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Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan c

Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board. This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Efforts to reduce the cost of tuition, rather than shift the cost burden to different people, are the real humanitarian work here. Here's a story from 2013 on Texas's efforts to create $10,000 Bachelor's degrees. https://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/30/guide-getting-one-texas-new-10000-degrees/ https://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/30/guide-getting-one-te...

lerpa 9y ago
The actual problem is people getting into debt without reasonable expectation of paying it, just wishful thinking.
- zbentley 9y ago
  I'm somewhat sympathetic to this position, but that's an unnecessarily extreme way of stating it. "Reasonable" is a weasel word. If I study for 4 years for a job in a lucrative, degree-requiring field with very high jobs demand when I matriculate, and I go into debt to study, is that "reasonable"? What if that field encounters a sea change on the year I graduate, or the economy crashes, leaving me with bleak prospects and debt? Does that make what I did "wishful thinking"? It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. Like, sure, it's easy to make fun of literature students who end up $200k in the whole with no marketable skills and no job prospects. But they are just a small fraction of the whole picture. A higher ed degree is by far the highest-chance-of-success way for a lot of people to make it financially (whether or not it should be is a separate discussion), and a lot of positions require degrees for good reasons.
  - lerpa 9y ago
    > It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. That's not my position. > "Reasonable" is a weasel word. You can have a reasonable definition of what is reasonable ;-) It just has to do with the ammount of risk you're willing to take, yes, it involves personal risk. But you can see, for example, in such and such people that get a degree are >70% unemployed or working in a different area that has nothing to do with it. Then well perhaps it's not a good choice if I don't have the liberty to do it just for the sake of it, without expecting money in return. Some other career choices probably have better expected outcomes for the average Joe. So maybe if you need the money, chose that. The bottom line is: it's just silly to live as if you were rich and but then after complain you don't have the money for it.
deleted 9y ago
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reverend_gonzo 9y ago
You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant. You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to be.
- wyldfire 9y ago
  The administrative costs have been the most sizable portion of cost increases for universities over the last few decades. The costs for teaching faculty have decreased, probably due to the use of adjunct professors (who don't get tenure nor benefits).
- dalbasal 9y ago
  The exploding cost of education over the last generation doesn't boil down to an increase in teaching or even research staff costs. These costs are stable, largely thanks to the very low cost of junior academics. In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more income focused. What the OP is saying is that education has become unaffordable because it has become expensive, not because of how it is financed. Fixing Brown students problem with donor financing is great for Brown students, but does not scale even if is sustainable at brown. Whether through donors, loans, public financing or parental savings, we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.
  - mnx 9y ago
    This is true of many things, but seems to be politically unpopular to notice. The right will claim that prices are what prices are and cannot be changed, and the left will claim it's all in resource allocation.
    - 9y ago
Retric 9y ago
If your pulling in ~10,000$ per person in tuition, and the average person takes 5 classes with a class size of 30 that's. 60,000$ per professor per year if they teach 4 classes, 75,000$ per professor if they teach 5 and 90k & 6 classes before expenses per class. So, the only way for that to work out is some other subsidies. However, lectures allow you to use TA's to more cheaply expand class sizes and might make it possible at the undergrad level.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  But Brown's tuition for out of state students is just under $50,000 per year per student. Does that mean they could be paying those professors $300,000?
  - timthelion 9y ago
    Aren't there other expenses like maintaining the campus and paying for journal subscriptions and research equipment?
    - nascar_is_bad 9y ago
      are you just listing off the things you think a university spends money on?
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Brown is private, so there is no distinction for out of state students.
  - Retric 9y ago
    That's nominally 50k/student they can then offer scholarships so it's possibly nobody actually pays that much. Further, just having a teacher without a classroom is not going to get you very far. Still, assuming the average student pays 1/2 that much per year they can probably cut the costs significantly.
- bmcusick 9y ago
