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Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! That's the only fair way. Also, a

Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.

s1artibartfast 2y ago
Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige. High cost and exclusivity is the entire point. A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  > universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige. I like to call this "resort-style education".
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe? I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    Good question. I wonder if labor competition in Europe is less reliant on University names and reputation? IT could also have to do with cultural difference is what students look for in a university. My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience. The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
    - nextos 2y ago
      Oxford doesn't pay staff well unless you are in the top of the pyramid, i.e. a professor. Paradoxically those tend to contribute less to education. Senior postdocs and fellows do a significant amount of teaching but their salaries are incredibly low. You need to make lots of life compromises to be able to sustain yourself at one of those. For example, fellows teaching at different colleges often get stipends and salaries in the range of £30-35,000 per year. Keep in mind that those fellowships require a PhD and a stellar CV. Most other British and EU universities suffer from the same issues. For more information, see this article at The Guardian, which generated lots of debate: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/nov/20/only-the-rich-can-afford-to-work-at-oxford-and-cambridge https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/no.... In a nutshell the article states that "[...] I no longer believe that early-career positions at Oxbridge universities are viable for individuals without independent financial means." Also "[...] the median non-professorial academic salary at Oxbridge is £45,000."
    - shiroiushi 2y ago
      >The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum. Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?
      - throwaway2037 2y ago
        I found this on Google: > According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for a professor at MIT is $114,792 per year, with a range of $94,500 to $179,500. And: > A professor's salary at the University of Oxford can range from around £89,429 to £122,261 per year, with an average of £104,347 The average at Oxford is much higher than MIT. Note: GBP to USD is currently 1.27
        2y ago
- currymj 2y ago
  actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I was speaking to the US situation, and agree most European schools are quite cheap in comparison. Not only in tuition, but in terms of their budgets; US schools spend 4-5X as much per student- so it isnt just about state funding.
    - foobarian 2y ago
      Guessing those schools can't provide access to the exclusive social network you get by restricting admissions.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I'm sure you can get some exclusive networking done at Oxford, with 25% the cost per student as MIT.
  - linksnapzz 2y ago
    Education quality, especially adjusting for tuition, doesn't correlate to prestige. Which, after WWII, almost required "Anglophone" as the language of instruction.
  - vinay427 2y ago
    They’re also significant funded by the state particularly as they’re the two federal universities. The figure I heard while there, although I can’t find actual numbers online, was in the low tens of thousands in subsidies that may otherwise mostly be collected through tuition. Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.
itsoktocry 2y ago
>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
- shafyy 2y ago
  I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    I live in Belgium, we earn quite a lot less on average indeed. However why would we need so much money? We can go to hospital, or even 20 times visit a dentist for that matter, without expensive insurance and without the fear of bankruptcy. We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kintergarten.
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      > We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten. FYI: Public kindergarten is 100% paid for by gov't across the US. I don't think any public schools in the US have tuition. (That said, there is no magical money. It is paid for by local taxes.) Where did you hear about this myth? Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthcare system? If the barrier to entry for healthcare services is very low, then there must be (1) a lot of abuse... or (2) long waiting times... or (3) very high taxes. My guess in Belgium: A combination of (2) and (3).
      - jltsiren 2y ago
        Kindergarten means different things in different countries, and that's probably the source of confusion. In Europe, it usually means a program that gradually transitions from daycare to a proper pre-school as the kids get older. Starting ages vary, but it seems to be 2.5 years in Belgium.
MisterBastahrd 2y ago
Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I really think Freedom, the American way, is super overrated. If the cost is misery, fear of loss of health or job, what's left of Its benefits? "I'm the chosen one protected by God"? Or does social security still have this huge connotation with communism? Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.
  - bdangubic 2y ago
    America is “free” might be one of the funniest things Americans believe…
    - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
      Having lived under a dictatorship I find it very offensive when people claim America isn’t free. Get some perspective please.
      - bdangubic 2y ago
        I have as well and it is a toss-up whether or not I would trade it :)
inglor_cz 2y ago
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries. As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too. Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  30 minutes does not seem too bad. Unless you paid a lot for the dorm.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    It wasn't meant as a complaint. 30 minutes is fine, even though the route led through some less-beautiful parts of Prague.
bobmcnamara 2y ago
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism. One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students. At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a world power and a great place to live.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      F*k that liberal education. Fruit picking is for Americans, dammit!
    - nuancebydefault 2y ago
      To me it is totally incomprehensible what happened. The only pro Trump reasoning I read was along the line of 'I don't care about all this guns/abortion/woke/climate stuff, I just want my taxes to be lower.' To me that sounds like a little child crying: I just want to go to bed late and eat candy all day. No one is going to take away those candy rights written in the xxth amendment.
      - 2y ago
currymj 2y ago
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people. american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees. it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
- hooo 2y ago
  Why should college be very expensive for rich people?
  - analog31 2y ago
    According to the old story, the New York Times asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks. The answer: Because that's where the money is. The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government. Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.
    - estebank 2y ago
      > The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government. That's what taxes are for: you take proportionally more from people with more assets. I find the entire conversation about "not wanting my tax dollars to pay for some millionaire's kids' education", because those millionaires would end up paying the difference in taxes (under a fair system) than they do now. That's without even considering the perverse incentives at play when a wealthy parent can use the payment or withholding of payment for education as a way to control their kids. Just because a parent is wealthy it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid would have access to those funds, or that explicit or implicit requirements that could be imposed to access those funds would be reasonable.
dec0dedab0de 2y ago
We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine. The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
- jhbadger 2y ago
  Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but not 5X (it's more like 2.5X).
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  The cheapest you're going to get is $10K a year (and that's hard to find), and that's just tuition. If it's not near your parents' home then you're looking at $25K/year bare minimum (as in living off ramen packs and peanut butter). So that's $100K that your parents have to have saved up (per child) or which you have to take on as debt. Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.
  - freeopinion 2y ago
    It is possible to go to a top-100 school for under $5K/year tuition. Tens of thousands of people do it every year.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      sure; my daughter went to a top-30 school for $0 on a full-ride scholarship What I was talking about what you expect to pay if 1) you don't have scholarships, and 2) you're not low income enough to qualify for a lot of financial aid (Pell Grant and matching grants from state schools)
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
sunshowers 2y ago
Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined
- corimaith 2y ago
  Funnily enough, if you think about for networking you'd much rather be surrounded by kids who can afford that 200k price tag upfront.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    That depends who you are. You want to be surrounded by kids who have assets you don't. If you're there on an academic scholarship, you want rich contacts. If you're there on family prestige, you want capable contacts. If you're there on a need-based scholarship, you need both kinds, but neither of them need you.
  - baq 2y ago
    Networking is a way to maximize your optionality. If you limit your network you limit your potential options. Rich kids have more options and there’s absolutely zero downside to being exposed to some of them. (Don’t confuse with actually exercising them when they appear, I’m just talking about having them.)
Nifty3929 2y ago
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better. College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
- Figs 2y ago
  > If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive. ...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive. e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1&year=1960 https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
  - mminer237 2y ago
    Tuition is like 3–5 times the price even adjusted for inflation though
  - baq 2y ago
    Costs ballooned in real terms.
  - mportela 2y ago
    Sure, but education (and healthcare) costs grew much faster than the inflation. "The average annual cost of tuition at a public 4-year college is 40 times higher than tuition in 1963. (...) After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963." https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
- 2y ago
Hilift 2y ago
Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.
0xEF 2y ago
The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.

