9 ms·

So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??

by soup10 12y ago

prostoalex 12y ago
http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/07/31/14406/three-coaches-on-university-of-california-top-5-pa/ http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/07/31/14406/three-c... In America, an institution of higher learning is not respected until they have a few sports teams with coaches, athletic directors, supporting staff, facilities staff and subsidies in the form of athletic scholarships.
cheepin 12y ago
Research, Sports, executive salaries. There are a lot of costs besides teacher's salaries.
- dec0dedab0de 12y ago
  I thought sports were mainly profit centers.
  - cheepin 12y ago
    Not exactly true: http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-Cow2.aspx http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar...
  - tomsthumb 12y ago
    Only for certain, usually large, schools
  - bilbo0s 12y ago
    Only for the major unis. For everyone else... I'm pretty sure sports COSTS money. That said... keeping a few young ladies running track can't possibly be the cause of the imbalance people are talking about. I'm pretty sure the money is sucked up by administrative and non instructional staff. But without the spreadsheets it is difficult to say anything with certainty.
  - InclinedPlane 12y ago
    Not usually. Most colleges don't have popular enough teams to turn a profit. And at the ones that do most of the profit ends up being spent on the sports teams (popular teams need big, modern, expensive stadiums). Almost no money flows from sports to education. At best there's an argument that sports helps drive enrollment and helps drive alumni donations. Though even then because of the cost of most sports programs it's questionable whether or not they break even on average.
- wldcordeiro 12y ago
  The latter two are the one's that should be most limited.
- pkaye 12y ago
  I thought research was funded through grants and sports was self funding?
  - throwketchup 12y ago
    Research is typically a profit center for the university. The standard cut (known as "overhead" in the biz) is 30% of research grants. Capital equipment (typically defined as stuff costing more than X dollars) is taxed at a lower rate (usually 10%). Research assistantships are also charged 30%. Also, any modification to lab facilities (electrical or carpentry for example) is usually required to be performed by university staff at a cost (to the grant) of around 2 to 3 times union rates.
  - epaladin 12y ago
    In the private university I work for (in research) the University keeps all patent revenue, keeps a portion of all grants, and requires the lab to pay for space- I was really surprised to find out how much went towards that. There's also a lot of really annoying charges, like costing $180 to reactivate ethernet jacks that they deactivate when a device hasn't been plugged into a port for three months.
- dustcoin 12y ago
  I doubt executive salaries make up a significant portion of any school's budget. Overpaid non-executive administrators are a much larger cost in aggregate, because there are so many of them.
  - ForHackernews 12y ago
    That's not quite true: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/higher-eds-for-profit-future/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/higher-eds-for-profit-fut... "compensation of a single person like Zimmer now approaches the reported inflation-adjusted $3 million annual operating deficit that ended a community resource benefiting both medical students and trauma patients."
    - dustcoin 12y ago
      UChicago spent $446M on academic salaries, $889M on staff salaries and $338M on benefits (not broken out into academic vs non-academic) in the the 2011-2012 fiscal year that Zimmer's compensation temporarily spiked to $3M. It is safe to say that over $1B was spent on non-academic salary and benefits (administration), which dwarfs both Zimmer's compensation and the $3M operating deficit. http://finserv.uchicago.edu/pdf/2012FinState.pdf http://finserv.uchicago.edu/pdf/2012FinState.pdf
      - ForHackernews 12y ago
        Yes, you're correct that Zimmer's compensation is less than the total salaries of every other person employed by the university. I guess we can argue about the meaning of the word "significant" now.
- umanwizard 12y ago
  Isn't "research" mainly professor and grad student salaries? What's the difference?
DennisP 12y ago
Meanwhile, Coursera has 677 courses available for free, many of them excellent. You don't get the diploma, but if the diploma is backed by lower-quality classes and grade inflation, that's going to matter less and less.
- Avshalom 12y ago
  And we don't have to pay any teachers.
  - QuantumChaos 12y ago
    Why should paying teachers be considered good in itself? Are you familiar with the First and Second Welfare Theorem in economics?
    - Avshalom 12y ago
      One the one hand it shouldn't. On their other hand it is bizarre to come into a thread about how teachers aren't getting paid despite school costs rising and present as an alternative paying teachers even less. On the gripping hand I'm not entirely sure what you think the welfare theorems have to do with this but its worth remember that they do not and quite likely cannot actually describe reality.
      - DennisP 12y ago
