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Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year – how did this happen?
- pydry 3y agoStaggering levels of wealth inequality
- umeshunni 3y agoIt's amazing how the highest rates of inflation are in the industries that are most affected by government intervention (housing, education, healthcare)
- ceejayoz 3y agoThey're also the industries whose providers know you can't really go without. US healthcare and education is abberantly expensive compared to the rest of the OECD, most of which regulate them more.
- dwallin 3y agoI know you only implied it but be careful with causation here. We know that there are situations where the free-market does not lead to ideal outcomes. Does it not seem likely for government to involve itself more in areas where the free market is most likely to fail?
- complianceowl 3y agoYou mean like involve itself in housing by requiring the industry to grant a certain amount of home loans to make the "American Dream" a reality, thereby creating a housing market bubble, then when the bubble popped and tanked the economy, blamed it on the banks?
- pydry 3y agoThe free market is a neoliberal fairy tale. A mystical idea. A hypothetical concept. There are no markets anywhere which are unsullied by the "dirty" touch of government in this reality. Government intervention also covers such a broad range of things that you can't lump them under one umbrella. Governments routinely create competition in some markets and suppress it in others and prices behave accordingly. This idea doesnt fit in a soundbite unfortunately but "government bad, regulations bad, markets good" is catchy. Thats why this soundbite message was carefully marketed to an American audience by Koch think tanks in response to their epic fights with the environmental protection agency.
- ushiroda80 3y agoThis happens in the USA. The regulation is pushed by private companies to increase cost of market entry ( I.e. decrease competition) Japan has none of the crazy inflation in these categories. The other key variable is these are core essential needs hence people will continue to pay.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- readthenotes1 3y agoStaggering levels of debt funding backed by the inability to bankrupt one's way out of it.
- next_xibalba 3y agoPlease explain the details of how wealth inequality causes extreme inflation in higher ed prices. I've yet to see wealth inequality fingered as the culprit.
- fire_lake 3y agoSome people have several orders of magnitude more to spend giving their offspring an advantage. It’s worth it too, due to massive inequality in job market.
- jgalt212 3y agosubsidized student loans don't make education cheaper, it increase the ability to pay (adjusting for demand elasticity). The same goes for the housing market. Govt interventions has only made home prices more expensive vis a vis other items we may consume.
- skadamat 3y agoAfter being frustrated for many years by the rising cost of college, I've internally decided to flip the questions. - Why would college tuition decrease? - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year? - What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition? It's unfortunately really hard to find good answers here IMO with the layout of the current "market conditions" for colleges that we've setup in America.
- f321x_ 3y ago[flagged]
- red-iron-pine 3y agoreplies like this generate no value. tell us what happened in 1971, don't make lazy, vague references to it. please provide a source, or at least some idea of what your point is.
- waterhouse 3y agoPresumably a reference to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_system > On 15 August 1971, the United States "temporarily" suspended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the Bretton Woods system to an end and rendering the dollar a fiat currency.
- jddj 3y agoIt's a reference to a website[1] which talks about the divorcing of the USD from the gold standard. [1]https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
- littlestymaar 3y agoThe funniest thing with this idea is that in practice nothing of economic significance really happened in 1971: the supply of dollar used on the international trade market[1] being each year more important than the amount of gold stored in Fort Knox had been a hot topic during most of the sixties already (and French president de Gaulle tried to fight against that as early as 1965!). What happened in 1971 (the suspension of the official conversion between gold and dollar) is just the political acknowledgement that the fiction of a gold/dollar parity was untenable any longer, but economically speaking, the divorce occurred during the previous decade (and then ironically the charts on that website show you how little correlation there is between this phenomenon and the later economic consequences). What really happened in that period was in 1973: Yom Kippur War and as a consequence OPEC shutting down the oil supply, derailing the industrial economies and the Welfare State. A crisis that was thereafter co-opted by neo-liberal movement, bringing the world back to the pre-war situation regarding inequalities and economic growth. [1] the domestic supply of dollar had been much higher than the gold reserves for pretty much the entirety of the existence of the US dollar, because that's pretty much how banking works since the end of the middle ages!
- xnx 3y agoWe are at peak college tuition. AI is coming for higher education. Not Ivy League at first, but starting with community colleges and working its way up.
- justapassenger 3y ago[dead]
- SkipperCat 3y agoI think it won't be AI that causes the collapse of university attendance. It will be people deciding not to go to college. Most people just want jobs. Many employers are finding out that people with or without college educations can perform at their tasks, think critically and do all the same functions at most jobs. Ergo, folks will choose not to go into student debt purgatory and just dive straight into the workplace.
- tqi 3y ago> AI is coming for higher education As long as hiring managers continue to give more weight to resumes with name brand colleges, these universities will never be threatened.
