I find it amazing that someone can write so much about the cost of college, and yet treat tuition bills as if they were handed down on stone tablets at Mt. Sinai, rather than something colleges themselves might have any responsibility for. Colleges have become giant money-sucking machines, similar to Scientology. In fact, they're so similar that I made a handy comparison chart (http://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/06/15/universities-vs-sci...).
The author here insinuates that the increased cost comes from paying for teaching and research. But this is wrong for at least five reasons:
1. Research is not a cost center for colleges. It is a profit center. Usually, research is not funded by the college itself; rather, professors get grants from outside agencies, which the college then takes a large, juicy cut of for itself. (Ask any professor.)
2. At most colleges, the number of faculty members per student has remained stagnant for the last thirty years. The author waves their hands about "new areas of knowledge", but these new areas aren't leading to more hiring.
3. Wages for tenured faculty have also remained stagnant, adjusted for inflation.
4. Colleges are rapidly replacing their tenured faculty with adjuncts, who are given heavy courseloads, and paid peanuts even compared to tenured faculty (barely minimum wage, in a lot of cases).
5. Most of the actual work of research and teaching is done by grad students, of whom there are far more than tenured faculty. Grad students are, again, a profit center rather than a cost center, since the university gets to charge them "tuition" (despite most of them taking few or no classes). This "tuition" is either paid by an outside research agency, or "generously" waived in exchange for the grad student doing teaching and grading, again at very low wages.
I'd just like to know the increase in administrative staff and their salaries against the rise in tuition. Local University has many more Assistant, Vice, etc. Deans and Chancellors than it did when I was there awhile ago.
I'd like to echo drjesusphd and ask if you could point us to any good information you've found on increasing per-student expenditures. My university likes to justify increasing tuition by pointing to a decrease in the proportion of a student's education that is funded by the state. The implication, is that per-student state funding has gone down and that's why tuition is going up, but state funding per student has remained relatively steady in inflation-adjusted terms for decades. It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on.
I have yet to look into the numbers in greater detail but if you could point me toward some good sources it would be much appreciated.
> It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on.
I just looked up the operating budget for my alma mater (Oregon State University), and if I'm reading it correctly, administrative costs are about 1/3 of the total. Interestingly, the direct instruction and research portion increased 5% since last year whereas the administration portion increased 15%. And looking back 10 years, the the direct instruction and research costs increased 85%, whereas admin costs increased 110%. So the admin : education costs ratio appears to be slowly increasing over time.
The funding numbers I've found for the University of California system are that per-student expenditures are roughly flat, and that tuition increases are almost 1-for-1 offsets for decreasing state funding. Here is a little ASCII table of the state funding history I collected in 2012: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt
I have no idea how representative this is of other universities, though, and wouldn't be surprised if it isn't.
Alyssa, if you want to know what happened, just look at state budgets. Public universities have seen their budgets cut at the same time that private universities have been able to gorge on low-interest student loans (whose collection is backed by the force of the government, and not subject to bankruptcy).
Useless middle-manager administration. Look up how many deans there are at your local university, and how many directors of mumble-mumble social justice mumble mumble. Or look at how many wildly expensive infrastructure projects are getting built, with very marginal usefulness.
Modern society expects universities to act in loco parentis. We expect them to prevent (or deal with the fall out from) school's alcohol culture. We expect them to prevent sexual assault, or respond to it with some kind of judicial system. We expect a fully staffed career center to help students revise resumes and draft cover letters. We expect them to have a full time staffer dealing with diversity issues, and another with Title IX, and another (few) with financial aid.
These are all new positions, and many are actually required by law.
If you want to argue against middle management, I'm not at all clear the schools are to blame. They're responding to clear demands from the government and from parents.
As I understand it, they're not justice systems that carry the full legtimacy of the government (they can't put you in prison, for example). It's a system by which they can carry out administrative punishments like community service, suspension, or expulsion.
The potential for abuse is certainly there, but calling it a seperate justice system is a tad disingenuous. Most importantly, it seems that the standards for evidence and the rights of the accused are far less than in real courts.
But how do you solve this? My opinion is that severe things like expulsion should only be considered if found guilty of a felony (or even only a violent felony) in an actual court of law. The difficulty of conviction is a feature, not a bug, of the legitimate justice system. Administrative punishments should only be meted out for administrative "crimes" (cheating, violating housing agreements, etc) that have no corresponding crime in the criminal code.
I'm not seeing what is disingenuous about it. you certainly didn't make an argument backing that statement, and the stories I'm finding of private tribunals with secret charges and no attorneys give me the impression I'm correct. that universities do not also have a private prison system in no way reduces the fact that they do have a private justice system.
Fair enough. My point was that there is a place for such "private justice systems" because there are transgressions that the state has no authority over and no interest in persuing.
