9 ms·

College is expensive because so much money is available in the forms of subsidies and loans. If the federal government stopped guaranteeing loans, and cut back

by pitaj 8y ago

College is expensive because so much money is available in the forms of subsidies and loans. If the federal government stopped guaranteeing loans, and cut back on other subsidies, the cost of college would be much much lower.

nostromo 8y ago
This seems to be a pattern in America. People call for X to be more affordable > government subsidizes X > X absorbs all subsidies and becomes even more expensive > people call for X to be socialized. Maybe instead we should start to unwind student financing. For example: let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy. That would give financiers pause and would put an upper bound on what many universities could charge.
- NTDF9 8y ago
  > People call for X to be more affordable > government subsidizes X > X absorbs all subsidies and becomes even more expensive > people call for X to be socialized. The problem is that government subsidizes loans. It doesn't do something like capped match. The government should just say, "We will cover your need-based education burden up to $20,000". Something like this would make most state schools accessible to most kids and yet, put a big limitation on how much schools can raise tuition. Some schools will raise it up to 40k, others will keep it at 20k, both will try to maximize intake for their tuition. Simply handing out unbounded, undischargeable loans is just crazy!
  - megamindbrian2 8y ago
    This sounds like government should pay people subsidiaries directly. Like an HSA but for more than just health. If you use the account for school it's tax free otherwise there are fee or the transaction is declined. How much more amazing would service from utilities be if they had to go through customer to get the same subsidiaries they get now.
    - NTDF9 8y ago
      I have taken an education loan from a bank in another country. They literally only approved me for a maximum of $30,000 loan. Let me explain how that worked. I had to pay first 15% from my account, they would pay the remaining 85%. Every semester, once I showed a receipt that I paid 15% to the university, that bank would wire the remaining 85% directly to that University. What did this do to my decision making? I literally only chose universities for which I could afford the upfront 15% and the max of $30k. I chose this university even though I had admit from other universities which had higher tuition. What impact does it have on universities? Universities with higher tuition start seeing a decline in enrollments. I got out with a max $30k debt, of which I paid 15% out of pocket already, per semester. I could've dropped out of school and joined again a few years later but that loan would still be available to me for 7 years.
    - pitaj 8y ago
      Or, we could try just doing none of that, like back when college was actually affordable!
      - testrun 8y ago
        How?
- moorhosj 8y ago
  == That would give financiers pause and would put an upper bound on what many universities could charge.== It would also limit the pool of people who could get a loan for college in the first place. Maybe we can take a page from other developed countries who don't seem to have the same problem. It seems to be a pattern in America where we act like a problem has no answers, meanwhile the rest of the world contains many potential solutions to the problem.
  - pitaj 8y ago
    Remember when college used to be cheap enough for people to afford working summers? I don't remember because that was before my time, but that was also before the subsidies and loans were made available by the feds. Turns out, if you dump money into an industry while increasing demand and not changing supply, prices will increase.
    - rrcaptain 8y ago
      That was because states covered most of the budget. Austerity policies changed that. And supply and demand is not applicable to macroeconomics, which education is part of.
      - nostrebored 8y ago
        States still cover most of the budget. As someone who went to school while poor and on a scholarship, I hated this, the price was so inflated because 1) The government pays the majority of it if you're poor, schools know you'll pay 2) If you're middle class your parents pay half of it, the government pays half of it, schools know they'll pay 3) If you're upper class, you might have a legacy admission and the school knows your parents will pay and probably donate to the school too
        rrcaptain 8y ago
        There's a difference between the government funding education and the government funding students. Costs are high because the government funds students (sometimes), not education. And very few people get government scholarships, most get loans which must be repayed: essentially an extra tax on the middle class.
- ataturk 8y ago
  The whole non-dischargeable loans thing was to make it possible at all for private lenders to make the loans. If you take that away, the underwriting will not work--the risk is too high, you would have 35% interest rates like on a credit card. Non starter.
- mcny 8y ago