- xhkkffbf 3y agoSome places like Google and many state governments are publicly removing all requirements for college degrees. Whether they still choose degree holders anyways is an open question, but some are very openly proclaiming that it's not a requirement.
- xyst 3y agothe internet already made college irrelevant. The second wave of AI is just cleaning it up. While I was attending college in the 2010s. They were always pushing “new buildings”, “new rock wall climbing”, “renovations to college housing”, “lazy river!”. Apparently funded through higher tuition and fees. At some point, a college degree will no longer be required which will be the death knell.
- api 3y agoHow did this happen? Subsidizing demand without addressing supply.
- topspin 3y agoSubsidizing and augmenting demand. The State Department grants about 500,000 F-1s every year. COVID curtailed that a little, but the numbers have since recovered.
- tekla 3y agoMostly because we allow easy loans for students who don't read the paperwork. We need to stop giving out easy loans to anyone who asks. The schools will lower prices if people can't afford it via a loan.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- orthecreedence 3y ago> We need to stop giving out easy loans to anyone who asks. Right, by not having student loans backed by the federal government. As it stands now, if you put glasses on a dog he could get a student loan because lenders have no incentive to scrutinize the debt. The federal government collects for them. We're pushing people with absolutely no financial experience and no financial training to sign up for debt they can never get rid of without what's effectively economic indentured servitude.
- nothercastle 3y agoI don’t have any issue with easy loans just make them dischargable so banks have skin in the game
- tekla 3y agoWhy would ANYONE agree to service that? It's an insane proposal.
- nothercastle 3y agoNatural check on lending. If you are too loose with requirements then you take heavy losses and the taxpayer bails you out.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- philip1209 3y agoFederal student loans broke the market. People became price-inelastic.
- silverquiet 3y agoWhat is your price elasticity for your childrens' future?
- brk 3y agoYour comment highlights what I personally think is some of the reason for the extreme tuition increases: too many people believe that college is the singular best path for their children's future.
- ceejayoz 3y agoIncluding, unfortunately, the vast majority of employers and human resources people those children will encounter when attempting to get a job.
- silverquiet 3y agoI don't have kids, but I believe it. I have several close family members whose biggest regret is that they didn't go to college.
- BobaFloutist 3y agoIt (still), mathematically is. The return on the investment of a college degree is absolutely worth it. What's becoming much less clearly worth it is the value add of going to an elite school over a state school.
- tekla 3y agoCollege was/is/remains one of the biggest factors in determining incoming levels and general success in life.
- cj 3y ago> What is your price elasticity for your childrens' future? This is a silly question. Silly answer: I would want my kid to be able to retire happily. If college debt prevents that, let's ditch it.
- spike021 3y agoThat's on top of every other expense like books, scantrons (not sure if those are even used anymore), and whatever else. Everything adds up for students.
- leplen 3y agoPrice discrimination in the form of scholarships and the "show us exactly how much money is in your wallet" scam they call "need-based-aid" allowing universities have essentially perfect price discrimination and to gobble up the entire consumer surplus is definitely a big part of it. Imagine any other service where they demanded your bank statements before they told you what they would charge you, and the impact that would have on sticker price.
- fishpen0 3y agoFunny enough this is exactly how vendor engagement goes when you are publicly traded. They can see your books more or less and charge wildly different numbers to different companies. It has nothing to do with how much you use the product or the resources you'll use and everything to do with what they think you are worth. We've had so many calls where we're like "brand new product with team of 10 wants your thing" and they come back with a high 6 figure saas contract. It's so fucking annoying that they don't have to show their prices online and can make all their customers sign pricing NDAs
- exe34 3y agoI suppose it's karma for all the companies that refuse to publish the salary being offered for jobs upfront.
- SkipperCat 3y agoI've always wondered why the family that pays full price for tuition does not get the tax credit for their charitable contribution to some other student whom they subsidize. If I donated $20k to a university, I'd get to write that off as a charitable contribution in my taxes. If I pay full tuition and 1/3 of that goes to a student needing aid, I get no deduction.
- vernon99 3y agoThat’s the only thing that bothers you? :) How about we outlaw the price discrimination described in the parent comment? I think everything else just pushed the conversation deeper in the weeds and does us all a disservice.
- peter_l_downs 3y ago"How did this happen?" — because the market will bear it. High sticker price + financial aid for 65% of students just makes it easier for a college to price discriminate, which is overall a good thing. And as the article points out, most students don't pay anywhere near as much as a Vanderbilt full tuition, so in a sense it really doesn't matter. The article does a good job of explaining this.
- complianceowl 3y agoYou can't say the market is bearing it when the college market is being sustained by government-backed funding via student loans. If the market were really bearing it, government's involvement would be minimal to non-existent.
- peter_l_downs 3y agoThe people paying $100k are not doing so via government-backed student loans.