        The article wasn't just about the poor teachers. It also complained that students aren't getting value for their money. But my main point is this: given that good competition exists, if colleges don't fix this quality issue, enrollment will drop and the situation for their teachers will keep getting worse. (But professors at Coursera could get paid well for their efforts, if Coursera ends up with an effective business model.)
- dccoolgai 12y ago
  Thatks where I see huge potential for disruption to higher ed; I think some trusted or recognized source will make a lot of money by offering credentialing... I saw something about 'nanodegrees' from Udacity (or one of those). When the situation reaches the tipping point where it's a signal of mental paucity that you decided to take on 200k of debt for something you could have gotten for a lot less, I wonder what will happen...or how close we are to that point.
tammer 12y ago
It's very clear where it's going. The number of administrative staff at colleges and universities have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. Just like in the corporate world, corruption and the proliferation of unnecessary management have sucked revenue to the top. http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behind_the_three_decade_scheme_to_raise_tuition_bankrupt_generations_and_hypnotize_the_media/ http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  I took a look at CMU's financials and it definitely looks like the money is going towards salaries. They don't offer a breakdown between the different kinds of salaries, naturally. Does anyone know of a representative dataset (by "representative" I mean "not the UC system, not an ivy with >$10b endowment, etc") that would include this information? https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/financial-reporting/files/2012_annual_report.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/fin...
  - nkurz 12y ago
    Here are numbers for Duke and Barnard. I have no idea if they are representative, but they have respectively 10% and 5% of their total budget going to administration. The Barnard link has quite a depth of information. Duke: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-000-a-year-for-college-is-actually-a-discount http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-... Barnard: https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_book.pdf https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_boo...
    - Retric 12y ago
      That's not really true. Duke includes finical aid as a cost but that's not actual spending. So from the chart, 10/.76 = ~13% is administrative costs. Though the Text says out of 90k in spending $14,000 goes to pay a share of administrative and academic support salaries which puts just salary's for administration at 15.5 not including their share of the building etc. So, a reasonable estimate ~25-40% of each dollar actually spent goes to administration depending on where you draw the line. AKA is a dean Administration or Faculty. PS: Not that facility get to actually spend anywhere close to 100% of there time on teaching.
ryguytilidie 12y ago
Isn't this the same as most businesses? The price of good is going up, salaries are stagnant or falling. Where is all of this extra profit going?
mitosis 12y ago
University administrators, mostly. They outnumber faculty at many universities, and their salaries are rising fast.
a3n 12y ago
It takes a lot of administrators to figure out how to keep contingent lecturers at just under full time employment.
HarryHirsch 12y ago
To the taxpayers. The share of state and federal funding (both direct and through grants) has been declining steadily over the last twenty years. Your student loan debt may be crippling but aren't you glad that you get to pay lower taxes?
steven777400 12y ago
This is anecdotal only. I used to be a full-time college instructor, and I still teach there occasionally part-time and interact with my former colleagues. Since I've left, the college has added a number of full-time staff to media and eLearning (e.g. maintain the LMS, setup video recording and conferencing systems, etc) and, for every dean, there is now an assistant dean to help with administrative workload. Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.
noonespecial 12y ago
The problem is simple. Teachers teach because they want to teach, administrators "administrate" for the money. And that's where it goes. The market won't work right for teachers because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. To fix it will take more than administration. It will take leadership.
- zanny 12y ago
  > because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. Then I fail to see what the problem is. Obviously, there is an oversupply of teaching staff, or else wages would be higher since good professors would be a scarce commodity. That obviously is not the case, thus wages fall. I guess when you have an excess of a generation going to college on false debt, you get an excess of teachers too. I'd imagine of the college going populace instructors make up a significant fraction.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >Then I fail to see what the problem is. That's because you're thinking like a market rather than a human being.
    - thejdude 12y ago
