8 ms·

"The solution is and always has been to cut the fluff from the academies. For context, go add up the salaries the 'student services' area of the expensive schoo

by Agamus 4y ago

"The solution is and always has been to cut the fluff from the academies. For context, go add up the salaries the 'student services' area of the expensive school of your choice. Having worked for one such office for ~15 years, the most appalling part was that they are largely antagonistic toward the faculty and mission of the schools. The waste is dizzying." I made the above comment on another thread with a similar topic: "Boston University Undergraduate Cost Reach $80K" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31309700

the_only_law 4y ago
Shit I’m fine with keeping stuff if majority of the student body wants to pay for it, but let me opt out. The education system and tangential friends have so far proven the hardest bureaucracy I’ve ever tried to find a way around. I hate that now, when I’m more mature, more experienced, and know exactly what I want from it is the time it’s the most difficult for me to go back.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  But why would they do that? They will taught these extravagant programs that few want/need/will take advantage of but they will bake into everyone's tuition.
- michaelt 4y ago
  > Shit I’m fine with keeping stuff if majority of the student body wants to pay for it, but let me opt out. For things like swimming pools and gyms, sure. But some of the new services are things like 'mental health support' - it would be problematic if you'd opted out of mental health support to save $50/month, then you committed suicide.
  - j_walter 4y ago
    What about things you already have...like say health insurance. I went back for an MBA ~2009 while working a full time job. I was forced to pay an extra ~$300 per term for health care even though I already had it through my work. No way to opt out. When my tuition was ~$2,500/term...another $300 doesn't seem like that much except I was paying out of pocket so every dollar counted.
    - yardie 4y ago
      I believe you are confusing the student health fee with health insurance plan and they aren't the same thing. Student health fee goes into paying for the on-campus student services like the athletic fee, computer fee, etc. I haven't been a student in years but I do remember walking into the clinic and getting seen by someone right away. The services under that fee are kind of unique to student lifestyle: birth control, STD tests, vaccines, common prescriptions, mental health. Which is slightly different from family healthcare which requires preauthorization on some health services. BTW, you could get a lot of fees removed or reduced by dropping to part-time commuter student. But they probably got rid of that exclusion since a lot of colleges are chasing money.
      - j_walter 4y ago
        This was a student health fee that also covered health insurance for students (dental too). It was a basic program through Aetna Student Health. Also included urgent and basic services on campus as well as mental health services. I was also an online student that only attended on campus class for 1 weekend per semester. It made no sense to make everyone pay the fee that included significant amounts of benefits that weren't needed by online students (the online MBA program was structured toward those currently working). This was on top of the $41 fee that I paid for the "Rec Center"...which again would never be used by me since I was an online student.
        yardie 4y ago
        Okay I think I understand better. When I was a student the student health fee you were told was not insurance and compulsory. You could get insurance through the school for $1200/semester. This was mainly international, grad students and their families. Like many first in their family college students I soon discovered a lot of scholarships only covered tuition (and books) and I was left to make up the difference in housing, meals, and fees. I felt the fees were a sly way for the college to scam money out of students. I was required to pay an athletic fee but they weren't required to give me tickets to every football game. For schools, MBA programs are such a money pump if they were entitled to charge more they would. A lot cases the employer pays for the MBA program and they don't have the wherewithal to scrutinize excess fees. So, you end up with online students paying student health, rec, bus, and athletic fees.
  - throwaway0a5e 4y ago
    >But some of the new services are things like 'mental health support' - it would be problematic if you'd opted out of mental health support to save $50/month, then you committed suicide. This sort of desire to tell people what's good for them is why we can't have nice things. You think you're being reasonable here but there's another well-meaning moron insisting they're being reasonable by preventing students from opting out of the the $50 gym fee, and another well-meaning moron that thinks they're being reasonable by requiring the dining hall have X Y and Z, etc, etc, etc. In reality what you people are doing is the institutional policy equivalent of littering. One or two people do it and it's fine, we can tolerate that. But everyone does it and the park turns into a dump and the college turns into a flaming pile of money that society cannot afford to keep feeding. The least crappy outcome is achieved when none of you get your way.
  - solveit 4y ago
    Schools should have none of those. And I say this as someone who happily uses my institution's nice gym and happy that decent mental health support will be available to me should I desire it. Schools try so very hard to be the entirety of their students' lives. They want students socialisation to be within their bounds, they want students to go to their hospital, exercise at their gym, be policed by their police force, work at their on-campus jobs, eat at their cafeteria, live in their dorms, cheer for their sports teams, and so on and so on. And society mostly caters to this desire, which the students and parents are also more-or-less on board with. But even as these integrations individually benefit the students, the net effect is to bubble students away from the rest of the world while also creating a bloated administrative entity that is both too powerful for its own good and completely unable to get things done.
zoolily 4y ago
