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I'd like to know why American university courses cost so much. The UK punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum fee univers

• joubert 15y ago
  Perhaps because they are the best in the world and there is a huge demand (from across the globe) to get in? http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp http://www.arwu.org/ARWU2010.jsp
  • DanI-S 15y ago
    That's a valid point, and an impressive list - but perhaps they are able to be the best in the world because they are able to charge so much.
    • Locke1689 15y ago
      That's not always true historically, though. It seems more like a relatively recent phenomenon, but US schools were still the best in the world a century ago. Perhaps it's more accurate that they are able to continue cementing their lead by charging so much.
  • tokenadult 15y ago
    Thomas Sowell is one of many commentators who point out that United States universities will be attractive at EQUAL quality, because they are located in the United States. But indeed, as United States universities attract students from all over the world, that helps even second-tier universities raise the quality of their programs, by gaining diverse groups of students with reasonably strong academic ability.
• eroded 15y ago
  UK fees, even at the new £9k (~$14k) rate, are still heavily subsidised by the state. To study my course (Imperial, CS) as an overseas student is £22.5k (~$36.5k).
  • nagrom 15y ago
    I always thought that universities charge overseas students a premium as it's the only chance to make money?
    • Lewisham 15y ago
      Yes, it is incorrect to assert that overseas students pay the "real cost". They pay as high as the market will take. The real cost will be somewhere in the middle.
      • hnhg 15y ago
        From speaking to someone on the board of a major UK uni, the funding provided is something like 11k, if I recall correctly. He added that if the uni opts for the 9k fees then the overall funding provided by the government in advance would jump up to 14k (presenting a cash flow problem for the government in the short term).
• nagrom 15y ago
  To approach your points individually: - The wider middle-class in the US are used to paying for quality. It's not so ingrained in the UK mindset, where we have been used, up until recently, to government subsidies. - The UK market is still emerging. Note that charging $14k is only available as of next year - and will most likely continue to rise. As it does, fewer will go to university and the 'value' will drop. - US Faculty do have higher salaries (~x1.5 - x2.0 in my experience), but good people are deserting UK universities in droves because of massive cuts in salaries, conditions and facilities. My own research group had seen 4 people from 25, including 2 faculty, leave in the past 12 months for better-paid positions abroad. I expect that we'll see another 5 go in the next 12 months. None of them have been replaced. - Typically, a college degree in the US has been worth the outlay. It's only the last 3-4 years that people have been questioning the worth of the college degree as an investment en masse, i.e. the US market is not currently stable and won't be so for another few years as people begin to reconsider what was previously a no-brainer. This will eventually translate to higher social status for a degree (as used to be the case) and cheaper prices (and so less debt necessary). - In the last 10 years, in the UK we have begun to view a university as a business. We're asked about cost centers, what we can sell commercially and requested to make PR material for wide circulation. As a business, we are forced to charge what the market will bear. But because there's not a huge amount of competition between universities (at least on price), that doesn't make for a particularly healthy market.
  • wyclif 15y ago
    I find most of what you say here fairly uncontroversial, but this raised eyebrows a bit: This will eventually translate to higher social status for a degree (as used to be the case) and cheaper prices (and so less debt necessary). That seems to violate a fundamental law of economics to me: If the demand for a good increases relative to the supply, the price will increase, which will reduce demand. If the supply of the product increases then the price will fall, encouraging more people to buy the product. Prices adjust up and down until the demand matches supply. So cheaper prices for degrees, by allowing more students to enroll, would seem to me to decrease status, not increase it.
    • 15y ago
• hugh3 15y ago
  Some of each of the above. In the absence of a "socialist" state, US colleges provide poorer students with a free/subsidized education by charging richer students more True for a lot of places. Last I heard you could get Harvard for free if your parents make less than some reasonably large amount ($70K or so) US faculty receive massively higher salaries. True, especially compared to the UK. There is in general a lot more money floating around the US university system to make life easier. My officemate recently moved from a postdoc position here at Big-Name American University to a lectureship at Mid-Ranked UK University and was bitching about how he lectures two and a half courses per semester (as opposed to the usual one course in the US) and has to do ridiculous things like taking out his own garbage because the university won't pay for cleaners. In a country where college education is commonly used as a mark of social status, they can charge a premium and people will still pay Well if we're comparing to the UK, then the UK is if anything more concerned with the status conveyed by education. The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school. The main reason, in the end, is that the US is the only major country where the higher education system isn't primarily an arm of the government. Great private universities just don't exist in other countries. There are upsides and downsides to this -- the upside is that America has most of the best universities in the world (can you imagine if it didn't?) and the downside is that they can be pretty darn expensive.
  • __rkaup__ 15y ago
    "The British elite will judge you not only by your university but by your high school." I've never seen people judging based on high school in the UK. Who, exactly, is doing this?
    • shod 15y ago
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#University_admissions_.282010.2C_2011.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eton_College#University_admissi...
    • withad 15y ago
      There's a certain prestige attached to some very famous, expensive private schools (called public schools in England alone, never quite worked out why). The number of Eton graduates running the country comes up a lot, for example. But other than that, no one really.
• nhangen 15y ago
  I think your first and last points are probably most accurate. Rich people will pay, and poor and middle class students will use grants and loans to get through. The problem with that is the loans seem like a great deal, because of the racket, and only when students get out of college and are still waiting tables to they realize that the coming out of school with tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of debt, debt which you cannot escape, is a bad deal. Perhaps I'm jaded because I funded my education with student loans that I used to receive a B.S. in Psychology and wish I would've studied engineering. I tried to move into post graduate studies, but I couldn't afford it - by that time I had a family and couldn't afford the time away from work. The military paid off my student loans, but my degree has been useless since.