      Wow. HN really IS the reddit of a few years ago... You can have your opinion, but if you can't behave in public, please bury your ad-hominem s___ in someone else's backyard.
      - base698 12y ago
        It's not really an ad hominem. I took it more as the reasoning in "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets."
        thejdude 12y ago
        Ok. It sounded pretty harsh over here. Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. Not all reasons or incentives for actions in a market have to be monetary. IOW: if something is of value to people, it will usually be done. If that doesn't happen, usually people say they want something, but do not really care that much.
aidenn0 12y ago
It's going to pay for things that the state used to pay for. The cost (to the school) of education at a state school has not gone up a lot versus inflation, but fraction of it paid for by the state has gone way down.
lurkinggrue 12y ago
Wall Street?
jckt 12y ago
I think another problem (though probably minor compared to the bloated bureaucracies everyone else is mentioning) is that the teaching quality doesn't matter as much to students these days. This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788 I feel bad for saying something like "kids these days" (I'm one of them, admittedly) but "fun" seems to be a big factor in a student's choice of a school today. Admittedly, this is mostly based on anecdote and stereotypes (I think there's a reason why "college life" is commonly associated with parties and frats). I won't say that the social aspect of education is unimportant, but it seems that rather than making the education itself more "fun", universities in the last few decades have gradually increased funding for recreational buildings, big events, frats, and sports [1], etc. Of course, I don't know how significant these costs actually are, and I'm happy to be convinced by some budgetary data if this is actually a non-issue. [1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athletics-cost-colleges-students-millions/2814455/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti...
- Double_Cast 12y ago
  > Wealth does not pass three generations. - Chinese proverb (Disclaimer: I'm one of them darned kids too.) I've only become aware of recently [1][2], but I've started to get the feeling that this "fun phenomenon" is something endemic to Generation Y. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u... [2] http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything. I haven't really investigated this theory in detail. But it agrees with my anecdotal experience and has a lot of explanatory power.
  - barry-cotter 12y ago
    > Wealth does not pass three generations. - Chinese proverb Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party. 〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything. Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates
tn13 12y ago
People do not get paid based on how much money the business makes. On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add. Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. I will not be surprised that a lot of college teachers teaching skills of no use are finding it hard to make enough money.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  > On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add. Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create. > Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. You seem to be awfully certain of that. Unless you meant to assume what you set out to prove (French lecturer is poorly paid => there isn't demand => poor pay is justified) I don't understand your argument. Clearly there is demand: sum up the price paid for the French credit by all the students in the class. There's just a middle man that skims a tremendous amount from the tuition paid for those credit hours before the money reaches the teacher / support staff.
  - shabadoop 12y ago
    Well, there is a huge surplus of PhD's in every field, and there is less industry demand for certain fields (French Lit, for example). This seems like a classic situation where certification in a professional association should be required to teach college, so there can be better collective bargaining at a national scale.
  - tn13 12y ago
    > Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create. That is rubbish, mostly the left liberal hippy logic. If a person is valuable there is always another competitor who will hire him for a higher pay to get the competitive advantage.
  - tn13 12y ago
delucain 12y ago
Generally, the cost of college tracks inflation. It's where the funding that is changing that makes it appear to increase. 40 years ago state funds paid for most state college costs (hence the name, "state" college"). Now, most states are broke and rapidly withdrawing most of the funding support from their universities, shifting costs to the students. Administrative staff costs are rising as well, but the tenure track professors are expected to do less and less administrative work, theoretically allowing them to teach more classes. I don't know how much this works though.
btbuildem 12y ago
Administration - top admins make orders of magnitude more than lecturers.
milesskorpen 12y ago
A lot of it is going to rising labor costs — while wages have largely been stagnant, health care, facilities, and insurance costs have not.

