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It would be much better to send those defaulters to prison where the annual cost is typically more than the most expensive colleges in the country...oh wait, ma
by theprop 9y ago
It would be much better to send those defaulters to prison where the annual cost is typically more than the most expensive colleges in the country...oh wait, maybe we should just send them to college and pay for it, that might save even more money?
- trendia 9y agoBefore we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years, and why the benefits of a degree have gone down. Then, neither debt nor debt collection would be an issue. After all, the reason people can't pay back their debts is 1) even state colleges are expensive, and 2) the job market doesn't reward degrees. It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues.
- emodendroket 9y agoWell, it could, if paired with a bigger government role in public universities.
- trendia 9y agoAh yes. Like setting a price ceiling? Adding more administrators, managers, and bureaucrats to "find where all that money is going"? By paying teachers less? It's not an easy task to reduce the cost of something... this is even more so when the government is the one doing it.
- bobdole1234 9y agoIt's actually really easy to cut the costs on things, and all you need to do is cut all the levels of useless middlemen taking their cut. Kind of like how Canada uses this one simple trick to cut their health care expenses.
- emodendroket 9y agoWell, no, you probably need far fewer administrators, actually.
- eloisius 9y agoI think GP was making this suggestion in a sarcastic jab about what cost reduction efforts look like when done by government.
- emodendroket 9y agoOK, but I don't think it holds up. The US has one of the systems of education (and healthcare, too) with the least government interference and it's wildly expensive. As far as I am aware the biggest drivers for rising tuition costs are construction and increasingly large administrative departments.
- poikniok 9y agoThe US has tons of government interference in all of those areas though!
- emodendroket 9y agoCompared to other OECD countries not really.
- StudentStuff 9y agoWhen you pass laws to force government organizations to be wasteful, they will comply. Outside of that, not wasting taxpayer dollars is generally a high priority. A great example of laws purposefully foot binding & hobbling organizations is USPS, who is not allowed to up the ante and offer any modern services, and has to severely overfund their pension obligations, to the point that they are funding pensions for people they haven't hired.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- majormajor 9y ago> 2) the job market doesn't reward degrees Oh, it does. The schools and banks have just positioned themselves to capture as much of the added value as they can - which might take away a lot of the financial upside, but the difference in unemployment rate is still quite significant.
- randomdata 9y ago> but the difference in unemployment rate is still quite significant. I was expecting significant to mean more than 1.3 percentage points[1] over the entire population of the same age[2], especially given those who have certain difficulties will most likely never attend college, and will struggle in the workplace because of those difficulties (think mental disabilities as an example). Handing a degree on a silver platter to someone in that position isn't really going to help them. Knowing that such people exist and need to be accounted for, while seeing how close the numbers really are, I'm even less convinced that the market rewards degrees than I was before I read these comments. [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000048 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14000048
- majormajor 9y agoSorry for the lack of clarity, I was referring to the combination of unemployment rate and workforce participation rate (which is 74% with bachelor's degree or higher, 58% with high school only). There's doubtless some confounding factors there, but it shows where the jobs are going. I don't think those inherent difficulties for certain people you mention don't need to be considered separately because the market doesn't care why you didn't attend college - part of what the market is rewarding is, frankly, either not having or being able to overcome inherent difficulties. ( https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11327662 and https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01327660 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01327660 ) -- edited to fix links
- randomdata 9y ago
- unclebucknasty 9y ago>we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically >It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues Some believe the ready availability of government-backed loans is partly responsible for the dramatic tuition increases.
- tzs 9y agoI've not had much luck finding historical tuition data, but was able to get some Stanford data going back to 1920. Here is a graph of Stanford tuition from 1920 through 2011: http://i.imgur.com/fXnjDNn.png http://i.imgur.com/fXnjDNn.png The data from 1920 through 1990 was only for every ten years, then it becomes yearly after, which is why the first part of the graph has more straight segments. Note the tuition axis is on a log scale. Comparing Stanford tuition growth by decade to inflation, here is how much Stanford tuition every 10 years was above the inflation adjusted tuition from 10 years earlier: 1930: 183% 1940: 41% 1950: 13% 1960: 22% 1970: 85% 1980: 27% 1990: 39% 2000: 29% 2010: 23% From this, it appears that if government loans affected Stanford tuition that did not manifest as a long term change in the growth rate. It looks like the long term growth is about 30ish% a decade in reasonably "normal" times. If the loans affected the growth rate it seems to have mostly been confined to around the time the loans first became widely available. In other words, if the loans had an effect, it seems to have been more of a level shift than a growth rate shift. I'd like to see similar data for other schools.
- cbanek 9y agoI agree that the system doesn't reward degrees. It merely requires them as a ticket to ride. I'd say that we're getting less productivity gains out of degrees these days likely because a lot of people get a degree, then get a job that uses absolutely nothing they learned from that degree. In that case, the degree is more or less worthless, and only proves to the employer that you can jump through the hoops. And between a known hoop-jumper and some random person, most companies would rather take the hoop-jumper.
