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Awesome post :) There's a lot of victim blaming in the student loan debt world. Let me attempt to explain how we can fix the system. 1) Education is too expens

Awesome post :) There's a lot of victim blaming in the student loan debt world. Let me attempt to explain how we can fix the system. 1) Education is too expensive (especially relative to the value it delivers). 2) But, that money isn't even going towards the underpaid adjuncts who teach the classes. wtf?? 3) Tuition expenses mostly go towards administrative salaries, very very old established professors, and buildings and services. This needs to change. 4) But it can't change, because you can't just open a college and get it accreditted easily. This is a regulated industry, just like the health insurance industry. You have to do the song and dance for months in front of regulators, who have their own interests in keeping competitors out. So, all in all, the student gets screwed, the company that hires them receives questionable value add, and the college administrators and banks make a killing. It is a massive wealth transfer that delivers little value.

dpark 8y ago
> Tuition expenses mostly go towards administrative salaries, very very old established professors, and buildings... At many (most?) universities, established professors make only slightly more than new hires because the budget simply isn’t there to pay significantly more and so the salary range compresses. And honestly, instructor pay seems like a good place to be spending money. On the other hand, administration costs are out of hand. Some universities have crossed the 50% threshold and now spend more on administration than everything else combined.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  We agree, I promise. Administrative costs are far and large the major problem, as well as needless capital and operational expenses like multi million dollar landscaping and etc. However, I seriously must qualify your statement. There are adjuncts making 20-30k per year, with no benefits. Then there are tenured professors who barely do any teaching anymore making upwards of 200k per year. Some also hold simultaneous administrative positions. So you have to tread carefully. I think what you are trying to say is that paying a tenured associate professor 60-80k per year is a reasonable expense. I agree with this statement.
  - Rylinks 8y ago
    Much of professors' salaries are paid from grants. The professor who barely does any teaching is (hopefully) pulling in research money.
  - dpark 8y ago
    > I think what you are trying to say is that paying a tenured associate professor 60-80k per year is a reasonable expense. Depends on the field. You aren’t hiring PhDs in computer science with that salary. They’ll leave for industry immediately. You’re also not hiring qualified instructors in CS at $20k for the same reason.
candiodari 8y ago
Oh wait ... if only we had a university system for a few thousand years before student debt, that might provide insight into an alternative ! Oh wait ! We do ! Problems student debt tried to solve: 1) these systems do not let many people learn at all. Maybe 1-2% of the population gets higher education. 2) there is a large difference between institutions. And society's classes arrange around specific institutions one way or the other (price, geography, ...) (by which I mean the rich go to one school, the poor to another, with of course vastly different prospects). The institutions attended by the wealthy get the best professors, the best reputation, and their alumni get an advantage in the workplace. (and let's just ignore that this is exactly the part that specific countries saved, and kept separately from whatever funding system they otherwise use for education: the part that worked best for the rich, like France's Ecole Nationale d'Administration, London School of Economics, and Germany's Bundesbank Hochschule. That's just peachy. Most of these schools you can only be referred into, you can't apply (or can't apply successfully), and they lead directly to the government's upper echelons) 3) There were much, much less study directions. Essentially anything you couldn't convince your parents to fund you learning for 2 or 4 years for could not sustainably be a university department. This resulted in much smaller arts, social studies, philosophy, archaeology, language, ... departments. Many people want to study those directions, but few feel like funding them. 4) Universities had perpetual funding problems, because everybody feels like regulating education. So the growth of administrators actually started before student loans were started. Whilst I don't agree with most idiots putting up this argument, there is a grain of truth to the idea that regulation forces universities into many unnecessary costs. 5) even the richest university directions, like economics departments in huge cities, weren't exactly swimming in cash. Therefore they focus on what brings in the bucks (more or less outsourced R&D for huge companies, creating spinoffs and some recruitment) ... 6) unwillingness of these departments to grow to the size people would like, and being pretty selective as a result (famously civil engineering and of course medicine) Every proposal here essentially boils down to forcing education to be a reasonable investment, which will re-cause much of the above problems. If we're willing to do that, sure, but ... I don't think so.

dpark 8y ago

> Tuition expenses mostly go towards administrative salaries, very very old established professors, and buildings... At many (most?) universities, established professors make only slightly more than new hires because the budget simply isn’t there to pay significantly more and so the salary range compresses. And honestly, instructor pay seems like a good place to be spending money. On the other hand, administration costs are out of hand. Some universities have crossed the 50% threshold and now spend more on administration than everything else combined.

anoncoward111 8y ago
We agree, I promise. Administrative costs are far and large the major problem, as well as needless capital and operational expenses like multi million dollar landscaping and etc. However, I seriously must qualify your statement. There are adjuncts making 20-30k per year, with no benefits. Then there are tenured professors who barely do any teaching anymore making upwards of 200k per year. Some also hold simultaneous administrative positions. So you have to tread carefully. I think what you are trying to say is that paying a tenured associate professor 60-80k per year is a reasonable expense. I agree with this statement.
- Rylinks 8y ago
  Much of professors' salaries are paid from grants. The professor who barely does any teaching is (hopefully) pulling in research money.
- dpark 8y ago
  > I think what you are trying to say is that paying a tenured associate professor 60-80k per year is a reasonable expense. Depends on the field. You aren’t hiring PhDs in computer science with that salary. They’ll leave for industry immediately. You’re also not hiring qualified instructors in CS at $20k for the same reason.

candiodari 8y ago

Oh wait ... if only we had a university system for a few thousand years before student debt, that might provide insight into an alternative ! Oh wait ! We do ! Problems student debt tried to solve: 1) these systems do not let many people learn at all. Maybe 1-2% of the population gets higher education. 2) there is a large difference between institutions. And society's classes arrange around specific institutions one way or the other (price, geography, ...) (by which I mean the rich go to one school, the poor to another, with of course vastly different prospects). The institutions attended by the wealthy get the best professors, the best reputation, and their alumni get an advantage in the workplace. (and let's just ignore that this is exactly the part that specific countries saved, and kept separately from whatever funding system they otherwise use for education: the part that worked best for the rich, like France's Ecole Nationale d'Administration, London School of Economics, and Germany's Bundesbank Hochschule. That's just peachy. Most of these schools you can only be referred into, you can't apply (or can't apply successfully), and they lead directly to the government's upper echelons) 3) There were much, much less study directions. Essentially anything you couldn't convince your parents to fund you learning for 2 or 4 years for could not sustainably be a university department. This resulted in much smaller arts, social studies, philosophy, archaeology, language, ... departments. Many people want to study those directions, but few feel like funding them. 4) Universities had perpetual funding problems, because everybody feels like regulating education. So the growth of administrators actually started before student loans were started. Whilst I don't agree with most idiots putting up this argument, there is a grain of truth to the idea that regulation forces universities into many unnecessary costs. 5) even the richest university directions, like economics departments in huge cities, weren't exactly swimming in cash. Therefore they focus on what brings in the bucks (more or less outsourced R&D for huge companies, creating spinoffs and some recruitment) ... 6) unwillingness of these departments to grow to the size people would like, and being pretty selective as a result (famously civil engineering and of course medicine) Every proposal here essentially boils down to forcing education to be a reasonable investment, which will re-cause much of the above problems. If we're willing to do that, sure, but ... I don't think so.