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Universities are and always have been expensive. This cost was hidden in the US and a lot of Western European countries by extremely generous government suppor

by zhdc1 6y ago

Universities are and always have been expensive. This cost was hidden in the US and a lot of Western European countries by extremely generous government support. Now that this is going away, more so in some places than others, it sounds like people are suffering from sticker shock. Is this a fair indictment of the modern university? There are definitely ways to lower the total cost of higher education, but how much I don't know. Edit: To be clear, I'm not arguing that there's anything ok with 50k-70K annual tuition. However, there is a spending floor that has to be met to fund an "ok" no-thrills research university. Examples: KIT, a very good research university in Germany, spends about 35K EUR per student. I wasn't able to find a source, but I remember reading that the University of Maryland in the states spends about 20-25K USD per student. Fu et al., 2019 quotes about 390K NTD (~13K USD) as the average per student spending in Taiwan.

grecy 6y ago
> Universities are and always have been expensive Why are they any more expensive than High School? In fact, in Australia until the 80s University was free in the same way High School is free. Many people are angry that it still isn't. And of course it's still free in that way in more than a few developed countries.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I am guessing professors salaries and a lot of university infrastructure.
- zhdc1 6y ago
  Free in the sense that the costs were borne by the government and not by the student. I'm totally ok with that. However, now that countries are shifting higher education costs off of their books and people are finding out that universities are, in fact, very expensive to run, it's not fair to blame the university.
- PopeDotNinja 6y ago
  In some cases, supply and demand. In the early 2000s, One of my professors in my MBA program made ~$250,000 USD per year for teaching 3 classes per yer, plus whatever else he did. My understanding is that if you want to attract & retain talent of his caliber, you have to compete with they salary that person can make in the business world, too.
lumost 6y ago
The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Given that the professors/assistants are certainly not getting paid within 2 orders of magnitude of 25k per student . There must either be irrationally high Capex expenditure, irrationally high administrative overhead, or universities are spending large fractions of tuition on other activities.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  In the UK at least, research is heavily subsidised by teaching income.
- zhdc1 6y ago
  You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable teaching requirement. If you go off of the paper I cited above, at least half of the per student cost can be attributed to this (lecturer salaries, overhead, and administration). Once you get to the research part, you have to keep in mind that tenured salaries and related overhead are generally covered by the university, along with one to two researchers (normally a PhD and a Post Doc).There are also a bunch of items that simply can't be funded through research grants, such as social security contributions and general equipment (e.g., work stations). The 20K number is also extremely conservative. Like I mentioned, Karlsruhe, which is a reasonably good (excellent) technical university, has an average student cost of ~35K EUR. I can't speak for them personally, but I doubt that KIT is dropping a lot of money on subsidized student housing and gourmet meal halls.
- jldugger 6y ago
  > The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Not every department can expect to fund faculty via research grants -- humanities departments in particular are often run as "service" departments reliant on the tuition revenue. Math departments often fall into this group as well. The standard teaching load is 3 three-credit-hour courses per semester. Taking a look at current rates I'm familiar with, in-state tuition is 225 per credit hour. If we assume a class size of 30, that yields 60k per semester. But there are heating and cooling costs, building maint and cleaning costs, for the classroom, as well as departmental overhead: admin assistants for hiring, room scheduling, budgeting etc, as well as uni overhead for accounting, IT, diversity training, classroom techs, etc. So you end up with maybe 90k annually to split between the professor and their TAs, if any. Which is about on par for starting tenure track wages. Not sure where the 2 orders of magnitude math comes from then.
musicale 6y ago
> Universities are and always have been expensive. Per-student spending seems to have outpaced inflation for 40 years or more (and tuition and fees along with it.) Where is the money going? Universities definitely seem to have more luxurious facilities as well as more non-teaching staff, but I'm not sure where the bulk of the spending increases actually come from.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  Hard to generalize, each school will have their own struggles and money pits. I went to a large school in Virginia. They had things like... * Campus Police / security * International Student office * Welcome office * Student Newspaper * Student radio station (multiple stations, I believe) * Art installations, fountains, and general beautification * Campus religious facilities * Plenty of on-campus housing, but also a huge quantity of parking lots and garages, and even shuttle buses to remote lots. * Multiple gyms and fitness centers, ranging from what was essentially a storage warehouse for old athletic team equipment that they'd let students workout with, to brand-spankin-new "fitness centers" that had multiple pools (so that the swim team and water polo team can practice at the same time). They allowed locals to buy memberships as well, and there were a number of kiddie swim teams that used the facilities too. * Multiple student union buildings, with lots of new, fancy furnishings. It was easy to identify and contrast the older buildings from the 60-80s to the ones that were built in the 90s-2000s -- much larger, more light, more windows and much more furniture. Made them nice to hangout and read a book in, though. * Road work and even a tunnel under a major 2-lane road. I'd heard they lobbied the city for years to no avail but eventually got traction by offering to subsidize some of the work. * Lots of street lights, call boxes, and other steps to make the campus less freaky to walk around at night. * A small child/daycare location on campus as well, mostly for the faculty, though I believe they let anyone (students, locals) enroll their kids there. The Uni was founded as a place to train teachers and nurses, and all of the teaching / psych / early child development students ran it

by zhdc1 6y ago

grecy 6y ago

> Universities are and always have been expensive Why are they any more expensive than High School? In fact, in Australia until the 80s University was free in the same way High School is free. Many people are angry that it still isn't. And of course it's still free in that way in more than a few developed countries.