I find that a lot of budget arguments in general, not just of Universities but all kinds of government and private institutions, suffer badly from the lack of having two budgets to compare side by side. Say a budget from 1990 and a budget from today, side by side line by line. But clean data is almost impossible to come by. So people just argue in ideological generalities. Which is absurd when it's a numbers question. Can we see the numbers please? No.
I wonder if there'd be room for a true alternative to an elite college. I've always felt that the value of such institutions was that it is the premier place to meet and befriend other smart students, not in the facilities or instructors who make up the bulk of the cost.
Imagine: thousands of applicants from around the world vie for a spot in Nollege, a new kind of edtech startup. Admitted students are flown to the "campus", an exotic site, rotating yearly and chosen for its cheap room and board. Instruction that can be automated a la Khan Academy, is; more experienced students also tutor newcomers as needed. Students spend half their time on work-study/internship programs, which cover all costs of attendance. They're encouraged to leave whenever they feel ready, be it one semester or 10; no arbitrary rules about which courses to take. When they do, they emerge with the same bonds of friendship and learned knowledge as their college-attending peers, but are years ahead in working experience and also debt free.
Perhaps this would be most feasible for cs, where the only materials needed are a laptop and WiFi, but I could see it working for English, art, mathematics, and many other disciplines.
That's a more high-flown version of what used to be called a "Java school": Pure job training, no theory, no concept of advancing the field. Also no concept of teaching people things which will be useful when the specific skills they learned are out of date, let alone skills which might transfer to other fields or have a non-obvious application in the CS field. English (as in "analysis of texts") comes to mind.
I'm not opposed to such schools, I just think they should advertise themselves honestly, and not try to compete with four-year schools for the same reason McDonald's doesn't try to compete with a steak house.
That sounds like a wonderful job-training program, if very exploitative since it treats "students" as explicit work-doing profit centers but markets itself as educational rather than an apprenticeship. Problem is, that's not actually giving a university-level education in the core academic material of a real field.
You're not going to learn abstract algebra from an employer!
There are probably more efficient ways to build useful skills and learn material than paying for an elite education. Prestige is much harder to manufacture. YC is 10 years old (i think?) and has managed to do this, impressively.
It seems to me that prestige is a combination of fame and selectivity; a school is prestigious if everyone has heard of it, but few get in. A long history is certainly helpful (a ranking of UC schools by age would probably correspond to a ranking by prestige), but I think that a genuinely good product and clever marketing should be able to bridge the gap.
prestige is a combination of fame and selectivity I recall a debate on the value of college( Peter Thiel vs some college admins) and Thiel asking his opponent (a university administrator) if Harvard is providing such a great value to the world why are they making it so hard to obtain for people? Good question.
Nobody is pretending that receiving money from Peter Thiel makes you better at whatever it is you do.
But a lot of people, such as Harvard admissions, do pretend that attending Harvard has such benefits.
In contrast, no one at Harvard is pretending that they couldn't afford to enroll ten times as many students.
Put another way, Thiel fundamentally doesn't fund most people because most people are bad investments. Harvard admissions isn't claiming that it won't admit you because you're a bad investment and would devalue their brand. They're claiming that, if you were admitted, the experience of attending Harvard would increase your personal quality, but they nevertheless won't admit you for undisclosed reasons.
I'm onboard with your utopian ideas, especially enabling students to be apprenticed to a future employer. A lot of what you describe is already being done at The Recurse Center (https://www.recurse.com/, formerly Hacker School).
What you're describing sounds a lot like Antioch College used to be (not sure if it still is). They had requirements for students to spend semesters on work experience, while campus life was pretty loose. They closed for a few years but then reopened... Not sure how they are now.
The author here insinuates that the increased cost comes from paying for teaching and research. But this is wrong for at least five reasons:
1. Research is not a cost center for colleges. It is a profit center. Usually, research is not funded by the college itself; rather, professors get grants from outside agencies, which the college then takes a large, juicy cut of for itself. (Ask any professor.)
2. At most colleges, the number of faculty members per student has remained stagnant for the last thirty years. The author waves their hands about "new areas of knowledge", but these new areas aren't leading to more hiring.
3. Wages for tenured faculty have also remained stagnant, adjusted for inflation.
4. Colleges are rapidly replacing their tenured faculty with adjuncts, who are given heavy courseloads, and paid peanuts even compared to tenured faculty (barely minimum wage, in a lot of cases).
5. Most of the actual work of research and teaching is done by grad students, of whom there are far more than tenured faculty. Grad students are, again, a profit center rather than a cost center, since the university gets to charge them "tuition" (despite most of them taking few or no classes). This "tuition" is either paid by an outside research agency, or "generously" waived in exchange for the grad student doing teaching and grading, again at very low wages.