  Why even use TAs for lectures? There's YouTube. There's automated software for quizzes and testing. Textbooks should be open source documentation, printed-on-demand. I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators. Check out how Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a real CS Master's Degree for a fraction of the cost using similar stuff: https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/ https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/
Improvotter 9y ago
I recently met an American here in Europe that mostly grew up here the last few years who wanted to go to NA (more specifically Toronto) for university when she could basically enrol here in a good university for a fraction of the cost. I pay less than a gran every year for my software engineering master's degree and can't fathom someone going to a different country knowing you're gonna be in debt for a large portion of your life. I'd rather study here and move to Canada after than study there and get a huge ass debt piled up. I really don't get how these universities manage their cashflow. With such an exorbitant amount of cash you can basically put people on Mars for all I know.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  Ivy League schools have massive endowments, which are essentially huge investment funds. They employ people to invest their money.
- wbkang 9y ago
  Canadians university has far lower tuition than the US equivalent. It's also easier to immigrate when you have a Canadian degree so the story might be a bit different for Canada.
  - refurb 9y ago
    Tuition is far lower if you're a Canadian citizen or resident. If you're foreign, it costs $25,000+ per year which isn't that different from public US universities.
    - wbkang 9y ago
      I went to UWaterloo CS co-op as an international student and it was less than CA$25000/year all-inclusive and before the money I made from co-op. I am pretty sure comparable education in US costs far more than that.
- bmmayer1 9y ago
  The trick is that most people don't pay full tuition[1]. It's like hospital prices: most people don't pay the sticker price and those who do are subsidizing those who don't. [1]http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2017/ http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2...
marcopolitik 9y ago
> This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Voluntarily giving some cash to a school endowment is not getting "bilked".
- baldfat 9y ago
  Brown has traditionally been one of the most expensive colleges in America for decades. The "Boys Club" of Brown is through the roof. This is just a weird story to come from Brown.
onwardly 9y ago
Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is that middle-class families get stuck in a gray zone. I went to Brown, and my parents made enough (~$110k) that I didn't get financial aid but they also couldn't pay $40k/year.
- ben_jones 9y ago
  While the process sounds good in theory there is an ever increasing gap that people fall into between parents making too much money and parents not making enough. I'm bias because I fell right into the middle of the gap - my parents inherited an illiquid share of real estate that on paper is worth about a million dollars, in reality after taxes it yields maybe 40k/yr that my parents live off of (60+, no college). Because of this I was denied any form of financial aid and had to fend for myself.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    Did you explain this to the financial aid office? Generally, elite schools are in the business of finding elite students first and then dealing with FA second. But you have to make your situation clear to them. They offered you admission or you wouldn't be dealing with FA. So they wanted you. But FA is a negotiation even especially if you're in the gap and then you have to negotiate hard because otherwise you pay sticker.
    - ktta 9y ago
      Often financial aid is given out to very needy students (don't even have anything as collateral for loan), and there's sometimes a quota.
      - ams6110 9y ago
elsherbini 9y ago
Today's elite schools offer myriad resources to students that they didn't before. And today's elite schools are therefore able to serve a much more diverse group of students. I think administrative costs have gone up too much and have space to cut back. But when articles come out saying administrative costs have ballooned 500%, I don't want people to imagine that it's all wasted - most of the new positions represent new services provided to students. And in anticipation of the argument that "I don't need those services so they shouldn't exist": see arguments for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes on healthy people. The whole university functions better and achieves its mission better if there is more diversity and if students have more access to services they need. Lowering tuition would be a trade-off, not just trimming fat.
- pc86 9y ago