  > For example: let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy. Ataturk's reply to this is dead below but I must agree with the (spirit of the) comment. While I support letting students discharge loans via bankruptcy, I VEHEMENTLY oppose making this applicable to loans already signed. This is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who supports this kind of position should be barred from public office on grounds of insanity. EDIT: I also think income and means testing ought for any government program or service ought to be illegal. You cannot say "you must make below $n to be eligible for this government program". I know the economists in the audience will bellow and bicker and say that we have limited resources that we must allocate "logically" but guess what macroeconomics is nonsense anyway because out here in the real world people don't behave logically. We need to make it against the law to use income, means, or property testing for any government program or service. Can't afford to offer it to the entire population regardless of income? Either increase taxes or rollback the program. Can't have it both ways.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    Wait, you are suggesting that medicaid, food stamps and low-income housing assistance should be offered to everybody? I don't think I have heard this suggested before. I'll have to ponder this.
    - mcny 8y ago
      > Wait, you are suggesting that medicaid, food stamps and low-income housing assistance should be offered to everybody? Yes. None of these programs should exist if we can't offer them to 100% of the population. Both Democrats and Republicans use these programs as a vote bank and it polarizes our public discourse.
      - wool_gather 8y ago
        Means testing is basically a compromise between the two extremes that you offer: fund them completely (by raising taxes) or drop them completely (because they're too expensive). That's the best you're going to get in a system where lots of people with vastly differing views have to agree on a single conclusion: a compromise that makes everyone a little bit unhappy.
- nicoburns 8y ago
  In Europe when the government subsidies things, they usually also put a cap on what the organisation is allowed to charge. See for example universities and trains in the UK. > people call for X to be socialized Alas it never gets to the final step: X is socialized.
- thedufer 8y ago
  > let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy This is a fine idea, but you have to recognize that this just means approximately no one gets student loans (and those who do get them don't need them). Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. Student loans are just inherently problematic - the people who need them have no assets, and the thing they pay for can't be used to secure the loan. Sure, prices would come down, but partially because so many people would be priced out and demand would drop. The solution has to involve more than that.
  - Gibbon1 8y ago
    > Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. You actually have to convince a judge that's appropriate. And the court has a wide variety of tools at it's disposal to reach an equitable decision. From telling the petitioner to get stuffed all the way to telling the creditors to get stuffed.
    - thedufer 8y ago
      Can you cite a case of this happening? As far as I can tell, chapter 7 cases are only ever denied for failing to file properly (missing deadlines, failure to disclose, etc), or kicked over to chapter 13 (which would be pretty remarkable in a case involving the little to no income of most students).
      - Gibbon1 8y ago
        If we were being reasonable about student loan debt Chapter 13 or 11 would be more appropriate than Chapter 7. Both of those allow for debt service to be renegotiated. Student loan debt is a particularly odious bit of neoliberal policy, forcing students to take on debt for something other societies provide for free, non dischargable and guaranteed by the state.
  - JauntyHatAngle 8y ago
- kurthr 8y ago
  Woah there... govt subsidizes what? This isn't about subsidies (except for loan guarantees), it's about unsecured credit and debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. That (like credit card spending, 8 year car loans, and payday lending) is a recipe for rising prices and high eventual bankruptcy rstes, but it's not govt subsidy. It is regulatory capture.
  - maxerickson 8y ago
    The government backing a huge portion of the loans and creating special treatment for the loans are both, ya know, subsidies. They are slightly indirect.
    - kurthr 8y ago
      Yes, that is why I called out loan guarantees. Regulatory capture (special treatment) on the other hand, is not subsidy any more than granting a patent/trademark is a subsidy... it's regulatory capture (the opposite of effective regulation). Corporations don't get to blame the govt for the rules that industry paid for... see what you made me do!
- Joeri 8y ago
  To bring down cost you don’t bring down the subsidies, but you let the government negotiate price limits on subsidized goods and services. This is how health care and college subsidies work in my country. The government negotiates with the universities and medical industry what the price and the subsidy level will be. Schools and health care can opt out of the subsidy scheme and shrink their market to the rich or opt in and have lower margins with higher quantities. Most choose to opt in, even the top tier. The trick is using the negotiating power of government, which is something U.S. politicians are unwilling to do.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
raverbashing 8y ago
And of course schools need 2 or 3 administrators per faculty member, earning more than faculty "because they are more important" naturally.
- curun1r 8y ago
  Don't forget the gymnasiums, stadiums, aquatic centers and all the other high-priced facilities that schools have constructed to compete for those easy-to-get student dollars. Because who can learn in an environment without swimming pools?
  - ams6110 8y ago
