It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays
randalolson.com
randalolson.com
When some people read articles like this, they call for more government aid to students. "We need to help young, hard working students from unprivileged backgrounds to pay for college!" Their hearts are certainly in the right place, and it isn't an unreasonable idea at first glance.
However, could this idea be part of the problem? Maybe giving people free money for college isn't the best idea.
There are four ways to spend money:
1) You spend your own money on yourself
2) You spend someone else's money on yourself
3) You spend your money on someone else
4) You spend someone else's money on someone else
When you spend your own money on yourself, you are very selective with how that money is spent. Not only do you gain from what you buy, you also lose money you could use to buy other things. The other three situations are ones in which being selective isn't as important to the spender.
Why does this matter? When people pay for college themselves, we are in situation 1; they have an incentive to choose a college they can afford while still being a great place to learn. When a student gets free money proportional to tuition, they can choose a school that charges ridiculously high rates for tuition. (Student loans are a middle ground. They are still spending money on themselves, but people the age of college students tend to be more frivolous with loans than money they earned, so they are still less interested in the price.)
The more students that get free money for college, the higher the cost of college becomes, because the equilibrium price of college gets distorted. If all student aid disappeared tomorrow, then certainly the cost of college would decrease.
If colleges get more money, then where does it go? Certainly not directly to education. It goes to fancy buildings to impress donors, and supporting the ultimate cash cow: government research grants. It goes to inflating the administrative staffs and inflating the salaries of the highest ranked members of that staff. If it was possible to pay for college on minimum wage, I wonder why we ever changed the system.
This. Bureaucratic bloat, no accountability and terrible efficiency. Many Universities are the largest employers in their state.
Do our Universities exist to be Research and Educational institutions, or to employ armies of admin workers that push papers?
The size of IT infrastructure has grown immensely compared to 30 years back, so you need people to take care of that. My department has four IT support people, and they carry a full workload.
The amount of foreign students has grown, consequently you need people to keep track of immigration requirements that seem to get worse each passing year, and you also need cultural programs, you can't expect people from non-western countries to be thrown into an alien culture and succeed.
The number of non-traditional and first-generation college students has grown, if the student body consists only of middle-class and wealthy people you don't need support staff for the students who teach them how to study.
Then there is career services, these things are expected these days. Back when you knew the major employers, and they had a hiring pipeline at your university.
There is also this competition through facilities, gyms and really fancy dorms are the norm, and those things need looking after.
Anyone who proposes cutting back on administrative staff must give suggestions how to deal with all these issues.
The services you listed are great; I'm not saying gyms and career centers are bad at all. The problem is that everyone in the school is forced to pay for them. The bloat comes because they get more funding than they need.
Here's the deal: it's not about you, it's the university that runs the numbers and decides where the scarce funds will go. (Yes, the funds are scarce. The machinist in my old department will retire soon, and the fear is that there won't be a replacement. When he leaves it will be a disaster, there won't be custom-built instrumentation any longer.)
If the rec. center attracts more tuition than it costs to provide there will be a rec. center. If the center for remedial math will prevent an unprepared student from dropping out - if three years more in tuition provides more money than running the courses then there will be remedial math. That's how non-teaching staff are allocated.
They aren't necessary, they're nice to have.
When it comes to budgets, the nice to have things that aren't really necessary get cut.
It's not all that hard.
Um, most of the reason foreign student enrollment has grown is because foreign students pay cash. Adding bureaucracy to manage students who whom you admitted primarily because they carry cash is not something I particularly sympathize with.
If something else, can you link to a source describing this? I'd love to know more.
Which isn't to say that we shouldn't be spending money on research, or that universities shouldn't be the ones to do it. But considering that government funding for research has been stagnating lately, I wonder if a less-explored factor in the situation hasn't been that we've slacked off on investing in research and are sticking our kids with the bill instead.
Where is the other 1/2?
Of the rest, the 5 next biggest things are financial aid at 12%, "enterprise operations" (which covers administration of everything from state labs to the student bookstore) at 8%, student services (including athletics) at 7%, academic support (administrators, libraries, etc.) at 6%, and physical plant at 6%.
The bloat has not been fueled by anything but massive consumer debt foisted on those least experienced with personal finance and with the least work experience and who these days are lucky to find an entry level professional position.
If defaulting on student loans were possible, then the cost of college would decrease.
If loan interest rates were increased to compensate for the additional losses this would increase the cost for everyone getting a college loan who doesn't default. And since default has significant costs overall costs would also go up. Lastly this would reduce the incentive to make wise decisions on educational choices.
On the other hand if interests rate remained the same then this be an would increase government subsidies and thus demand and thus costs for everyone. And again would reduce the incentives to make sound financial choices on education spending.
Either way costs would very likely increase for most students and we would get a less efficient education system.
I think the argument goes like this:
1. Allow college debt to be defaulted on
2. After some time the government (or banks) will start to assess the risk of making student loans
3. Some time after that the loan market for students will be less crazy and more rational
4. With enrolled students able to spend less, colleges will be forced to charge less or lose students
5. Some college close, others stay open
6. College now costs a more reasonable amount of money
We're seeing the same dynamic in the college market as we saw in the housing market. The banks were typically in the business of saying "no, you can't do that" to people who were borrowing money, thus enforcing restraint on those who didn't have enough on their own. Once the banks stopped saying "no" when people were not a good credit risk, everyone went nuts and bid housing up to rather crazy levels. Housing prices are inversely proportional to interest rates in a very nonlinear way.
The situation is similar in the college market. The interest rates are more sane, but the risk assessment is much worse. There's all kinds of loan money sloshing around and not a tremendous amount of out-of-pocket money. If college had to be paid out of pocket you'd see lower enrollment or lower prices or both. Allowing defaults will force the market from largely loan-funded to a more reasonable mix of loan and out of pocket funding.
- The government controls undergraduate tuition fees for UK/EU students (currently capped at 9k per year).
- Until about 25 years ago, undergraduates' tuition fees and living expenses were paid by the state. These two direct subsidies have gradually been replaced by student loans. It will take some time for people's tolerance for larger and larger student loans to match that in the US.
