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There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a C

There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? I wrote a little about it in the context of Lambda School, but it mostly applies: https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2019/04/08/lambda-school.html “The current university system in the US is a mess of incentives. Easy access to non-defaultable federal loans means school’s tuition is able to reach extreme heights and competition for this money leads to spending on sports stadiums, expensive dorms, and other things not critical to the success of the students. Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. Universities care about their students to the small extent that it helps their brand to have successful students do important things, but they get their tuition regardless of the actual outcome of their students (with a slight preference for them passing classes and not failing out).”

awillen 6y ago
Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on their degree.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  It might be different now, but I remember my computer engineering degree could have probably been done in 3 years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
  - evilduck 6y ago
    TBF you can learn how MOSFETs and compilers work on your own too, you don't need college courses for those either. A higher education degree is a package deal and isn't necessarily intended to be a vocational training course, for better or for worse.
    - taurath 6y ago
      But of course businesses do treat it as a vocational course if they gatekeeper based on that degree. The actual value on the job is different than in the interview room, a fact that perpetuates inequality. I’m a counterpoint in that I’ve no degree but have done well, but I can’t find myself recommending self learning because the barrier to initial entry to industry is so high.
      - agar 6y ago
        Have you considered that one reason businesses gatekeep based on the degree is /because/ of the well-roundedness that comes from a university education instead of a trade school or online learning? Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still measurable during an interview: presentation skills, discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable research into the hiring organization, insightful questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration skills articulated through example and past experience, etc. If an interview is exclusively writing code on a whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.
        foolinaround 6y ago
        the business just did not have a good filtering (recruitment) function - either time or expertise, and so decided to use other signals, like college degrees, etc.
    - packagetheft 6y ago
      You can get a very simplified and overall summary of a compiler and mosfet but you won't necessarily be learning it. Knowing the basic of a mosfet is very different from actually getting hands on experience and taping out a 7nm chip.
gandalfian 6y ago
why are all degrees four years? The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a university with longer courses but more holiday and students interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".
908B64B197 6y ago
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand. > Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.
- fossuser 6y ago
  > "Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand." I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option. > Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers. This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option. Probably. But the value falls dramatically once you get to tier two schools, and becomes almost worthless for tier 3.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      Which is exactly what I'd predict in a world where "Interest Surges in Top Colleges, While Struggling Ones Scrape for Applicants". When the thing being sold is prestige, lower tier colleges don't actually have the product that's in demand. So they can charge basically nothing since they're selling nothing of value. That's not viable as a business (unless they lie to students who don't know better and pretend that they're selling prestige they don't have, "a degree will improve your life"). A lot of lower tier colleges fit this kind of con, the for-profit ones are explicitly this. If they actually provided valuable education that'd be different, but they largely don't. I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be good at education. Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant. You don't even have to give up the classics if you don't want to, they can just exist along side the other stuff (as they should). You just don't pretend they're hard or economically viable on their own. Actual education is super powerful, it's just a diminutive part of what Universities have become and they're not very good at it.
tzs 6y ago
Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have lead to tuition increases? I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.
- lumost 6y ago
  Arguably inexhaustible government and loan money drove the price increase. The current loan program was introduced to stem increasing government direct grant expenditures. Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops. Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    >It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff. That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.
fennecfoxen 6y ago
> why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect justice through political action? To signal your desirability through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your desirability through a brand like "Harvard"? I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as different things as different types of achievement. This will come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden. Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.
birdyrooster 6y ago
Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program? Why can't they test or interview folks into master's programs? Schools are precluding themselves from good candidates that didn't see the value in bachelor's degrees (often for the reasons found in this thread).
- LargeWu 6y ago
  I suspect willingness to complete an undergraduate degree is a strong signal to masters' programs. The 4-year degree is itself part of the test for the master's program.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Even if you have a BS, you'll still need to get recommendations from professors you likely have not talked to in a decade (and also take the GRE).
  - beastman82 6y ago
    I suspect this is not generally accurate. I have an MS in CS and had neither recs nor a GRE score
    - wikibob 6y ago
      Where did you go?
      - fma 6y ago
        Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science requires neither GRE nor letters from professors. I got my letters from my former managers. Of course you can get them from professors, if you want...they want letters from anyone who can vouch for your competency and ability to complete the program.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program? Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything. It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)
cldellow 6y ago
For what it's worth, the things you call out don't seem to be the case in the Canadian public university that I attended, the University of Waterloo. > why are all degrees four years? UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)". > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree? Similarly, my software engineering degree now costs $17,100/year. An arts degree costs $7,700/year. (Data: https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition) It would be interesting to understand how they set the prices.
- dbspin 6y ago
  Wow. As a European I had no idea that Canadian education was so expensive. Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely free, like health care. Obviously much cheaper than the US - which is life destroyingly expensive. But the figures you cite are still pricey enough to exclude enormous numbers of people from higher education.
  - ido 6y ago
    For comparison in Germany and Austria public universities are mostly free or close to it (a few €100s per year in misc fees).
    - rsj_hn 6y ago
      On the other hand, the majority of US college kids would not be able to get into university in Germany nor Austria. You are comparing apples and oranges. In the US, the best students get scholarship and aid and don't need to pay either (or at least have the option of free education unless they insist on going to a school that does not offer them scholarship). The poorest students don't need to pay. The middle pays for both. In the German system only the best students are admitted period -- there is no university available for 2/3 of the population. And it only lasts 3 years. You would also be shocked to learn that the US government spends more per capita subsidizing tertiary education than the German government. Except that we also allow non-subsidized students the option of attending at their own cost, so at least they have more options than in the German system, where University education is simply unavailable to them.
