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Incentive structures are important, but not the entire story. The article makes no attempt to examine where tuition revenue is actually being spent. Without tha

Incentive structures are important, but not the entire story. The article makes no attempt to examine where tuition revenue is actually being spent. Without that piece, I don't find their argument particularly convincing. The article asserts: > Close to 70% of college students attend using federal student loans, so schools would have no choice but to adjust their tuitions to match [the maximum federal loan], or risk losing a large chunk of revenue. But as the article points out, the vast majority of schools are non-profits. Unlike corporations, they should not be attempting to maximize revenue. I could be wrong, but I do not think most college administrators are looking to extract as much money for their students as possible. They want to put their students on a path to success, which implies not leaving them with crippling levels of debt. Unfortunately, colleges sometimes don't have a choice, because they have bills to pay and are not swimming in piles of cash. Which leaves my primary question—if tuition has risen so much, where is that money going? I have not yet seen a really good examination of this question.

bumby 4y ago
>where is that money going? One place is that it is used to replace reductions in government support. "the single most important factor associated with tuition increases was decreasing revenue from government appropriations, with state appropriations making up the majority of such revenue.[1] (this is an old study, but I believe the pattern still exists, and is even more exacerbated) Another seems to be that administrative costs are growing disproportionately at the same time that public money has been getting smaller. This seems to be aligned politically, so it may need to be taken with a grain of salt but I can give one anecdote. When I went to college, I was sent to see the veterans representative. At that time it was just a single person who had those duties tasked on top of her "real" role. Now, it's common for colleges to have entire admin teams to recruit and help veteran students. On one hand, this can be great for the colleges and students; if managed well, those students bring in "free" government money. On the other, it's probably hard to calculate the true ROI of such a team; for example, it may be hard to know how many of those student-veterans would have attended regardless if there was a full team to support them or not. But all those admin teams, across all the different groups and bureaucracies add up. [1]https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002157.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002157.pdf

bumby 4y ago

>where is that money going? One place is that it is used to replace reductions in government support. "the single most important factor associated with tuition increases was decreasing revenue from government appropriations, with state appropriations making up the majority of such revenue.[1] (this is an old study, but I believe the pattern still exists, and is even more exacerbated) Another seems to be that administrative costs are growing disproportionately at the same time that public money has been getting smaller. This seems to be aligned politically, so it may need to be taken with a grain of salt but I can give one anecdote. When I went to college, I was sent to see the veterans representative. At that time it was just a single person who had those duties tasked on top of her "real" role. Now, it's common for colleges to have entire admin teams to recruit and help veteran students. On one hand, this can be great for the colleges and students; if managed well, those students bring in "free" government money. On the other, it's probably hard to calculate the true ROI of such a team; for example, it may be hard to know how many of those student-veterans would have attended regardless if there was a full team to support them or not. But all those admin teams, across all the different groups and bureaucracies add up. [1]https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002157.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/2002157.pdf