Colleges Spend Like There's No Tomorrow. (wsj.com) 262
The nation's best-known public universities have been on an unfettered spending spree. Over the past two decades, they erected new skylines comprising snazzy academic buildings and dorms. They poured money into big-time sports programs and hired layers of administrators. Then they passed the bill along to students. From a report: The University of Kentucky upgraded its campus to the tune of $805,000 a day for more than a decade. Its freshmen, who come from one of America's poorest states, paid an average $18,693 to attend in 2021-22.
Pennsylvania State University spent so much money that it now has a budget crisis -- even though it's among the most expensive public universities in the U.S.
The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program. The spending is inextricably tied to the nation's $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.
It has long been clear to American families that the cost of college has gone up, even at public schools designed to be affordable for state residents. To get at the root cause, The Wall Street Journal examined financial statements since 2002 from 50 universities known as flagships, typically the oldest public school in each state, and adjusted for inflation. At the median flagship university, spending rose 38% between 2002 and 2022. Only one school in the Journal's analysis -- the University of Idaho -- spent less. The schools paid for it in part by pulling in tuition dollars. The median flagship received more than double the revenue from undergraduate and graduate tuition and fees it did 20 years prior. Even accounting for enrollment gains, that amounted to a 64% price increase for the average student, far outpacing the growth in most big household expenses.
The University of Oklahoma hit students with some of the biggest tuition increases, while spending millions on projects including acquiring and renovating a 32,000-square-foot Italian monastery for its study-abroad program. The spending is inextricably tied to the nation's $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis. Colleges have paid for their sprees in part by raising tuition prices, leaving many students with few options but to take on more debt. That means student loans served as easy financing for university projects.
It has long been clear to American families that the cost of college has gone up, even at public schools designed to be affordable for state residents. To get at the root cause, The Wall Street Journal examined financial statements since 2002 from 50 universities known as flagships, typically the oldest public school in each state, and adjusted for inflation. At the median flagship university, spending rose 38% between 2002 and 2022. Only one school in the Journal's analysis -- the University of Idaho -- spent less. The schools paid for it in part by pulling in tuition dollars. The median flagship received more than double the revenue from undergraduate and graduate tuition and fees it did 20 years prior. Even accounting for enrollment gains, that amounted to a 64% price increase for the average student, far outpacing the growth in most big household expenses.
student loans need bankruptcy so that banks & (Score:4, Insightful)
student loans need bankruptcy so that banks & schools have skin in the game vs the umlimed loans that young kids can get
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Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:2)
As soon as I read the headline I thought that I ought to suggest they check out our local college, the University of Kentucky, because they did that to such a degree that I'm almost certain that someone there got a LOT of kickback from the deal, but it seems they are damn near the center of the controversy. They even put Tempurpedic brand(not generic) beds in their dorms and we all know that shit ain't cheap. I've got far more than one reason to dislike UK but this is really at the top of the list.
Re:Thank God education isn't a right in 'merka (Score:4, Insightful)
I think you are forgetting Education itself is a "business" and quite big.
The fix is a class action lawsuit by students who got worthless degrees from Universities and target the Endowment funds to pay for the loans on worthless degrees.
As long as the borrowers AND lenders are continually bailed out of poor decisions, they will continue to make those poor choices. Utopia doesn't exist and if it did, it would actually be a dystopian version.
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That you think him getting modded down has anything to do with anything beyond not going with "groupthink" is amusing.
I generally agree with most of what he said. Parents should encourage their children to do useful things which isn't always "follow your passion".
Sure, he had a lot of generalizations and not everyone will follow that path, but for a very large amount of people, that's exactly what has happened.
I'm glad my parents were not trying to be my friends. I'm glad they tried to give me useful advice
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you can't have enough experience with such a broad subject to know what's actually happened without being a person who's spent a ton of time on the actual data .. but I get it, feelings are facts
and nobody with brains thinks getting downmodded should ever be considered as validation of a point .. I mean that's just a very stupid thing to think. I get that relatively bright but emotionally ill adjusted people get wired early on to think resistance to opinion equals truthiness, but .. it's basic AF
I Spent 32 years in a University environment, and have seen the people coming through over those years. Interacted with so many departments, my own was engineering and research, but got to interact with the others, even the opinion majors. So I haven't done a peer reviewd study published in Annals of Higher Education, nor called into court as an expert witness, but my opinion is based on experience, and counts for something more than someone reading blogs, and CNN or Fox News. I lived it homie!