The program has some great incentives for drawing qualified people in medicine, law, etc. into Federal jobs.
With federal loans, you can only take out at most $5,500/year as an 18 year old, which doesn't do a lot. Cost of attendance in my home state is $20,000/year, so that's about 25% of what you need to go.
http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsidized...
So, basically you have a situation in which demand for the best possible education is inelastic. Pretty much everybody wants it and is willing to pay anything they can for it. If you offer students more money to spend on their education, they naturally will.
That means that schools are in the very powerful position of deciding who deserves the privilege of an education. But, at the same time, they're competing with each other for the best students. If money is no object for the students, you can bet that schools will spend as much as possible to get the "best" students. Fancy buildings aren't just there to impress donors. They're there to impress prospective students.
I think MOOCs will help and basic income will help. High tuition isn't a problem if you don't need to go to school. You don't need to go to school if you don't need a job and you can educate yourself elsewhere.
I know most MOOC courses are up to par. I've taken several and the introductory Python programming course at Udacity was more difficult than any of the classes from my arts degree. Right now, a certificate from a MOOC is about as worthless as a certificate I make for myself. I could take those Python skills and do useful things that would make me stand out among other candidates, but that requires a willing ear. Rare exceptions are employers who are actually aware of MOOCs and also favorable to the idea.
I could sell the idea of a MOOC in an interview, even show what I've learned, but getting the interview with MOOC credentials seems very suspect unless you find that aware employer. The idea of MOOCs (free education that leads to employment) threatens colleges, but I don't think the existing MOOCs are currently having an impact on price. When they will begin to have an impact is anyone's guess.
Like you say, high quality MOOCs can really help people learn. The reason I mentioned MOOCs alongside basic income is because basic income removes people's dependence on jobs.
I think trying to save money by cutting benefits to underpriveliged people is extremely wrongheaded. That money is an investment, it's not just set in fire and wasted. (For that, see the vast taxpayer subsidies we hand out to telecoms and dirty coal companies..)
Here you go http://studentaid.ed.gov/types/grants-scholarships
Without grants, there wouldn't be a gap. College would cost less. Also, society "demanding" people to go to college is part of the problem.
I haven't done the numbers but I suspect there's like 10x as much tuition coming from loans as there is from grants -- wouldn't that make grants a tiny portion of the problem?
It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure).
There are probably a few factors.
- increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students
- increasingly top-heavy administration (hey, let's add another $300K Assistant Deputy VP of Student Diversity, etc) providing a path for faculty to 'advance' in their careers
- federally subsidized student loans make it less painful for colleges to increase tuition than if students had to borrow independently or pay out of pocket (this is especially egregious in for-profit education, where getting that federal money is key ... gotta get those marks, er, students enrolled so you get paid!)
Essentially, it's a racket where everyone has an incentive for the price to keep rising - except for the students and their families, and perhaps the government, who's underwriting this entire disastrous bubble.
I'd like to point out that much of the administrative bloat has occurred because of new (bipartisan) laws forcing colleges to provide more services. There are services for veterans, services for the disabled, services for victims of crimes, oversight services for grants and such, etc. My girlfriend works for a university, and much of the administrative hiring they do is directly correlated to new requirements, laws, and administrative rules passed down from the federal or state governments.
So I think you're right, but don't place all the blame on the schools, just as much belongs to the political parties that like to use universities as a battlefield for whatever agenda they've got at the moment.
Edit: It is especially wrong to think that the faculty are driving administrative bloat when, in fact, the faculty are the biggest opponents (and literally stage rallies against it at some schools) because every dollar the university spends on an administrator is a dollar they don't spend paying a faculty member).
Please refrain from reducing veterans to a political action committee. They deserve much more than they currently get under our system. Try and get through the red tape at the VA and then tell me how you feel about the outsize effect that the veterans are having on the benefits debate.
Veterans who go to war come back bearing terrible scars. They are routinely subjected to horrific conditions that would make you cringe. They are asked to do terrible things to terrible people and still maintain a standard of professional conduct that civilians cannot maintain.
SO I do believe it's unreasonable to treat war veterans, who volunteered to sacrifice themselves and their lives to defend our way of life, just like any other citizen who needs some governmental support.
Veterans who have no obligation to serve but do so anyway deserve our utmost respect and admiration. And on the list of people who contribute to the safety, security, and greatness of this country, they are at the very top.
It's great for the mid to late career faculty member who wants to take the next step and become an administrator. It's less so for those whose areas of interest are lower priority and must tighten belts.
Those are the students who found a job to put themselves through school. See, it's a vicious cycle.
This gets cited a lot, and sometimes people actually go to the trouble of citing the cost of a new facility at $x million. Is there evidence that these facilities actually raise the cost substantially per student per year? Often when I hear people getting offended about, say, a $15 million building, I run a back-of-the-napkin calculation and it's not even a drop in the bucket on a tuition bill when you consider that it's going to serve something like 40,000 people per year for more than 30 years.
UGH! These kind of comments make me so angry. Sure, lots of graduate students are sub par due to inexperience or distraction or pure, simple busy-ness, but lots and lots of professors don't give a damn either. I TA'd on and off for about five years, sometimes spending 20-30 hours a week meeting with students and doing 1:1 sessions with them to help them learn whatever topics the course required. Did I sometimes get stumped by a slightly off-the-beaten-path question in a recitation section? Sure. But I'd still take a motivated grad student over many of the professors I suffered through.
(And to be fair, tons of--perhaps even most--graduate students don't give a damn either. But the problem isn't "More and more classes taught by graduate students and adjuncts", it's a combination of "Lack of interest in being a good teacher" and "Lack of interest in incentivising good teaching".)
However, in my undergraduate experience, the most interesting and memorable classes were taught by active professors with many years of teaching experience, who also had a good research program. It helped a lot when they would teach class material, and also connect it to what was current in their field of research.
PS: I actually hated most of my TAs and loved the courses where the professor didn't use a TA and was involved in teaching, himself.