- Supermancho 3y agoI don't understand this. When Harvard or CalTech says that anyone admitted will not be turned away due to financial hardship, it's because the loans are issued with a qualification based on their admission. 100k or any other price, the current financing structure remains the same.
- 082349872349872 3y agoHow did it happen? Education in the US works on a freemium model. The pay-to-win aspect is more obvious at the university level, but it occurs at K-12 too: it's just that there the cost is not directly charged by a school district, but occurs via the premium for housing in that district. (take a null hypothesis: a world where school districts all offer the same education. Even in this case, should parents somehow agree on which the "good" district were, it would have a premium reflecting how much parents who care about education are willing to pay to live somewhere where their children's likely friends' parents also care about education. "the mother of Mencius chose a neighbourhood")
- uejfiweun 3y agoSometimes I feel like college tuitions and need based aid programs are specifically calibrated to fuck over the "upper middle class." It's completely ridiculous that households making 300K or whatever (which is barely enough to support a family in many cities in the nation) are put into the same financial aid category as billionaires (that is to say, no financial aid at all). It's a hoop that you have to jump through so that the man can keep you tied to your desk working throughout your entire life.
- iamthirsty 3y ago> It's completely ridiculous that households making 300K or whatever (which is barely enough to support a family in many cities in the nation) ...Is this /s? $300k is sufficiently enough to support a family of 4 in literally any city in the U.S., including NYC & LA. Outside of those 2 major cities, $300k/y for a family is more than enough.
- tstrimple 3y agoI lived comfortably in SoCal making around $160k/year with a family of 5. These were in family friendly neighborhoods with low crime and good schools, so definitely not the cheapest areas either.
- complianceowl 3y agoPosing this question almost feels insulting. How did this happen? As with so many (not all) things that government gets involved with, Uncle Sam did it. Why on God's green earth would colleges lower their prices when they have guaranteed funding via guaranteed student loans? If anyone could get a loan for a house, the same thing would happen to the housing market. Cough Cough...2008. Government placed quotas on the industry to make the "American Dream" a reality for everyone. I get it. Government-backed student loans does indeed give opportunities for many less fortunate people. But does giving opportunities to the less fortunate, which is a much, much smaller percentage than those who are not in that category, justify making college unaffordable for the entire country? Keep in mind that most people fall into a middle category where they are not poor but still don't have enough for college and have to find a way. And sure, call me a conspiracy theorist, but at the end of the day, the Government doesn't back student loans because they want to help. They do it because it serves their special interest groups.
- jppope 3y ago"Its not about what you can afford, its about what you can borrow"
- oldpersonintx 3y ago[dead]
- cjpearson 3y agoVery few students will pay that price. Even those above financial aid thresholds will typically be offered a ~~sale price~~ merit scholarship. Also, if they have other offers they can try and price match. The sticker price is so high because it feels nice to get something for 50% off. Much more so if it was due to your "merit" rather than your coupon clipping prowess. College tuition is expensive, much more than it should be, but the obsession over a sticker price that is almost never relevant is silly. People should be more concerned about the actual cost of attendance.
- bandrami 3y agoThis sounds disturbingly like the health care market.
- lxgr 3y agoI was just about to say this. What's the way back out? Finding a way for the US to stop producing (at a meta-level) highly inflated, price-inelastic markets backed up by powerful bureaucracies (following Pournelle's law) and somehow soft-landing the existing ones without throwing out the value they definitely provide seems like a big challenge going forward.
- bandrami 3y agoWhy is this presumed to be a bad thing? College attendance and graduation rates are higher than at any point in the past, so the cost isn't actually keeping people from going to college (or at least, isn't keeping people from going to college more than they were kept from going to it 50 years ago). In general, the income premium from a college education is much greater than the debt accrued to get that education, which is why people still take the deal. (There's people on the margins for whom that isn't true and I think most of the reform/bailout effort should involve them.) Is this actually something that needs to be "fixed"?
- pc86 3y agoFor the sake of argument let's say college triples your income potential. To make the math easy, let's say instead of earning $1M over your life you'll now earn $3M. We shouldn't look at a school charging $400k and say "well you'll make more than that so it's a good deal." We should look at what you're actually getting. A cinder block dorm, mass-produced assembly line food, a professor making $80k a year telling you to write a paper on a book that's in the public domain. None of that is worth $400k.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago> We shouldn't look at a school charging $400k and say "well you'll make more than that so it's a good deal." We should look at what you're actually getting. A cinder block dorm, mass-produced assembly line food, a professor making $80k a year telling you to write a paper on a book that's in the public domain. None of that is worth $400k. If passing this exercise in docility gives you the mentioned 2 million USD over life: why not?
- bandrami 3y ago> None of that is worth $400k Huh? You just said it gives you $2M over your life. That's obviously worth $400K.