  I don't think anyone's saying it's all wasted, and I agree that a university in 2015 is going to offer a lot more to its students in terms of non-academic services than a university of 1985. But it's hard to argue that even half of that 500% is good spending. - The year I started my undergrad, there a mini-scandal where tuition was raised by over 10% with little warning and it leaked that the school President, having written a heart felt letter about how hard it was cutting costs in these difficult economic times, made over $400k/yr and the college was paying his mortgage. Nearly $600k adjusted for inflation. - At that same undergrad institution, the career services officer, responsible for finding people jobs (or at least helping), had never held a job outside of that college, and would do little more than putting your resume on Monster for you. Just two examples from my limited academic experience (undergrad only) at one small liberal arts school nobody's ever heard of. I'm sure the graduate folks here could throw dozens of examples at you of much more egregious things.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    > never held a job outside of that college This happens a lot at universities. They are great places to work if you're OK with an "adequate" salary (with generally very good benefits and time off) and not being held accountable for very much. So you have staff people who have worked there for decades, if not their entire careers. Often entire families (parents and eventually their children) will be working there. Those sorts of people have no understanding of what the "real world" or private sector is like, so the problem of low productivity and low accountability perpetuates itself. It's normal and they don't know anything else.
finolex1 9y ago
Keep in mind that these are Ivy League universities hoping to attract the best students they can in order to boost their prestige. If Princeton for instance decided to lower tuition fees by cutting down on 'luxuries' like smaller class sizes/ unrestricted enrollments in classes, then they'd lose out on the best students to Harvard or Yale. So the only way to reduce tuition fees would be to do it across the board at once, but the richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.
- creatornator 9y ago
  That seems... backwards. If the standard of admission remains the same (which is unrelated to cost of attending), lowering prices doesn't decrease the quality of the admitted student body, but _increases_ it. Lowering the cost means that additionally to the students who would be admitted and are capable of affording the school, students who are more qualified but would otherwise _not_ be able to afford attending would then be able to apply and attend. Admissions can only benefit from giving opportunities to a larger body of prospective students. The wealth of a student isn't what gives a school prestige--it's their academic prowess and likelihood of becoming successful later that gives the school a good name.
  - njarboe 9y ago
    Wealth of the students family probably has some influence on "likelihood of becoming successful later". Especially if one measures success in how much money people donate to their alma mater.
  - 121789 9y ago
    I don't think you're really disagreeing with the parent comment. In order to remain at a constant level of profitability with a price reduction for all students, universities would have to reduce the benefits given to students (e.g., larger class sizes, fewer building upgrades). This would negatively impact the student's likelihood of becoming successful (like you mentioned), and would potentially cause some high-potential students to switch to other schools. Brown is trying to get the best of all worlds: let the rich pay full price to maximize income, invest heavily in students to optimize chances of later success, and subsidize education for less wealthy students to keep the applicant pool as large as possible.
pc86 9y ago
> Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? Because the Third Associate Dean of Humanities can't fund their $600k salary with the goodwill from a more reasonable tuition. Snark aside, it's because the administrators are attacking a symptom - high tuition prices - and not the illness - administrative bloat and universities that are not run by academics, but by Professional Educators who in many cases have never taught a class in their lives, or haven't taught in the past n decades.
- salvar 9y ago
  Are you sure you put the snark aside?
  - pc86 9y ago
    OK maybe some of the snark was still there, but at least I got rid of the hyperbole :)
- horsecaptin 9y ago
  If their Humanities Dean gets paid that much, their football coach must be a billionaire from salary alone.
  - pc86 9y ago
    I'm no fan of coaches being the most highly paid public employees in most states by any stretch (especially with the athletes earning at most a free ride and a rubber-stamped business degree), but at least the sports teams are bringing in revenue, and people willingly donate to build a new stadium, etc. The Humanities Dean isn't a revenue center for the college, and nobody is (knowingly) donating so s/he can get a new office.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      Revenue is easy. Anyone can bring in revenue. Uber brings in revenue. The more important question is is the athletic department as a whole even profitable? At Berkeley, the football coaches make $16.3M. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Cal-football-coaches-tab-hits-16-3-million-4833013.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Cal-footba... The law school deans make $333,847. At the same time, Cal Athletics faces largest debt among all college programs. https://www1.salary.com/CA/Berkeley/Dean-of-Law-salary.html https://www1.salary.com/CA/Berkeley/Dean-of-Law-salary.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-football-s-top-teams-are-built-on-crippling-debt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-f... So your humanities deans vs revenue digression is just whataboutism.
deleted 9y ago
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adamfisk 9y ago
