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Higher education is important and must continue. The problem is that, in America, costs are out of control. Some blame it on the ease of obtaining student loan
by blisterpeanuts 11y ago
Higher education is important and must continue. The problem is that, in America, costs are out of control. Some blame it on the ease of obtaining student loans; some blame it on poor management, decrease in public funding, decrease in alumni donations, reduction in federal research grants.
Probably it's a combination of all of the above. But when the average private school is trying to charge $50K+ per year for an undergraduate education, and the average public school is over $10K per year, something's seriously wrong.
I would tighten up the student loan system, cap it at $10K per year, and then let the universities figure out how to roll back their ridiculous tuitions that have risen many times faster than has the cost of living.
You could take an old warehouse, subdivide into about 10 lecture halls and classrooms, get a bunch of chairs and whiteboards, and hire 20 professors. That's in essence all a university should be. In this day and age, of course, you could add some online access, at a minimum stream the lectures in real time which costs almost nothing.
These glitzy $100 million "student centers", multimillion dollar athletic facilities, on-campus coffee shops and restaurants, dorms, hordes of administrative officials, assistant deans, etc. pulling down six figure incomes when they don't even teach -- that's just lifestyle crap that has nothing to do with education (although, sports teams can sometimes bring in big bucks). It all costs money -- maintenance, insurance, expansion, lawyers, advertising, marketing -- money, money, money. That's what has done in the American university system. Some of these campuses have turned into towns-plus-shopping malls and have lost their original vision.
- the_watcher 11y agoPublic schools in a lot of states are nowhere near that cheap anymore either. The UC system, for example, is comparable to private schools now.
- scintill76 11y ago> I would tighten up the student loan system, cap it at $10K per year, and then let the universities figure out how to roll back their ridiculous tuitions that have risen many times faster than has the cost of living. I suppose they'll be forced to when their student numbers dive because nobody can afford it anymore, but what happens in the meantime? Only the rich get to go to school? Or if the public funding tap gets shut off, are private lenders going to step in and just make it cost more? Lowering the "expectation" that going to school is what all good American youths do is another solution that gets proposed sometimes (though maybe at odds with your premise "higher education is important and must continue"), so maybe lower attendance rates is acceptable, but I wouldn't want it to fall along class lines, or any other uneven distribution of demographics. You could gradually step the funding down each year, but it seems like the steps would either be so small it would take generations to reform, or so big that it's basically as hard as doing it all at once.
- blisterpeanuts 11y agoPerhaps in addition to loan caps, the states should increase grants to their public universities, and that will help keep down tuition. The private schools, however, are kind of on their own. They'll probably need to cut back on the frills and hope students still want to apply. We're probably going to see a few closures of private schools over the next few years.
- mahyarm 11y agoAt least with a shopping mall, parking & dorms they should make some profit off of these side businesses alone.