- pc86 3y agoWhy just $400K why not $800K? Why not $1.6M? $1.99M? Why not just a contract that you pay the college 95% of whatever you make above the median HS graduate salary every year? I mean they're letting you keep 5% of the earnings you're only getting because of them, you should be happy with that, right? Just because $2M > $400K doesn't mean it's objectively worth that amount of money.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y agoThere an easy way to fix this: Have a set price per semester hour that the college/university is allowed to charge. Colleges/universities are free not to abide by this, but in that case they get zero federal funds, including research grants or student loans, and they get treated like a for profit which means no more tax deductible donations. Once you set a limit on how much they can charge, the colleges will iron out the inefficiencies themselves.
- janalsncm 3y agoSomething that would cost virtually nothing compared with the cost of tuition is for the IRS to connect with the department of education and help students as consumers to make an informed decision about schools and financial outcomes. An opaque system will never lead to price reductions. I want to know average salary 1, 10, and 20 years after graduating for each school and each major at the school. Some might think it’s a bit too on the nose to think in purely financial terms about education. Fine. They can ignore the price tags. But let’s not pretend there’s no relationship between software engineering salaries, companies’ almost uniform requirement of a CS degree, and the thousands of students lining up for said degrees willing to pay whatever it takes. Here’s another idea. How about the billionaires who say America doesn’t know how to build anymore, how about they create a new computer science university? Undercut the competition, give students an education at scale. Hire leading researchers to teach classes. Students who want to pay full sticker price at a legacy school can continue to do so.
- janalsncm 3y agoOne thing I have noticed in these conversations is some who say government-backed loans are the root cause of price increases. Even if this is technically correct, it ignores how we got here, which is also why going back on that is non-negotiable. And from the other side, public college was never free in the US, but it didn’t have to be free to be affordable. We don’t have to make it free to solve the problem. In 1970 tuition at University of California schools was about $1000 in today’s dollars. It’s not nothing, but it also means you’re not making a huge financial mistake by going to college and not getting a degree. Without student loans, a lot of families simply wouldn’t be able to afford to send kids to college. Meanwhile, as government (especially state governments) cut funding to schools, sticker price has skyrocketed even at public schools. So really the only solution is more public funding for public universities. This will force prices down and force private schools to compete. Vanderbilt wouldn’t list their tuition at 100k if in state was $1000.
- redserk 3y agoI believe a number of states trimmed state-run college and university funding during the 2008 housing crisis to help balance the books.
- ta_1138 3y agoNot at all. Go to one of those almost-free european colleges, and then compare the experience to a US college. The US colleges expect most students to come from far away, live on a big, expensive, beautiful campus and have massive efforts in student lifestyle. Sport facilities, museums, academic support, actual office hours... it's closer to expensive, private EU universities. Most EU universities don't do that, and they are ran to cut costs. The expense per student is low, on purpose. They might both be called universities, but it's completely different goods. The transformations of European schools to be available to the masses just didn't happen in the US, and therefore the prices are through the roof. Give any American university the budget per student than a German or Spanish university has, and they'd have to just close, because they aren't built for it.
- lxgr 3y ago
- totalhack 3y agoLoans. Loans are how this happened.
- brigadier132 3y agoThe schools are not free of blame. These are non-profit institutions, supposedly they have 0 incentive to be raising prices like this.
- dragonwriter 3y agoIf there is effectively unlimited ability to pay, and the additional revenue can be used for higher-quality services (and since its free money for the institution, the marginal quality per dollar hardly matters) there is little reason, even as a not-profit-seeking institution, not to raise tuition. The way to stop it is to turn off the unlimited ability to pay, which is tricky to do while maintaining both independent private education institutions and a desire to promote access the way federal aid was intended to, but it probably can be done by cost caps for institutions to be eligible for aid (which can apply only for students with federal aid, so long as there is no negative discrimination rule for such students).
- brigadier132 3y ago> there is little reason, even as a not-profit-seeking institution, not to raise tuition Except the well-being of the students? Not for profit institutions are supposed to be immune to this kind of behavior. Also I agree with you that the way to stop this is to end student loans.
- dragonwriter 3y ago> Except the well-being of the students? The long-term well-being of the students is not what most educational institutions frame as their charitable mission, and even if they did they don’t have a good way to assess marginal impacts on it the way they do other things, so its unlikely to get factored in consistently even if there is an intention to respect it. > Not for profit institutions are supposed to be immune to this kind of behavior. No, charitable non-profit institutions are supposed to be immune to seeking returns to investors, not from seeking money to serve what they have defined as their charitable mission. Quite the opposite. > Also I agree with you that the way to stop this is to end student loans. I very specifically did not say the solution was to end student loans, I said it was to condition aid (including whatever combination of grants and loans) on cost caps. (I think aid should be mostly or all grants and not loans, but that’s unrelated to the cost of tuition problem.)