This is a complete misunderstanding of what is happening in higher education. The increase in tuitions for need-blind schools like Brown is essentially forced donations for the families that can afford to pay. Everyone is already given financial aid to meet whatever their need is. Now, however, some of that is in the form of loans. Alongside the increase in tuitions has been a massive increase in financial aid. Princeton really kicked this off around 2000 when they started drastically reducing loans and increasing grants, essentially competing for the top talent among lower income students.
Taylor_OD 9y ago
Regardless of the validity of your claim I think the answer to your question is why would Brown be incentive to lower tuition to eliminate student loans (lower profits) if they could just ask for it from alumni (same profits and free good PR)?
- okaram 9y ago
  Brown (and all other Ivy League-ish universities) are non-profit; they do not seek (or have) profit
  - krull10 9y ago
    Most universities are run like a business. They are "non-profit" but essentially they are trying to generate "profits" that raise their endowment. Larger endowments mean more $ per year to spend on faculty, admin/staff, and student services/housing. Having more faculty and better student services/housing helps recruit more and stronger students...
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Humphrey: Bernard, you know perfectly well there has to be some way to measure success in the Civil Service. British Leyland measure their success by the size of their profits. Or, to be more accurate, they measure the size of their failure by the size of their losses. But, we don’t have profits and losses. We have to measure our success by the size of our staff and our budget. By definition a big department is more successful than a small one.
boobsbr 9y ago
Aren't universities charging exorbitant prices because of higly available cheap student credit subsidized by the Government?
- okaram 9y ago
  no
bobwaycott 9y ago
My guess is to protect the ability to charge more to those who can ostensibly afford to pay more. PS: It’s led, not its metallic homonym lead.
okaram 9y ago
Actually ... they are probably NOT charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room and board, when you look at their costs; good education is expensive. Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable. Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher salaries ... add benefits, offices, etc, and you're at about twice that, so 26K just for faculty; add some for facilities and management, and their cost is probably about 40K/year per student, so a 20-25% markup, doesn't sound unreasonable (and then almost no student pays the sticker price). High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty). BTW, other universities will do it cheaper by either paying their faculty much less (which usually leads to quality problems), or having much larger classes, or crummy facilities, or government subsidies (or all of the above). Community colleges do an amazing job for the price they charge, but it's not the same education :)
- rdtsc 9y ago
  > High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty). Interesting. Wonder why it's more labor intensive compared to engineering or other degrees. 7:1 teacher-student ratio seems very good. Why can't it be 14:1, would that result in a dramatically worse outcome? (Not even sure what I mean by outcome, maybe inability to find a position after graduation...)
  - okaram 9y ago
    I guess it depends on what you mean by outcomes ... if the outcome is finding a job after graduation, probably not; if the outcome is becoming a 'better' human being, probably yes :) Having a 7:1 teacher/student ratio means that students will have tons of contact with the faculty outside the classroom; they can walk to their offices and chat (and a lot of learning happens that way). It means 'large' classes are 15-20 students, which means there's no 'lecturing' per se, and a lot more discussions. Doubling that rate means larger classes (40 students means teacher cannot answer all questions, assignments are made to be graded quickly etc), less interaction with faculty inside and outside classroom Is it worth it ? I think so, and, if needed (and able), would willingly pay it for my kids. If you don't think it's worth it, or can't afford it, good state universities cost 1/2 or 1/3 as much (tuition is probably around 10K for in-state, room and board is still probably 1K/mo). Community/technical colleges are cheap for a reason, but teachers want to teach, and good students will learn from them, and get a degree; and of course, there's tons of free learning resources
ams6110 9y ago
I'm not sure the Ivy schools "lead" in price gouging. They've always been very expensive. I wonder what a comparison of tuition from 20 years ago would look like, compared to a typical public university? The tuition at public universities I know of has gone from something an in-state kid could probably manange by "working his way through school" to something you better hope your parents have been saving for since you were born. And during the same time there's been an explosion of administrative staff, new buildings, extravagant landscaping and green space, brick sidewalks, etc.
goialoq 9y ago
> Lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges They aren't similar. The Ivy League has ultra-wealthy donors and parents paying the tuition of students of modest means. Most students don't pay the sticker price