    For the most part, those types of facilities are paid for out of athletic department funds and donations. yes the sorts of facilities that universities build for athletics are extravagant and many would say ridiculous, but they really don't have a bearing on the cost of tuition.
    - smileysteve 8y ago
      > For the most part, those types of facilities are paid for out of athletic department funds and donations. Just 23 of 228 (NCAA DIV 1 2013) athletic departments were profitable for their schools. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/ncaa-finances-subsidies/2142443/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/nca...
- rrcaptain 8y ago
  You often do because the cost of administering financial aid and loan programs is much more than if the government simply funded education. The same applies to healthcare: you need dozens of administrators because you have dozens of insurers to deal with. Simplify the system so all costs are paid for by the state and your costs go down.
justonepost 8y ago
No, College is expensive because it's horribly inefficient. Professors are paid terribly.
- dboreham 8y ago
  Administrators and swanky campuses are expensive.
- Reedx 8y ago
  That would mean they're getting increasingly inefficient, significantly so? Given how much costs have increased. Certainly factors into the cost, but seems unlikely it's the key factor in the rising costs.
  - monocasa 8y ago
    Why would it be unlikely? > Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970. > By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. > Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
- ithilglin909 8y ago
  Professors aren't paid terribly -- adjuncts, lecturers, and teaching assistants typically are. That's because there are far more people jockeying for teaching positions than there are positions available. But saying college is expensive because it's inefficient begs the question: why is it inefficient? I'm inclined to think that the amount of federal money available is, at least, a factor...
eugeniub 8y ago
Considering the millions of people struggling to pay for college and desperate for lower tuition, this is totally untrue. This is like saying, "if we didn't have food stamps, food would be half the cost."
- mikec3010 8y ago
  I think the reverse of what he said was true: that tuition has risen artificially because of all the free money. But yeah I'm also skeptical that tuition would decrease even close to the same way if the money were removed. I think they'd cut supply before they cut price. Especially with the all too common "but you need a degree" fallacy
  - Retric 8y ago
    Let's ballpark things. Assuming 1 teacher making 100k teaching 20 students * 5 classes * 3 credit hour classes a semester ~= 333$ / credit hour. 128 credit hour degree ~= 43k over 4 years. And that's assuming relatively small average class size and ignoring adjuncts etc. Yet, many schools are charging 4-10 times that much. The question becomes what are the 3+ other people doing if not teaching and can you get rid of that? PS: And sure some professors make well over 100k and facilities are not free, but again many people even at expensive schools are pulling in less than that.
    - mikec3010 8y ago
      > Assuming 1 teacher making 100k Assume a PhD student making a $35k stipend or a foreign grad student making $14/hr. This covers a good 25%-40% of the curriculum, depending on the institution.
- et1337 8y ago
  That's reductive. Food and education are very different industries, and the scale of subsidies to individuals is HUGE in education compared to food stamps. Plus, the nature of the subsidy is important. State-sponsored universities don't seem any more culpable than private ones in this mess.
trylist 8y ago
That's backwards. College is expensive because demand is extremely high. Subsidies increase that demand by making college affordable for most, but the suggestion that the subsidies themselves are the problem is plain wrong. We wanted an educated workforce, we've got one. We can say we don't want one, but to blame our efforts to educate people as the problem with education is not productive. We either educate people or we don't. We increased demand on purpose (and we should have!). Of course prices are going to go up! Normally supply would expand to keep up, but something is rotten in education. Teachers get paid a pittance, there were several high profile accreditation frauds, and the natural inclination towards prestige as worth more than the actual diploma combine to seriously limit our ability to expand and mitigate prices.
- robotrout 8y ago
  As the supply of available money increases, there is no incentive not to increase tuition. Any system that is flooded with money experiences price inflation. Because students are not able to discharge their debt in bankruptcy, they constitute a riskless loan opportunity to the lenders, who throw money at them. A sad side-effect of this as that the price inflation that this causes is forcing more and more students who might have otherwise been able to finance their tuition without loans, into needing loans also, thus dooming more and more of the next generation into huge debts that will effect their ability to buy houses, start families, and save for retirement.
kurtisc 8y ago
There shouldn't be a debate on why higher education is expensive, it was answered in a 1973 paper that won a 2001 Nobel prize: https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teaching/EC860/signallingscreening/SpenceQJE1973.pdf https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teaching/EC860/signallingscreening... tl;dr: In markets where the cost of education is less than the increase in wages, the real cost of education isn't the fee, it's the relative effort of passing it.

