9 ms·
After being frustrated for many years by the rising cost of college, I've internally decided to flip the questions. - Why would college tuition decrease? - Wh
by skadamat 3y ago
After 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!
- pc86 3y agoEvery time someone mentions prices going up even slightly there's at least one person who is convinced it's because of Nixon, or the gold standard, or too much cryptocurrency, or not enough cryptocurrency, or something else vaguely related to those.
- astura 3y agoIt's just your typical "gold standard conspiracy" boogyman. https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98G07F/ https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE98G07F/
- colechristensen 3y agoReduce the amount students can borrow for college, that’s it. If you give people ever increasing amounts of money to acquire something that society convinces them they need, the price will keep going up as the loan money available goes up. It’s just being sucked into bullshit administration and infrastructure costs. A university could be a few dozen professors, zero admin besides secretaries for the professors, and having the professors share whatever small organizational tasks are actually necessary. Like think of how you would run a startup university. Do as little as possible outside of actual teaching and research, charge tuition to cover costs which would be much lower. There’s not any competition though. So it’s not happening.
- pc86 3y agoI agree with the general thrust of your argument but it's oversimplifying the causes. A real university would not be able to run with just professors and secretaries, that's ludicrous. You need some administration to handle compliance, organization, finance, etc. You can both acknowledge the objective reality that a university is a complex organization that needs administration and that most universities today have 3-4x more administrators than they need.
- colechristensen 3y agoAnd why couldn’t the professor or two who teach finance be responsible for the university’s finances?
- pc86 3y agoSurely you're not implying that every person with a PhD in something is an excellent practitioner of that thing. Most aren't. They shouldn't be - their job is primarily research on that thing, and teaching that thing. Not every finance professor can manage a multi-billion dollar budget, not every Political Science professor can manage a campaign or run for office, not every Comp Sci professor can maintain a university network, etc. Not to mention the fact that not every college will even have a professor for every discipline that you could theoretically use to replace an administrator.
- d--b 3y agoBecause not everything in life should be driven by optimizing profit?
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y agoParent comment is probably not arguing in favor of overpriced college, just saying the situation won’t resolve naturally
- d--b 3y agoI'm saying it may resolve naturally, if any of the overpriced university decides that over charging for education is not in line with their ethics.
- readyman 3y agoSounds pretty short-sighted. Capitalism is not a system we can simply opt out of, and regardless one university is just one university.
- stuartjohnson12 3y agoThis is a normative claim, which therefore cannot answer questions about what is, or what could be.
- pc86 3y ago#2 and #3 both have simple answers - "Nothing," and "Eliminate the free money buffet of federally guaranteed loans that can't be discharged by anything short of death." "Eliminate 80% of administrators" would also help with #3 but there's no incentive to do that, especially without the more direct answer to #3 happening first.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoThat’s just attacking the bottom of the ladder. Taking a resource away from the common people is not a nice policy to pursue. The schools are the ones raising prices. What exactly about teaching a bunch of kids in one room at a time has gotten (checks notes) 300%??? more expensive in the last 20 years? The workforce is not even doing that good, the competition for few permanent positions is fierce and the compensation outside of management is low compared to other industries.
- ravelfan 3y agoIMO there is no hope. We have a culture that values college degrees, no matter how useless, as some kind of high moral good. To take away student loans then is a form of evil. First, you would have to ban discrimination against people without college degrees. You can't discriminate against people without college degrees and then complain college degrees are expensive lol.
- Tiktaalik 3y agoJust in general I would like to say that flipping the question like this is a great way to look at all aspects of a problem. Similarly "why would the price of housing decrease?" etc
- lukas099 3y ago> What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year? If a school doubled tuition, it would be less competitive and fewer of the best students would choose to apply and enroll there. That would make that school less elite. > What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition? Increased supply and/or lowered demand.
- pc86 3y agoHarvard could triple its tuition and the same people are going to apply to Harvard.
- gnicholas 3y agoThis would be true for those whose contribution would be capped based on parental earnings/assets, since their effective price would not increase. And it would be true for extremely wealthy folks whose parents can spend $1M on college and not worry about it. But for the marginal applicants who would be paying full freight under the old price but can't easily toss out another $150k/yr on tuition, there would definitely be a drop in application rates.
- finolex1 3y agoThey might apply, but certainly won't attend if they are admitted to Stanford, Yale, etc. The higher the price differential, the more likely people would be willing to take a 'prestige' hit and go to the lower cost school. Anyone applying from a family making 400k a year (top 2%) would still be sensitive to an 80k vs 240k/year sticker price change.
- TuringNYC 3y agoOperation Varsity Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal) suggests there are plenty of individuals willing to pay plenty more. Some would even break the law and risk prison. If it were legal, probably many more would pay. There are just the people who got caught!
- bnralt 3y ago> - What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition? Decoupling education from certification would work. Most people are willing to pay so much for college because they need certification; they're forced to pay for the education, whether or not they actually learn anything. The Federal government could mandate that any school that's eligible for funds has to make the certification open to anyone, and also make sure that the certifications themselves around coupled together (you don't need a certification in Art History to get certified in Biochemistry). If people can pass the Harvard certification for, say, Harvard Astrophysics, then they get a Harvard Astrophysics degree the same as someone who took classes at Harvard and passed the certification. It's known that bundling items together is usually a good way to force people to buy things they don't want. People talk about this all the time when it comes to cable bundles. But our higher education system is based on bundling a lot of things together, so when people are trying to acquire what they need, they're forced to pay for many things they don't.
