This is another example of the law of unintended consequences.
While the idea of helping people become more educated is obviously beneficial to both individuals and the society as a whole, government loans - which are supposed to "help" - are a huge factor fueling ever-raising costs. The loans, in effect, subsidize the higher-education complex, rather than students.
Many of us have been brainwashed to think that higher education has to cost a lot of money. But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers).
We don't need football/hockey teams with coaches paid $3-4M/year. We don't need armies of "Deans of Diversity & Inclusion" (and other phony administrative positions), who make $400K/year, we don't need manicured lawns and Olympics-quality sports facilities (these salaries are from the Univ of California - a state school!)
If a good private university cost < $20K/year and a state university < $10K, we would not have endless discussions wrt who should pay, who should study what, etc.
> But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers).
It's funny that a lot of the outliers are the degrees that can actually help you with financial stability later. Universities love humanity courses, exactly for the reasons you point out. It's easy to shoehorn a couple more undergrads into a literature or philosophy class, all you need to do is buy a few more chairs, and the books sort of buy themselves, and you're paying the TAs starvation wages anyways, what's a few more students between friends.
Whereas in a material science lab, you need a rockwell brinell hardness tester. For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms (might have changed lately, it's been going on 20 years for me). For electrical engineering, you need the CAD workstations with licenses for VHDL programs and the hardware to reprogram FPGAs.
> For a computer science lab, you need some heavy iron if you're going to be doing heavy algorithms
Not for 200 undergrads learning how to bubblesort. For that you need a lab with 50-100 PC's. For grad courses in parallel comp. or AI, you might need a semi-expensive cluster to play around with, but if you want something that just works you could just buy cluster time on AWS, which I'm sure they'd give a discounted academic rate. I'd expect the most expensive thing in a CS lab to be the electricity to power the computers.
Can you imagine a raspberry pi for every student where you just buy a new microSD card for each class and all notes/assignments are stored in the cloud or a gitlab type site for higher-education? That way it's a snap to set up with the exact development environment you need and if you mess something up badly, the T.A. could re-image your sd card and you just grab your assignments from your git.
Indeed there seem few disciplines where you really need much equipment for bachelor's degree study. Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.
> Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.
I think most life/physical sciences mandate a lab requirement. I think you can learn the facts from books, but if you want a job in those fields after you graduate with a bachelor's, you'll be spending most of your time in a lab.
That is only if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge of basic science.
What you learn in lab classes in college is what's important in most industry and academia. Being careful of cross contamination, religiously keeping up your lab notebook, being able to troubleshoot experiments, keeping things documented and repeatable. That's 99.9% of industry research, not coming up with new reactions or processes.
Except its a program that can be managed correctly. The problem was that there were no incentives to do so. My understanding is that loans initially were smaller and helped with the cost of tuition at a time where tuition was more affordable, but still out of reach for many working class families. Now they can pay for all of tuition and the cost of tuition is just pegged to the max loan offer from the government.
No one put in sane cost controls. No one told the universities that federal money wouldn't just increase to their whims. No one told students what its really like in real life to payback a 50k or 100k or even 150+k loan for a 4 year degree. What that means as an opportunity cost compared to cheaper schooling. My relatively modest loan is like making car payments on a decent car everything month... for 20 years. So 4 lower-end Lexus's if you consider interest. Or less to put in retirement.
I have no idea how people with large loans get by. I imagine the recent Obama rules regarding loan repayment as percentage of salary helps with an 20 year payment forgiveness plan. Not sure if the new business friendly administration is going to keep that in place.
I see this sentiment a lot, and I feel like you fundamentally misunderstand what is actually happening at universities. Discounting athletics, which in some places are revenue neutral and can be counted as marketing/local cultural artifact depending on who you talk to, the "wise passionate teachers" you praise so aren't there to teach idiot undergrads. Instead, they're hired to do research with the teaching as essentially a subset of that in most cases. Pure research, especially in a political climate that's increasingly anti-intellectual and anti science, is expensive and that cost gets offloaded to incoming students since the hard requirement for a college degree for many professional jobs creates inelastic demand.
