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Your point about rising tuition driving out less well off families is also a result of reduced government funding. Research should never be funded by tuition a

Your point about rising tuition driving out less well off families is also a result of reduced government funding. Research should never be funded by tuition anyway. That research is a public good, the burden for funding it should not be placed on the backs of the nations youth, who have to in turn finance that tuition with debt. It's a shame that one political party in this country has taken to believing that all of the world's problems can be solved with lower taxes (not low taxes, lowER taxes). Externalities and public goods do not exist.

pragmatic12 9y ago
It seems clear that easy money (anyone can get student loans) is the primary driver of rising tuition costs (driving out less well off families) not reduced government funding. http://images.mic.com/gcnmd1o6fihnkyh0kgimslfoombvuel882tmhohvkeevifezxnbckipfamtbpvvx.jpg http://images.mic.com/gcnmd1o6fihnkyh0kgimslfoombvuel882tmho... https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+education+costs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_tPTMufvWAhUnllQKHdJCAxgQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=940#imgrc=FXR8HQljRmAnaM https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+education+costs&sourc...:
- allenz 9y ago
  It isn't clear to me. Your links only show that student debt and tuition costs are correlated. I think that costs cause debt rather than vice versa.
  - acjohnson55 9y ago
    It's not just debt, it's the fact that the debt is effectively unlimited. The problem is that we want an education market but also for no one to be priced out of higher ed. So we provide easy credit, and there's consequently no brake on costs.
    - allenz 9y ago
      That is a matter of political interpretation. You aren't wrong, but your solution of reducing the availability of loans has the direct consequence of reducing access to education for poor people and reducing university budgets funded by that debt. I don't like these consequences. My solution is to increase government investment in education which is why I view reduced funding as the main driver of tuition costs. I believe this partly because I believe that a college education can be worth a million dollars, because it can increase salary by $80k/yr, not to mention the non-economic personal and societal benefits.
      - aaron-lebo 9y ago
        If everyone in society had a college degree, they wouldn't increase salary by $80k. They already don't for most people and if you increase the supply... I don't see how your interpretation is based in anything other than wishful thinking.
        YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        >> If everyone in society had a college degree, they wouldn't increase salary by $80k. Free education doesn't mean that everyone has a college degree. It means that everyone who chooses to study for a college degree has the opportunity to obtain one. Most colleges and universities in the USA were non-profit, until the 1970's. Everyone didn't have a college degree back then. Finally, as an aside- it's a bit problematic to measure the value of a college degree just by monetary gains alone. Job satisfaction is at least as important and probably more.
      - bzbarsky 9y ago
        I think the main issue with your point of view is that "the cost of education" is not fixed. If you make it possible for students to pay more for education, colleges _will_ charge more. Some of that money will go towards the actual education (e.g. professor salaries, labs, lecture halls) and some will go toward nicer dorms, better gyms, more extracurricular options, higher administrator salaries, more administrators, fancier food in dining halls, etc. And even the money spent on labs and lecture halls can be well-spent or ill-spent. This is pretty much equivalent to how increasing the amount of investment in any area can lead to both productive investment (e.g. better roads where they're really needed) and unproductive investment (the stereotypical "bridge to nowhere", though usually it's a bit more subtle than that). There are two actual empirical questions here: 1) Are there ways that universities can spend extra money productively, from the point of view of society? 