College costs have increased due to decreased state funding and increased regulation (both legal and from accreditors), which requires more administrative staff. Ironically, decreased state funding leads to an increase of administrative staff too, as universities invest in grant offices, development offices, and outreach departments in an attempt to find more funds.
- Agamus 4y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is at least partially wrong. Are you only speaking of public universities? I worked at an expensive, private, liberal arts, non-profit college, where I witnessed revolting inefficiency. Do such schools receive _significant_ state funding? Any? One example of the waste I witnessed: at the end of the financial year, the student services departments where I worked would blow whatever money remained in their budget on frivolous, needless things, because if they didn't spend it, it went back into the college's budget. This mostly changed after the 2008 financial crisis, (I think?) but that's how it was for a long, long time. All staff were complicit, and knew what they were doing. These departments were given executive privileges with very little oversight of expenditure or outcomes. The corruption was surreal. Another dynamic that I never see mentioned: in a small college town, the hiring pool is challenging, and the college jobs are the high-status local jobs. I witnessed, on several occasions, needless positions being opened for people who were basically friends of staff, so they could have one of the "college jobs". When I hear students discussing college debt, and I remember these and other examples, it makes me a bit sick.
  - zoolily 4y ago
    I was only writing about public universities.
  - yardie 4y ago
    > These departments were given executive privileges with very little oversight of expenditure or outcomes. If only they hired an inspector general or auditor to keep tabs on these sort of shenanigans! /s
etempleton 4y ago
As the article mentioned schools are no longer competing on price, but they are competing on features / services / amenities. It seems intuitive to cut those to reduce costs, but the market doesn’t want that even if people say that is what they want that is not how they vote with their dollar. The biggest declines in enrollments are at community colleges and state schools. Also counter intuitively when a college lowers their listed tuition to offer more transparent pricing they almost see an enrollment decline. The difference between 50k, 60k, 70k, 80k per year is almost irrelevant to the students if they are able to secure a gurnanteed government loan.
- mfer 4y ago
  Some of this situation is bad advice up front. I know numerous people who were guided by guidance counselors, schools, and loan folks to think that taking a large student debt would be just fine. Only to later have issues with it. Schools and loan folks have skin in the game so I can understand why they are pushing for more high priced loans. Why aren't school guidance counselors and school programs better preparing people? We should be taking a hard look at that.
  - SoftTalker 4y ago
    High schools in general do an extremely poor job at teaching financial literacy. The only education I had on the cost of debt and the time value of money were incidental story problems in math classes. The strangely named "home economics" classes were all about cooking and nutrition and sewing, not about buying vs. renting a house or buying a new vs. used car vs. leasing, or saving for retirement or emergencies. It's no wonder many young people have no idea what a burden debt can be.
  - speeder 4y ago
    I went to college while taking debt, and a big reason for it was not even just "advice", it was almost coercion, adults in my life back then (in a way I was still a minor, being 17) just outright made it look like not going to college, or waiting for a year to get in a military college (that was free) was going to ruin my adult life and whatnot, and when I was adamant about going to military college, my parents told me they would just go and sign me up for a private college without my consent ,and all I could do was choose what college I wanted. No, I didn't went to military college, sadly, and now that I am properly independent and could do that in theory, I am over the age limit. I am now debt free, but paying debts took a huge chunk of my life and set me back a lot, I married way later than I planned, got back to my sport way later than planned too and so on. (it took me 16 years to be able to rejoin my old team! now I am horribly out of shape and struggling to get back in shape).
devwastaken 4y ago
I work at a well known public uni. We can get state and federal funding for anything that aligns with democrat political talking points. We cannot get funding for basic tech and projects. We have a program where students design and build actual tech related directly to their degree and future employment, and we have to beg people to fund us. The school nor grants will find us in any way yet we are entirely bound to all the unis policies. This often means we pull money out of our own pockets for super basic tooling and materials. Students simply cannot learn in such a restricted environment and often burn out because they have to spend days working around a problem that a $10 component is meant to solve. Those students are also required to work to even afford tuition. They have to take on a second external job to have any "extra" money to buy their own hardware with. Yet the uni absolutely preaches equality and opportunity. Again, democrat talking points. They do nothing to actually make that happen. We need to defund unis, and we should have done it 20 years ago. Across the board no more public funding, if it's worthwhile then private industry will fund it like they do for any other trade.
- hfern 4y ago
  So it seems that your complaint is that certain things are not funded enough at a university. Why is your conclusion then to defund universities entirely? It seems like a non sequitur.
  - jimbokun 4y ago
    Replace a non-functioning system with a new functioning system. In other words, the "burn it to the ground and start over" approach.
    - idiotsecant 4y ago
      Burning a system to the ground is almost always the best way to turn a bad system into a worse one. Just like the junior devs impulse to tear out the bad code some other guy wrote and replace it with the differently bad code that they wrote. Refactor. Don't rebuild. The bigger the system, the more true that is.