Moving on
Re: Thank God education isn't a right in 'merka (Score:5, Insightful)
"The University and loan situation is all part of the messed up movement to instill self esteem without accomplishment,"
So in your world people who have been kept down by others should feel bad about that? Tool.
You realize you just proved my point.
If you had cared to read the whole post, you would have seen:
"And they aren't happy. I'm on their side - they've been damaged by well meaning parents and teachers, and of course the Universities took the money being thrown at them.
The final sadness is that they will read what I wrote, that they are victims of all this, and their free floating anger will have them trigger them to lash out at me, even though I am on their side, other than telling them they have to move forward, not wallow."
Instead, you get triggerd to rage and name calling. My point made to a T
But since we are here - what is your fix? Just give each damaged kid a 6 figure amount of money a year for life, and just let them sit on the couch?
That is the last part of the advice I give young people who are upset about their situation. More or less like this
"There are all manner of different situations. You might be upset, you might feel that you've been abused. But you have to make a decision. Are you going to wallow in despair? Are you going to just blame others for everything? There is a path forward from everyone. A decision to be made. There is a wall that needs climbed. Different people have different walls. So ya need to make a choice. You can decide to stay behind the wall and feel sorry for yourself, and blame everyone, or you can decide to try to climb over it and get on with life, maybe make something of yourself."
And if that makes me a tool, I accept it, and maybe your calling me that pejorative reflects more on you than me. The same advice I gave my millennial son, which after early struggles he took that advice, and is now moving up in the world.
My advice to you is read entire posts before going on the attack. Which side of that wall are you on anyhow?
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Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Insightful)
student loans need bankruptcy so that banks & schools have skin in the game vs the umlimed loans that young kids can get
That negates the entire point of the student loan system. It's intrinsic to society in the west. Preach college as the only option after leaving high school, then make sure those bastards are well and truly shackled, forcing them into jobs they'll likely despise for years to come, but they have to keep because student loans can not be forgiven. We WANT young adults to be financially turbo-fucked to keep them in the system as designed. If they came out of school on a semi-stable financial footing, they wouldn't be forced to take shit jobs for shit pay just to try to keep their heads above water.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Interesting)
George Friedman of Geopolitical Futures wrote about that a year ago in an essay titled "America's Institutional Crisis":
'In my latest book, âoeThe Storm Before the Calm,â I predicted that the U.S. would go through a massive social crisis in the 2020s. That prediction has obviously come to pass. I also forecast that America would go through its fourth institutional crisis. The previous three all followed existential wars and transformed the governing institutions.
The first came after the Revolutionary War, which eliminated British imperial rule and installed a union of states and a republican form of government. The second, some 80 years later, came after the Civil War, which established the primacy of the federal government over the states. Eighty years after that, World War II extended the power of the federal government over American society and put in place a technocratic government â" that is, a government of experts.
We are now 80 or so years removed from World War II, and the nature of this new institutional crisis is becoming clear. It started when the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how ineffective a federal technocracy is in imposing solutions over a vast and diverse continent. As I argued in âoeThe Storm Before the Calm,â experts are essential but insufficient when it comes to governance. Their fundamental weakness is that expertise in one area can be insensitive to or ignorant of the problems their solutions create. Medical institutions did the best they could do under the circumstances, but their solutions disrupted the production and distribution of goods and alienated people from one another. Governance is the art of seeing the whole. Physicians tend to see only their own domain. The federal government responded to expertise in one area without creating systems of competing expertise, and it often failed to recognize the variability of circumstances that the founders envisioned.
Now another important dimension of the institutional shift is taking place: the crisis of universities. Universities have been central to the moral functioning of the United States since Thomas Jefferson required that all new states admitted to the republic fund universities. He saw them as essential in the cultivation of expertise and in creating an educated elite armed with varied knowledge essential to the regime. Over time, universities, and especially elite universities, tended to exclude prospective students and teachers who were not already part of the elite, and thus tended to suppress ideas offensive to elite values.