2) Are they actually doing it? I don't know of good studies on the former, offhand. For the latter, as far as I can tell, the answer is "no": increased funding in the recent past has almost entirely funneled into making the lives of college students ritzier and increasing the number and salaries of administrative staff at all levels. And this matches my understanding of the incentive structures involved. As a simple example, parents and students who feel like they're paying a large amount of money demand better service for it (nicer dorms, better food, etc).... I believe that increasing government investment in education without implementing any brake on the tendency to simply misuse the investment on the part of the colleges is not going to improve actual outcomes for students much in general. It may (or may not, depending on how the money gets used) improve things on the margin a bit for poor people. It will _definitely_ increase the price tab for taxpayers (including those same poor people). Weighing the overall societal benefits is hard to judge. As in many cases, people agree that there is a point of diminishing, or vanishing returns, but disagree on where that point is. But in general, if we agree there is such a point, we should be trying to figure out whether we've reached it or not. We should also be trying to figure out how to move that point around, e.g. by abovementioned brakes on the misuse of extra investment. There are, of course, hard questions about how such a brake could be implemented. It could be done via direct government regulation, but I expect this to get a significant amount of pushback _and_ increase the number of adminstrative positions needed to deal with it, somewhat contributing to the problem. It could be done via changes to the incentives universities have, but it's not entirely clear how to effect those. We should strongly consider experimenting with "X percent of future income over Y years" funding models instead of the "pay us now and it's your problem how to raise the money". I say this especially in light of data like http://www.nber.org/papers/w23888 http://www.nber.org/papers/w23888 that indicates that this approach _increases_ access for disadvantaged students. Of course there are still incentive problems here, especially if you feel that the point of college is not just to increase salaries. Which is all to say that there are some hard questions here, and research and experimentation is desperately needed. Anyone claiming that "we just need to increase government spending on higher education without changing anything else" or "we should just decrease government spending on higher education without changing anything else" is likely wrong. So is anyone claiming "we should just keep things as they are", because I believe the system is fundamentally broken and getting more so.
- davidf18 9y ago
  > "It seems clear that easy money (anyone can get student loans)" This is not true. I was unable to get any grants or even loans as an undergrad and I am an American citizen. The financial aid formulas are flawed in that they determine how much of a contribution your parents should pay as opposed to how much one actually receives from their parents. I paid for my undergrad education by programming computers beginning in high school.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Chathamization 9y ago
> Research should never be funded by tuition anyway. I don't even think research should be coupled to the universities the way it currently is. From what I've seen it ends up being somewhat of a mess. Seeing what goes on there - for example, how grad students are treated - has made me doubt the ability of most universities to effectively manage and oversee research labs. It's also adds one more thing to the odd stitched together thing we end up calling a university. It's a certification program/4-year summer camp/undergrad education center/research institute/cultural center/professional training center/sports franchise/etc.
- jostmey 9y ago
  Just wait. Universities will start offering on campus "job-training" where you work as interns. Students will receive "income" through their student loans, which they have to pay back, while the University sells the student's labor to make more money. Treating researchers as students is just the beginning.
- bo1024 9y ago
  It would be very interesting to see proposals for public, basic research that is divorced from universities. However, it's pretty challenging to see how it could work. For one thing, a lot of the best researchers are also the best ones to teach their subject or topic (and relatively fewer talented people want to teach alone without doing any research). For another, the grad school system makes sense because you need training to do research, and that training often comes while you're also learning and taking classes, and it makes sense that you receive that training from the most experienced researchers (currently, professors). Finally, having research sit within a larger university institution makes it less fragile to economic or political shocks.