lerpa 9y ago

The actual problem is people getting into debt without reasonable expectation of paying it, just wishful thinking.

zbentley 9y ago
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this position, but that's an unnecessarily extreme way of stating it. "Reasonable" is a weasel word. If I study for 4 years for a job in a lucrative, degree-requiring field with very high jobs demand when I matriculate, and I go into debt to study, is that "reasonable"? What if that field encounters a sea change on the year I graduate, or the economy crashes, leaving me with bleak prospects and debt? Does that make what I did "wishful thinking"? It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. Like, sure, it's easy to make fun of literature students who end up $200k in the whole with no marketable skills and no job prospects. But they are just a small fraction of the whole picture. A higher ed degree is by far the highest-chance-of-success way for a lot of people to make it financially (whether or not it should be is a separate discussion), and a lot of positions require degrees for good reasons.
- lerpa 9y ago
  > It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. That's not my position. > "Reasonable" is a weasel word. You can have a reasonable definition of what is reasonable ;-) It just has to do with the ammount of risk you're willing to take, yes, it involves personal risk. But you can see, for example, in such and such people that get a degree are >70% unemployed or working in a different area that has nothing to do with it. Then well perhaps it's not a good choice if I don't have the liberty to do it just for the sake of it, without expecting money in return. Some other career choices probably have better expected outcomes for the average Joe. So maybe if you need the money, chose that. The bottom line is: it's just silly to live as if you were rich and but then after complain you don't have the money for it.

deleted 9y ago

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reverend_gonzo 9y ago

You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant. You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to be.

wyldfire 9y ago
The administrative costs have been the most sizable portion of cost increases for universities over the last few decades. The costs for teaching faculty have decreased, probably due to the use of adjunct professors (who don't get tenure nor benefits).
dalbasal 9y ago
The exploding cost of education over the last generation doesn't boil down to an increase in teaching or even research staff costs. These costs are stable, largely thanks to the very low cost of junior academics. In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more income focused. What the OP is saying is that education has become unaffordable because it has become expensive, not because of how it is financed. Fixing Brown students problem with donor financing is great for Brown students, but does not scale even if is sustainable at brown. Whether through donors, loans, public financing or parental savings, we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.
- mnx 9y ago
  This is true of many things, but seems to be politically unpopular to notice. The right will claim that prices are what prices are and cannot be changed, and the left will claim it's all in resource allocation.
  - 9y ago

Retric 9y ago

If your pulling in ~10,000$ per person in tuition, and the average person takes 5 classes with a class size of 30 that's. 60,000$ per professor per year if they teach 4 classes, 75,000$ per professor if they teach 5 and 90k & 6 classes before expenses per class. So, the only way for that to work out is some other subsidies. However, lectures allow you to use TA's to more cheaply expand class sizes and might make it possible at the undergrad level.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
But Brown's tuition for out of state students is just under $50,000 per year per student. Does that mean they could be paying those professors $300,000?
- timthelion 9y ago
  Aren't there other expenses like maintaining the campus and paying for journal subscriptions and research equipment?
  - nascar_is_bad 9y ago
    are you just listing off the things you think a university spends money on?
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Brown is private, so there is no distinction for out of state students.
- Retric 9y ago
  That's nominally 50k/student they can then offer scholarships so it's possibly nobody actually pays that much. Further, just having a teacher without a classroom is not going to get you very far. Still, assuming the average student pays 1/2 that much per year they can probably cut the costs significantly.
bmcusick 9y ago
Why even use TAs for lectures? There's YouTube. There's automated software for quizzes and testing. Textbooks should be open source documentation, printed-on-demand. I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators. Check out how Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a real CS Master's Degree for a fraction of the cost using similar stuff: https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/ https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/