So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??

by soup10 12y ago

So the cost of college is skyrocketing and teachers are getting paid less and less. Where is the money going??

http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/07/31/14406/three-coaches-on-university-of-california-top-5-pa/ http://www.scpr.org/blogs/education/2013/07/31/14406/three-c... In America, an institution of higher learning is not respected until they have a few sports teams with coaches, athletic directors, supporting staff, facilities staff and subsidies in the form of athletic scholarships.

cheepin 12y ago

Research, Sports, executive salaries. There are a lot of costs besides teacher's salaries.

dec0dedab0de 12y ago
I thought sports were mainly profit centers.
- cheepin 12y ago
  Not exactly true: http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Are-a-Cash-Cow2.aspx http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Pages/Myth-College-Sports-Ar...
- tomsthumb 12y ago
  Only for certain, usually large, schools
- bilbo0s 12y ago
  Only for the major unis. For everyone else... I'm pretty sure sports COSTS money. That said... keeping a few young ladies running track can't possibly be the cause of the imbalance people are talking about. I'm pretty sure the money is sucked up by administrative and non instructional staff. But without the spreadsheets it is difficult to say anything with certainty.
- InclinedPlane 12y ago
  Not usually. Most colleges don't have popular enough teams to turn a profit. And at the ones that do most of the profit ends up being spent on the sports teams (popular teams need big, modern, expensive stadiums). Almost no money flows from sports to education. At best there's an argument that sports helps drive enrollment and helps drive alumni donations. Though even then because of the cost of most sports programs it's questionable whether or not they break even on average.
wldcordeiro 12y ago
The latter two are the one's that should be most limited.
pkaye 12y ago
I thought research was funded through grants and sports was self funding?
- throwketchup 12y ago
  Research is typically a profit center for the university. The standard cut (known as "overhead" in the biz) is 30% of research grants. Capital equipment (typically defined as stuff costing more than X dollars) is taxed at a lower rate (usually 10%). Research assistantships are also charged 30%. Also, any modification to lab facilities (electrical or carpentry for example) is usually required to be performed by university staff at a cost (to the grant) of around 2 to 3 times union rates.
- epaladin 12y ago
  In the private university I work for (in research) the University keeps all patent revenue, keeps a portion of all grants, and requires the lab to pay for space- I was really surprised to find out how much went towards that. There's also a lot of really annoying charges, like costing $180 to reactivate ethernet jacks that they deactivate when a device hasn't been plugged into a port for three months.
dustcoin 12y ago
I doubt executive salaries make up a significant portion of any school's budget. Overpaid non-executive administrators are a much larger cost in aggregate, because there are so many of them.
- ForHackernews 12y ago
  That's not quite true: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/higher-eds-for-profit-future/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/higher-eds-for-profit-fut... "compensation of a single person like Zimmer now approaches the reported inflation-adjusted $3 million annual operating deficit that ended a community resource benefiting both medical students and trauma patients."
  - dustcoin 12y ago
    UChicago spent $446M on academic salaries, $889M on staff salaries and $338M on benefits (not broken out into academic vs non-academic) in the the 2011-2012 fiscal year that Zimmer's compensation temporarily spiked to $3M. It is safe to say that over $1B was spent on non-academic salary and benefits (administration), which dwarfs both Zimmer's compensation and the $3M operating deficit. http://finserv.uchicago.edu/pdf/2012FinState.pdf http://finserv.uchicago.edu/pdf/2012FinState.pdf
    - ForHackernews 12y ago
      Yes, you're correct that Zimmer's compensation is less than the total salaries of every other person employed by the university. I guess we can argue about the meaning of the word "significant" now.
umanwizard 12y ago
Isn't "research" mainly professor and grad student salaries? What's the difference?

DennisP 12y ago

Meanwhile, Coursera has 677 courses available for free, many of them excellent. You don't get the diploma, but if the diploma is backed by lower-quality classes and grade inflation, that's going to matter less and less.

Avshalom 12y ago
And we don't have to pay any teachers.
- QuantumChaos 12y ago
  Why should paying teachers be considered good in itself? Are you familiar with the First and Second Welfare Theorem in economics?
  - Avshalom 12y ago
    One the one hand it shouldn't. On their other hand it is bizarre to come into a thread about how teachers aren't getting paid despite school costs rising and present as an alternative paying teachers even less. On the gripping hand I'm not entirely sure what you think the welfare theorems have to do with this but its worth remember that they do not and quite likely cannot actually describe reality.
    - DennisP 12y ago
      The article wasn't just about the poor teachers. It also complained that students aren't getting value for their money. But my main point is this: given that good competition exists, if colleges don't fix this quality issue, enrollment will drop and the situation for their teachers will keep getting worse. (But professors at Coursera could get paid well for their efforts, if Coursera ends up with an effective business model.)
dccoolgai 12y ago
Thatks where I see huge potential for disruption to higher ed; I think some trusted or recognized source will make a lot of money by offering credentialing... I saw something about 'nanodegrees' from Udacity (or one of those). When the situation reaches the tipping point where it's a signal of mental paucity that you decided to take on 200k of debt for something you could have gotten for a lot less, I wonder what will happen...or how close we are to that point.