  - maksimum 9y ago
    IME most of the classes you take in grad school are irrelevant to your research. Maybe 2 will be useful, 3-5 if you're lucky. That's basically 1-2 semesters of learning compared to 3-6 years doing research for a PhD. My point is that the coupling of teaching and research isn't necessary, teaching could be covered in a 4+1 undergrad/masters. I've personally had professors from each combination of (good at teaching) x (good at research), and I think the (good,bad) is more common than (good,good). Coupling of research and university in order to protect research against financial/political shocks does seem to have some merit. But I think we have to examine the costs. For example, in my department one of the professors has a poster that reads what is expected of their time commitment: 30% of their time devoted to service, 70% to teaching, and 100% to research. If the reaserch is that important to us, shouldn't it be done by someone who can spend all their time thinking about it?
dnautics 9y ago
Research should never be funded by government. Government contractors should be bound by rapid response accountability. Basic science operates under the mantra of "we don't know if it will ever be useful", which is fundamentally in conflict with accountability. It's too facile for elderly established scientists (or even younger ones) to pitch misguided fanciful research projects in the name of "the public good" and effectively swindle public coffers for their own flights of fancy.
Qwertious 9y ago
>Externalities and public goods do not exist. You repeat yourself. A public good is a positive externality, in that it benefits third-parties. Kind of weird how so much of republican policy seems to boil down to "externalities don't exist".
throwawayjava 9y ago
> Research should never be funded by tuition anyway It mostly isn't.
autokad 9y ago
> "Research should never be funded by tuition anyway." Almost all research is funded through grants. > "It's a shame that one political party in this country has taken to believing that all of the world's problems can be solved with lower taxes (not low taxes, lowER taxes)" We have a budget problem, most of which is due to entitlements and it cannot be resolved through increased income through taxes. maybe it can be solved through higher taxes due to people doing more things, but not higher overall taxes. my numbers are old, but they should be in ball park. if you took all the money off the rich (1 million$+ nw) in the entire world (not just US), its somewhere around 7 trillion $. - Lets ignore the fact that they do pay the lions share of tax revenue, and that revenue would now be gone an the 99% would have to take on that burden - Lets further ignore their wealth is shared, as in if zuckerberg sold all of facebooks stock, Billy G would lose net worth because he owns facebook stock and the laws of suply and demand would dictate a lower price. that 7 trillion would pay our deficit for only 16 years, and wouldn't even bring the total debt down to when Obama was elected president. I dont agree that research spending should be cut, but I sort of get why its facing the axe. Universities (on the administrative level) aren't apolitical anymore, and increasingly neither is their research. One example was that I noticed how well diabetes overlapped with obesity rates on the map. The areas that did not overlap did overlap with another thing: excessive alcohol consumption. When I brought it up in the lab, it was immediately dismissed - I dont disagree with the hyps, but science means looking into things not going by personal opinion. As an experiment, I showed the same trend to another group, but I told them the non-overlapping region was increased diabetes rates, and that the other factor was soda consumption. This drew immediate attention, they were ready to write grant proposals to NSF and NIH in hopes that this can be used to broaden soda taxes across the country. I do think its a shame that the current president is focusing on so many things other than getting tech companies to bring their revenues 'home' to be taxed. I think that would benefit everyone. But when I look at whats going on, I dont agree with it, but I do get it.