Improvotter 9y ago

I recently met an American here in Europe that mostly grew up here the last few years who wanted to go to NA (more specifically Toronto) for university when she could basically enrol here in a good university for a fraction of the cost. I pay less than a gran every year for my software engineering master's degree and can't fathom someone going to a different country knowing you're gonna be in debt for a large portion of your life. I'd rather study here and move to Canada after than study there and get a huge ass debt piled up. I really don't get how these universities manage their cashflow. With such an exorbitant amount of cash you can basically put people on Mars for all I know.

charlesdm 9y ago
Ivy League schools have massive endowments, which are essentially huge investment funds. They employ people to invest their money.
wbkang 9y ago
Canadians university has far lower tuition than the US equivalent. It's also easier to immigrate when you have a Canadian degree so the story might be a bit different for Canada.
- refurb 9y ago
  Tuition is far lower if you're a Canadian citizen or resident. If you're foreign, it costs $25,000+ per year which isn't that different from public US universities.
  - wbkang 9y ago
    I went to UWaterloo CS co-op as an international student and it was less than CA$25000/year all-inclusive and before the money I made from co-op. I am pretty sure comparable education in US costs far more than that.
bmmayer1 9y ago
The trick is that most people don't pay full tuition[1]. It's like hospital prices: most people don't pay the sticker price and those who do are subsidizing those who don't. [1]http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2017/ http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2...

marcopolitik 9y ago

> This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people. Voluntarily giving some cash to a school endowment is not getting "bilked".

baldfat 9y ago
Brown has traditionally been one of the most expensive colleges in America for decades. The "Boys Club" of Brown is through the roof. This is just a weird story to come from Brown.

onwardly 9y ago

Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component. The problem still is that middle-class families get stuck in a gray zone. I went to Brown, and my parents made enough (~$110k) that I didn't get financial aid but they also couldn't pay $40k/year.

ben_jones 9y ago
While the process sounds good in theory there is an ever increasing gap that people fall into between parents making too much money and parents not making enough. I'm bias because I fell right into the middle of the gap - my parents inherited an illiquid share of real estate that on paper is worth about a million dollars, in reality after taxes it yields maybe 40k/yr that my parents live off of (60+, no college). Because of this I was denied any form of financial aid and had to fend for myself.
- CalChris 9y ago
  Did you explain this to the financial aid office? Generally, elite schools are in the business of finding elite students first and then dealing with FA second. But you have to make your situation clear to them. They offered you admission or you wouldn't be dealing with FA. So they wanted you. But FA is a negotiation even especially if you're in the gap and then you have to negotiate hard because otherwise you pay sticker.
  - ktta 9y ago
    Often financial aid is given out to very needy students (don't even have anything as collateral for loan), and there's sometimes a quota.
    - ams6110 9y ago

elsherbini 9y ago

Today's elite schools offer myriad resources to students that they didn't before. And today's elite schools are therefore able to serve a much more diverse group of students. I think administrative costs have gone up too much and have space to cut back. But when articles come out saying administrative costs have ballooned 500%, I don't want people to imagine that it's all wasted - most of the new positions represent new services provided to students. And in anticipation of the argument that "I don't need those services so they shouldn't exist": see arguments for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes on healthy people. The whole university functions better and achieves its mission better if there is more diversity and if students have more access to services they need. Lowering tuition would be a trade-off, not just trimming fat.

pc86 9y ago
I don't think anyone's saying it's all wasted, and I agree that a university in 2015 is going to offer a lot more to its students in terms of non-academic services than a university of 1985. But it's hard to argue that even half of that 500% is good spending. - The year I started my undergrad, there a mini-scandal where tuition was raised by over 10% with little warning and it leaked that the school President, having written a heart felt letter about how hard it was cutting costs in these difficult economic times, made over $400k/yr and the college was paying his mortgage. Nearly $600k adjusted for inflation. - At that same undergrad institution, the career services officer, responsible for finding people jobs (or at least helping), had never held a job outside of that college, and would do little more than putting your resume on Monster for you. Just two examples from my limited academic experience (undergrad only) at one small liberal arts school nobody's ever heard of. I'm sure the graduate folks here could throw dozens of examples at you of much more egregious things.
- ams6110 9y ago
  > never held a job outside of that college This happens a lot at universities. They are great places to work if you're OK with an "adequate" salary (with generally very good benefits and time off) and not being held accountable for very much. So you have staff people who have worked there for decades, if not their entire careers. Often entire families (parents and eventually their children) will be working there. Those sorts of people have no understanding of what the "real world" or private sector is like, so the problem of low productivity and low accountability perpetuates itself. It's normal and they don't know anything else.