yw3410 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree with your article. I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free, the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of students rather than quality. This already happens in things like recruiting where incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a stretch to apply it to ISA agreements. It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the winnings. What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living wage on completion until you found a job.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think LS is piloting a program that pays students per month while they attend. Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't thought of. Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that. I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would be the most likely way to get a return. LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them importantly different. - They cap return to 30k. - They only apply if you get hired in a software role making more than 50k a year. - They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit 30k).
jackcosgrove 6y ago
> This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when I was in college. The joke was that being voted the department's best instructor by the students was an excellent way to be denied tenure.
neonological 6y ago
>Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in acceptance.
- fossuser 6y ago
  I think it's not good - not because a CS degree needs to be more expensive, but because the liberal arts degrees are over priced. A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does. CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible, not less. The current system harms the poor. As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions (often this is true of specific departments too).
- imtringued 6y ago
  >This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market. Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action. If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.
  - neonological 6y ago
    >What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market. The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.
matwood 6y ago
> why are all degrees four years? Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in college I went year round so I could have a more even schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to get done and move on.
- boatsie 6y ago
  I think the parent post refers to all of the different majors taking the same time.
  - alasdair_ 6y ago
    Can you get four years worth of government-backed tuition money out of a student when the degree only takes. a year?
    - jdale27 6y ago
      As other comments have pointed out, many colleges do not require you to stay for four years if you can finish faster. But most students do not want to, or are not capable of, taking twice the normal course load. Not everything is a conspiracy by the elites to extract more money from the masses.
VLM 6y ago
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree. It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure the greater classics community does to the same extent. Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids. Which might explain why the classics are going away as available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands over long term.
- imtringued 6y ago
  Are there no kids interested in reading classics on their own? Shouldn't the barrier be even lower since those classics aren't protected by copyright? All you'd need is a kindle with internet. What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?
oceanplexian 6y ago
You are correct about lending being the problem. Education is not a free market where capital is allocated in proportion to value that is created, because all of the loans are subsidized. And the government can’t put itself into a position where it subsidized some loans but not others based on the curriculum, because there would be public outrage. A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of knowledge.
- gshubert17 6y ago
  I've listened to lecture courses from The Great Courses (Teaching Company) on literature, history, music, philosophy, and science for 20+ years now. I get to learn what I want, at my own pace, etc. The lecturers are good, and I can replay or repeat lectures as I like. Many advantages of taking college courses without the hassles you ran into.
chiefalchemist 6y ago
The student loan system created artificial demand. Demand increases price. Students get larger loans because it's easy. Demand continues. Prices rise more, and so on. Price will rise as much as the market can bear. Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians make out well. Students and often their parents lose. That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly, finding a community college with programs in a given field that would support transfer to a prestige school is difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal students and often the surrounding community is not student supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any significant campus-based aid, which can make them more expensive for some students than “prestige” universities.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Agreed - "students refuse to do so" as the parent comment mentioned because they recognize the risk, both with the things you suggest and the ding to the prestige they're trying to buy in the first place. While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason for the federally backed loans was to give people access to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives that get created are quite bad.
  - chiefalchemist 6y ago
    Fair enough. But it can be done. Because I've seen it done. Easy or not it can be done.
musicale 6y ago
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero If that is true it probably says more about the short-sightedness of the job market rather than the practical benefits of a program in Classics. A Classics education – like CS in fact – actually has wide applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are unlikely to become obsolete any time soon. Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts computer "languages" to shame. Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)
- fossuser 6y ago
  > “Classics graduates are also likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate.” “Typical” might be doing a lot of work there. I wouldn’t buy it in the general case.
  - musicale 6y ago
    Classics programs generally require more evaluated prose writing, as well as text reading and analysis, so it is reasonable to assume that they would yield benefits in actual writing skill. However, it would be interesting to have some data to compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs. CS graduates.
    - fossuser 6y ago
      I don't mean to come across as overly harsh or partisan against liberal arts majors. I think the content is often interesting. I just think it should be taken along side a technical major too. I do have a bias against overly flowery language that obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes from the less technical side of the academic spectrum: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html
hardtke 6y ago
> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.
- ativzzz 6y ago
  While those skills are useful for life, they are "worth" nothing in the marketplace without the ability to sell yourself. Ultimately a classics degree only limits her job options in the short term. An engineer can go be an engineer, or transition to anything a classics grad can be, assuming both can sell themselves equally well. (if we are assuming high quality white collar jobs that pay well and have good career prospects) Of course, college brand name greatly contributes to "selling yourself", so an expensive classics degree from Harvard is at a significant advantage over an engineering degree from some no-name university for non-engineering roles.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- musicale 6y ago
  > It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete This 100% - you said it better than I did. It's the underlying concepts and meta-skills that stay with you, and most "knowledge worker" jobs - not to mention real life - depend heavily on communication and learning to master complexity. Even in CS I'd say that while the technology quickly becomes "obsolete" the general concepts and ways of thinking (not to mention underlying math and theory) last a lot longer.
screye 6y ago
> There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each other.
- abcc8 6y ago
  The 100s of choices in university are all accredited by the same few accreditation bodies. This is a partial cause of the cookie cutter nature of the degree programs.