- TrevorJ 3y agoBusinesses will charge what the market will bear. And if 'the market' can get government loans to pay for tuition, then the market will bear an awful lot.
- bdw5204 3y agoOne major reason is the college rankings which are based on how much the college price gouges and how many prospective students it rejects after stealing an application fee from them. Another one is the federal student loan program which makes it possible for students to borrow whatever the college wants to charge even if it is obvious they'll never be able to afford to repay it.
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- hbosch 3y agoIt's actually incredible how many engineers and designers I have met personally who believe that college was a waste of time, in comparison to the knowledge that can be gained just through internships, mentorship and forms of apprenticeship. Do you think someone with 4 years of interning around major tech companies is better equipped to work for those companies compared to a person who came directly out of college? The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions of the cost as well. Are university educations really that much better? To me, the value of the university system seems to be the connections and networking that form rather than skills and acuity.
- life-and-quiet 3y agoI think it really depends on what your goals are. If you're just aiming to get a job or make as much money as possible, then yeah I think college is often overrated. But as somebody who took the nontraditional route and is now interested in the "harder" aspects of computer science, there are absolutely gaps where my formally trained colleagues have a leg up. Formal academic bodies of knowledge, and getting exposure to them, absolutely have a use. But you for sure don't need them in many day-to-day jobs or to advance as a professional much of the time. EDIT: this response assumes a good program / department. There are absolutely subpar college programs that are a giant waste of money and time.
- d0gsg0w00f 3y agoI totally feel you on this. One time I spent three nights writing a language parser before my Google wormhole showed me I was writing a lexer/tokenizer. My colleagues with CS degrees just looked at me like I was an alien when I shared my excitement.
- dan-robertson 3y agoIt’s not too hard to imagine what it’s like when someone spends four years interning at tech companies. That’s basically one of the computer science courses at Waterloo. So you can just find people who graduated from those courses and see how it worked out for them. Though obviously there’s a lot of selection bias there.
- ars 3y agoThis is why I'm so against the government forgiving education loans. All that will happen is the money will go to colleges, and they'll raise tuition. Instead put the schools on the hook for the loans - if someone doesn't pay, well, it's the school that has to eat the cost.
- jollyllama 3y agoYou're against a particular kind of loan forgiveness, where it's assumed the schools are made whole. As you note, there's another kind of loan forgiveness where the obligations simply evaporate.
- dragonwriter 3y agoThe schools are already whole; the schools aren’t the loan issuers for the loans at issue, the federal government is. The schools already got paid.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- empath-nirvana 3y agoThe US already has a 'loan forgiveness program' that works for every single loan _other_ than student loans, called "bankruptcy". It's worked for hundreds of years, and we used to allow it for college loans.
- gnicholas 3y agoThere is one difference: student loans that are being "forgiven" are being put to taxpayers, whereas in bankruptcy the loans are absorbed by banks that lent money (and to a lesser extent, to parties with outstanding debts, such as vendors).
- ramesh31 3y agoI've always deeply resented this "personal expenses" cost being lumped into tuition prices. Yeah, living and existing as a human being for a year costs about that much, whether you are going to college or not. It makes no sense whatsoever how that got conflated. And that's exactly how a huge portion of our entire generation got to enjoy a four year free for all party sabbatical in the prime of their lives, as the rest of us struggled at entry level jobs through global recessions, for which they now want forgiven on the backs of taxpayers.
- redserk 3y agoIt's not that uncommon for a university to require you live on-campus the first couple of years unless you live locally. On top of this, it's not uncommon for universities to mandate on-campus students pay for meal-plans and a lot of other potentially unnecessary garbage.
- ars 3y agoOne way this happened is that schools are including all sorts of useless, but expensive, frivolities. Why do school have ultra fancy sports areas? Why do they need 15 different restaurants? Go visit a college - they are basically little resort towns, or cruise ships on land. Instead they should focus on education, and let other companies do the rest of that, if students want them.
- bandrami 3y agoWhen I was in grad school we got, on the same day, one email saying that tuition was going up by 15% for the next semester, and another email proudly announcing the gym now had a lazy river.
- supertrope 3y agoI attended a college with a spartan mindset. No research. The entire sports budget was less than one FTE. They were laser focused on instruction and recruiting elite students whom them could offer actually generous “financial aid” terms.
- maestroia 3y agoI was talking to a college professor I know a couple weeks ago about this exact thing. And what they said comprised a substantial amount of the expenses of their 4 year private college made perfect sense, because it's happening to every business. Health insurance costs. Now, add to this: salaries and other benefits to both staff and educators. liability insurance. increased food costs. I'm certain facilities have increased costs also, from new construction to utilities. *Plus anything else I've left out. Let's face it, everything has become more expensive. The Five Guys meal of a little cheeseburger, little fries, and regular drink which cost me $12 4 years ago in March, 2020 (I keep records), would cost me $17-18 today (I checked the prices today at noon and walked away). That's a 40-50% increase. Why would we expect higher education to not be effected?