kyawzazaw 6y ago
I am guessing professors salaries and a lot of university infrastructure.
zhdc1 6y ago
Free in the sense that the costs were borne by the government and not by the student. I'm totally ok with that. However, now that countries are shifting higher education costs off of their books and people are finding out that universities are, in fact, very expensive to run, it's not fair to blame the university.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
In some cases, supply and demand. In the early 2000s, One of my professors in my MBA program made ~$250,000 USD per year for teaching 3 classes per yer, plus whatever else he did. My understanding is that if you want to attract & retain talent of his caliber, you have to compete with they salary that person can make in the business world, too.

lumost 6y ago

The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Given that the professors/assistants are certainly not getting paid within 2 orders of magnitude of 25k per student . There must either be irrationally high Capex expenditure, irrationally high administrative overhead, or universities are spending large fractions of tuition on other activities.

CJefferson 6y ago
In the UK at least, research is heavily subsidised by teaching income.
zhdc1 6y ago
You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable teaching requirement. If you go off of the paper I cited above, at least half of the per student cost can be attributed to this (lecturer salaries, overhead, and administration). Once you get to the research part, you have to keep in mind that tenured salaries and related overhead are generally covered by the university, along with one to two researchers (normally a PhD and a Post Doc).There are also a bunch of items that simply can't be funded through research grants, such as social security contributions and general equipment (e.g., work stations). The 20K number is also extremely conservative. Like I mentioned, Karlsruhe, which is a reasonably good (excellent) technical university, has an average student cost of ~35K EUR. I can't speak for them personally, but I doubt that KIT is dropping a lot of money on subsidized student housing and gourmet meal halls.
jldugger 6y ago
> The tough question is where is that 20-25k going? Large research expenditures are typically funded by external grant rather than tuition and fees. The university owns all of it's land, and surely should or could have the majority of the buildings already paid for given a 100+ year history. Not every department can expect to fund faculty via research grants -- humanities departments in particular are often run as "service" departments reliant on the tuition revenue. Math departments often fall into this group as well. The standard teaching load is 3 three-credit-hour courses per semester. Taking a look at current rates I'm familiar with, in-state tuition is 225 per credit hour. If we assume a class size of 30, that yields 60k per semester. But there are heating and cooling costs, building maint and cleaning costs, for the classroom, as well as departmental overhead: admin assistants for hiring, room scheduling, budgeting etc, as well as uni overhead for accounting, IT, diversity training, classroom techs, etc. So you end up with maybe 90k annually to split between the professor and their TAs, if any. Which is about on par for starting tenure track wages. Not sure where the 2 orders of magnitude math comes from then.

musicale 6y ago

> Universities are and always have been expensive. Per-student spending seems to have outpaced inflation for 40 years or more (and tuition and fees along with it.) Where is the money going? Universities definitely seem to have more luxurious facilities as well as more non-teaching staff, but I'm not sure where the bulk of the spending increases actually come from.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
Hard to generalize, each school will have their own struggles and money pits. I went to a large school in Virginia. They had things like... * Campus Police / security * International Student office * Welcome office * Student Newspaper * Student radio station (multiple stations, I believe) * Art installations, fountains, and general beautification * Campus religious facilities * Plenty of on-campus housing, but also a huge quantity of parking lots and garages, and even shuttle buses to remote lots. * Multiple gyms and fitness centers, ranging from what was essentially a storage warehouse for old athletic team equipment that they'd let students workout with, to brand-spankin-new "fitness centers" that had multiple pools (so that the swim team and water polo team can practice at the same time). They allowed locals to buy memberships as well, and there were a number of kiddie swim teams that used the facilities too. * Multiple student union buildings, with lots of new, fancy furnishings. It was easy to identify and contrast the older buildings from the 60-80s to the ones that were built in the 90s-2000s -- much larger, more light, more windows and much more furniture. Made them nice to hangout and read a book in, though. * Road work and even a tunnel under a major 2-lane road. I'd heard they lobbied the city for years to no avail but eventually got traction by offering to subsidize some of the work. * Lots of street lights, call boxes, and other steps to make the campus less freaky to walk around at night. * A small child/daycare location on campus as well, mostly for the faculty, though I believe they let anyone (students, locals) enroll their kids there. The Uni was founded as a place to train teachers and nurses, and all of the teaching / psych / early child development students ran it