The GI Bill disrupted the system by welcoming soldiers into universities regardless of background. Many of them already had elements of technical expertise, thanks to their time in the armed services, and they knew too much about life not to doubt the self-certainties of their professors. This development helped create a massive professional class with highly specific areas of knowledge. That notion of expertise fed the emerging principle of government. It accepted diversity as a principle, except that its proponents weren't always aware of, let alone concerned about, those their definition of diversity excluded. The university was therefore the pivot to the elite. It always develops cultural idiosyncrasies that overlay its function, but it also remains a foundation of the institutional structure. The university has again developed strange dynamics, but it has also developed in a direction that is deeply linked to the federal system. The problem is that students must take out outlandish loans to pay for the outlandishly high price of higher education. Given the existence of a federal lending program that linked available credit to the cost of education, universities had little incentive to control costs. The lending program was linked to cost, and the cost could rise because the available loans, in general, increased in tandem.
At the time that I wrote âoeThe Storm Before the Calm,â student debt stood at about $1.34 trillion. This was roughl
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Insightful)
It should be noted that the systemic shifts of the past required major wars to compel change. All were existential in the sense that the republic was at stake. The war in Ukraine does not have that much weight for the United States. With only three prior institutional shifts, we don't have enough examples to be certain war is required. Or there is a nasty one coming.'
I don't know that war is coming, but I do know something is coming. I'm not exactly sure what, but I think most of us can feel it in our bones. We need change. Real change. Or we, as a country, will collapse completely. It may very well boil down to the under-classes joining together to take down the current oligarchs. Our government hasn't worked for the people in my lifetime. They work for big business. In some cases directly. With people leaving massive conglomerates to take government positions as regulators over those businesses, then leaving those government positions to return to the massive conglomerates, it's obvious that there's collusion at the very best, if not outright control over the regulating bodies. The mouth-spewing drivel that congress says bares little resemblance to the laws it passes. Laws that almost invariable take away rights from ordinary citizens and hands them to corporate entities. Not to mention creating massive hand-outs for these immensely wealthy companies for various reasons with zero real strings attached while telling the middle and lower classes that we need to pay more taxes to cover the bill "for the good of all."
And the healthcare bullshit brigade needs to stop. We should not have to pay more per capita than any other country while large segments of us can't actually get any form of medical treatment until we're in crisis, and then we bankrupt our families for the privilege of it. I had a nasty fall a few years back on the ice where I cracked my head hard enough to actually move my jaw. And I couldn't go to the doctor for fear of what it would do to my family's finances for years to come. It took about six months to get back to normal. Is that something that should happen in a civilized country?
At some point, even the lazy among us will get fed up with this garbage and want it dealt with. It's obviously not going to happen at the voting booth. The single party acting as a dueling distraction for the masses while stuffing their own pockets in between handfuls of cash being handed off to the uber-rich or the corporations is no longer working even as a distraction for a large chunk of us. But there are still a lot of folks wrapped up in the team cheerleading.
I would hope the blood spilled is minimal, but I don't think there will be a fix to the American system without some blood. I don't know of a single ordinary citizen that would cry much if Washington was nuked while fully occupied. Clear out the current garbage and give us a chance at a true government that actually gives a single fuck about the ordinary citizen? That might present us with some sense of hope. Heavens forbid.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a job, with medical insurance as an offer. But? Why pay 12k a year for something that absolutely doesn't cover any expenses? That's my cheapest option, with a huge deductible, and the insurance company still holding the ultimate decision over whether I'm valuable enough to be worth treating. Insurance literally denies any claim for anything over a sniffle or a cough. It's fucking idiotic that we have people scared of government death panels, but having private insurance companies deciding our fates in perfectly fine.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds like you have a real job...and I"ve never heard of someone with a real job insurance plan that cost $12K a year AND...doesn't cover anything
I can't tell if you're being disingenuous or simply have no clue what a shitshow the American medical establishment is.
When I was laid off from HP I moved onto my wife's work insurance plan. It cost $1900 and change every month - that's what was deducted from her check. She had to go to the ER once, and her portion was a hair under $3000 - the insurance actually only paid a couple hundred above that. I got the flu/bronchitis and went to an urgent care facility - even though it was "in network" nothing ended up being covered. This was with Cigna.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
I'm a software developer at a manufacturing company.