Teachers/administrators are told that they need these packages from corporations to make sure students best learn the material and to make sure that teachers best teach material, too, but what really ends up happening is that teachers become worse at teaching and students become worse at learning because more organic methods of education (teacher-student interaction, certain forms of abstract thinking, etc) can be forgotten, and we can see the lines between offline/online schools blurring as education becomes a corporate process like so many other things in our age. It is a bad racket all around.
As someone who's worked for a college before, there are things I could say about accreditation, but won't because it's generally a valid practice.
You're also right about the buildings and staff bloat. I work at a state university and see all of that happening. The IT organization is honestly twice the size it needs to be, if people were held accountable for being even moderately productive.
The problem is the students have been fed the lie that more "prestigious" schools yield better outcomes. Although this might be true in an extreme minority of situations (investment banking is one example where prestige matters), for the most part, the ranking and cost of the college don't matter at all.
Everyone simply ignores selection bias and assumes that getting into the "best," most expensive school possible will improve their life. In reality, if you control for selection bias, there is no difference between the outcomes one gets from Harvard and the outcomes one gets from Suffolk. In fact, the people who make the most money out of college are community college graduates. (Obviously, this is influenced by a lot of factors, but the blanket assumption that a high-end four-year school is automatically better is clearly false.)
For some reason, no one bothers to actually evaluate the value of their education critically. Instead, everyone simply buys into the collegiate cult of prestige.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/10/who-need... http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/03/community-college-g...
When I was in high school deciding which colleges I might want to attend, the guidance counselors spent great effort emphasizing that median salaries from all schools n (where n >> 1) years after graduation tended toward the same value, even if graduates from prestigious schools had better salaries at n=1 or n=2.
What I want to know is how the top quartile, top decile, etc. compare, especially for fields in which there are large companies paying high salaries, but primarily to graduates from prestigious schools.
Because you cannot discharge student loan debt through bankruptcy.
If students could discharge their debt, loans would match risk better and decrease. In turn, colleges wouldn't be able to raise their prices as far since they would price themselves out of students.
I think there is a more simplistic answer to this question.
1. Obama said everyone should go to college. (demand increases)
2. Supply is scarce (we don't have enough good teachers, so people are battling to go to the best university however way - money - possible)
3. If demand increases, and supplies decrease, it means price elasticity expands (prices go up)
4. Right now we are trying to increase supply but are struggling (MOOC's will save us!)
So let's all go back to the beginning now and ask ourselves "Why does everyone need to go to college?" I think that's the real question to be answered here.
2.) False. There are waaaaaaay too many professors, to the point where most aren't tenured and make barely livable wages. There is a limited supply of universities, but it seems like most collude on prices, or at least refuse to compete on price. At any rate, universities seem to scale pretty well to handle extremely large population bodies, aside from a few statistical outliers that don't matter for this conversation.
3.) Demand has been constant for a while, along with supply. Easy credit is the driver of price change here, not a radical shift in supply or demand.
4.) "We are trying to increase supply". Education isn't what's lacking. You can learn a lot from independent study and books. What's lacking is degree factories. MOOCs aren't degree farms, so they are not an equivalent good.
In this environment, you would expect more universities to flood the market to capitalize on the high profit, but that isn't happening. There is an excess supply of professors, but not universities.
This might be due to regulation, accreditation, high capital demand, and or the inability to create a lean university that just offered specific curricula. Is it so absurd to think a CS degree could happen entirely online and mostly asynchronously?
I don't think so, but it hasn't happened well yet.
So high barriers of entry + inelastic demand because easy credit = no universities created to drive down price.
Nope.
Everyone should be able to get a college education without having to pay exorbitant prices. The solution isn't to tell people not to go to college. It's to make college education cheaper, and NOT by student loans etc. That just equates to free money/easy credit and thus lets colleges inflate their prices to ridiculous amounts.
Its simple as this: If you are selling candy to a kid and he asks the price, u ask how much money can u get your dad to pay? If the dad is wiling to spend a LOT (like the govt and its loans) then obviously price skyrockets
In the US at least, my understanding is that it's relatively easy for college students to get loans to pay for their education (I have several US citizens friends who did that and repaid their loans over the years), so this amounts to easy credit. When free money is available, prices tend to go up, and the more government steps in to provide low rates kind of loans to students, the more the universities can increase and inflate their prices because the supply of cheap credit increases. It's a well known mechanism in economics.
For reference, see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RDMdc5r5z8
I believe the question, "Why college is so expensive" is the right one, but I don't think this is the right solution.
Decreased funding has gone hand-in-hand with higher tuition.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/a-truly-...
Today there are MW jobs, and there are middle-class 40/year jobs, but there not much in between. I'm 30 so I don't know for certain about the past, but the only higher than MW job I could find when in school 4 years ago was delivering pizza.
I'm not sure that the math works out. 4% of those with high school educations, but not a degree, work a minimum wage job. That works out to about 8M people. At the same time, there are ~14M people enrolled in college. So even if we assume every single one of those 8M minimum wage jobs are filled by people who are in college, that still leaves 6M people who are either unemployed or making more. And if we make that assumption, that also means everyone who is not enrolled in college and has a high school education is making more than minimum wage.
(Even McDonald's was paying more than minimum in my area.)
For example in my hometown it is still possible to rent a flat with a friend for less than $400/month meaning single people can survive on very little
Ok, so from the chart, on minimum wage you'd work 10 hours per credit, at twice the minimum wage you'd work 5 hours. For 2013 you'd work 60 hours at minimum wage or 30 hours at twice the minimum wage.
I'd say there's quite a difference between 5 and 30 hours either way?
That would only be useful if either a) we knew there were no students working minimum wage jobs or b) we were unconcerned with students unable to obtain higher paying jobs
At the amount I was getting paid in 2007, it would have taken me 33.3 years to save up for the first two years of in state public college.