awillen 6y ago

Yeah, the four year thing is a great point. I got a psychology degree, which definitely could've been done in three (I know this because I switched sophomore year). I have friends in hard sciences whose mental health probably would've been waaaaaay better if they spent 5-6 years on their degree.

ryandrake 6y ago
It might be different now, but I remember my computer engineering degree could have probably been done in 3 years, if not for 1. the artificial dependency/prerequisite tree requiring you to take certain courses in a certain order and 2. all the required filler courses you needed to take in order to meet the university's arbitrary definition of well-roundedness. I just want to learn how to write compliers and how a MOSFET works, but you want me to take university-level theater? I could learn theater on my own if I wanted to.
- evilduck 6y ago
  TBF you can learn how MOSFETs and compilers work on your own too, you don't need college courses for those either. A higher education degree is a package deal and isn't necessarily intended to be a vocational training course, for better or for worse.
  - taurath 6y ago
    But of course businesses do treat it as a vocational course if they gatekeeper based on that degree. The actual value on the job is different than in the interview room, a fact that perpetuates inequality. I’m a counterpoint in that I’ve no degree but have done well, but I can’t find myself recommending self learning because the barrier to initial entry to industry is so high.
    - agar 6y ago
      Have you considered that one reason businesses gatekeep based on the degree is /because/ of the well-roundedness that comes from a university education instead of a trade school or online learning? Many benefits are difficult to quantify, but still measurable during an interview: presentation skills, discussions of how you overcome obstacles, demonstrable research into the hiring organization, insightful questions you ask, active listening skills, collaboration skills articulated through example and past experience, etc. If an interview is exclusively writing code on a whiteboard, that says a lot of what will be asked of you during the job. Good fit for some, poor fit for others.
      - foolinaround 6y ago
        the business just did not have a good filtering (recruitment) function - either time or expertise, and so decided to use other signals, like college degrees, etc.
  - packagetheft 6y ago
    You can get a very simplified and overall summary of a compiler and mosfet but you won't necessarily be learning it. Knowing the basic of a mosfet is very different from actually getting hands on experience and taping out a 7nm chip.

gandalfian 6y ago

why are all degrees four years? The university of Buckingham in the UK will do a two year official BA with no holidays. about $15000 a year. Americans are welcomed. It does OK but most students still choose a university with longer courses but more holiday and students interested in greater, let us say, "cultural development".