by pitaj 8y ago

nostromo 8y ago

This seems to be a pattern in America. People call for X to be more affordable > government subsidizes X > X absorbs all subsidies and becomes even more expensive > people call for X to be socialized. Maybe instead we should start to unwind student financing. For example: let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy. That would give financiers pause and would put an upper bound on what many universities could charge.

NTDF9 8y ago
> People call for X to be more affordable > government subsidizes X > X absorbs all subsidies and becomes even more expensive > people call for X to be socialized. The problem is that government subsidizes loans. It doesn't do something like capped match. The government should just say, "We will cover your need-based education burden up to $20,000". Something like this would make most state schools accessible to most kids and yet, put a big limitation on how much schools can raise tuition. Some schools will raise it up to 40k, others will keep it at 20k, both will try to maximize intake for their tuition. Simply handing out unbounded, undischargeable loans is just crazy!
- megamindbrian2 8y ago
  This sounds like government should pay people subsidiaries directly. Like an HSA but for more than just health. If you use the account for school it's tax free otherwise there are fee or the transaction is declined. How much more amazing would service from utilities be if they had to go through customer to get the same subsidiaries they get now.
  - NTDF9 8y ago
    I have taken an education loan from a bank in another country. They literally only approved me for a maximum of $30,000 loan. Let me explain how that worked. I had to pay first 15% from my account, they would pay the remaining 85%. Every semester, once I showed a receipt that I paid 15% to the university, that bank would wire the remaining 85% directly to that University. What did this do to my decision making? I literally only chose universities for which I could afford the upfront 15% and the max of $30k. I chose this university even though I had admit from other universities which had higher tuition. What impact does it have on universities? Universities with higher tuition start seeing a decline in enrollments. I got out with a max $30k debt, of which I paid 15% out of pocket already, per semester. I could've dropped out of school and joined again a few years later but that loan would still be available to me for 7 years.
  - pitaj 8y ago
    Or, we could try just doing none of that, like back when college was actually affordable!
    - testrun 8y ago
      How?
moorhosj 8y ago
== That would give financiers pause and would put an upper bound on what many universities could charge.== It would also limit the pool of people who could get a loan for college in the first place. Maybe we can take a page from other developed countries who don't seem to have the same problem. It seems to be a pattern in America where we act like a problem has no answers, meanwhile the rest of the world contains many potential solutions to the problem.
- pitaj 8y ago
  Remember when college used to be cheap enough for people to afford working summers? I don't remember because that was before my time, but that was also before the subsidies and loans were made available by the feds. Turns out, if you dump money into an industry while increasing demand and not changing supply, prices will increase.
  - rrcaptain 8y ago
    That was because states covered most of the budget. Austerity policies changed that. And supply and demand is not applicable to macroeconomics, which education is part of.
    - nostrebored 8y ago
      States still cover most of the budget. As someone who went to school while poor and on a scholarship, I hated this, the price was so inflated because 1) The government pays the majority of it if you're poor, schools know you'll pay 2) If you're middle class your parents pay half of it, the government pays half of it, schools know they'll pay 3) If you're upper class, you might have a legacy admission and the school knows your parents will pay and probably donate to the school too
      - rrcaptain 8y ago
        There's a difference between the government funding education and the government funding students. Costs are high because the government funds students (sometimes), not education. And very few people get government scholarships, most get loans which must be repayed: essentially an extra tax on the middle class.
ataturk 8y ago
The whole non-dischargeable loans thing was to make it possible at all for private lenders to make the loans. If you take that away, the underwriting will not work--the risk is too high, you would have 35% interest rates like on a credit card. Non starter.
mcny 8y ago