The "phony administrative positions", lawns, and student facilties you dismiss as pork are the school's way of competing for the piles of grant money replacement known as undergrads.
Then further more, prices are already in the ball park of your supposed ideal. An instate student can go to a school like Georgia Tech (ranked 5 or so in engineering nationally depending on the year) for 12k before scholarships, essentially free if they don't piss away their grades. Private top tier schools cost more, but tend to offer more scholarships and grants so that's harder to compare between institutions. It's not that schools are expensive, it's that students are choosing to not go to the inexpensive schools, usually to get out of their state, or to be in an institution that specializes in their major, or go someplace with better student institutions.
US research is what makes our schools the top in the world, and the actual education gained from an undergrad degree isn't the drive for most people. It's the networking, the exposure, and the certification, none of which can be duplicated in a dinky classroom with a whiteboard and an underpaid teacher. Just look at American High Schools if you want to see how that turns out.
> Pure research... is expensive and that cost gets offloaded to incoming students
Do you have evidence for this?
I have never been privy to the financials of a university, college, or even department where tuition money subsidizes research staff, including professors.
> The "phony administrative positions", lawns, and student facilties you dismiss as pork are the school's way of competing for the piles of grant money replacement known as undergrads.
Believe me, we'd see this dynamic regardless of whether your hypothesis re: research funding were true. For evidence, look toward small liberal arts colleges. Most have never received anything more than token amounts of federal grant money, and yet their tuition increases match those of research universities.
>...Georgia Tech...
is an extreme outlier in terms of quality for cost.
Also, that $12k is only tuition. The actual cost, assuming you can't find free room/board in Atlanta, is 2x before interest on inevitable loans.
> the school's way of competing for the piles of grant money replacement known as undergrads.
I say it's a consequence of their windfall profits from 3-5% yearly tuition increases. Most institutions have "use-it-or-lose-it" budgets. Their accountants can only be so clever in finding ways to spend it, lest it pile up and get released on a state budget report. Then everyone would scream "Why does UXY have a $50mil surplus when they just increased tuition!".
If they wanted to actually compete, they would lower prices. Thats what attracts buyers.
> That is a dangerously oversimplified view of how markets work.
Because university is so expensive, we're told that more things matter than just price.
Buyers are obviously attracted to more than low prices, but some buyers are highly price-sensitive. So, we should let them find something that works for them.
>you fundamentally misunderstand what is actually happening at universities
What is actually happening is that in many cases "researchers" chase fame and money, not academic excellence. They have no time to teach "idiot undergrads", as you nicely put it, because they are busy running their consultancies on the side.
[I am in Boston, I see a lot of this first-hand, in "elite" schools in particular]
Alabama pays Nick Saban almost $7M/year. At first blush that seems outrageous. Then we find out that Alabama pulls in nearly $100M/year from football [0]. While not every school is so lucky, most (if not all) that are spending 7 figures on a coach are getting that money back and then some.
Isn't it disingenuous to use an outlier to make a point?
UoA made significantly more money than any other college team (some of which lose money). So using them as an example of why college sports is a net gain rather than a net loss is extremely (and purposely) misleading.
Plus even UoA spent $47 million on arena expansion in 2006 and then $65.6 million on further arena expansion in 2010. So it isn't like the football program doesn't have debt it has to repay the school (and incidentally many arenas are never funded from the programs that they house).
It also provides low-income youth an opportunity to get a college degree, and incentivizes kids from low-income communities to stay off the streets and focus on something productive (like sports).
Collegiate sports teams are effectively the same as student tutors, student RAs, student librarians, or any other school-sponsored jobs that hire students. One could argue that they're even superior at schools like Alabama because they provide even more money to be used on scholarships.
Alabama could take away their football program, but they would 1) take away scholarship money from the 30-50 low-income scholarship athletes, 2) take away money that could be reinvested into buildings, facilities, teachers, or academic scholarships, and 3) reduce alumni donations (because unhappy alumni don't donate), which further reduces the funds available to the school.
It's one thing if a school has sports programs that aren't a net gain for the university. But for the schools where it is, any talk of them removing the funding is absurdly ignorant.