Thing is, with any plan I've ever been on, it covers nothing aside from sniffles. The insurance companies literally have entire departments dedicated to finding reasons they can't cover whatever treatment they "approved" up front just to put you on the hook for it. The only time I've had decent coverage at all was when my wife worked for a large bank that was big enough to host its own insurance for employees and families of employees. They were pretty goo
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:4, Interesting)
We are now 80 or so years removed from World War II, and the nature of this new institutional crisis is becoming clear. It started when the COVID-19 pandemic revealed how ineffective a federal technocracy is in imposing solutions over a vast and diverse continent. As I argued in âoeThe Storm Before the Calm,â experts are essential but insufficient when it comes to governance. Their fundamental weakness is that expertise in one area can be insensitive to or ignorant of the problems their solutions create. Medical institutions did the best they could do under the circumstances, but their solutions disrupted the production and distribution of goods and alienated people from one another. Governance is the art of seeing the whole. Physicians tend to see only their own domain. The federal government responded to expertise in one area without creating systems of competing expertise, and it often failed to recognize the variability of circumstances that the founders envisioned.
I stopped reading at this paragraph. In the US the whole COVID-19 response was politically lead. Yes, there were medical opinions which were mostly ignored by the political class that set the rules.
Governance would be the art of seeing the whole thing but we have partisan politics. What we have is not about governance, it's about greed and getting ahead of our neighbour. Some of the worst problems we face today is due to political governance. Housing, pollution, school debt, etc...
It's sad that in the US we only have 2 options to choose from. Black or white. Politicians can say anything with impunity. Citizens follow blindly not even listening. Just as long as "we" win. Who is we and what do we win does not matter. Who cares what the consequences are? Well here we are, farther apart than ever before.
Politicians created the housing crisis. Politicians allowed the pollution and the destruction of our natural resources for the benefit of the few. Politicians set the rules for student debt. Even today you can't apply for some basic jobs without a college diploma.
As an addict we need to admit that a diploma is just a piece of paper that confirms you learned the basics before you entered the world. Some are more thorough than others. Some are not worth the paper they are written on. When I go into surgery I am more interested in how many successful operations, of the type he is about to perform on me, that the doctor performed than what school he graduated 20 - 50 years ago.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
Civil strife in the US is almost certainly not going to happen no matter what the media tells you. Remember, they make money on outrage, it doesn't matter if it is real or not.
Look, this specific problem is actually pretty easy to solve. University presidents are judged based upon something called the university's capital value. And increasing that capital value can be done in several ways, most of which are pretty hard. But one is way too easy, building buildings. So they do the easy thing and instead
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Insightful)
That negates the entire point of the student loan system. It's intrinsic to society in the west.
No it's not. Only the US has "student loans" as a thing. Usually education is free or has symbolic costs and many countries will pay a stipend for living expenses for the duration.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh BS. Old people don't listen to young people because we were young once too and know the young are stupid. All societies do this. When you get older and more mature (and more wise) you will learn this too. In the meantime, don't expect any of us to listen to your BS.
I'm almost fifty. Assuming I'm a kid just because I see how systemically we beat the shit out of young folks doesn't make me a kid.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like you're saying that the whole point of the student loan system is to create indentured servants out of the middle class.
I'd have to agree.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:2)
Sounds like you're saying that the whole point of the student loan system is to create indentured servants out of the middle class.
I'd have to agree.
Spot on.
Re: student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &a (Score:2)
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Insightful)
I imagine that this is about the wild tuition increases which have been happening at private universities. The public ones could do this and get away with it, because they're still the cheaper option. $19k is still a bargain compared to modern private tuition.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
You can't repossess an education.
Well; People go to university to get the degree - the education is partly an accident.
You can't repo an education, but you can revoke a degree. Or, better yet.. How about making all degrees digital documents and adding a $100/year fee for students to keep the degree?
Failure to pay requires payment for missing months to reinstate, and notice is mailed out to anyone you'd had the status of that degree officially verified to in the past.
what happened? (Score:2)
Instead universities went on a spending spree building brick and mortar infrastructure and an arms race in sportsball coach salaries.
Granted, some things you need labs and studios to do in-person work in.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:2)
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:5, Interesting)
student loans need bankruptcy so that banks & schools have skin
I suggest establishing a federal loan limit. And make the rule that universities Must take the maximum loan value amount as "Paid in full" for students under financial aid, Even if the school's price is higher for students attending without loans.