I almost feel penalized for not working at night but how can I give up (and really why should I give up) working at a great job. The school states that they have more evening classes for the Grad students but what about us Undergrads don’t we need evening classes? At least back in the 90′s (when I should have been in school), and in CA, I could have taken every Undergrad course at night. It would have taken me 6 – 7 years to earn a BS in Computer Science now I’m on year 8 and I still have a couple years to go at this rate.
Why am I being penalized? is the real question…oh and I’m earning straight A’s and I’m on the Chancellor’s/Dean’s list. But it doesn’t make sense to me.
Reminds me of my time hitting the books. We complained about our schedules that had huge gaps in them, like a one-hour lecture in the morning, then four or five hours later, another lecture in the afternoon. Why couldn't they be scheduled more closely?
The response was "You are full-time students. You are expected to be free from 8 to 5"
So we replied "Why then is our main lecture set assigned for 7pm? That's outside this 8 to 5 timeframe" (evening was popular with part timers)
The response was... crickets. There weren't many contact hours - 20-25/week - but they were somewhat hostile to people being able to work at the same time.
Housing+tuition is around $18K for in-state students. If you wanted to pay off your entire annual dues without taking out a single loan or getting support from family, you would probably have to work part-time for at least one semester, possibly two.
Of course, there are a fair number of students who pay for school by being self-employed; a number of my classmates make sufficient advertising or sales revenue to cover the entire annual cost of college.
During the school year I didn't work much because the way the school counted credits I could take as many courses as I wanted at the fixed full-time student rate as long as I 1) received approval from the professors and 2) maintained a certain GPA. So I'd just load up on a ridiculous number of classes and spend my days and nights in the library. The girl I was dating lived across the street from the school, so I'd just spend most weeknights with her to save the commute.
Even though the cost of my college education was low by any measure, we (my family) could still barely afford it and I almost had to drop out. I distinctly remember the conversation where my mom told me that she may not be able to afford to keep sending me to school. You'd think being a mix of Black, Mexican and Native American and being on the honor roll every year I'd have had a scholarship of some sort, but nope.
Anyway, last year I was back home visiting family and spoke to a buddy's girlfriend about her educational plans since she was going to the same community college I went to. The cost per credit hour is now about 3X what I paid just 8 years ago! WTF!? I'm not sure how much the fees have increased at the 4-year state school, but I can only imagine.
I was completely blown away. Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea education prices had increased so much, especially at community colleges.
I thought about improving myself in high school by going into early college. A free AA degree and at the same time as my HS diploma? Hell yeah! They didn't tell me that almost none of the credits would apply to my degree because 4-year degrees have almost every single course planned - so I still have 4 years to go... Oh and the feds just made a law that says if you take to long your tuition doubles. So for about the last year of my college that's $16k instead. Oh yeah, and we forgot. This state school requires every single student to take 9 credit hours in the summer - where summers aren't covered by any federal loans.
So that's a lovely $40k pile of debt on me by the time I graduate.
EDIT: Oops, included living costs, not just tuition. Living cost is about $8k-$12k a year. So the real total of debt is $72k.
>Here's another graph showing that the recent rise in tuition in Michigan is due to declining state education appropriations.
>http://i.imgur.com/5gYHQK5.png
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DING DING DING! Why did I have to scroll to the bottom to see this? As far as I'm concerned this is the major symptom that few people ever look at, much less ever try to think of a root cause for.
The states, nearly all of which have to "balance the budget" every budget period, have to find ways to make cuts when economic downturns hit. Seeing as so much of what used to be the purview of the state has been captured by the private sector under the guise of "we can do it better, just let us handle it," the only major expense left to the state other than healthcare is education.
When legislatures are faced with a choice of cutting Healthcare or Education, which one do you think is going to get the bigger axe? Which demographic does more voting? The not-of-age children and teenagers? The politically charged college students that paradoxically never seem to actually make it to the voting booth? Their parents perhaps? The same ones that love to hate on public education and talk about how terrible it is? Or... Is it the hundreds of thousands of individuals that rely on the state for medical assistance in one way or another?
It's not a surprise at all that education gets the short end of the stick. It is the politically expedient answer in the face of economic downturns, when already-stretched state social programs are tasked further still. But the real clincher is this: the state legislatures know that the federal government will pick up the tab; it is ultimately the guarantor of the loans it issues. Better yet, since the liabilities were shifted onto the students individually, the state legislatures don't even look like they had to seek the help of the Big Government they're all so keen to hate! And best of all, thanks to the continued infusion of capital from the federal government, their state institutions actually have the outward appearance of growth: new buildings, renovations, fancy stadiums and gyms and elite professors.
Of course, this is all on the backs of young students. And as a young 20-something, I'd like to know why the federal government agreed to balance states' budgets on the backs of its youths at all, much less without price controls. Just who is benefiting from such a laissez-faire attitude? It certainly doesn't feel like I am.
As another young 20-something, I always wonder why people are so quick to use the "administrative bloat" or "federal loans" arguments when discussing rising tuition. The data seems to clearly support the relation between state funding and tuition costs, and yet less substantiated claims continue to rise to the top.
Do I think college administrations could stand to lay off some people? Sure. Does that mean that those extra employees are the reason I'm saddled with $40k in loans? Hell no. If you don't want to pitch in to fund college educations, then fine, but don't act like the reason students are paying more isn't because of you.
Do I think college administrations could stand to lay off some people? Sure. Does that mean that those extra employees are the reason I'm saddled with $40k in loans? Hell no. If you don't want to pitch in to fund college educations, then fine, but don't act like the reason students are paying more isn't because of you.
The graph http://i.imgur.com/5gYHQK5.png shows that from 2001 to 2012, the revenue per full time student went up by 50% (courses became more expensive), while the state's contribution was reduced by 50% (state is paying less money toward education). So it seems like the data is suggesting that the rising cost of education may be correlated with the state's reduced funding towards education compared to previous years. If so, then the reason students are paying more isn't because of the individual voters or the population in general, but because the way the administrations are allocating the budget.
It seems like the money has to come from somewhere, and politicians are choosing to take it away from education, which causes students to be saddled with ever-higher loans. The reason for that is because it's politically a pretty safe maneuver, because there are much fewer students proportional to the total population, which means politicians will lose proportionally less votes than if they tried to pull the money from something else like healthcare.