pragmatic12 9y ago

It seems clear that easy money (anyone can get student loans) is the primary driver of rising tuition costs (driving out less well off families) not reduced government funding. http://images.mic.com/gcnmd1o6fihnkyh0kgimslfoombvuel882tmhohvkeevifezxnbckipfamtbpvvx.jpg http://images.mic.com/gcnmd1o6fihnkyh0kgimslfoombvuel882tmho... https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+education+costs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi_tPTMufvWAhUnllQKHdJCAxgQ_AUICigB&biw=1920&bih=940#imgrc=FXR8HQljRmAnaM https://www.google.com/search?q=rising+education+costs&sourc...:

allenz 9y ago
It isn't clear to me. Your links only show that student debt and tuition costs are correlated. I think that costs cause debt rather than vice versa.
- acjohnson55 9y ago
  It's not just debt, it's the fact that the debt is effectively unlimited. The problem is that we want an education market but also for no one to be priced out of higher ed. So we provide easy credit, and there's consequently no brake on costs.
  - allenz 9y ago
    That is a matter of political interpretation. You aren't wrong, but your solution of reducing the availability of loans has the direct consequence of reducing access to education for poor people and reducing university budgets funded by that debt. I don't like these consequences. My solution is to increase government investment in education which is why I view reduced funding as the main driver of tuition costs. I believe this partly because I believe that a college education can be worth a million dollars, because it can increase salary by $80k/yr, not to mention the non-economic personal and societal benefits.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      If everyone in society had a college degree, they wouldn't increase salary by $80k. They already don't for most people and if you increase the supply... I don't see how your interpretation is based in anything other than wishful thinking.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        >> If everyone in society had a college degree, they wouldn't increase salary by $80k. Free education doesn't mean that everyone has a college degree. It means that everyone who chooses to study for a college degree has the opportunity to obtain one. Most colleges and universities in the USA were non-profit, until the 1970's. Everyone didn't have a college degree back then. Finally, as an aside- it's a bit problematic to measure the value of a college degree just by monetary gains alone. Job satisfaction is at least as important and probably more.
    - bzbarsky 9y ago
      I think the main issue with your point of view is that "the cost of education" is not fixed. If you make it possible for students to pay more for education, colleges _will_ charge more. Some of that money will go towards the actual education (e.g. professor salaries, labs, lecture halls) and some will go toward nicer dorms, better gyms, more extracurricular options, higher administrator salaries, more administrators, fancier food in dining halls, etc. And even the money spent on labs and lecture halls can be well-spent or ill-spent. This is pretty much equivalent to how increasing the amount of investment in any area can lead to both productive investment (e.g. better roads where they're really needed) and unproductive investment (the stereotypical "bridge to nowhere", though usually it's a bit more subtle than that). There are two actual empirical questions here: 1) Are there ways that universities can spend extra money productively, from the point of view of society? 2) Are they actually doing it? I don't know of good studies on the former, offhand. For the latter, as far as I can tell, the answer is "no": increased funding in the recent past has almost entirely funneled into making the lives of college students ritzier and increasing the number and salaries of administrative staff at all levels. And this matches my understanding of the incentive structures involved. As a simple example, parents and students who feel like they're paying a large amount of money demand better service for it (nicer dorms, better food, etc).... I believe that increasing government investment in education without implementing any brake on the tendency to simply misuse the investment on the part of the colleges is not going to improve actual outcomes for students much in general. It may (or may not, depending on how the money gets used) improve things on the margin a bit for poor people. It will _definitely_ increase the price tab for taxpayers (including those same poor people). Weighing the overall societal benefits is hard to judge. As in many cases, people agree that there is a point of diminishing, or vanishing returns, but disagree on where that point is. But in general, if we agree there is such a point, we should be trying to figure out whether we've reached it or not. We should also be trying to figure out how to move that point around, e.g. by abovementioned brakes on the misuse of extra investment. There are, of course, hard questions about how such a brake could be implemented. It could be done via direct government regulation, but I expect this to get a significant amount of pushback _and_ increase the number of adminstrative positions needed to deal with it, somewhat contributing to the problem. It could be done via changes to the incentives universities have, but it's not entirely clear how to effect those. We should strongly consider experimenting with "X percent of future income over Y years" funding models instead of the "pay us now and it's your problem how to raise the money". I say this especially in light of data like http://www.nber.org/papers/w23888 http://www.nber.org/papers/w23888 that indicates that this approach _increases_ access for disadvantaged students. Of course there are still incentive problems here, especially if you feel that the point of college is not just to increase salaries. Which is all to say that there are some hard questions here, and research and experimentation is desperately needed. Anyone claiming that "we just need to increase government spending on higher education without changing anything else" or "we should just decrease government spending on higher education without changing anything else" is likely wrong. So is anyone claiming "we should just keep things as they are", because I believe the system is fundamentally broken and getting more so.
davidf18 9y ago
> "It seems clear that easy money (anyone can get student loans)" This is not true. I was unable to get any grants or even loans as an undergrad and I am an American citizen. The financial aid formulas are flawed in that they determine how much of a contribution your parents should pay as opposed to how much one actually receives from their parents. I paid for my undergrad education by programming computers beginning in high school.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Chathamization 9y ago

> Research should never be funded by tuition anyway. I don't even think research should be coupled to the universities the way it currently is. From what I've seen it ends up being somewhat of a mess. Seeing what goes on there - for example, how grad students are treated - has made me doubt the ability of most universities to effectively manage and oversee research labs. It's also adds one more thing to the odd stitched together thing we end up calling a university. It's a certification program/4-year summer camp/undergrad education center/research institute/cultural center/professional training center/sports franchise/etc.