908B64B197 6y ago

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand. > Universities also get a lot of their prestige from research and the majority of their effort is typically not spent on undergraduate education. This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers.

fossuser 6y ago
> "Because it has a large numbers of applicants. It's offer and demand." I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option. > Something I've noticed and take this with a grain of salt as this is a sample=1 observation is that the better researchers (more publications, better funded labs) were generally also better teachers. This isn't a huge surprise to me since it's crazy competitive so the better funded labs are likely outliers in a bunch of ways (including social skills/teaching). Not all researchers teach much though and being good is more of a side-effect than a goal for Universities.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > I suspect that's because these students are really buying prestige and a classics degree is the easiest option. Probably. But the value falls dramatically once you get to tier two schools, and becomes almost worthless for tier 3.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Which is exactly what I'd predict in a world where "Interest Surges in Top Colleges, While Struggling Ones Scrape for Applicants". When the thing being sold is prestige, lower tier colleges don't actually have the product that's in demand. So they can charge basically nothing since they're selling nothing of value. That's not viable as a business (unless they lie to students who don't know better and pretend that they're selling prestige they don't have, "a degree will improve your life"). A lot of lower tier colleges fit this kind of con, the for-profit ones are explicitly this. If they actually provided valuable education that'd be different, but they largely don't. I think Lambda School style ISAs are the way for all but the top tier colleges. It means they have to actually be good at education. Imagine the opportunity of actually being good at education and doing ISAs. It would mean your institution could do what Universities largely just pretend to do. You could make money from ISAs and aligned incentives/student success. You could also make money from companies as a recruiting agency if your students were actually guaranteed to be good. Your curriculum would be closely tied to what's needed and what's relevant. You don't even have to give up the classics if you don't want to, they can just exist along side the other stuff (as they should). You just don't pretend they're hard or economically viable on their own. Actual education is super powerful, it's just a diminutive part of what Universities have become and they're not very good at it.

tzs 6y ago

Do you have any actual data showing that federal loans have lead to tuition increases? I've not been able to find much historical tuition data online, but what little I did find (Stanford going back about 100 years and one state university whose name I've forgotten) showed no clear change in the rate of tuition increases pre-federal loans compared to post-federal loans.

lumost 6y ago
Arguably inexhaustible government and loan money drove the price increase. The current loan program was introduced to stem increasing government direct grant expenditures. Odds are that we're seeing the tail end of this where costs have risen to match the maximum that students are willing to pay over the course of 10 years multiplied by 1/interest rates. In times of economic uncertainty the amount I'm willing to spend in the future drops, when interest rates rise the total amount I'm willing to spend now drops. Colleges will either have to become cheaper or face diminished demand for college education. It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff.
- imtringued 6y ago
  >It's a great time to found a new university with a lower cost structure and more emphasis put on professors/tenured teaching staff. That's basically how you survive any bubble. Make sure that your investment actually has an underlying strategy that doesn't depend on the existence of a bubble. Most of the time that means providing whatever good is demand for a reasonable cost even if it means that you lose out on potential bubble gains.

fennecfoxen 6y ago

> why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree Consider all the weird sets of expectations that people glue together and name "college education". There's this ancient classical idea of the Liberal Arts, that is, the arts that were deemed suitable for free men to know, Philosophy, Literature, higher callings. There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." There are those who would use it to promote critical thinking; there are those who would use it to promote indoctrination. Are you going to school to network? To learn? To find your purpose? To effect justice through political action? To signal your desirability through the brand "bachelors degree"? To signal your desirability through a brand like "Harvard"? I suspect society is going to slowly move away from the idea of all-encompassing "college" and consider all of these as different things as different types of achievement. This will come as a blow to the big schools, who have long used the aura of the "Liberal Arts" as the brand.

imtringued 6y ago
>There's the modern, results-oriented idea of "you should develop useful skills," split between people who think of it as "this is an investment in yourself and your human capital" and those who say "this is to produce more cogs for the machine." The irony is that those who get a student loan but don't get an economically viable degree will ultimately end up as full time cogs in the machine because of their debt burden. Once you have a lucrative job, the amount of time you have to spend your life working for the machine goes down and your ability to choose how you want to live your life goes up.

birdyrooster 6y ago

Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program? Why can't they test or interview folks into master's programs? Schools are precluding themselves from good candidates that didn't see the value in bachelor's degrees (often for the reasons found in this thread).