There doesn't seem much to be done except to make sure that you're voting and letting their offices know that your vote is going to whomever can stop the education cuts (if that's the topic which is most important to you).
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/a-truly-...
What we need is a culture that respects people who want to just work at a factory, a big box store, a mall, whatever, without pushing them into doing something they don't want to do (school). Trade schools also help in this regard. I actually believe we need more push towards trades like plumbing, hvac, and carpentry rather than having more degrees in over-filled areas.
Many loans cannot legally be denied. This removes what otherwise would be a barrier to frivolous spending.
What seems to have expanded most is a means of getting a generic "college degree". Compared to that time, there are a lot more low-end places which will accept people with a checkbook (or federal student loan) and a pulse.
Also, you can even acquire the knowledge associated with a degree, but without an actual diploma (MOOCs, online learning, etc).
Disclaimer: I have a degree from a top school
Everyone has to start at zero in any profession, so this is not a negative. I respect everyone who tries to learn something, and God bless "Teach Yourself" books. But becoming a good computer programmer takes many years of hard work.
A raw student who didn't already have a few successful projects using technology X would very likely cost an employer more than he/she would benefit the employer. Hiring such an intern has to be thought of as pro-bono work, or perhaps an investment in a future employee. With very occasional exception, undergrad interns in any profession don't deserve much above minimum wage.
The solution though, as some people propose, is not to end subsidies for lower income individuals. I see several people putting forth the argument that people are the most efficient at allocating money for themselves. That is not true except in an Ayn Rand novel. If people were so rational, everyone would go to college because the expected value of college still dwarfs the cost of college. Even for those individuals who would graduate with a significant amount of debt, it is far more worth it to have a degree than not.
So, how would a society reduce the cost of college education without removing the supports that enable low income individuals to enroll? Instead of giving colleges free money, we need to re-orient our structure of providing support for students that need it so that the college has the right incentives. For example, tying the cost of college to graduate's earnings.
Right now, a university gets money merely for pursuing higher levels of enrollment. There is no financial incentive for the university to involve students in student organizations, in leadership roles in their community, in politics or in networking. There is a tenuous link between those activities and pursuing alumni programs, but from what I've seen, alumni programs are a post-hoc solution to funding. A university sees an alumnus has done very well, and seeks to share in their wealth.
Let's simplify: the cost of a college education is 3-5% of aggregate gross income for the rest of your life. People who go on to be tremendously successful will benefit their university, and the university will have an incentive to churn out more tremendously successful people. This tax could be enforced by the IRS, automatically deducted in most cases, and manually reported elsewhere.
Now no one has to worry about the stress of student loans, and universities have every incentive to provide the highest quality education possible to maximize the value of their students. No more flooding the rosters of the university with under- and unqualified adjuncts in order to support higher enrollment numbers at lower costs to pad the pockets of administration. No more cutting student involvement to pad the athletics program.
No, the expected value of a college degree is a result of a labour supply/demand curve and it wouldn't remain the same if you drastically shifted the supply curve. If everyone went to college, the additional earning power of a college graduate relative to the mean would be zero.
The Danish educational strategy is more or less betting on "going upmarket" via levels of education that are much higher than the global norm. Denmark can't compete on price, so the idea is to get everyone a high level of education and position the entire country as essentially a high-end consulting/services firm. Hence a goal to have 50% of people have bachelor's degrees by 20xx (I don't remember the target date). Part of hitting those numbers is maintaining the structure where not only is there no tuition, but students are paid to attend university (about $900/month if in good standing and studying full-time).
Interestingly, the college enrolment rate is 66% in the USA with around 30% of the population completing. Similarly, in Canada, the university enrolment rate is 50% with 25% of the population completing.
Given that, it seems that the only way we might even be able to come close to a 50% degree attainment rate, in North America at least, is to force everyone into college or make it so easy that anyone can do it. Neither solution is one I would feel comfortable getting behind just to meet artificial targets.
Can you shed some more light on how the Danes hope to be able to achieve this beyond the financial aspect? What makes their population more successful in academic pursuits?
But, I somewhat misspoke: the goal is not to have 50% have specifically bachelor's degrees, but 50% complete some form of accredited tertiary education, which includes vocationally oriented degrees (currently a pretty small proportion, but makes the gap to 50% less than it would be if they weren't included).
The current numbers (for young people, typically age 25-34) are approximately: ~65% of people enter university, and 1/2 of those graduate (~32% of the population). Also, 25% (some the same people) enter tertiary vocational education, and 1/3 of those graduate (~8% of the population). Some people complete both, so the total is a bit less than 32+8, but overall ~38% of young people are attaining some kind of tertiary education.
Current trends are that vocational education is roughly flat (in both enrollment and completion rates), but university education is massively increasing (also, in both enrollment and completion rates). It used to be very common to attend university a few years and then do something else, with very low completion rates (only 1/4 of enrolled students eventually graduated as of 1995), perhaps partly because it's free to try it out for a year or two. This seems to be becoming less common, with completion rates now on par with the U.S. and Canada (1/2 completing as of 2010).
I haven't read too much on the current policy, but I believe further increasing university enrollment rates, to maybe closer to 80% rather than 65%, is one part of it. There are also some efforts to improve completion rates of vocational degrees to be closer to the university rates (1/2) rather than the current ones (1/3). Possibly also to get more people into vocational programs, especially people from the category of "young people not currently in work or education".
Data on the current rates and trends from this big PDF: http://www.oecd.org/edu/highlights.pdf
That's a pretty tautological conclusion- if everyone went to college and their absolute circumstances were that of the upper middle class today, wouldn't we all be happy?
I've never read an Ayn Rand novel, yet I still agree with that statement. I guess if you call someone an Ayn Rand supporter, that is supposed to discredit them? It's a pretty basic economic principle. If you take $10000 from your bank account, you are less likely to impulsively purchase a new car than if someone walked up to your house and gave you $10000. Seriously, it's super simple, and has nothing to do with Ayn Rand.