tammer 12y ago

It's very clear where it's going. The number of administrative staff at colleges and universities have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. Just like in the corporate world, corruption and the proliferation of unnecessary management have sucked revenue to the top. http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behind_the_three_decade_scheme_to_raise_tuition_bankrupt_generations_and_hypnotize_the_media/ http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behi...

jjoonathan 12y ago
I took a look at CMU's financials and it definitely looks like the money is going towards salaries. They don't offer a breakdown between the different kinds of salaries, naturally. Does anyone know of a representative dataset (by "representative" I mean "not the UC system, not an ivy with >$10b endowment, etc") that would include this information? https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/financial-reporting/files/2012_annual_report.pdf https://www.cmu.edu/finance/reporting-and-incoming-funds/fin...
- nkurz 12y ago
  Here are numbers for Duke and Barnard. I have no idea if they are representative, but they have respectively 10% and 5% of their total budget going to administration. The Barnard link has quite a depth of information. Duke: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-000-a-year-for-college-is-actually-a-discount http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-... Barnard: https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_book.pdf https://barnard.edu/sites/default/files/inline/2012_data_boo...
  - Retric 12y ago
    That's not really true. Duke includes finical aid as a cost but that's not actual spending. So from the chart, 10/.76 = ~13% is administrative costs. Though the Text says out of 90k in spending $14,000 goes to pay a share of administrative and academic support salaries which puts just salary's for administration at 15.5 not including their share of the building etc. So, a reasonable estimate ~25-40% of each dollar actually spent goes to administration depending on where you draw the line. AKA is a dean Administration or Faculty. PS: Not that facility get to actually spend anywhere close to 100% of there time on teaching.

ryguytilidie 12y ago

Isn't this the same as most businesses? The price of good is going up, salaries are stagnant or falling. Where is all of this extra profit going?

mitosis 12y ago

University administrators, mostly. They outnumber faculty at many universities, and their salaries are rising fast.

a3n 12y ago

It takes a lot of administrators to figure out how to keep contingent lecturers at just under full time employment.

HarryHirsch 12y ago

To the taxpayers. The share of state and federal funding (both direct and through grants) has been declining steadily over the last twenty years. Your student loan debt may be crippling but aren't you glad that you get to pay lower taxes?

steven777400 12y ago

This is anecdotal only. I used to be a full-time college instructor, and I still teach there occasionally part-time and interact with my former colleagues. Since I've left, the college has added a number of full-time staff to media and eLearning (e.g. maintain the LMS, setup video recording and conferencing systems, etc) and, for every dean, there is now an assistant dean to help with administrative workload. Meanwhile, whole programs at the college are being shutdown or targeted for shutdown, with the corresponding faculty laid off.

noonespecial 12y ago

The problem is simple. Teachers teach because they want to teach, administrators "administrate" for the money. And that's where it goes. The market won't work right for teachers because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. To fix it will take more than administration. It will take leadership.

zanny 12y ago
> because some of them would do it for free if they had some other way to eat. Then I fail to see what the problem is. Obviously, there is an oversupply of teaching staff, or else wages would be higher since good professors would be a scarce commodity. That obviously is not the case, thus wages fall. I guess when you have an excess of a generation going to college on false debt, you get an excess of teachers too. I'd imagine of the college going populace instructors make up a significant fraction.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >Then I fail to see what the problem is. That's because you're thinking like a market rather than a human being.
  - thejdude 12y ago
    Wow. HN really IS the reddit of a few years ago... You can have your opinion, but if you can't behave in public, please bury your ad-hominem s___ in someone else's backyard.
    - base698 12y ago
      It's not really an ad hominem. I took it more as the reasoning in "What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets."
      - thejdude 12y ago
        Ok. It sounded pretty harsh over here. Regarding markets: they are only the sum of the people that constitute them. Not all reasons or incentives for actions in a market have to be monetary. IOW: if something is of value to people, it will usually be done. If that doesn't happen, usually people say they want something, but do not really care that much.

aidenn0 12y ago

It's going to pay for things that the state used to pay for. The cost (to the school) of education at a state school has not gone up a lot versus inflation, but fraction of it paid for by the state has gone way down.