LargeWu 6y ago
I suspect willingness to complete an undergraduate degree is a strong signal to masters' programs. The 4-year degree is itself part of the test for the master's program.
fossuser 6y ago
Even if you have a BS, you'll still need to get recommendations from professors you likely have not talked to in a decade (and also take the GRE).
- beastman82 6y ago
  I suspect this is not generally accurate. I have an MS in CS and had neither recs nor a GRE score
  - wikibob 6y ago
    Where did you go?
    - fma 6y ago
      Georgia Tech's Online Master of Science requires neither GRE nor letters from professors. I got my letters from my former managers. Of course you can get them from professors, if you want...they want letters from anyone who can vouch for your competency and ability to complete the program.
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Here is another one: Why do I need to complete a bachelors degree in order to join a CS master program? Some masters programs let you join with no bachelors. I have a masters and PhD in CS but no bachelors in anything. It wasn't any kind of special programme and I'm not any kind of gifted student either (my grades were quite low.)

cldellow 6y ago

For what it's worth, the things you call out don't seem to be the case in the Canadian public university that I attended, the University of Waterloo. > why are all degrees four years? UW offers three-year degrees. A four-year degree typically gets you an Honours Bachelor degree, whereas a three-year degree is a General Bachelor. On a resume it'd still be written as "B.A.", and the reviewer would have to know to inquire, or to infer from the absence of "B.A. (Hons)". > Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree? Similarly, my software engineering degree now costs $17,100/year. An arts degree costs $7,700/year. (Data: https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition https://uwaterloo.ca/future-students/financing/tuition) It would be interesting to understand how they set the prices.

dbspin 6y ago
Wow. As a European I had no idea that Canadian education was so expensive. Was under the mistaken impression that it was largely free, like health care. Obviously much cheaper than the US - which is life destroyingly expensive. But the figures you cite are still pricey enough to exclude enormous numbers of people from higher education.
- ido 6y ago
  For comparison in Germany and Austria public universities are mostly free or close to it (a few €100s per year in misc fees).
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    On the other hand, the majority of US college kids would not be able to get into university in Germany nor Austria. You are comparing apples and oranges. In the US, the best students get scholarship and aid and don't need to pay either (or at least have the option of free education unless they insist on going to a school that does not offer them scholarship). The poorest students don't need to pay. The middle pays for both. In the German system only the best students are admitted period -- there is no university available for 2/3 of the population. And it only lasts 3 years. You would also be shocked to learn that the US government spends more per capita subsidizing tertiary education than the German government. Except that we also allow non-subsidized students the option of attending at their own cost, so at least they have more options than in the German system, where University education is simply unavailable to them.

yw3410 6y ago

I'm not sure I agree with your article. I can think of at least one way to structure an ISA such that incentives aren't aligned. Since it's relatively risk-free, the ISA could essentially just optimize for number of students rather than quality. This already happens in things like recruiting where incentives supposedly align; so I don't think it would be a stretch to apply it to ISA agreements. It's like the illustrative story of the shaman/psychic who offers to change the lottery odds for you for a cut of the winnings. What would be interesting is if the ISA /paid/ you a living wage on completion until you found a job.

fossuser 6y ago
I think LS is piloting a program that pays students per month while they attend. Your point about them just scaling up to maximize potential return is a good one - a bad potential outcome I hadn't thought of. Hopefully reputation would provide some counter to that. I think they'd also want to increase the percentage of successful students, I'm not sure scaling up blindly would be the most likely way to get a return. LS style ISAs also have a few parts that make them importantly different. - They cap return to 30k. - They only apply if you get hired in a software role making more than 50k a year. - They're time limited to 10 yrs (even if you don't hit 30k).