jostmey 9y ago
Just wait. Universities will start offering on campus "job-training" where you work as interns. Students will receive "income" through their student loans, which they have to pay back, while the University sells the student's labor to make more money. Treating researchers as students is just the beginning.
bo1024 9y ago
It would be very interesting to see proposals for public, basic research that is divorced from universities. However, it's pretty challenging to see how it could work. For one thing, a lot of the best researchers are also the best ones to teach their subject or topic (and relatively fewer talented people want to teach alone without doing any research). For another, the grad school system makes sense because you need training to do research, and that training often comes while you're also learning and taking classes, and it makes sense that you receive that training from the most experienced researchers (currently, professors). Finally, having research sit within a larger university institution makes it less fragile to economic or political shocks.
- maksimum 9y ago
  IME most of the classes you take in grad school are irrelevant to your research. Maybe 2 will be useful, 3-5 if you're lucky. That's basically 1-2 semesters of learning compared to 3-6 years doing research for a PhD. My point is that the coupling of teaching and research isn't necessary, teaching could be covered in a 4+1 undergrad/masters. I've personally had professors from each combination of (good at teaching) x (good at research), and I think the (good,bad) is more common than (good,good). Coupling of research and university in order to protect research against financial/political shocks does seem to have some merit. But I think we have to examine the costs. For example, in my department one of the professors has a poster that reads what is expected of their time commitment: 30% of their time devoted to service, 70% to teaching, and 100% to research. If the reaserch is that important to us, shouldn't it be done by someone who can spend all their time thinking about it?

dnautics 9y ago

Research should never be funded by government. Government contractors should be bound by rapid response accountability. Basic science operates under the mantra of "we don't know if it will ever be useful", which is fundamentally in conflict with accountability. It's too facile for elderly established scientists (or even younger ones) to pitch misguided fanciful research projects in the name of "the public good" and effectively swindle public coffers for their own flights of fancy.

Qwertious 9y ago

>Externalities and public goods do not exist. You repeat yourself. A public good is a positive externality, in that it benefits third-parties. Kind of weird how so much of republican policy seems to boil down to "externalities don't exist".

throwawayjava 9y ago

> Research should never be funded by tuition anyway It mostly isn't.

autokad 9y ago

> "Research should never be funded by tuition anyway." Almost all research is funded through grants. > "It's a shame that one political party in this country has taken to believing that all of the world's problems can be solved with lower taxes (not low taxes, lowER taxes)" We have a budget problem, most of which is due to entitlements and it cannot be resolved through increased income through taxes. maybe it can be solved through higher taxes due to people doing more things, but not higher overall taxes. my numbers are old, but they should be in ball park. if you took all the money off the rich (1 million$+ nw) in the entire world (not just US), its somewhere around 7 trillion $. - Lets ignore the fact that they do pay the lions share of tax revenue, and that revenue would now be gone an the 99% would have to take on that burden - Lets further ignore their wealth is shared, as in if zuckerberg sold all of facebooks stock, Billy G would lose net worth because he owns facebook stock and the laws of suply and demand would dictate a lower price. that 7 trillion would pay our deficit for only 16 years, and wouldn't even bring the total debt down to when Obama was elected president. I dont agree that research spending should be cut, but I sort of get why its facing the axe. Universities (on the administrative level) aren't apolitical anymore, and increasingly neither is their research. One example was that I noticed how well diabetes overlapped with obesity rates on the map. The areas that did not overlap did overlap with another thing: excessive alcohol consumption. When I brought it up in the lab, it was immediately dismissed - I dont disagree with the hyps, but science means looking into things not going by personal opinion. As an experiment, I showed the same trend to another group, but I told them the non-overlapping region was increased diabetes rates, and that the other factor was soda consumption. This drew immediate attention, they were ready to write grant proposals to NSF and NIH in hopes that this can be used to broaden soda taxes across the country. I do think its a shame that the current president is focusing on so many things other than getting tech companies to bring their revenues 'home' to be taxed. I think that would benefit everyone. But when I look at whats going on, I dont agree with it, but I do get it.