by Agamus 4y ago

the_only_law 4y ago

Shit I’m fine with keeping stuff if majority of the student body wants to pay for it, but let me opt out. The education system and tangential friends have so far proven the hardest bureaucracy I’ve ever tried to find a way around. I hate that now, when I’m more mature, more experienced, and know exactly what I want from it is the time it’s the most difficult for me to go back.

nonethewiser 4y ago
But why would they do that? They will taught these extravagant programs that few want/need/will take advantage of but they will bake into everyone's tuition.
michaelt 4y ago
> Shit I’m fine with keeping stuff if majority of the student body wants to pay for it, but let me opt out. For things like swimming pools and gyms, sure. But some of the new services are things like 'mental health support' - it would be problematic if you'd opted out of mental health support to save $50/month, then you committed suicide.
- j_walter 4y ago
  What about things you already have...like say health insurance. I went back for an MBA ~2009 while working a full time job. I was forced to pay an extra ~$300 per term for health care even though I already had it through my work. No way to opt out. When my tuition was ~$2,500/term...another $300 doesn't seem like that much except I was paying out of pocket so every dollar counted.
  - yardie 4y ago
    I believe you are confusing the student health fee with health insurance plan and they aren't the same thing. Student health fee goes into paying for the on-campus student services like the athletic fee, computer fee, etc. I haven't been a student in years but I do remember walking into the clinic and getting seen by someone right away. The services under that fee are kind of unique to student lifestyle: birth control, STD tests, vaccines, common prescriptions, mental health. Which is slightly different from family healthcare which requires preauthorization on some health services. BTW, you could get a lot of fees removed or reduced by dropping to part-time commuter student. But they probably got rid of that exclusion since a lot of colleges are chasing money.
    - j_walter 4y ago
      This was a student health fee that also covered health insurance for students (dental too). It was a basic program through Aetna Student Health. Also included urgent and basic services on campus as well as mental health services. I was also an online student that only attended on campus class for 1 weekend per semester. It made no sense to make everyone pay the fee that included significant amounts of benefits that weren't needed by online students (the online MBA program was structured toward those currently working). This was on top of the $41 fee that I paid for the "Rec Center"...which again would never be used by me since I was an online student.
      - yardie 4y ago
        Okay I think I understand better. When I was a student the student health fee you were told was not insurance and compulsory. You could get insurance through the school for $1200/semester. This was mainly international, grad students and their families. Like many first in their family college students I soon discovered a lot of scholarships only covered tuition (and books) and I was left to make up the difference in housing, meals, and fees. I felt the fees were a sly way for the college to scam money out of students. I was required to pay an athletic fee but they weren't required to give me tickets to every football game. For schools, MBA programs are such a money pump if they were entitled to charge more they would. A lot cases the employer pays for the MBA program and they don't have the wherewithal to scrutinize excess fees. So, you end up with online students paying student health, rec, bus, and athletic fees.
- throwaway0a5e 4y ago
  >But some of the new services are things like 'mental health support' - it would be problematic if you'd opted out of mental health support to save $50/month, then you committed suicide. This sort of desire to tell people what's good for them is why we can't have nice things. You think you're being reasonable here but there's another well-meaning moron insisting they're being reasonable by preventing students from opting out of the the $50 gym fee, and another well-meaning moron that thinks they're being reasonable by requiring the dining hall have X Y and Z, etc, etc, etc. In reality what you people are doing is the institutional policy equivalent of littering. One or two people do it and it's fine, we can tolerate that. But everyone does it and the park turns into a dump and the college turns into a flaming pile of money that society cannot afford to keep feeding. The least crappy outcome is achieved when none of you get your way.
- solveit 4y ago
  Schools should have none of those. And I say this as someone who happily uses my institution's nice gym and happy that decent mental health support will be available to me should I desire it. Schools try so very hard to be the entirety of their students' lives. They want students socialisation to be within their bounds, they want students to go to their hospital, exercise at their gym, be policed by their police force, work at their on-campus jobs, eat at their cafeteria, live in their dorms, cheer for their sports teams, and so on and so on. And society mostly caters to this desire, which the students and parents are also more-or-less on board with. But even as these integrations individually benefit the students, the net effect is to bubble students away from the rest of the world while also creating a bloated administrative entity that is both too powerful for its own good and completely unable to get things done.

zoolily 4y ago

College costs have increased due to decreased state funding and increased regulation (both legal and from accreditors), which requires more administrative staff. Ironically, decreased state funding leads to an increase of administrative staff too, as universities invest in grant offices, development offices, and outreach departments in an attempt to find more funds.