> For example: let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy. Ataturk's reply to this is dead below but I must agree with the (spirit of the) comment. While I support letting students discharge loans via bankruptcy, I VEHEMENTLY oppose making this applicable to loans already signed. This is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who supports this kind of position should be barred from public office on grounds of insanity. EDIT: I also think income and means testing ought for any government program or service ought to be illegal. You cannot say "you must make below $n to be eligible for this government program". I know the economists in the audience will bellow and bicker and say that we have limited resources that we must allocate "logically" but guess what macroeconomics is nonsense anyway because out here in the real world people don't behave logically. We need to make it against the law to use income, means, or property testing for any government program or service. Can't afford to offer it to the entire population regardless of income? Either increase taxes or rollback the program. Can't have it both ways.
- amanaplanacanal 8y ago
  Wait, you are suggesting that medicaid, food stamps and low-income housing assistance should be offered to everybody? I don't think I have heard this suggested before. I'll have to ponder this.
  - mcny 8y ago
    > Wait, you are suggesting that medicaid, food stamps and low-income housing assistance should be offered to everybody? Yes. None of these programs should exist if we can't offer them to 100% of the population. Both Democrats and Republicans use these programs as a vote bank and it polarizes our public discourse.
    - wool_gather 8y ago
      Means testing is basically a compromise between the two extremes that you offer: fund them completely (by raising taxes) or drop them completely (because they're too expensive). That's the best you're going to get in a system where lots of people with vastly differing views have to agree on a single conclusion: a compromise that makes everyone a little bit unhappy.
nicoburns 8y ago
In Europe when the government subsidies things, they usually also put a cap on what the organisation is allowed to charge. See for example universities and trains in the UK. > people call for X to be socialized Alas it never gets to the final step: X is socialized.
thedufer 8y ago
> let students discharge student loans via bankruptcy This is a fine idea, but you have to recognize that this just means approximately no one gets student loans (and those who do get them don't need them). Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. Student loans are just inherently problematic - the people who need them have no assets, and the thing they pay for can't be used to secure the loan. Sure, prices would come down, but partially because so many people would be priced out and demand would drop. The solution has to involve more than that.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  > Think about it: if you come out of college with, say, $20k of debt (granting that this might bring down prices) and no assets, bankruptcy is a very tempting option. You actually have to convince a judge that's appropriate. And the court has a wide variety of tools at it's disposal to reach an equitable decision. From telling the petitioner to get stuffed all the way to telling the creditors to get stuffed.
  - thedufer 8y ago
    Can you cite a case of this happening? As far as I can tell, chapter 7 cases are only ever denied for failing to file properly (missing deadlines, failure to disclose, etc), or kicked over to chapter 13 (which would be pretty remarkable in a case involving the little to no income of most students).
    - Gibbon1 8y ago
      If we were being reasonable about student loan debt Chapter 13 or 11 would be more appropriate than Chapter 7. Both of those allow for debt service to be renegotiated. Student loan debt is a particularly odious bit of neoliberal policy, forcing students to take on debt for something other societies provide for free, non dischargable and guaranteed by the state.
- JauntyHatAngle 8y ago
kurthr 8y ago
Woah there... govt subsidizes what? This isn't about subsidies (except for loan guarantees), it's about unsecured credit and debt that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. That (like credit card spending, 8 year car loans, and payday lending) is a recipe for rising prices and high eventual bankruptcy rstes, but it's not govt subsidy. It is regulatory capture.
- maxerickson 8y ago
  The government backing a huge portion of the loans and creating special treatment for the loans are both, ya know, subsidies. They are slightly indirect.
  - kurthr 8y ago
    Yes, that is why I called out loan guarantees. Regulatory capture (special treatment) on the other hand, is not subsidy any more than granting a patent/trademark is a subsidy... it's regulatory capture (the opposite of effective regulation). Corporations don't get to blame the govt for the rules that industry paid for... see what you made me do!
Joeri 8y ago
To bring down cost you don’t bring down the subsidies, but you let the government negotiate price limits on subsidized goods and services. This is how health care and college subsidies work in my country. The government negotiates with the universities and medical industry what the price and the subsidy level will be. Schools and health care can opt out of the subsidy scheme and shrink their market to the rich or opt in and have lower margins with higher quantities. Most choose to opt in, even the top tier. The trick is using the negotiating power of government, which is something U.S. politicians are unwilling to do.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