- brigadier132 3y agoSalaries are the primary cost not health insurance. There are more administrators than students. Also there is no excuse, the educational institutions are incompetent at managing their finances.
- maxlybbert 3y agoI don’t think anybody is surprised that college tuition has increased. They’re surprised it’s increased faster than the prices for almost every other service. So have health care costs. And in both cases, the system is designed to make it difficult and pointless to shop based on price. I have a hard time believing health insurance costs have driven the drastic increase in college costs. They’ve certainly played a role, but I don’t see any reason they would increase the cost of education more than they’ve increased the price of everything else.
- science4sail 3y ago> Let's face it, everything has become more expensive. The Five Guys meal of a little cheeseburger, little fries, and regular drink which cost me $12 4 years ago in March, 2020 (I keep records), would cost me $17-18 today (I checked the prices today at noon and walked away). That's a 40-50% increase. Couldn't this just be combated using shrinkflation? I'm sure that rice, beans, ramen, and other grad student fare is still cheap yet provides enough nutrients to study. After all, these are supposed to be institutions of the mind, not institutions of the stomach.
- jmmay 3y agohttps://archive.is/3bUf5 https://archive.is/3bUf5
- lulznews 3y agoThanks
- thephyber 3y agoIn high school, I only worried about what college I could get into and what was the reputation of the college. Cost was irrelevant because I had no job (I had worked, but for only around minimum wage) and didn’t know what kind of job I could get after I graduated. I had no ability to effectively price shop, to compare the value of the degrees of different colleges, and the ability to get reviews of each college seemed “impossible” (opaque and/or difficult to get started). In retrospect, I was a terrible consumer of the college product, but I don’t know how I could have changed it at the time, given my situation. I know the US federal government required colleges to publish key metrics such as the average salary by degree/program and specific costs like tuition. Those are incredibly valuable compared to the info I had, but I’m curious if high school students today are any better at making value judgements before they have had a non-trivial paycheck.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- oneplane 3y agoCommercial goals and no regulation that desires everyone to pass the same accreditation, and only that same accreditation. In theory, doing it 'better' than the competition is good, in practise this just means there will always only be a handful that are actually better and they will capitalise on that as much as possible. But purely regulating everything into the ground also doesn't help. Not sure if this is even fixable, because it is a complete ecosystem that is highly lucrative (money, status, offloading HR to the schools) for everyone except the students and teachers (professors). You can also wonder if the goal of just providing good education is something people are even interested in, it's so much more geared towards a 'future fabrication factory' where the learning stuff part is secondary to the "follow this track go get a shot at job XYZ" part that everything is minmaxing for.
- brightball 3y agoStudent loans that removed any incentive to keep it affordable?
- recursivedoubts 3y agoUsury.
- ilamont 3y agoIn 2022 one of my kids wanted to take college classes online over the summer. We created a spreadsheet with the costs for each school, and what was surprising was the range of prices, from $900 per class for MassBay Community College and UC Berkeley, to $7,000 for Babson (a private college near Boston). The state universities were all over the map - UConn and UVM are both big flagship universities but UVM was >2x UConn, and even more than private colleges like Brandeis. We went with UC Berkeley. UVM online $4,800 MassBay $900 Harvard Extension $3,500 Lasell online $1,600 Brandeis $3,290 Babson $7,000 B.C. Woods College $2,200 UConn online $1,800 Berkeley extension $900 Umass Boston $1,500 (in state rate)
- vsuperpower2020 3y agoHalf the money goes to administrators. This is also anecdotal, but it's hard not to notice that my university constructed a huge building exclusively for DEI. Not sure what it did that wasn't done before.
- tacocataco 3y agoPeople in debt are more easily manipulated.
- amateuring 3y agoGovernment
- cyclecount 3y agoHigher education in the US is hardly about learning the skills for a particular discipline or trade. The American university system is a class differentiation mechanism, and students are paying for access to the managerial professional class, often the highest class one can achieve without family connections. Even if tuition costs more than can be earned back in wages, it’s still a good investment because the alternative is lower class jobs or unemployment. (There are a few counter examples of professions which pay well and don’t require a university degree).
- supertrope 3y agoExactly. It’s literally a barrier to entry. Have you been accepted and then credentialed by an institution? Your resume will then meet the checkbox of has a degree.
- lukewrites 3y agoI love living in the land of opportunity to accrue debt. Student debt, medical debt, it's all Freedom Debt™ to me!
- contemporary343 3y agoWorth remembering that ~2/3 of U.S. students in college are in public colleges and universities, not private ones like Vanderbilt. Prices have gone up there too (especially since state governments subsidize their public universities significantly less than they used to), but they are still pretty good deals given U.S. GDP per capita. In many states they can also be practically free depending on income level and typically provide excellent educations and career opportunities for most students.