Agamus 4y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is at least partially wrong. Are you only speaking of public universities? I worked at an expensive, private, liberal arts, non-profit college, where I witnessed revolting inefficiency. Do such schools receive _significant_ state funding? Any? One example of the waste I witnessed: at the end of the financial year, the student services departments where I worked would blow whatever money remained in their budget on frivolous, needless things, because if they didn't spend it, it went back into the college's budget. This mostly changed after the 2008 financial crisis, (I think?) but that's how it was for a long, long time. All staff were complicit, and knew what they were doing. These departments were given executive privileges with very little oversight of expenditure or outcomes. The corruption was surreal. Another dynamic that I never see mentioned: in a small college town, the hiring pool is challenging, and the college jobs are the high-status local jobs. I witnessed, on several occasions, needless positions being opened for people who were basically friends of staff, so they could have one of the "college jobs". When I hear students discussing college debt, and I remember these and other examples, it makes me a bit sick.
- zoolily 4y ago
  I was only writing about public universities.
- yardie 4y ago
  > These departments were given executive privileges with very little oversight of expenditure or outcomes. If only they hired an inspector general or auditor to keep tabs on these sort of shenanigans! /s

etempleton 4y ago

As the article mentioned schools are no longer competing on price, but they are competing on features / services / amenities. It seems intuitive to cut those to reduce costs, but the market doesn’t want that even if people say that is what they want that is not how they vote with their dollar. The biggest declines in enrollments are at community colleges and state schools. Also counter intuitively when a college lowers their listed tuition to offer more transparent pricing they almost see an enrollment decline. The difference between 50k, 60k, 70k, 80k per year is almost irrelevant to the students if they are able to secure a gurnanteed government loan.

mfer 4y ago
Some of this situation is bad advice up front. I know numerous people who were guided by guidance counselors, schools, and loan folks to think that taking a large student debt would be just fine. Only to later have issues with it. Schools and loan folks have skin in the game so I can understand why they are pushing for more high priced loans. Why aren't school guidance counselors and school programs better preparing people? We should be taking a hard look at that.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  High schools in general do an extremely poor job at teaching financial literacy. The only education I had on the cost of debt and the time value of money were incidental story problems in math classes. The strangely named "home economics" classes were all about cooking and nutrition and sewing, not about buying vs. renting a house or buying a new vs. used car vs. leasing, or saving for retirement or emergencies. It's no wonder many young people have no idea what a burden debt can be.
- speeder 4y ago
  I went to college while taking debt, and a big reason for it was not even just "advice", it was almost coercion, adults in my life back then (in a way I was still a minor, being 17) just outright made it look like not going to college, or waiting for a year to get in a military college (that was free) was going to ruin my adult life and whatnot, and when I was adamant about going to military college, my parents told me they would just go and sign me up for a private college without my consent ,and all I could do was choose what college I wanted. No, I didn't went to military college, sadly, and now that I am properly independent and could do that in theory, I am over the age limit. I am now debt free, but paying debts took a huge chunk of my life and set me back a lot, I married way later than I planned, got back to my sport way later than planned too and so on. (it took me 16 years to be able to rejoin my old team! now I am horribly out of shape and struggling to get back in shape).

devwastaken 4y ago

I work at a well known public uni. We can get state and federal funding for anything that aligns with democrat political talking points. We cannot get funding for basic tech and projects. We have a program where students design and build actual tech related directly to their degree and future employment, and we have to beg people to fund us. The school nor grants will find us in any way yet we are entirely bound to all the unis policies. This often means we pull money out of our own pockets for super basic tooling and materials. Students simply cannot learn in such a restricted environment and often burn out because they have to spend days working around a problem that a $10 component is meant to solve. Those students are also required to work to even afford tuition. They have to take on a second external job to have any "extra" money to buy their own hardware with. Yet the uni absolutely preaches equality and opportunity. Again, democrat talking points. They do nothing to actually make that happen. We need to defund unis, and we should have done it 20 years ago. Across the board no more public funding, if it's worthwhile then private industry will fund it like they do for any other trade.

hfern 4y ago
So it seems that your complaint is that certain things are not funded enough at a university. Why is your conclusion then to defund universities entirely? It seems like a non sequitur.
- jimbokun 4y ago
  Replace a non-functioning system with a new functioning system. In other words, the "burn it to the ground and start over" approach.
  - idiotsecant 4y ago
    Burning a system to the ground is almost always the best way to turn a bad system into a worse one. Just like the junior devs impulse to tear out the bad code some other guy wrote and replace it with the differently bad code that they wrote. Refactor. Don't rebuild. The bigger the system, the more true that is.