Making their school able to accept federal loan funds requires signing a paper. Obligating the schools to cover any excess cost above the maximum allowed award amounts for Tuition, Attendance fees, and Books.
Then set the maximum amounts at like $5,000 per semester for school costs, $500/sem book fee, up to $1k issuable Only to the student for their own costs such as transportation, and $6,000 per year for full room and board to include the year and break periods between semesters and at end of year.
And one again. If the university has set a higher cost for tuition - then the Additional cost above the loan maximum is the School's expected contribution for students requiring financial aid; they can either sign a guarantee to pay the excess themselves for the next 4 years, and accept the student, or they can refuse the student, But they can't ask the student Pay more, borrow more, or otherwise source more funds.
Attend A non-US University (Score:4, Insightful)
Other Canadian universities are similar and Canada is so intertwined with the US that even some professional degrees e.g. medicine are valid in both countries and your mobile phone plan will probably still work. Yet you'll still have the experience of living in a foreign country and as a bonus, the legal drinking age is 18 so you can legally drink too (unless you are unlucky enough to be in Ontario where you have to wait an extra year).
Education is a global market and if you are being massively overcharged in your own country get educated somewhere else that's better and cheaper. If enough Americans start doing this you can be sure that US universities will take note and start reigning in their fees. Europe is another option although if you only speak English, language can limit your options there and I do not know what the fees are like for international students.
That's a terrible idea (Score:2)
And speaking as a parent, those loans are nowhere's near unlimited. My kid will need to go to grad school. They can borrow enough for tuition at a public uni (a little over $100k) but for living expenses they're on their own, and it's been made crystal clear they
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Allowed full or partial bankruptcy for student loans is probably the only solution that won't lead to a cataclysmic collapse of the educatIonal system.
What people are failing to understand in the debate over student loan forgiveness is that it does absolutely nothing to interrupt the positive feedback loop. In fact, loan forgiveness will accelerate the collapse as schools instantly ja
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The entire thing needs to be redone such that colleges must show how they spent the 'loan' money and prove that the student learned something by being hired after graduation. If they can't prove both were done competently then they should be responsible for refunding the government 'loan.'
Many colleges with their fat expense sheet will go bankrupt, but they will deserve it.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, let's do a couple of things.
We know that college is NOT for everyone. So, let's push for allocation of resources for vocational type education after HS....
Let's also tie student loans to folks that DO go to college to what chances they have to earn money sufficient to pay back said loans...you get money loaded if you are in STEM, etc.
If you only want to study underwater basket weaving, or aboriginal gender studies, well, you need to be wealthy enough to
and allow vocational to give pices of paper (Score:2)
and allow vocational to give pices of paper that add up to an degree.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
How vocational? Not sure on welding, AC, plumbing, electical, or automotive stuff but all the normal financial aid stuff covers AS and BAS degrees just fine at the used-to-be-community college I work for. Book keeping, graphic design, IT stuff (sysadmin, cisco/network admin, developer), nursing, all the other health related stuff - dental asisstants/hygenists, radiology and nuke med and ultrasound techs, respiratory therapists, physical therapy assistant, etc. Even the few four year degrees (IT stuff agai
Re: student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &a (Score:3)
"We know that college is NOT for everyone."
Found the guy who wants to live in a nation of idiots.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
Right immigration and free trade ARE the problems. They are not good for wealth distribution or the average person.
Re:student loans need bankruptcy so that banks &am (Score:3)
Cry harder. I'd rather have banks dictating course of study than worthless overeducated academics scamming the taxpayer for $400,000 gender studies degrees.
It used to be different (Score:4, Interesting)
Before the government took over the student loan programs, most people had to get a bank loan.
Tuition was much lower in both absolute and relative terms because the banks were only willing to loan out just so much money so the schools had to accept that number or have empty class rooms.
Once the government took over, it was sky's the limit and rates climbed at a dizzying pace. The government would just give out more loan money to match. But the burden was still on the students to pay those inflated numbers. Had the government simply said no, we're not going to let you raise rates a billion % every week, suck it up, rates would be much lower today and the total debt load wouldn't be such a big deal.