finolex1 9y ago

Keep in mind that these are Ivy League universities hoping to attract the best students they can in order to boost their prestige. If Princeton for instance decided to lower tuition fees by cutting down on 'luxuries' like smaller class sizes/ unrestricted enrollments in classes, then they'd lose out on the best students to Harvard or Yale. So the only way to reduce tuition fees would be to do it across the board at once, but the richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.

creatornator 9y ago
That seems... backwards. If the standard of admission remains the same (which is unrelated to cost of attending), lowering prices doesn't decrease the quality of the admitted student body, but _increases_ it. Lowering the cost means that additionally to the students who would be admitted and are capable of affording the school, students who are more qualified but would otherwise _not_ be able to afford attending would then be able to apply and attend. Admissions can only benefit from giving opportunities to a larger body of prospective students. The wealth of a student isn't what gives a school prestige--it's their academic prowess and likelihood of becoming successful later that gives the school a good name.
- njarboe 9y ago
  Wealth of the students family probably has some influence on "likelihood of becoming successful later". Especially if one measures success in how much money people donate to their alma mater.
- 121789 9y ago
  I don't think you're really disagreeing with the parent comment. In order to remain at a constant level of profitability with a price reduction for all students, universities would have to reduce the benefits given to students (e.g., larger class sizes, fewer building upgrades). This would negatively impact the student's likelihood of becoming successful (like you mentioned), and would potentially cause some high-potential students to switch to other schools. Brown is trying to get the best of all worlds: let the rich pay full price to maximize income, invest heavily in students to optimize chances of later success, and subsidize education for less wealthy students to keep the applicant pool as large as possible.

pc86 9y ago

> Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M? Because the Third Associate Dean of Humanities can't fund their $600k salary with the goodwill from a more reasonable tuition. Snark aside, it's because the administrators are attacking a symptom - high tuition prices - and not the illness - administrative bloat and universities that are not run by academics, but by Professional Educators who in many cases have never taught a class in their lives, or haven't taught in the past n decades.

salvar 9y ago
Are you sure you put the snark aside?
- pc86 9y ago
  OK maybe some of the snark was still there, but at least I got rid of the hyperbole :)
horsecaptin 9y ago
If their Humanities Dean gets paid that much, their football coach must be a billionaire from salary alone.
- pc86 9y ago
  I'm no fan of coaches being the most highly paid public employees in most states by any stretch (especially with the athletes earning at most a free ride and a rubber-stamped business degree), but at least the sports teams are bringing in revenue, and people willingly donate to build a new stadium, etc. The Humanities Dean isn't a revenue center for the college, and nobody is (knowingly) donating so s/he can get a new office.
  - CalChris 9y ago
    Revenue is easy. Anyone can bring in revenue. Uber brings in revenue. The more important question is is the athletic department as a whole even profitable? At Berkeley, the football coaches make $16.3M. http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Cal-football-coaches-tab-hits-16-3-million-4833013.php http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Cal-footba... The law school deans make $333,847. At the same time, Cal Athletics faces largest debt among all college programs. https://www1.salary.com/CA/Berkeley/Dean-of-Law-salary.html https://www1.salary.com/CA/Berkeley/Dean-of-Law-salary.html https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-football-s-top-teams-are-built-on-crippling-debt https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-f... So your humanities deans vs revenue digression is just whataboutism.

deleted 9y ago

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adamfisk 9y ago

This is a complete misunderstanding of what is happening in higher education. The increase in tuitions for need-blind schools like Brown is essentially forced donations for the families that can afford to pay. Everyone is already given financial aid to meet whatever their need is. Now, however, some of that is in the form of loans. Alongside the increase in tuitions has been a massive increase in financial aid. Princeton really kicked this off around 2000 when they started drastically reducing loans and increasing grants, essentially competing for the top talent among lower income students.