jackcosgrove 6y ago

> This means professors are not typically rewarded for being (or even expected to be) excellent teachers. This reminds me of a joke that circulated among students when I was in college. The joke was that being voted the department's best instructor by the students was an excellent way to be denied tenure.

neonological 6y ago

>Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. Currently the bar for getting a degree is partly economics and partly intelligence. You can't get rid of economics completely but at the very least they keep prices egalitarian and allow for raw intelligence to be a huge factor in acceptance.

fossuser 6y ago
I think it's not good - not because a CS degree needs to be more expensive, but because the liberal arts degrees are over priced. A poetry degree should not cost nearly what it does. CS education tied to ISAs makes education more accessible, not less. The current system harms the poor. As it is degrees are already tied to supply and demand economics, the supply is just constrained by admissions (often this is true of specific departments too).
imtringued 6y ago
>This is good. If degrees were priced based off of supply and demand economics then only rich people would be able to afford a CS degree. What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market. Usually the rhetoric is the opposite. Economic STEM degrees will be very cheap or have low interest rates while some of the uneconomic liberal arts will have higher interest rates. Meaning only rich people will be able to get financing for the liberal arts degree. From a societal standpoint this is the correct course of action. If people can support themselves then they have every right to get a degree. If they can support themselves through a job they deserve the degree. If they can support themselves by being rich they deserve the degree.
- neonological 6y ago
  >What makes you think that? If anything people with a CS degree can afford to pay more because they are in high demand on the job market. The only people who want a CS degree are people who don't have jobs in CS and who don't have a degree. Your talking as if the people without these degrees are already super rich.

matwood 6y ago

> why are all degrees four years? Most people take the required hours over 4 years, but you certainly don't have to (you do have to plan since some classes are only offered at certain times). When I was in college I went year round so I could have a more even schedule and worked nearly full time. My wife did her undergrad in ~2.5 years after she got out the Army. She didn't go for the 'college experience', and just wanted to get done and move on.

boatsie 6y ago
I think the parent post refers to all of the different majors taking the same time.
- alasdair_ 6y ago
  Can you get four years worth of government-backed tuition money out of a student when the degree only takes. a year?
  - jdale27 6y ago
    As other comments have pointed out, many colleges do not require you to stay for four years if you can finish faster. But most students do not want to, or are not capable of, taking twice the normal course load. Not everything is a conspiracy by the elites to extract more money from the masses.

VLM 6y ago

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree Under a Marx labor theory of value, the professorial labor to produce a classics degree holder is almost certainly more expensive than the labor to produce a (edited: CS) degree. It subjectively seems near universal in CS that the surviving graduates self taught themselves to program in high school or earlier, whereas AFAIK classics degree holders pretty much require professorial direction and education. The "greater CS community" aggressively self educates whereas I'm not sure the greater classics community does to the same extent. Business, such as modern higher ed, is often an interesting tradeoff between the cost of production and revenue. I'm sure you can squeeze more revenue out of CS kids but the cost of production is almost certainly higher for Classics kids. Which might explain why the classics are going away as available degree programs whereas CS generally only expands over long term.

imtringued 6y ago
Are there no kids interested in reading classics on their own? Shouldn't the barrier be even lower since those classics aren't protected by copyright? All you'd need is a kindle with internet. What's driving the difference between CS and classics? Is one of those simply more fun than the other?

oceanplexian 6y ago

You are correct about lending being the problem. Education is not a free market where capital is allocated in proportion to value that is created, because all of the loans are subsidized. And the government can’t put itself into a position where it subsidized some loans but not others based on the curriculum, because there would be public outrage. A long time ago I attempted to enroll in a nearby college to take some literature courses and simply pay cash and they were dumbfounded. I had to have career conversations, take a test, take required courses, and other nonsense. It is a deeply flawed system IMHO, designed to stamp out obedient employees and not actually encourage the proliferation of knowledge.

gshubert17 6y ago
I've listened to lecture courses from The Great Courses (Teaching Company) on literature, history, music, philosophy, and science for 20+ years now. I get to learn what I want, at my own pace, etc. The lecturers are good, and I can replay or repeat lectures as I like. Many advantages of taking college courses without the hassles you ran into.