- chii 9y ago> It merely requires them as a ticket to ride. sounds suspiciously like the advertising landscape, where it's a zero sum game. You pay $X to advertise to obtain Y% marketshare gain, but if your competitor also spends $X, it nullifies your Y% marketshare gain. Replace the above with a college degree and job, and it seems the same.
- laGrenouille 9y agoExcept that neither is actually a zero sum game. If Pepsi and Coca-Cola both spend $1B in advertising neither may gain any proportional market share but they would still expect to collectively benefit from converting some coffee/tea/juice drinkers to their product. In the case of raising the bar for a basic education across the board, at least in theory, we would expect to increase national/global GDP. I'm not saying the increase in either case warrants the respective cost, but dismissing improvements in education on the grounds that life is just one big zero sum rat race seems overly simplistic.
- nroets 9y agoWithout advertising spend, the best search engine in the world would have been a university research project (the original Google based on Page Rank.) I would not see many of the quality TV productions, because I don't have pay TV and I don't pirate. (Survivor etc). Advertising spend paid for instant search, voice search, knowledge graph, Chrome and even Android.
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago
- robotjosh 9y agoNobody has ever asked to see my degree or if I have one. They only care what I can do and how much it will cost. I looked into taking a few classes but saw that tuition has quadrupled making 2 classes cost more than an entire semester when I was in school only 10 years ago. Not only that, there are fewer professors and more non-professors teaching. Professors still do not make 100k even if they teach all day every semester so all this extra money isn't going to them.
- derekp7 9y agoI wonder if anyone has done an itemized breakdown of where each dollar of tuition goes to? How much to the teaching staff, how much to building maintenance, etc. Would be interesting.
- douche 9y agoIt's all facilities and administrators.
- csa 9y agoI don't have the numbers with me right now (on phone), but the ratio of administrators to professors has gone through the roof over the past few decades. This is where a lot of the money is going. Facilities have also improved quite a bit at many schools. Over the same period, the ratio of adjunct faculty to permanent faculty has also increased. Meanwhile, the permanent faculty are burdened with even more administrative duties (e.g., committees). The administrators learned that they could eat high on the hog on the government's dime, and they have done so with a frightening degree of efficiency.
- peckrob 9y ago> Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years When I started college in 2000, in-state tuition at my alma mater (a major state university) was $3,021 for 2 semesters. I just looked and it's now $10,968 for the same 2 semesters. In 17 years, tuition went up 263%. From what I can tell, inflation over the same period was 42%. At this rate, I'm scared that I will literally never be able to save enough to put my daughter through college without taking out loans, assuming tuition continues this trend. Something has got to give.
- eli 9y agoYes, it is outpacing even healthcare and child care spending. Definitely beyond inflation.
- Arizhel 9y agoIt seems to me the answer isn't all that difficult: colleges in other countries are much cheaper, or even free. So just move to someplace like Germany.
- kaybe 9y agoIf she's young enough to learn another language well in time, you could consider sending her to Europe. All in all, it's still cheaper and possible to get by with summer jobs and some help from parents.
- madengr 9y agoYes, at KU in 1994 it was a little over $100/credit*Hr. Tutituon was free if you were a TA. I had an RA and TA, so I got paid to go to grad school. Now I have two kids in elementary school, and I'm socking away $2k/month for college savings, wondering if that will be enough. I figure $80k/kid.
- ProAm 9y ago> ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years This is easy its because the government increased the amount students are allowed to borrow. It's a 1:1 ratio
- criddell 9y agoIs that true though? I thought it was more because funding has been cut so the costs are shifted from taxpayers to the students.
- StudentStuff 9y agoThat is part of the issue, but it is also an excuse so that universities can hire vast numbers of administrative staff that they have historically never hired. Why should a small satellite campus of a major university have 2 officers on duty 24/7, when they respond to anywhere from 5 to a dozen incidents a month? That is 8 full time employees plus space & equipment doing a BS job that should be handled by local police (who also happen to be overstaffed). Should a university really be blowing that much cash needlessly?
- criddell 9y agoSecurity officers might not be the best example. A university needs insurance and chances are the cost of setting up and maintaining a security force is less expensive than paying a higher insurance premium.
- StudentStuff 9y agoMost universities are self-insured from what I've seen, in the education industry most schools are self-insured too.