raverbashing 8y ago

And of course schools need 2 or 3 administrators per faculty member, earning more than faculty "because they are more important" naturally.

curun1r 8y ago
Don't forget the gymnasiums, stadiums, aquatic centers and all the other high-priced facilities that schools have constructed to compete for those easy-to-get student dollars. Because who can learn in an environment without swimming pools?
- ams6110 8y ago
  For the most part, those types of facilities are paid for out of athletic department funds and donations. yes the sorts of facilities that universities build for athletics are extravagant and many would say ridiculous, but they really don't have a bearing on the cost of tuition.
  - smileysteve 8y ago
    > For the most part, those types of facilities are paid for out of athletic department funds and donations. Just 23 of 228 (NCAA DIV 1 2013) athletic departments were profitable for their schools. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/ncaa-finances-subsidies/2142443/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/2013/05/07/nca...
rrcaptain 8y ago
You often do because the cost of administering financial aid and loan programs is much more than if the government simply funded education. The same applies to healthcare: you need dozens of administrators because you have dozens of insurers to deal with. Simplify the system so all costs are paid for by the state and your costs go down.

justonepost 8y ago

No, College is expensive because it's horribly inefficient. Professors are paid terribly.

dboreham 8y ago
Administrators and swanky campuses are expensive.
Reedx 8y ago
That would mean they're getting increasingly inefficient, significantly so? Given how much costs have increased. Certainly factors into the cost, but seems unlikely it's the key factor in the rising costs.
- monocasa 8y ago
  Why would it be unlikely? > Interestingly, increased spending has not been going into the pockets of the typical professor. Salaries of full-time faculty members are, on average, barely higher than they were in 1970. Moreover, while 45 years ago 78 percent of college and university professors were full time, today half of postsecondary faculty members are lower-paid part-time employees, meaning that the average salaries of the people who do the teaching in American higher education are actually quite a bit lower than they were in 1970. > By contrast, a major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration. According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. > Even more strikingly, an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-reason-college-tuition-costs-so-much.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...
ithilglin909 8y ago
Professors aren't paid terribly -- adjuncts, lecturers, and teaching assistants typically are. That's because there are far more people jockeying for teaching positions than there are positions available. But saying college is expensive because it's inefficient begs the question: why is it inefficient? I'm inclined to think that the amount of federal money available is, at least, a factor...

eugeniub 8y ago

Considering the millions of people struggling to pay for college and desperate for lower tuition, this is totally untrue. This is like saying, "if we didn't have food stamps, food would be half the cost."

mikec3010 8y ago
I think the reverse of what he said was true: that tuition has risen artificially because of all the free money. But yeah I'm also skeptical that tuition would decrease even close to the same way if the money were removed. I think they'd cut supply before they cut price. Especially with the all too common "but you need a degree" fallacy
- Retric 8y ago
  Let's ballpark things. Assuming 1 teacher making 100k teaching 20 students * 5 classes * 3 credit hour classes a semester ~= 333$ / credit hour. 128 credit hour degree ~= 43k over 4 years. And that's assuming relatively small average class size and ignoring adjuncts etc. Yet, many schools are charging 4-10 times that much. The question becomes what are the 3+ other people doing if not teaching and can you get rid of that? PS: And sure some professors make well over 100k and facilities are not free, but again many people even at expensive schools are pulling in less than that.
  - mikec3010 8y ago
    > Assuming 1 teacher making 100k Assume a PhD student making a $35k stipend or a foreign grad student making $14/hr. This covers a good 25%-40% of the curriculum, depending on the institution.
et1337 8y ago
That's reductive. Food and education are very different industries, and the scale of subsidies to individuals is HUGE in education compared to food stamps. Plus, the nature of the subsidy is important. State-sponsored universities don't seem any more culpable than private ones in this mess.

trylist 8y ago

That's backwards. College is expensive because demand is extremely high. Subsidies increase that demand by making college affordable for most, but the suggestion that the subsidies themselves are the problem is plain wrong. We wanted an educated workforce, we've got one. We can say we don't want one, but to blame our efforts to educate people as the problem with education is not productive. We either educate people or we don't. We increased demand on purpose (and we should have!). Of course prices are going to go up! Normally supply would expand to keep up, but something is rotten in education. Teachers get paid a pittance, there were several high profile accreditation frauds, and the natural inclination towards prestige as worth more than the actual diploma combine to seriously limit our ability to expand and mitigate prices.

robotrout 8y ago
As the supply of available money increases, there is no incentive not to increase tuition. Any system that is flooded with money experiences price inflation. Because students are not able to discharge their debt in bankruptcy, they constitute a riskless loan opportunity to the lenders, who throw money at them. A sad side-effect of this as that the price inflation that this causes is forcing more and more students who might have otherwise been able to finance their tuition without loans, into needing loans also, thus dooming more and more of the next generation into huge debts that will effect their ability to buy houses, start families, and save for retirement.

kurtisc 8y ago

There shouldn't be a debate on why higher education is expensive, it was answered in a 1973 paper that won a 2001 Nobel prize: https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teaching/EC860/signallingscreening/SpenceQJE1973.pdf https://msu.edu/~conlinmi/teaching/EC860/signallingscreening... tl;dr: In markets where the cost of education is less than the increase in wages, the real cost of education isn't the fee, it's the relative effort of passing it.