s1artibartfast 2y ago

Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige. High cost and exclusivity is the entire point. A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige. I like to call this "resort-style education".
nuancebydefault 2y ago
Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe? I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  Good question. I wonder if labor competition in Europe is less reliant on University names and reputation? IT could also have to do with cultural difference is what students look for in a university. My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience. The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
  - nextos 2y ago
    Oxford doesn't pay staff well unless you are in the top of the pyramid, i.e. a professor. Paradoxically those tend to contribute less to education. Senior postdocs and fellows do a significant amount of teaching but their salaries are incredibly low. You need to make lots of life compromises to be able to sustain yourself at one of those. For example, fellows teaching at different colleges often get stipends and salaries in the range of £30-35,000 per year. Keep in mind that those fellowships require a PhD and a stellar CV. Most other British and EU universities suffer from the same issues. For more information, see this article at The Guardian, which generated lots of debate: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/nov/20/only-the-rich-can-afford-to-work-at-oxford-and-cambridge https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/no.... In a nutshell the article states that "[...] I no longer believe that early-career positions at Oxbridge universities are viable for individuals without independent financial means." Also "[...] the median non-professorial academic salary at Oxbridge is £45,000."
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum. Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?
    - throwaway2037 2y ago
      I found this on Google: > According to ZipRecruiter, the average salary for a professor at MIT is $114,792 per year, with a range of $94,500 to $179,500. And: > A professor's salary at the University of Oxford can range from around £89,429 to £122,261 per year, with an average of £104,347 The average at Oxford is much higher than MIT. Note: GBP to USD is currently 1.27
      - 2y ago
currymj 2y ago
actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I was speaking to the US situation, and agree most European schools are quite cheap in comparison. Not only in tuition, but in terms of their budgets; US schools spend 4-5X as much per student- so it isnt just about state funding.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    Guessing those schools can't provide access to the exclusive social network you get by restricting admissions.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I'm sure you can get some exclusive networking done at Oxford, with 25% the cost per student as MIT.
- linksnapzz 2y ago
  Education quality, especially adjusting for tuition, doesn't correlate to prestige. Which, after WWII, almost required "Anglophone" as the language of instruction.
- vinay427 2y ago
  They’re also significant funded by the state particularly as they’re the two federal universities. The figure I heard while there, although I can’t find actual numbers online, was in the low tens of thousands in subsidies that may otherwise mostly be collected through tuition. Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.

itsoktocry 2y ago

>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone! I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.