- Spooky23 9y agoIt doesn't take a Kreskin. 1 - There are an amazingly large number of well compensated overhead positions and offices compared to the 90s. My alma mater, a large state university literally had to buy a 9 story office building to house administration. 2 - They spend money like water. Example: The student internet network was run when I was there in 1996 by three telecom/network guys and a little army of student helpers who did installs and support for $4.25/hr. Now the costs are 25x, and the contractor has also built a small office building next door to house their people. Example: Capital costs run amok. My alma mater has built a Tier-4 data center that is 15% occupied, a football stadium, a monumental second library that doesn't contain many books but does contain a lot of marble, a business school building, an art building, a bunch of extra dorms, and a gas fired power plant. Example: New dorms are hotel like, with multiple fitness centers, TVs approximately every 10 linear feet, and associated parking structures. The school I'm thinking about is doing well, but they've probably bonded nearly a half billion worth of capital projects alone that are not research funded. If you had 0% 30 year bonds that's over $1500 a student alone for 30 years assuming 10,000 students.
- dancing_shark 9y agoNo need to be coy -- what is the university you're talking about?
- mjevans 9y agoWhat's happening in one place is probably happening in more than one place... so everywhere.
- Spooky23 9y agoI didn't call them out because they aren't doing anything unusual. Drive around any town. The colleges and hospitals are wrapping up an orgy of construction in most places. The root causes are very similar
- learc83 9y ago538 did a brief analysis here https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-m...
- icantdrive55 9y ago"Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years, and why the benefits of a degree have gone down. Then, neither debt nor debt collection would be an issue." 1. Yes--this is important, and a lot of people gloss over it. 2. They always rebuff it with,"Hay--look at the low unemployment number." My response is, "Hay--look at the able-bodied, but can't find a job number." It's going up every year. 3. Trump hit it on the nose. We need to bring jobs back. Trump knew the Average unemployed, underemployed, or has to compete with people who will work for under the minimum wage was the the problem. He took down all those talking heads. It turns out the powers at be sold out a long time ago, and changing things will probally never happen. I don't think Trump had the insight to realize we will never go back to "Make America great Again". The wealthy have been screwing over the poor forever,and they are just really banging away now. Wait until this bubble ends. 4. I don't know if the average person realizes just how terrible the economy is on most parts of the country. Guys like, Shimmy Boy realized there's a huge glut of unemployed people out there that would drive a newer vechicle for peanuts. There's no a wealthy person out there that doesn't take advantage of the low wage labor. Christ---do the moderators on here even get paid? No--they do it because they have nothing better to do. Probally some? When did it become o.k. in America to underpay the help?
- tenpies 9y agoCan you imagine trying to convince tax payers who don't even agree on universal healthcare that they should now pay NYU's tuition for someone studying Intersectional Feminist Literature?
- TillE 9y agoYeah what a crazy hippie liberal idea...supported by, for example, the ruling center-right Christian party in Germany. Americans really need to get over their dumb cultural hangups on a lot of issues. (Also, universal healthcare does enjoy very wide support already.)
- ericd 9y agoWhat is that person going to do for work afterwards that it's worth it for society to do this with its limited resources, given that they're not independently wealthy, and they haven't been developing their skills for a career on the side? I don't mean to be snarky, I'm genuinely curious. If I'm not mistaken, historically, only the rich have gotten these sorts of degrees.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> If I'm not mistaken, historically, only the rich have gotten these sorts of degrees. I'm fairly confident you're quite mistaken.
- ericd 9y agoIt's very possible. Do you know of any evidence of a large number of people in the lower classes getting college degrees that had very little direct career relevance outside of a few spots in academia?
- Spooky23 9y agoThey are going to have a well practiced ability to analyze text, data and other sources and understand, critique or respond to arguments presented. Liberal arts teach you about thinking. I dual majored in CS and History, concentrating on the path that Marco Polo supposedly took to China's the people and cultures there. The later has been far more helpful to me that the CS stuff, which was mostly theoretical bullshit.
- zaroth 9y agoWe did send them to college... and I can guarantee you that we are paying for it. It doesn't seem to have helped much if all you need to not default is $5/mo and yet what's the default rate again?
- johng 9y agoSo part of the reason we are in this situation and the costs have skyrocketed is because the government got involved in loaning money for school. We follow that up by getting the government involved in loan collections and obviously they've screwed that up entirely. So your suggestion is to now have the government get involved in paying for the college altogether, and then expect that NOT to go wrong in any way?
- tedmiston 9y agoWhatever happened to trade schools and apprenticeships anyway?
- SamUK96 9y agoThe 60s-80s-born generation performed a real doozy and told their kids "you can be anything you wanted!", so of course we ended up with a culling in trades and "plebian" jobs, and an explosive influx into "soft skills" like history, literature, etc., since that's far better than milling drill-bits all day right? The craziest thing is that this has been a totally first-world thing. Any english/american university student will tell you how engineering degree courses are made up predominately of foreign students, where-as the less employable and "trade"-producing courses are dominanted by the firsr-world population. I did Physics. It was 130 students 120 white male, 9 white female, 1 black female. Zero international students Same university, but mechanical engineering, 70%+ black, 70%+ international students (india/china essentially). So, to answer your question to what happened to trade schools: they still exist, but the first world young white generation doesn't want to do it anymore, and foriegn/black students have filled in the gap, for whatever that may be.