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1.) No. 2.) False. There are waaaaaaay too many professors, to the point where most aren't tenured and make barely livable wages. There is a limited supply of
by stefan_kendall3 13y ago
1.) No.
2.) False. There are waaaaaaay too many professors, to the point where most aren't tenured and make barely livable wages. There is a limited supply of universities, but it seems like most collude on prices, or at least refuse to compete on price. At any rate, universities seem to scale pretty well to handle extremely large population bodies, aside from a few statistical outliers that don't matter for this conversation.
3.) Demand has been constant for a while, along with supply. Easy credit is the driver of price change here, not a radical shift in supply or demand.
4.) "We are trying to increase supply". Education isn't what's lacking. You can learn a lot from independent study and books. What's lacking is degree factories. MOOCs aren't degree farms, so they are not an equivalent good.
- spacehome 13y agoWhy would universities need to compete on price if there are surplus qualified professors? It sounds like the low wages are a function of excess supply.
- stefan_kendall3 13y agoMost universities staff up to handle as many students as they wish. They have a glut of students. In this environment, you would expect more universities to flood the market to capitalize on the high profit, but that isn't happening. There is an excess supply of professors, but not universities. This might be due to regulation, accreditation, high capital demand, and or the inability to create a lean university that just offered specific curricula. Is it so absurd to think a CS degree could happen entirely online and mostly asynchronously? I don't think so, but it hasn't happened well yet. So high barriers of entry + inelastic demand because easy credit = no universities created to drive down price.