- 65 3y agoI went to my state school instead of a private university purely because of cost. It just never seemed worth it to spend so much for 4 years of my life. It's funny too, since I went to a high school where everyone felt the need to go to expensive colleges. Guidance counselors would assume you were going to an out of state or private school. There was no push for in-state schools. Other than technical reasons for college being so expensive, such as legislation making it extremely easy to take out huge loans, a big factor is "prestige" and social status. Going to my school was extremely uncool where I lived. But over the years the school I went to has gotten more and more enticing for students, I'm guessing because more high schoolers are wondering what the purpose of spending so much on college is. I suspect (or, at least hope) US state schools become something like public European universities, where they become increasingly more "prestigious" as costs increase.
- wakawaka28 3y agoBasically it's because of unlimited/unconditional student loans that are 100% backed by the government. If students had to pay out of pocket, the market for useless and expensive programs would collapse. If lenders had to bear the risk of default due to the sheer uselessness of certain degrees, they would loan much less money.
- nojvek 3y agoMake the federal government guaranteeing loans, the market would sort itself out. In this specific instance, this is money slurped up by administration fees. If they stopped the loans, the prices would drop to meet reduced supply of loans. I am against Biden forgiving loans when they keep on guaranteeing more loans. I'd be okay if they said the government is out of student loan business. Let the banks handle it. Demand and supply - it's like the speed limit of light.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoNo "paywall": https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/costs-at-some-colleges-near-100000-a-year-many-families-pay-a-lot-less.html https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/03/costs-at-some-colleges-near-... https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/revenue-strategies/2024/04/03/inching-toward-100000-sticker-price https://www.insidehighered.com/news/business/revenue-strateg... https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-much-should-you-pay-for-college-with-ron-lieber-encore/id1452395408?i=1000629157364 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-much-should-you-pa... https://boglecenter.net/bogleheads-speaker-series-with-ron-lieber/ https://boglecenter.net/bogleheads-speaker-series-with-ron-l... https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/some-colleges-could-soon-cost-100000-year/601648/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/11/some-c... (2019)
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 3y agoVanderbilt University tuition and fees 2023-2024 https://www.vanderbilt.edu/stuaccts/fees/tuition_fees_2023-24_ugrd.php https://www.vanderbilt.edu/stuaccts/fees/tuition_fees_2023-2...
- KoftaBob 3y agoThis is how: https://shrewdcuriosity.medium.com/why-has-college-gotten-so-expensive-in-the-last-30-years-3505af9aded8 https://shrewdcuriosity.medium.com/why-has-college-gotten-so...
- Rury 3y agoBecause of government subsidies. The government subsidizes college prices by backing student loans. This creates a vicious circle. Colleges raise their prices, the government ensures those prices can be met, and students are on the hook for it. This is also ultimately why house prices are high. The government subsidizes house prices by backing mortgage debt.
- lupire 3y agoGovernment also donates tax on mortgage interest to home sellers.
- latency-guy2 3y agoBecause the government still wins no matter what in this arrangement. Property owners are a captive audience, government can siphon their money almost on a whim. It is free money.
- bandrami 3y agoThis at least notionally stopped in 2018, though you could argue it's hidden in the larger standard deduction.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIt’s coming back as the trump tax cuts for non-companies expire with little hope of being renewed.
- flandish 3y agoHow? Is that sarcastic? Allowing colleges to profit is the problem. Clearly they care more about roi than education. If a college gets any federal taxpayer funds in any way, they should not be allowed to profit. At all.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pyuser583 3y agoIncreasing tuition increases applications and matriculations. Usually higher prices decrease demand. But when they increase demand, and credit is available below market … that’s how you get insanely high prices.
- jalapenos 3y agoThese questions come down to a lack of doing a root cause analysis, and getting caught up in the existing framing of the issue. So let's try an RCA here. Why do people pay it? They think it'll pay off. Why? Because it does. Employers respect it, thereby it gives them more employability than without it. Why do employers respect it? Because it means they know what they need for the job? Of course not. It's because they've proved conscientiousness, intelligence, interest, and basic cultural match, by sticking through 4 years of that. So what is the solution? Obvious. Entrepreneurialism to offer competing services that satisfy the above screening for employers, while being faster, cheaper, and more effective on the employees' end. Throw in teaching something useful into the mix too and you're winning. If an undercurrent of that gets going, the universities are toast. But people keep talking about this like it's a political and cultural matter. The problem with that is you externalize the issue, make it the responsibility of others, and disempower yourself. Everyone can join in in producing or aiding that competition, unilaterally and individually.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoGermany has a good model that we can follow with a very economical university system (sans some elite schools). They do it with low overhead courses with homework that isn’t graded by a TA that they can’t afford, no midterm just your entire grade based on a final (at least, that’s what I heard from my colleague who went through it just after unification). No fancy dorms or student recreation centers, just classes that you show up to take. Why don’t we have this in the states? Even community colleges are expected to be luxurious with lots of graded homework, exams, and a less high-stakes final. But really, we really just need the classes to go to and maybe someplace to study (but local libraries can help there). We don’t actually need N-layers of administrators and counselors. That’s all overhead.