It provides a small number of low-income youth, specifically football players.
Collegiate sports teams are not like other school-sponsored jobs. Student librarians cannot make millions of dollars if they plied their librarian skills on the open market. At least some college football players could. Student librarians don't face high risk of physical injury, disability, or long term health effects as part of their job. College football players do.
Pulling in 100m in revenue to supply 50 scholarships doesn't seem like the right tag line.
Also see below, most college sports revenue does not get pushed back into general academics.
Most alumni donations are to the university's athletic association - that's because those donations comes with the perks that alumni want - seats, being wined and dine, shaking the coach's hand, etc.
Talk of removing funding is absurd because its a system that's been this way for a long time - of course it would seem absurb to change it.
Perhaps there are other ways of making money for the university, which are better aligned with the purpose of academia? One such example is cooperation on research projects with the industry (which actually works pretty well), but I am sure there are other ideas.
This isn't true, most football programs have single digit percentages of their revenue being redirected back to academic programs and most of that is earmarked for scholarships for ...student athletes.[1]
The idea that football programs generate substantial revenue that improves academics for the entire university is not true.
Because if a sports program brings in $100m of revenue and a school has 50k kids, that's only about $2,000 per student. Tack off the sports costs and you're looking at maybe $1,000 extra per student, but instead of offering discounts, they may 1) invest in their trust fund for future growth, 2) pay down their debts to reduce the lifetime interest payments and save money down the road, 3) Roll the money up into more scholarships or 4) invest in infrastructure. None of those things directly lower the immediate cost for other students, but add tangible value to students and the institution.
I believe it started as an unintended consequence, but now it is intentional -- the surprise is long past.
When you have wealth, you want to get maximum benefit out of that wealth. Since wealth is a relative concept, the only way to do so is to widen the gap between those who have wealth and those who don't. You're making your dollars go farther.
If you can drive the cost of college (or anything else) to exorbitant heights, people will be forced to come to you for loans. Then, you own many years of their future.
College is one of the most sinister purchases to do this to, because it is the very mechanism by which someone could possibly break free of being a Havenot.
Add to that students have "suites" with private bedrooms and shared living space. Add to that meal plans with all you can eat Nutella and endless options. That money has to come from somewhere. It used to be old buildings with one block wall room with a set of bunks and two crappy desks. It has become an arms race and the parents have helped this along by indulging their kids. A lot of this debt is the parents paying. You can't get $60K per year of loans for an undergrad degree as the student. Plus you have small liberal arts schools that cost more than Harvard (yeah, I know they need no money) to get a BA in literature and then do what......? Complain you can't get a job?
I had similar requirements for school. Meals ended up costing me ~$10 per. I could get much cheaper food on my own, but that wasn't going to make the university any money.
Where I went to school the student meal plan you were required to buy costed something like $14 per meal, while they provided the same food at the university hospital for something like $4 per meal.
That almost happened at my university the semester after they went big into debt for a new stadium. We're one of the last ones in the state who aren't forcing under clansmen to live in the dorms. They cited things like, "it sill save them money! It will help with inclusion! It will help their GPA!" It was bogus of course. Thankfully the students protested fairly hard and our president sided with the students.
While the idea of helping people become more educated is obviously beneficial to both individuals and the society as a whole, government loans - which are supposed to "help" - are a huge factor fueling ever-raising costs. The loans, in effect, subsidize the higher-education complex, rather than students.
Many of us have been brainwashed to think that higher education has to cost a lot of money. But it need not: all that great education requires are wise, passionate teachers and a bit of infrastructure: a whiteboard, a few books, and a laptop computer (with a couple of outliers).
We don't need football/hockey teams with coaches paid $3-4M/year. We don't need armies of "Deans of Diversity & Inclusion" (and other phony administrative positions), who make $400K/year, we don't need manicured lawns and Olympics-quality sports facilities (these salaries are from the Univ of California - a state school!)
If a good private university cost < $20K/year and a state university < $10K, we would not have endless discussions wrt who should pay, who should study what, etc.