I'm not a bank shill by any means but they did student loans reasonably well. The government has only allowed schools to fuck over student with ever higher and unplayable rates to get degrees that can never repay the costs.
Oh, yeah, back then there were a lot more grants and other sorts of free money available, too. I watched that dry up while I was in school and then working for the school for a while after graduating.
Re:It used to be different (Score:5, Interesting)
Before the government took over the student loan programs, most people had to get a bank loan.
Tuition was much lower in both absolute and relative terms because the banks were only willing to loan out just so much money so the schools had to accept that number or have empty class rooms.
Early in my career, I had the pleasure of working with two old gentlemen that were construction consultants, after having retired after decades of working for major construction firms and major projects in the southern US. They were a treat and a blessing to be around and I learned a lot from them. Despite our vast age differences, we became great friends, and would often sit and "shoot the shit" during off-hours. I was amazed to learn that when they went to school... in the early 1950's... their parents didn't pay their way (they didn't have the money), THEY paid their own way. They were able to pay their tuition and board at a state college (what was then knows as API, Alabama Polytechnic Institute, now Auburn University) by working summers in construction. Not all year round, mind you. They worked part-time during semesters, but only worked full time during the summer break. And with the money they saved, they were able to pay their tuition and board. No loans. No debt. Save up the money, pay the bills, be done with it.
Try doing that at pretty much ANY public four year college today, even the cheapest ones. You can't.
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Another little thought about option is to do a short hitch in the military. The Army just announced a new two-year enlistment with a two-year reserve obligation after that. https://recruiting.army.mil/Ne... [army.mil]
So for two years of active duty (6 months training + 18 months serving) you can get great technical training, eligibility for the GI bill to finish your degree or post grad, plus any left over tuition assistance can be transferred to your spouse or dependents. The GI Bill covers tuition + fees + books
Visibility (Score:3)
You can see this happening in average tuition cost charts. I remember vividly when I was in college in the late 1990s, hearing that they were opening up student loans to nearly everyone. Before 1999 average tuition costs were steadily creeping upwards. Afterwards, the line shot up significantly.
It makes sense economically. You are giving students cheap money. You think universities are going to let the students keep that money in their pockets?
https://educationdata.org/aver... [educationdata.org]
See how spending on "Education" (Score:5, Insightful)
See how spending on "Education" is actually spending on the needs of the Education barons, and trying to make their schools look more attractive and competitive. But not actually benefitting the students.
I am not sure what I recommend as a whole, but I would suggest that Public universities should be limited on what total costs they can charge Per student.
This should be a price cap BEFORE any financial aid will be applied. If the cost of attendance exceeds the cap, then the University must take whatever amount is paid by financial aid as Paid in Full for all costs for the whole term.
Furthermore, schools with lower attendance costs should be given priority consideration for grants, Etc. Excessively high tuition should be a reason for rejection
of funding and projects when applied for by schools.
Re:See how spending on "Education" (Score:4, Informative)
Money (Score:2)
The company I work for sold their main office building, on a *very* nice piece of land, for nine figures. It was a *lot* of money. A major university bought it. They had no immediate need nor plans for it, they just thought it would make a very nice office building for them.
Tell me a university has too much money without telling me it has too much money.
Loans and prices (Score:4, Insightful)
Queue the "forgive loans" crowd when the real solution is to reduce prices. But that won't create a captured voting block for the future now, would it?
Not Purdue (Score:5, Informative)
This is the future model. https://www.purdue.edu/newsroo... [purdue.edu]
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Many of the top universities have so much fucking money sitting around that they can pay for the actual education part with returns from that indefinitely. It's pretty wild.
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Many of the top universities have so much fucking money sitting around that they can pay for the actual education part with returns from that indefinitely. It's pretty wild.
Harvard's endowment is over 53 billion, which is more than the GDP of over half of the world's nations.
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Student loans need overhead rate cap (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not just construction spending. The staff:student ratio at many schools has gone from 1:50 to 1:7 over the last 60 years. These people not only cost money, they spend money.
The government could fix this by defining base_tuition as (sum of in-classroom faculty salaries for a year) / (sum of credits taught in a year) and allowed_tuition as (federally_allowed_overhead_rate) X (base_tuition).
At this point no reasonable overhead rate would cover the school's budgets, but the federal government could publish a remediation table for overhead rates so that the schools could adapt their budgets over a decade or so.