- freddealmeida 3y agoDoes a $400k degree make any sense? That seems like a massive amount of debt to take on for knowledge you can get from watching youtube and personal learning. I'm not sure the elite status of schools is worth this much. Especially for non technical studies. Are we moving back to when elite schools are only for the very rich?
- hilux 3y agoAmericans could pay much less by attending community college for at least two years, or by going to Canada, or Europe, or many other countries. But as long as high-income parents are willing to pay for little Johnny/Jane to have their four-year partying rite, universities will charge. Why shouldn't they?
- Cloudef 3y agoIt seems america is slowly transitioning to phase where you have to be either millionaire or live without home and food
- RecycledEle 3y agoIt's the US Department of Education that did this. Trigger warning: A rant follows that will upset some people. The US Department of Education destroyed the innovators in inexpensive online learning by claiming that an online course you can take online at your own pace is not a distance learning course but is instead a correspondence course. The US Department of Education says the difference is RSI. No, not Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, but something more painful called "Regular and Substantive Interaction" between the teacher and student, in a way that is scheduled by the teacher. The two biggest advantages of online courses were that you could work on them where you wanted to, and when you wanted to. The US Department of Education killed that. I mean they pulled the baby of online learning baby halfway out of the birth canal, forced a pair of scissors into the back of the squirming newborn's head to make a hole, rammed a curettage and suction device into the agonized baby's skull, and sucked out the baby's brain, murdering the newborn online learning industry before it could draw its first breath. As an instructor who built online courses that were perfect to the point that 80% of my students could finish the course and do better on a departmental final exam than in-class students did, I am horrified. My online classes in Canvas are regularly gutted by school administrators who delete large portions of the courses. They are meticulous in deleting all my backups as well. I am forced to schedule absurd mandatory office hours that are really online pseudo-lectures without decent visual aides where students fight for hours to glean the bits of knowledge that could have fit on a PowerPoint slide or two. The more disfunctional these sessions are, the more pleased the college administrators are. If I dare to use competent visual aides, then students do not sit through the multi-hour torture session and instead screen-capture what they need in a minute or two and leave. Such competence threatens the existence of our college because it means we can not get paid for online education courses if there is not regular and substantive interaction between the teacher and the students in a way that is scheduled by the teacher. My competent online courses cost one college their SACS accreditation. The fact that I respond to all student emails within 12 hours, 24/7/365 is not enough. The fact that I detail grade all assignments with detailed comments on a clear grading rubric within 12 hours of the assignment being submitted is not enough. The fact that I give my personal cell phone number to my students (when ethics rules allow it) is not enough because they do not all call me every week and because I do not schedule that time. If I do not force my students to schedule a time every week to sit down and listen to me, then we lack RSI. The US Department of Education took over $700 million dollars from one college that did a great job innovating online courses. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/17/regular-and-substantive-interaction-online-college https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2022/11/17/regular-and-s... I've never taught for that college, but I have seen other colleges completely gutted by the government scum.
- bhawks 3y agoCollege is a social signaling tool. It's social acceptable to be prejudiced to someone based on if/where they attended college. It is also a great social network for upper-class and upper class adjacent individuals to utilize. Learning is generally kept to a minimum - the first 2 points are more than enough to guarantee a supply of customers.
- ThinkBeat 3y agoThe price can increase because there are people willing to pay that much. This is in large part driven by companies who seek out students who have attended the most prestigious schools. If the labor market was about the same for people with bachelor or graduate degrees from an accredited university then the benefit of paying $$$$ would rapidly decrease. That is not likely to happen. "Inclusive" hiring should target having a lot of employees from less known universities
- ThinkBeat 3y agoThe admin bloat is real. It is a bureaucracy which like all bureaucracies is mainly interested in growing and being indispensable. Mainly being indispensable by a web of dependencies internal to the bureaucracy. Look at trends on staff at universities over the last 20 years. Most universities now have more students (not all) but the academic staff has not kept up with growth, while the bureaucracy has seen solid growth
- ryandetzel 3y agoHave we seen people start to game this system? Basically, attend a cheaper school for 2-3 years then jump to an elite one to get the paper?
- maxglute 3y agoSocial signalling because tertiary degrees have become commoditized. Someone you want to hire someone because of who they're potentially connected to. It doesn't have to be targetted, but hire a large enough cohort of very expensive private school kids and all of sudden you're one bacon factor away from some well resourced families.
- _lazlo 3y ago[dead]