  • hugh3 15y ago
    My deepest sympathies for your degree in psychology. It seems that the best thing we could do for the university system is to stop treating all degrees as equal. We need folks standing outside the university gates on day one of freshman year going "Hey you, what are you studying? Cultural studies? Hahaha, no really, here's a calculus textbook, get to work."
    • nhangen 15y ago
      I agree completely. Getting a degree in philosophy sounds cool until you realize that you've just wasted your money and could have studied philosophy for free by reading books while you paid the bills with the education from your CS degree, etc.
      • te_chris 15y ago
        That's the the thing really though isn't it. It's YOUR degree. Who are you to say that someone made the wrong choice? I have liberal arts and a music degree. I'm now a self-taught web developer earning good money, building a start-up and paying my student loan (interest free because I stayed in New Zealand) off. My arts education helped with my general understanding and comprehension of the world and I credit it for making it easier for me to pick up development. I'm so sick of the belittling of the humanities by commerce and science. We're all needed, if there's any elephant in the room robbing people of value there, to me it is commerce. I studied some marketing while I was at uni as well, and it felt like I was no longer at university but at some parallel universe on my campus where suddenly creative thinking was discouraged, intellectual creativity was discouraged and you'd succeed if you submitted answers the lecturers wanted to hear. NOTE: I'm also educated enough in research methods to know that my anecdotal proof is not conclusive, however I find that in NZ, the people who I meet who generally seem like they're less intelligent are the ones with business degrees. It's the science and humanities grads who are the ones who seem smarter and more motivated. There's even a successful business person here (bob jones) who refuses to hire commerce grads and insists on hiring humanities and science grads because he believes they're more suited (once trained) to coping with a complex business environment..
• dvvarf 15y ago
  One thing that gets lost in most of these debates is the fact that many students don't pay the sticker price that universities advertise. At most of the top 50 universities in the US, something like 50% of students receive some sort of financial aid/subsidy. These discounts are often substantial. The $50k sticker price is a tool universities use to price discriminate based on a family's ability to pay and how much a university wants a student. Thus, it's not crazy to see a talented student from a low-income background paying something like $2k a year to attend a top-tier university. Of course, this doesn't really answer your question. This phenomenon still leaves the 50% of students paying full freight, and only applies to wealthy universities that can afford such financial aid programs.
  • nkassis 15y ago
    Financial aid is pretty hard to obtain now days. Your parent's must be in the lower range of salaries combine for you to obtain anything other than unsubsidized loans. Pell Grants and other such things are pretty uncommon from what I've gathered. Once I managed to become independent as a student, I was making too much (35k a year) for any student aid so I had to pay full price (albeit I was smart enough to go to school in a state were education is pretty cheap, Florida if you have to know).
    • william42 15y ago
      From what I've heard, financial aid is much easier to get at Harvard than, say, FSU.
      • lurker19 15y ago
        For who? Did you mean to pick a different state for your example? For Florida residents, Florida state colleges are tuition-free for all qualified applicants, but these schools pad enrollment with students who do not show college-readiness but choose to attend and pay (subsidized) tuition anyway. http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/factsheets/BF.htm http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/factsheets/B... Harvard is tuition-free for all but the wealthiest few who can easily afford their share without sweating.
• Daniel_Newby 15y ago
  "The UK punches above its weight in research and quality of education, yet the maximum fee universities can charge is around $14k per year." My US alma mater, a middle-of-the-road state university, costs $9k per year for residents, or $21k per year for non-residents. A lesser university is $5k per year, and a junior college is $3.5k per year. (Tuition and fees only, room and board not included.)
  • Lewisham 15y ago
    This has only been true very recently. It used to be about $3k a year, and before that it cost nothing at all, and before that, you got paid to go to university with a grant. Only this year has the UK launched these awful fees (did you see the riots?) and now put itself in a position where students are now paying the same as some of the public schools in the US. If there was an easy way for UK students to get California residency, it would be cheaper for them to come here than go to a domestic university, as the overall cost of living is much lower.
• pnathan 15y ago
  As someone under a ton of debt, I'd like to know the answer to your question too. For a fun-time experiement, plot college cost vs. : minimum wage inflation health care since the 70s or so. Right around 1980ish, health care and college costs started heading for the roof relative to inflation. edit: I haven't worked the math to differentiate between average cost of ivy league schools and average cost of state schools. I think the current difference sits at 4x or so for list price.
  • yummyfajitas 15y ago
    Right around 1980ish, health care and college costs started heading for the roof relative to inflation. Interesting - right around the time computers started making business processes way more efficient, a few areas unaffected by computers started skyrocketing in cost (relative to inflation). I wonder what could be causing this phenomenon? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease
    • ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
      Click this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumols_cost_disease A ' was forgotten
      • awa 15y ago
        404?
        • ZackOfAllTrades 15y ago
          The hyperlink is taking out the ' for some reason. Not sure why exactly.
          • mchouza 15y ago
            It must be some protection against code injection. Here is the link in a different format, avoiding the explicit single quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
• wisty 15y ago
  You are forgetting - a bubble is a bubble. The US has too many students, and not enough seats. Just like California had too many house investors, and not enough condos. Of course, there might be some structural reason (the UK has better state sponsored education, or the size of the US means there's more competition for the top 2 schools), but it's mostly just transient. There's a mad dash for the top schools. Don't ask me why. The top schools crank their prices through the roof, spending their gains on new buildings, or bonuses for the administration, or football scholarships, or maybe even research. The flood of new grads on the market means you would have to be nuts to employ somebody without a sheepskin, so the cycle cranks up a notch. Only to fly apart when the affordability ceiling is reached (and few grads have a sheepskin, and suddenly people start looking for bright high-school leavers for such essential jobs as keeping HR records in order), or you can't even get a job as a burger technician without a PhD.