shafyy 2y ago
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
- nuancebydefault 2y ago
  I live in Belgium, we earn quite a lot less on average indeed. However why would we need so much money? We can go to hospital, or even 20 times visit a dentist for that matter, without expensive insurance and without the fear of bankruptcy. We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kintergarten.
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    > We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten. FYI: Public kindergarten is 100% paid for by gov't across the US. I don't think any public schools in the US have tuition. (That said, there is no magical money. It is paid for by local taxes.) Where did you hear about this myth? Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthcare system? If the barrier to entry for healthcare services is very low, then there must be (1) a lot of abuse... or (2) long waiting times... or (3) very high taxes. My guess in Belgium: A combination of (2) and (3).
    - jltsiren 2y ago
      Kindergarten means different things in different countries, and that's probably the source of confusion. In Europe, it usually means a program that gradually transitions from daycare to a proper pre-school as the kids get older. Starting ages vary, but it seems to be 2.5 years in Belgium.

MisterBastahrd 2y ago

Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.

nuancebydefault 2y ago
I really think Freedom, the American way, is super overrated. If the cost is misery, fear of loss of health or job, what's left of Its benefits? "I'm the chosen one protected by God"? Or does social security still have this huge connotation with communism? Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.
- bdangubic 2y ago
  America is “free” might be one of the funniest things Americans believe…
  - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
    Having lived under a dictatorship I find it very offensive when people claim America isn’t free. Get some perspective please.
    - bdangubic 2y ago
      I have as well and it is a toss-up whether or not I would trade it :)

inglor_cz 2y ago

American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries. As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too. Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.

nuancebydefault 2y ago
30 minutes does not seem too bad. Unless you paid a lot for the dorm.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  It wasn't meant as a complaint. 30 minutes is fine, even though the route led through some less-beautiful parts of Prague.

bobmcnamara 2y ago

Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism. One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students. At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.

nuancebydefault 2y ago
A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a world power and a great place to live.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    F*k that liberal education. Fruit picking is for Americans, dammit!
  - nuancebydefault 2y ago
    To me it is totally incomprehensible what happened. The only pro Trump reasoning I read was along the line of 'I don't care about all this guns/abortion/woke/climate stuff, I just want my taxes to be lower.' To me that sounds like a little child crying: I just want to go to bed late and eat candy all day. No one is going to take away those candy rights written in the xxth amendment.
    - 2y ago

currymj 2y ago

the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people. american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees. it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.

hooo 2y ago
Why should college be very expensive for rich people?
- analog31 2y ago
  According to the old story, the New York Times asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks. The answer: Because that's where the money is. The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government. Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.
  - estebank 2y ago
    > The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government. That's what taxes are for: you take proportionally more from people with more assets. I find the entire conversation about "not wanting my tax dollars to pay for some millionaire's kids' education", because those millionaires would end up paying the difference in taxes (under a fair system) than they do now. That's without even considering the perverse incentives at play when a wealthy parent can use the payment or withholding of payment for education as a way to control their kids. Just because a parent is wealthy it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid would have access to those funds, or that explicit or implicit requirements that could be imposed to access those funds would be reasonable.

dec0dedab0de 2y ago

We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine. The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.

jhbadger 2y ago
Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but not 5X (it's more like 2.5X).
insane_dreamer 2y ago
The cheapest you're going to get is $10K a year (and that's hard to find), and that's just tuition. If it's not near your parents' home then you're looking at $25K/year bare minimum (as in living off ramen packs and peanut butter). So that's $100K that your parents have to have saved up (per child) or which you have to take on as debt. Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.
- freeopinion 2y ago
  It is possible to go to a top-100 school for under $5K/year tuition. Tens of thousands of people do it every year.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    sure; my daughter went to a top-30 school for $0 on a full-ride scholarship What I was talking about what you expect to pay if 1) you don't have scholarships, and 2) you're not low income enough to qualify for a lot of financial aid (Pell Grant and matching grants from state schools)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

sunshowers 2y ago

Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.

wholinator2 2y ago
I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined
corimaith 2y ago
Funnily enough, if you think about for networking you'd much rather be surrounded by kids who can afford that 200k price tag upfront.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  That depends who you are. You want to be surrounded by kids who have assets you don't. If you're there on an academic scholarship, you want rich contacts. If you're there on family prestige, you want capable contacts. If you're there on a need-based scholarship, you need both kinds, but neither of them need you.
- baq 2y ago
  Networking is a way to maximize your optionality. If you limit your network you limit your potential options. Rich kids have more options and there’s absolutely zero downside to being exposed to some of them. (Don’t confuse with actually exercising them when they appear, I’m just talking about having them.)

Nifty3929 2y ago

Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better. College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.

Figs 2y ago
> If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive. ...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive. e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1&year=1960 https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
- mminer237 2y ago
  Tuition is like 3–5 times the price even adjusted for inflation though
- baq 2y ago
  Costs ballooned in real terms.
- mportela 2y ago
  Sure, but education (and healthcare) costs grew much faster than the inflation. "The average annual cost of tuition at a public 4-year college is 40 times higher than tuition in 1963. (...) After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963." https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
2y ago

Hilift 2y ago

Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.

0xEF 2y ago

The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.