> If people were so rational, everyone would go to college because the expected value of college still dwarfs the cost of college.
Many people get off fine without college. You are touting your preferences as the only "rational" set of preferences. There is more to life than the "expected value of college."
are you better off if I give you $1k no string attached or $1k specifying down to the cent how you are to use it?
Generally speaking people know what their needs are and how to balance them more than complete strangers or even, often, friends. Yes, people have weaknesses, but to try to rule over their weaknesses is highly paternalistic and demeaning. Moreover because of the fungibility of money, in the end often the person will find a way to spend an equivalent batch of the same money in the way they would have anyways.
I would classify that as someone else spending money on you, with the superficial detail that the money happened to pass through your bank account.
It's not as black and white as you guys put it. Strings can exist, but how much they control you can vary greatly.
I agree with you that it isn't black and white. (This is simply a semantic argument.)
"Ayn Rand supporter" is the new "communist sympathizer" or "pinko."
Those calculations are by necessity based on estimates based on earlier generations of college graduates. Moreover, those results have a selection bias of people applying to college.
Finally, the reason why you can't implement your plan in the US is because it totally violates the 13th amendment. Do you really think it's a good idea to give colleges fractional ownership of a person?
When compared to people who are selected to not have the ability to complete (or even enter) college. It seems highly improbable to me that someone who struggles to pass classes in high school has the same average earning potential as a straight-A student, even if they both end their education at the same point.
Hence, at least partially because of the middle class not buying nursing home insurance, the public universities are being deprived of their funding.
Nowadays, City University of New York tuition reportedly is $3000 per semester. At least in some fields (eg Engineering) you can get a very good education there I am told.
This situation has gotten insane.
I'm really grateful CCNY still exists to provide me a path out of poverty. However, they're hiking tuition by $800/year for the next few years, so soon it'll be unaffordable, too...
Universities have had to close entire departments in order to make ends meet, and some regional schools have even contemplated the idea of becoming junior colleges. This is at a time when the state was largely shielded from the larger national economic downturn because of the economic boom that happened during the recovery from Katrina. He will go down as the worst governor in at least the last half century, which is quite a feat, given that Kathleen Blanco and Edwin Edwards occupied the governor's mansion for nearly half that time.
Think about that for a second. While we bicker and boast on here about bootstraps and how to pay off debt by living like a pauper we have to realize that we are straight up being stolen from.
There is no reason why public universities should cost 10s of thousands of dollars for a 4 year degree. That's the whole reason they exist in the first place.
The main reason that college tuition has risen in America is that it become less and less subsidized by state governments. It's not straight up theft when that subsidy gets reduced.
A lot of them were work study program people, although on the east coast. If you Google the school he talks about, though, you can see they offer a similar program where the college pays half the student's salary: https://finaid.msu.edu/work.asp
So a work study student only costs the employer half as much, and would generally be assumed to be earning a full pay check for working half the time and studying half the time. So it seems very doable. Generally a student with such low income isn't going to be paying full price anyway, so his other number is off too.
For others retrospect: I got an 8 month internship after my second year and saved up enough money to pay for my next semester and some savings. Following that semester, I took another 8 month internship with the same process. I'm now finishing my third year (so to speak) and I intend to get another 4 month internship so I can use my remaining savings for a last full year of tuition and spending.
I can't encourage enough that more people should look for and apply for internships for this reason alone if no other.
I hate the idea of being in debt and this seems like the only way to survive.
EDIT: Grammar
That's honestly a huge boon to meritocracy which we should not forget about. All these people pushing for the elimination of aid and a shift to market mechanisms need to seriously consider the impact that a zero-aid, market-based system would have: a return to a time when only the wealthy could attend great institutions and everyone else is relegated to community colleges and second-tier state universities. That's what market mechanisms are great at: matching products to people's ability to pay.
I dearly hope we don't actually want that for our country. It undermines the very meritocracy we pride ourselves on——if we can't get an equal education, regardless of economic ability, then the rest of the market-based American economy is a sham of wealth perpetuation.
---------
On a completely different note, I do actually think it is possible to work full-time during college. I've done so for the past year, in a fairly intense job capacity. I'll be graduating with enough money in the bank for the down payment on a small house.
So good for you - you can get your house. Meanwhile the other half of us cannot work off our debt even if we worked full time and put 100% of our income into paying it off.
Maybe you're not pursuing the right jobs? With a CS degree, even internships should be paying WAY more than minimum wage.
I've had a similar, but different thing happen as the state school I went to has shot up in the arbitrary US News and World Reports college rankings list over the last 20 years.
It enabled them to finance a bunch of new construction (research buildings, classrooms, specialized degree satellite campuses), all new dorms, etc. What used to be basically a small commuter school that happened to offer university (Masters and Doctorates) degrees has turned into the largest university in the the State.
The prestige it's offered my resume has gotten me endless recruitment offers and I ended up just taking it off my facebook profile I was getting contacted by too many people I didn't know wanting to form various alumni networks.
At any rate, rising tuition, etc. just means that what I already received is becoming a more valuable investment. I like that.
But I also feel empathy towards those going into college, knowing what a huge boost it was to my income earning potential.
I worked my way through college, Pell Grants, a few loans. I was doing an 2x minimum wage internship my last 2 years that made it suck, but doable. I made enough after graduation that I paid off my loans in just a couple years. It was really tight though. I think it's still very possible to do at the state school level if you get the loans. But it's definitely getting harder.
I couldn't imagine doing it at the private school or out of state level back then, and I can't imagine doing it today.
The premise must be shifted toward students being able to choose their educational path. General requirements are expensive and a waste of money for students. Learning is a lifelong process. Students need to become self-motivated to educate themselves, instead of depending on a curriculum defined by authorities.
General requirements are coercive because the student does not choose to learn these subjects. This means the student will be less engaged.
There needs to be more emphasis on cross-functional & student inspired collaboration. Examples are engineering students collaborate with artists to create something. History students collaborate with theater & film students to create historical movies. Encourage professors, grad students, and undergrad students to collaborate on active research & projects.