lurkinggrue 12y ago

Wall Street?

jckt 12y ago

I think another problem (though probably minor compared to the bloated bureaucracies everyone else is mentioning) is that the teaching quality doesn't matter as much to students these days. This is a UK source, but I think it reflects the view of most students in the West: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-14616788 I feel bad for saying something like "kids these days" (I'm one of them, admittedly) but "fun" seems to be a big factor in a student's choice of a school today. Admittedly, this is mostly based on anecdote and stereotypes (I think there's a reason why "college life" is commonly associated with parties and frats). I won't say that the social aspect of education is unimportant, but it seems that rather than making the education itself more "fun", universities in the last few decades have gradually increased funding for recreational buildings, big events, frats, and sports [1], etc. Of course, I don't know how significant these costs actually are, and I'm happy to be convinced by some budgetary data if this is actually a non-issue. [1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athletics-cost-colleges-students-millions/2814455/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/athleti...

Double_Cast 12y ago
> Wealth does not pass three generations. - Chinese proverb (Disclaimer: I'm one of them darned kids too.) I've only become aware of recently [1][2], but I've started to get the feeling that this "fun phenomenon" is something endemic to Generation Y. [1] http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-unhappy.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u... [2] http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html http://ejmas.com/pt/2012pt/ptart_tong_teacher24-1210.html tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything. I haven't really investigated this theory in detail. But it agrees with my anecdotal experience and has a lot of explanatory power.
- barry-cotter 12y ago
  > Wealth does not pass three generations. - Chinese proverb Not true. Gregory Clark has an awesome book on this, The Son Also Rises. Social status has a heritability of 0.7ish in every society he measured it in. That's almost as high as the upper bound estimate for IQ. To give an idea of how powerful heritability of social status/roles is consider this: Norman surnames are over represented among the battlefield casualties of WW1 and 2 for the UK. Nearly a thousand years later a prospensity for organised violence lives on. And despite the Cultural Revolution and 30 years of Communism, the same surnames that were over represented among the Mandarins of Qing China are over represented among the upper echelons of today's Communist Party. 〉tl;dr = Generation 1 builds wealth from scratch, Gen 2 is inspired by the raw dedication of the first, but Gen 3 never meets Gen 1 and feels entitled and lazy and squanders everything. Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers. -- Socrates

tn13 12y ago

People do not get paid based on how much money the business makes. On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add. Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. I will not be surprised that a lot of college teachers teaching skills of no use are finding it hard to make enough money.

jjoonathan 12y ago
> On the other hand they get paid based on how much value they add. Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create. > Someone whose skill is French Language is surely is not much worth compared to someone who knows how to make pancakes. You seem to be awfully certain of that. Unless you meant to assume what you set out to prove (French lecturer is poorly paid => there isn't demand => poor pay is justified) I don't understand your argument. Clearly there is demand: sum up the price paid for the French credit by all the students in the class. There's just a middle man that skims a tremendous amount from the tuition paid for those credit hours before the money reaches the teacher / support staff.
- shabadoop 12y ago
  Well, there is a huge surplus of PhD's in every field, and there is less industry demand for certain fields (French Lit, for example). This seems like a classic situation where certification in a professional association should be required to teach college, so there can be better collective bargaining at a national scale.
- tn13 12y ago
  > Nope. That only happens if they're scarce. If they aren't scarce (or are otherwise deleveraged) they get paid minimum wage regardless of the value they create. That is rubbish, mostly the left liberal hippy logic. If a person is valuable there is always another competitor who will hire him for a higher pay to get the competitive advantage.
- tn13 12y ago

delucain 12y ago

Generally, the cost of college tracks inflation. It's where the funding that is changing that makes it appear to increase. 40 years ago state funds paid for most state college costs (hence the name, "state" college"). Now, most states are broke and rapidly withdrawing most of the funding support from their universities, shifting costs to the students. Administrative staff costs are rising as well, but the tenure track professors are expected to do less and less administrative work, theoretically allowing them to teach more classes. I don't know how much this works though.

btbuildem 12y ago

Administration - top admins make orders of magnitude more than lecturers.

milesskorpen 12y ago

A lot of it is going to rising labor costs — while wages have largely been stagnant, health care, facilities, and insurance costs have not.