- OkayPhysicist 3y agoThe resulting certifications would be worth approximately the same amount as the existing online-only degrees. Basically ticking the box for "college educated", but be passed over on any further scrutiny than that. Because the selling point of prestigious schools is the filtering and networking.
- totalhack 3y agoI'm not opposed to any attempt to remove the need for these full college degrees as a hiring requirement, but this also ignores that the point of many colleges is the network. You are paying to be part of a club.
- miki123211 3y agoI don't think you're wrong, but I think that food and accommodations would be better places to start the unbundling with. A lot of US schools require you to live on campus and pay for campus food, which is a perfect example of bundling if there ever was one. As a European, the fact this is legal seems absurd and ridiculous to me.
- 3y ago
- red-iron-pine 3y ago> - Why would college tuition decrease? in theory, because of a few factors 1) more kids doing online, or community college, degrees 2) more people opting to go into the trades, as AI eats knowledge workers and the cost-benefit doesn't make sense; or else skipping and going straight to certifications for things like IT 3) legal or structural changes impacting how many international and out-of-state students are allowed. many public universities operate at a loss for locals, but subsidize those costs with higher fees for out of state and international students. 4) the gub'mnt finally gets around to rejecting or capping a lot of student loan applications Been seeing a lot of chat about #1 and #2, but until the last two get changed I don't think anything will drastically improve
- nameless912 3y ago> - Why would college tuition decrease? The only answer I can think of is strong and swift government regulation, and there's no appetite for that, so...I dunno man.
- gnicholas 3y agoTuition could decrease because of the growing sense that college is not 'worth it'. > A poll published in 2022 asked parents if they would rather their child attended a four-year college or a three-year apprenticeship that would train them for a job and pay them while they learned. Nearly half of parents whose child had graduated from college chose the apprenticeship. [1] > Nearly half of parents say they would prefer not to send their children to a four-year college after high school, even if there were no obstacles, financial or otherwise. Two-thirds of high-school students think they will be just fine without a college degree. [1] When there is a large change in the demand for a product, the price often drops. 1: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/why-americans-have-lost-faith-in-the-value-of-college-b6b635f2 https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/why-americans-have-los...
- Manuel_D 3y agoYou'd think that college tuition would decrease in the US because university enrollment has actually been on a downward trend for over a decade. However, in the US university primarily serve as social signalling and an elite prestigious university is a very different type of product than a typical university (most of which are not particularly exclusive, admitting over 70% of applicants). Presumably, competition prevents this. It would really depend on the applicants' other options. Between attending Vanderbilt at $200K per year and a moderately less prestigious state university for about an order of magnitude less a lot of students would pick the latter. The university could admit more students that are willing to pay the doubled tuition, but that'd probably result in lower graduate quality. I'm not sure what could make elite universities lower their tuition save for legislation. As the Varsity Blues scandal demonstrated, families are willing to pay huge sums of money to get their kids into elite university. Besides laws, the only other answer I can think of is to reduce the prestige of elite universities. If an Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT diploma ceases to confer so much advantage in academia and the labor market then their ability to charge large sums would go down.
- lupire 3y agoUniversity enrollment is down way at the bottom end where schools are shutting down. So supply is dropping instead of prices, as economics expects.
- fancyfredbot 3y agoThis is a great question. - Why would college tuition decrease? 1) College tuition would decrease if it led to increased profit for the college. This could happen for many reasons including the case that they can't find enough students willing to pay. - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year? 2) Mostly the fear that it would reduce profits - for example through bad publicity, increased regulation, or an inability to find students willing to pay -What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their tuition? 3) market forces - on the demand side a decrease in students willing to pay, or maybe on the supply side an increase in competition for students. Or maybe government/regulatory interventions. Or possibly even a reduction in the costs of providing education.
- dan-robertson 3y agoWhat does it mean for a school like Harvard to make a profit? Why do they want to do that?
- StressedDev 3y agoThey won't call it a profit. What they will do is spend as much as they can on salaries (especially for the senior employees), increasing the size of the administration (more jobs for insiders), buildings, sports, etc. Basically, people think non-profit means the organization works for the public or puts the public first. Unfortunately, what it often means is money goes to employees and insiders instead of shareholders. For colleges, it means the students (and the Federal Government which issued the student loads) comes last and the college's employees come first. Not great public policy.
- kristopolous 3y agoThis is why running things that aren't a business "like a business" is profoundly dangerous and destructive and anybody advocating it should be dismissed as ideologically driven.
- 3y ago
- quickthrowman 3y ago> - Why would college tuition decrease? The single change that would cause the largest downward pressure on college pricing would be removing federally subsidized student loans.
- readyman 3y agoSocialism makes a lot more sense when you realize that all the rigging to make people feel good about capitalism results in the same structure simply because anything else would not be permitted.
- TuringNYC 3y ago>> - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their tuition in a single year? It is effectively double -- the rest of the "tuition" is legacy contribution. There is an entire standard contribution schedule based on how many years out of college you are. Many legacy parents pay hoping this gets their children into the school when the time comes.