Remove the notion that GPA intrinsically means anything other than someone is good at playing the school game. Make the goals more in line with life after college. A portfolio of interesting projects says more about someone than a GPA.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_education_fees_in_Aust...
e.g. For CS (3 year course), pre-1997 you'd pay ~$9000. Today you'd pay ~21000.
Adjusted for inflation, you'd still be paying roughly half in 1996, what you are paying today.
Consider also those who are 3 years into the degree and decide that field isn't for them, and they want to leave school - that's nearly $20k down the toilet which will be hard to pay back.
BTW, your logic applies equally well to indentured servants. (Years of labor enables free passage to the US and the chance for one's own farm at the end.) Since I don't like the concept of debt bondage, I distrust logic which supports it.
I'm definitely not complaining about $30k, I just wish there was some way I could directly pay one brilliant person like the one great professor, so they could speak at me in an intelligent way and give me new perspective on things that I read in a textbook.
And he's the vast minority that has such an opportunity!
I still had a great social life- interestingly, most of my roommates and friends in college didn't care for theoretical math and didn't know the first thing about CS.
I know what the author is trying to convey, but I'm not sure he has the best metric.
He wasn't saying what we should or should not do about it. Merely that working through college on standard college jobs is no longer a viable option.
There's a group who sees this as an indictment of the excessive student loans propping up the college bubble.
Colleges offer five things (from an academic point of view):
1. Access to information. 2. Directed learning. 3. Time to explore your own interests. 4. Research facilities. 5. Qualifications.
Access to information is easy enough outside college (books, Internet, etc...). Lack of research facilities is only really a hindrance if you're trying to study a hard science or engineering. Time to explore your own interests is easy enough without college, in the worst case you could borrow money, not pay college tuition fees, and study just as long.
So that leaves two remaining benefits (and arguably only one benefit to real learning); directed learning and qualifications. The college system directs you towards the ideas in a field that are deemed as key to understanding the subject more fully. Having access to mentors gives the students guidance and reassurance. Qualifications are seen as the reward for the work (not by everyone, it's possible to study for the fun of it too, but that just preaching to the choir on a site like HN).
The requirement for colleges for certain qualifications would be easy to fix. The main factor that is lacking from non-college learning is the directed learning aspect. It can be fun to learn a little bit of everything, but colleges can bring you up to speed in something quicker because of this guru-led focus. If/when mavens from a field are simple to interact with, efficient learning is unlocked. The "hacker" community is a great example of this, we have all the resources at our disposal, including access to the leading lights, no other group has it quite as good. Now imagine how other fields could grow with the same blend of learning opportunities that our group has.
It's also hard to get a degree in most arts (eg. fine arts, dance, drama, and music) without physical interactions and without access to the physical resources that a university can provide. Yet that doesn't fall under any of your 5 categories. Perhaps #4 is the closest, but you argue that it's only really relevant to hard science or engineering.
Your last bit sounds more utopian than with basis in reality. I don't see why it's any harder to contact leading lights in chemistry, biology, mathematics, philosophy, history, or poetry than it is hackers. Nor do I believe many of those leading lights - hackers included - really want to engage in much unpaid "learning opportunity" to strangers.
Perhaps 'leading lights' was a bit of a stretch, but the reality is there are many people in the hacker community that spend a good amount of time helping others to learn. Whether that's through blogs, hackerspaces, IRC, sites like StackOverflow, etc... there's a wide range of people helping others out.
Why does this happen? Beyond feeling good about it, there's another benefit, a good question from a novice can help a more experienced practitioner deepen their own understanding. These benefits need not only apply to hackers, they can apply to any skillset. The potential for resources that facilitate this exists, and in fact such arragements do exist elsewhere in more chaotic forms, but I'd argue the path for development as hackers is clearer than in many other fields (at the moment).
> fine arts, dance, drama, and music
What physical resources do you need to study such subjects? Do you think organising practice space and meeting likeminded individuals would be hard outside college?
> You left out physical access to peers.
Yes I did. I see the social benefits of learning with peers, and I'm sure that makes learning more fun, but why pay huge sums of money for that privilege when it's possible to arrange in a more straightforward way (hackerspaces being a good example)?
For example, near where I live are two rowing clubs, both with their own clubhouses and storage areas. I used to be a member of a tango organization, with its own membership structure and bank account. It would organize events, and bring in guest teachers. And so on. What is special about hackerspaces?
> What physical resources do you need to study such subjects?
Are you asking me because you don't have any experience with those programs, nor have any friends who participated in them? If so, that would suggest a large gap in your understanding of how colleges work.
A music program will have a large range of instruments, including large instruments like a pipe organ and more exotic instruments like a gamelan (and people who can build/maintain/tune the instruments), practice spaces, and performance spaces. An art program will have equipment ranging from paints and brushes to kilns to welding equipment and perhaps even a foundry. Some of these require support staff. A theater program will have performance spaces, costumes and props, plus again support people (eg, a licensed carpenter for stage building, someone to oversee the electrics, etc.)
This is not something that every small town will have, which is why people go somewhere else where those resources can be concentrated.
> Do you think organising practice space and meeting likeminded individuals would be hard outside college?
Umm, yes? That's my point. In my town of 70,000 people, there probably aren't enough like-minded individuals interested in, say, early medieval music. Certainly not enough to have the instruments on-hand. While "[t]he Early Music Institute at the Jacobs School of Music [at Indiana University] provides a comprehensive program in the study of historical performance on original instruments of music before ca.1800." (See http://www.music.indiana.edu/departments/academic/early-musi... , which also points out that commuting faculty and students "makes it difficult to offer such a well-rounded educational experience and to have major ensembles of such caliber".)
Or take the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, which has "theatrical spaces outfitted with state-of-the-art intelligent lighting systems to animation studios equipped with the latest 3D computer graphics software." How does one get access to that sort of equipment, and put on a play which uses it, in a hackerspace model?