chiefalchemist 6y ago

The student loan system created artificial demand. Demand increases price. Students get larger loans because it's easy. Demand continues. Prices rise more, and so on. Price will rise as much as the market can bear. Banks make out well. Higher edu makes out well. Politicians make out well. Students and often their parents lose. That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige - but they too often refuse to do so. Gotta keep up with those Jones.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> That said, students and parents have alternatives - e.g., two years of community college and then transfer for two more years where a degree would have more prestige Non-public prestige schools aren't particularly favorable to transfers generally or CC transfers particularly, finding a community college with programs in a given field that would support transfer to a prestige school is difficult, and CCs aren't really geared to nonlocal students and often the surrounding community is not student supportive the way university towns can be. CCs do save on tuition and registration fees, but often don't save on lab fees, books, and living expenses, and rarely have any significant campus-based aid, which can make them more expensive for some students than “prestige” universities.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Agreed - "students refuse to do so" as the parent comment mentioned because they recognize the risk, both with the things you suggest and the ding to the prestige they're trying to buy in the first place. While I agree with the parent's general sentiment I also think it's not addressing the initial intent. The reason for the federally backed loans was to give people access to loans that the banks would otherwise deny. The intent is good, but the knock-on effects and perverse incentives that get created are quite bad.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Fair enough. But it can be done. Because I've seen it done. Easy or not it can be done.

musicale 6y ago

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero If that is true it probably says more about the short-sightedness of the job market rather than the practical benefits of a program in Classics. A Classics education – like CS in fact – actually has wide applicability over a range of disciplines. There is a reason we call things "Humanities" after all. Greek and Latin classics, for example, have proven their value and relevance to humanity over centuries if not millennia! They are unlikely to become obsolete any time soon. Classics graduates are likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate. And the complexity of real languages like Latin or Greek puts computer "languages" to shame. Moreover, it's a lot easier to learn CS on your own or on the job. ;-)

fossuser 6y ago
> “Classics graduates are also likely to have superior reading and writing skills compared to a typical CS graduate.” “Typical” might be doing a lot of work there. I wouldn’t buy it in the general case.
- musicale 6y ago
  Classics programs generally require more evaluated prose writing, as well as text reading and analysis, so it is reasonable to assume that they would yield benefits in actual writing skill. However, it would be interesting to have some data to compare, for example GRE writing scores of Classics vs. CS graduates.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    I don't mean to come across as overly harsh or partisan against liberal arts majors. I think the content is often interesting. I just think it should be taken along side a technical major too. I do have a bias against overly flowery language that obscures meaning, and tend to find that more often comes from the less technical side of the academic spectrum: http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html

hardtke 6y ago

> Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Maybe I am deluding myself because my daughter has decided to get an expensive classics degree, but the most valuable skill one can acquire in college is how to communicate, particularly how to write well. The second most valuable skill is learning how to master complicated material. Each major teaches these skills in a different way, but the value of learning these skills is basically the same however you accomplish it. It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete.

ativzzz 6y ago
While those skills are useful for life, they are "worth" nothing in the marketplace without the ability to sell yourself. Ultimately a classics degree only limits her job options in the short term. An engineer can go be an engineer, or transition to anything a classics grad can be, assuming both can sell themselves equally well. (if we are assuming high quality white collar jobs that pay well and have good career prospects) Of course, college brand name greatly contributes to "selling yourself", so an expensive classics degree from Harvard is at a significant advantage over an engineering degree from some no-name university for non-engineering roles.
- deleted 6y ago
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musicale 6y ago
> It might be easier to get a high paying job right out of school with a CS degree, but the ability to communicate and the ability to learn will still pay dividends long after your technical knowledge is obsolete This 100% - you said it better than I did. It's the underlying concepts and meta-skills that stay with you, and most "knowledge worker" jobs - not to mention real life - depend heavily on communication and learning to master complexity. Even in CS I'd say that while the technology quickly becomes "obsolete" the general concepts and ways of thinking (not to mention underlying math and theory) last a lot longer.

screye 6y ago

> There is so much broken with modern universities and incentives around pricing - why are all degrees four years? Why does a classics degree cost the same as a CS degree when the market value of a classics degree is basically zero? Totally agree. Despite 100s of choices for universities in the US, they all appear to be cookie cutter copies of each other.

abcc8 6y ago
The 100s of choices in university are all accredited by the same few accreditation bodies. This is a partial cause of the cookie cutter nature of the degree programs.