Taylor_OD 9y ago

Regardless of the validity of your claim I think the answer to your question is why would Brown be incentive to lower tuition to eliminate student loans (lower profits) if they could just ask for it from alumni (same profits and free good PR)?

okaram 9y ago
Brown (and all other Ivy League-ish universities) are non-profit; they do not seek (or have) profit
- krull10 9y ago
  Most universities are run like a business. They are "non-profit" but essentially they are trying to generate "profits" that raise their endowment. Larger endowments mean more $ per year to spend on faculty, admin/staff, and student services/housing. Having more faculty and better student services/housing helps recruit more and stronger students...
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Humphrey: Bernard, you know perfectly well there has to be some way to measure success in the Civil Service. British Leyland measure their success by the size of their profits. Or, to be more accurate, they measure the size of their failure by the size of their losses. But, we don’t have profits and losses. We have to measure our success by the size of our staff and our budget. By definition a big department is more successful than a small one.

boobsbr 9y ago

Aren't universities charging exorbitant prices because of higly available cheap student credit subsidized by the Government?

okaram 9y ago
no

bobwaycott 9y ago

My guess is to protect the ability to charge more to those who can ostensibly afford to pay more. PS: It’s led, not its metallic homonym lead.

okaram 9y ago

Actually ... they are probably NOT charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room and board, when you look at their costs; good education is expensive. Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable. Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher salaries ... add benefits, offices, etc, and you're at about twice that, so 26K just for faculty; add some for facilities and management, and their cost is probably about 40K/year per student, so a 20-25% markup, doesn't sound unreasonable (and then almost no student pays the sticker price). High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty). BTW, other universities will do it cheaper by either paying their faculty much less (which usually leads to quality problems), or having much larger classes, or crummy facilities, or government subsidies (or all of the above). Community colleges do an amazing job for the price they charge, but it's not the same education :)

rdtsc 9y ago
> High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty). Interesting. Wonder why it's more labor intensive compared to engineering or other degrees. 7:1 teacher-student ratio seems very good. Why can't it be 14:1, would that result in a dramatically worse outcome? (Not even sure what I mean by outcome, maybe inability to find a position after graduation...)
- okaram 9y ago
  I guess it depends on what you mean by outcomes ... if the outcome is finding a job after graduation, probably not; if the outcome is becoming a 'better' human being, probably yes :) Having a 7:1 teacher/student ratio means that students will have tons of contact with the faculty outside the classroom; they can walk to their offices and chat (and a lot of learning happens that way). It means 'large' classes are 15-20 students, which means there's no 'lecturing' per se, and a lot more discussions. Doubling that rate means larger classes (40 students means teacher cannot answer all questions, assignments are made to be graded quickly etc), less interaction with faculty inside and outside classroom Is it worth it ? I think so, and, if needed (and able), would willingly pay it for my kids. If you don't think it's worth it, or can't afford it, good state universities cost 1/2 or 1/3 as much (tuition is probably around 10K for in-state, room and board is still probably 1K/mo). Community/technical colleges are cheap for a reason, but teachers want to teach, and good students will learn from them, and get a degree; and of course, there's tons of free learning resources

ams6110 9y ago

I'm not sure the Ivy schools "lead" in price gouging. They've always been very expensive. I wonder what a comparison of tuition from 20 years ago would look like, compared to a typical public university? The tuition at public universities I know of has gone from something an in-state kid could probably manange by "working his way through school" to something you better hope your parents have been saving for since you were born. And during the same time there's been an explosion of administrative staff, new buildings, extravagant landscaping and green space, brick sidewalks, etc.

goialoq 9y ago

> Lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges They aren't similar. The Ivy League has ultra-wealthy donors and parents paying the tuition of students of modest means. Most students don't pay the sticker price