> why pay huge sums of money for that privilege when it's possible to arrange in a more straightforward way
You've changed the topic. You originally said "Colleges offer five things (from an academic point of view)", while I said that physical access to peers is a sixth.
Physical peer proximity, in the hackerspace model, is hard to arrange for many subjects. I studied physics. There are some 5,000-6,000 physics graduates each year. (See http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201112/backpage.cfm and http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2008/04/13/the-extr... ).
How does one establish a "physics space" when there are so few others in one's immediate neighborhood who are interested in learning particle physics? This seems like a prime reason to concentrate physics studies in one geographic area, and have people move there to study and to teach. In other words, college. Isn't that more straightforward than what you propose? (If not, how would your model be more effective than what we have now?)
I feel when you said "I'm sure that makes learning more fun" that you didn't get the point. This wasn't for fun, this was peer education. A few years ago a friend told me "I don't think I could have graduated without your help." And I know myself well enough to know that I do better with physical proximity than telepresence. There are educational benefits of learning with peers.
Focusing now on "why pay huge sums of money for that privilege".
That's also a different topic, and you didn't bring it up earlier. I agree with you - college should not cost huge sums of money. I think higher education is a social good and should be supported by the state, either free or highly subsidized. Where I disagree with you is the idea that hackerspaces provide a more straightforward way than what we have now, which includes geographically co-located studies, and colleges with a strong distance learning component like the Open University in the UK.
I didn't change the topic. The reason I mentioned the five factors I believe colleges contribute was in order to explore how they could be found without the financial burdens that college can bring. I mentioned them in order to find how colleges could best be disrupted from their position as gatekeepers to knowledge.
> How does one establish a "physics space" when there are so few others in one's immediate neighborhood who are interested in learning particle physics?
Let's take your town of 70,000 people as an example. How many people would you guess that would be interested in learning about physics? Would you say less than 20? More than 5? How many people would you envision is required for a decent physics meetup group?
The change in topic was when you said "pay huge sums of money" - that's a negative to colleges, and then the question becomes a cost benefit analysis. Previous you were mostly focused on the benefits of college, which is all that I addressed. Hence "change of topic." (Perhaps I should have said "widening of topic"?)
I take it by the absence of a response that you are convinced that arts programs can require more than what a hackerspace-style organization can provide?
> How many people would you guess that would be interested in learning about physics?
"Learning about physics" is uselessly broad. Classical mechanics, electricity&magnetism, thermodynamics, particle physics, astrophysics, and solid state physics are very different aspects of physics. A meetup can't be "learning about physics" but "learning about a specific topic in physics", and likely even "and at the same level of understanding", since an introductory quantum mechanics student likely won't make heads or tails of Cohen-Tannoudji or Sakurai.
(For that matter, my school didn't even have a solid state course for undergraduates, while some other colleges do.)
Why didn't you work out the math yourself? Assuming 6,000 new B.S.s in physics per year out of a US population of 317 million, times 70,000 students in the city => 1.3 students at a senior level.
Obviously at least two are needed for a study group, and some people prefer to work independently, giving a high likelihood that a small city cannot support a decent peer-based physics meetup group. FWIW, our study group had about 5 physics majors, out of 15 in the graduating class.
To put it another way, I grew up in Miami. The Miami metropolitan area has a density of 890 people/sq. mi. That's 1 physics student for each 60 square miles. For two nearby students to meet requires a minimum average of 5 miles of travel. More likely there's 30+ minutes of travel for each hackspace-style meeting with 5 people. While on campus, when most people live on or very near to campus, the commute time is a lot smaller. Thus, moving to be close to peers can increase the amount of time available for studying and practice.
You then added a new thesis to the mix, which is that "colleges are the gatekeeper to knowledge."
They most certainly are not. Colleges are the gatekeeper to certification in some fields (as your #5 points out; and as a real-world example, a Master of Library and Information Science is required for most professional librarian positions).
But "gatekeeper to knowledge"? Nonsense! How did you get that idea? What does it even mean? What knowledge is prohibited or withheld from those without a college education? Are you sure you aren't just using that term as a scare tactic?
So, ways to disrupt the expensive college education system of the US:
1) free or highly subsidized college education for anyone who wants it, in any field whatsoever.
2) minimize the importance of a (semi) classical liberal arts education and promote trade, craft, and technical colleges as the better route for certification-based skills training.
3) subsidize adult continuing education for those who have done #2 and still want a general liberal arts education. (A town of 70,000 people can easily have a few people interested in a common sophomore level course every other year.)
4) set up something like the Open University, that is, a state school/non-profit which has distance learning for those who can't attend a physical college for all classes, and with research/lab space for those courses which need it.
Is that disruptive enough for you?
Like I said, I see education as a general social good, and not a simple cost/benefit analysis for a single person's own career.
On one hand, it really sucks that I can't really afford to focus mainly on education because I have no plan B regarding money and have spent enough time being totally broke. It was a bit crushing experience when I knew I could do much better, if I could spend more time on it.
But on other hand, that experience of working my up definitely helped me to grow up as a person. Which maybe is much more valuable, then the technical skills and the degree?
Assuming it (and other forms of further education) are, might we be better off funding state schools to the point that they have an affordable tuition? The upshot of this would be an cost competitive alternative to private schools. The looming debt these students take on now is not going to go away and will remain a drag on their forward progress for decades. Perhaps the collective interest being spent on all these loans might be better spent on actual education.
24 credits a year?! I am curious, is this really the norm in the US? At the universitiy I attended in mainland Europe you were excpected to do 30 credits each semester, so 60 CP a year.
Although it is somewhat cynical...
And if Belle Knox can do it, you can do it:
- http://www.sbindependent.org/belle-knoxs-lust-education/
- http://www.the360experiment.com/2014/03/entertainment/colleg...
I was making more than minimum wage, nearly double at the time at $13/hour. This helped, but I kept everything cheap. My apartment was $300/mo, phone, food, and insurance was less than $400. That left me with nearly $1000 left each month.
It wasn't easy and it wasn't glamourous. I worked 8-5 every day and went to class in the evenings until 8 or 9.