't pay as well as private industry, but at least you got good benefits and summers off. Since then we got rid of private industry and boosted the pay and benefits in teaching beyond whatever private industry is left, if any.

I'd rather see a basic income guarantee (mainly for creative people like artists or FOSS developers) and the removal of minimum wage, so businesses can correct the true value of labor in various fields.

It would help eliminate the rampant service industry that destroys souls because most people don't have the fortitude to deal with random strangers idiocy.

If we matched minimum wage from 1951, or 1961, we'd need to be paying $40,000 to $50,000 per year. Anybody that has run a liquor store, or a fast food business, understands that's mathematically impossible.

The sole reason students can get loans totaling $40k or $50k is the government is subsidizing the entire process with guaranteed loans.

Most likely as this soon to be multi-trillion dollar debt debacle explodes, the government is going to end up paying for a lot of that debt via bailouts. They're certainly not going to let that tower of debt truly fall over, so a bailout is the only likely outcome.

Some blame Baumol's cost disease[1], and that's probably an element of it, but so too are the multiplication of deanlets and deanlings[2], the cancerous growth of the physical facilities a of every school, spending per student being used as a proxy for quality by the USN&WR, the rise of bidding wars for celebraty faculty, ect.

Much or all these effects are enabled by incentives for those that run universities in which holding costs down play little to no role. That's partially a function of the student loan system and partially a function of lax oversight of "charitable" organizations in general.

[1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease [2]http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...

We need someone to pave the way :). Maybe rising tuition is the way to go. At some point uni education becomes so prohibitive that even the mass may avoid it.

(btw I was not a fighter)

Compared to the farm work, tree planting, and landlording which my father did to pay for University I'm on vacation.

No, it isn't or else you'll soon run out of researchers.

Faculty salaries, however, are much lower since a large percentage now are part time temps with PhDs.

Administrators always claim their biggest expense is faculty, I remain skeptical.

>Do they offer a better staff/student relation,

No, worse.

>better equipment,

No, and equipment is almost always paid for with grant money.

>better buildings,

My own Ivory Tower is a cold-war era brick dungeon with not a single damn window. The A/C system, which used to be great, was designed for 2.5cent/kW/h electricity, and still uses quite a lot of power even though they have disabled the dehumidifier functionality. Buildings are usually bought with local bonds, grants, or endowments.

do they pay their staff better...?

Staff, maybe, faculty? no.

>if I understand the article correctly the (inflation adjusted) amount of money the government provides also has not decreased.

Negatory, at least in Texas, the state has been slashing funds each year for at least the last 4 years. (Texas A&M, UT, were exempt, I think)

The explosion in costs isn't merely on the tuition side. Being on a college campus is to be a captive consumer. Lots of McDonald's, Burger King, Coke/Pepsi, the bookstore is a BN franchise and they get practically exclusive access to students' money. Fin-Aid makes it easy to spend money at the campus bookstore and much harder to use Fin-Aid money outside that ecosystem.

And college coaches usually make a lot more than college presidents.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/13/public-college-pres...

I believe outside the Postdoc instructors, they pay the market rate for staff. You can't get good sys admins on $10/hr but you can make a PhD candidate practically beg for every dollar.

Because for a generation the customers didn't care about the cost. And since they saw cost as positively correlated with quality, any college that attempted cost control was shooting itself in the foot.

(I'm not saying the generation that didn't care about price was stupid; they were responding mostly rationally to other perverse incentives.)

In 1981 minimum wage was $3.31 and tuition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison was $832. In 2012 minimum wage for teenage summer jobs ("Opportunity Wage") was $5.25 and tuition at UW Madison was $8,592. Some retail paid more like $8 but that's still a 2-3x increase, whereas tuition increased more than 10x.

However, your thesis of more federal funding leading to raising prices doesn't square with my experience, what I understand of the current situation, and many of the sourced comments below. (I currently work in higher ed; funding, tuition, loans, worth of degrees are discussed ad nauseum. Though I sling code, many friends and coworkers deal with the money, budgets, and legislature.)

By "federal funding", do you mean research grants? I dimly recall that during my father's generation, Sputnik motivated huge influx of cash into both K-12 and higher ed. Also, my grandfather's generation benefitted from the GI Bill. Those initiatives lowered student costs.

It's accepted wisdom that our tuition has risen in direct proportion to the withdrawal of state funding. We're currently funded at 9%. It's completely, sadly accepted that we'll eventually be fully tuition funded.

I can't speak to the student loan gouging. Prior generations of students had very low interest rates with lenient payback enforcement. So your point seems counterfactual, leaning on some libertarian "free market" worldview.

For example, the University of Washington has sustained a state funding decrease of nearly 50% since 2009. In 1990 the funding per student was $17,000 with 82% paid by the state and the remainder by the student, in 2013 the state pays 29% and the student 71%.

The demand for a college educated workforce has also increased since 1990, with the majority of middle class occupations requiring a four year degree. This demand is inelastic, and while it is true that federal student loans make up nearly 90% loans, if supplanted by private loan bodies at higher interest rates it is unlikely that the market demand would decrease.

The reasons for making student loans non-dischargeable was based on a theory that only rich students would be able to go to college. However, I think experience has been a very harsh teacher that we got something much worse out of that bargain than we thought.