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This
Easy solution (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is ad easy as it us painful. End federal involvement in student loans. Just stop, already.
Colleges will be forced to reduce cists or die. Many will die, but that's ok: new ones will be started.
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We do not want to disrupt this large of an industry non-linearly.
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"Brilliantly" isn't the word that comes to my mind. "Fraudulently" is much closer to the truth. The government literally impoverished an entire generation, all while patting themselves on the back -- and lining the pockets of useless paper-pushers from coast to coast.
There is no organization better at absolutely ruining things than the federal government. They are truly gi
not tuition (Score:2)
Because... (Score:3)
This is a battle that needs fighting. (Score:4, Insightful)
While the public (in predictable political cleave-lines) argues about loan-forgiveness, race-based admissions, legacy admissions...the colleges more or less stand back and avoid it all. They need to be held directly accountable.
When the US gov't started getting more involved in financially supporting students going to college, we can all recognize that colleges THEMSELVES basically skyrocketed their tuitions to MULTIPLES of inflation. How have they been allowed to get away with this?
We sent 4 kids to college in the last decade. The mantra from colleges is "don't worry about the cost - it's up to us to figure out a way to fit your family budget". THIS IS BULLSHIT.
All they do is gin up more and more loans.
That's their "helping" with nearly no actual adjustment to the tuition.
(And let's be clear; my wife donates bookkeeping and tax prep work for poorer families. She is therefore very well aware that low income families in our community can go to these SAME SCHOOLS for basically nothing. Esp if female. Esp if minority. Esp if immigrant.
We unfortunately have the misfortune of being middle class - so we're screwed. In fact, the SMART play would have been for us to get a divorce 3 years before our oldest went to college and then just live together; as a 'single mom' with 4 teens, our kids too could have gone to college for nearly nothing. Of course, that would have been fraud, but would have saved us something like $95,000 the year all 4 were in school at the same time....)
My father, a couple of my kids, and I all went to the U of MN, so let's compare:
1954: $350/year (this was my dad's football scholarship, I think this was room AND board)
1986: about $4500/year about $7500 with living on campus. I could work a part time job 20hrs/week@$4.25 and just about pay for tuition.
2014: $28000/year.
That 1954 rate in 2023 dollars? about $4000.
As we talk today about students with crippling loan debt (often on degrees that are largely worthless), again, we can argue politics all day long about why, and who exploited whom, but the unassailable fact is that colleges themselves have VAST endowments that somehow aren't at all on the table for the discussion.
Harvard, a big example, has an endowment of more than $37bn. At their retail tuition rate, they could FULLY pay the tuition for the next 670,000 students. At this years freshman class size of 1900, that means they could pay the tuition for all students for more than 350 years from now.
Let's grab a more average example: UofMN endowment is $3.2bn. At in-state tuition of $15k, that's tuition for 210,000 students.
That's fucking absurd.
This while colleges around the country routinely build multi-$hundred-million buildings vastly more expensive per sqft than, say, even downtown office spaces in the same cities. Why?
In principal, I don't agree with letting people off the hook for loans that they agreed to. Caveat Emptor. But I am sympathetic that these loans are crippling the ability for Gen Z and later to move on with life. How are you supposed to start a family, buy a house, etc with massive monthly loan payments?
Colleges have been GOUGING the public without consequence for 40 years.
They need to see the sharp end of government oversight, at the very least the "public" schools.
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I agree to all of this. There needs to be a system where colleges have skin in the game. For example all loans must be 50% backed by the schools. If a student defaults, then they lose the money, instead of the current system where the schools get all the cash, then if the student defaults because their pay can't cover the loans (for example), the government is no the hook, which is you and me.
The schools get the cash, the students get a worthless degree, and the public pays for it.
Do yourself a favour (Score:3)
Send your kids to another country (Score:5, Interesting)
Renting a Millionaire's Lifestyle (Score:5, Informative)
And since it's 2023, a computer certainly wouldn't hurt, but that's about it. Everything else comes down to first-world amenities, which are nice, but absolutely aren't necessary. And to quote myself from a previous post:
How can there possibly be an absolute need for one administrator per 1.5 students?!
One solution to this could be to take some money earmarked for student loan debt relief and put it into community colleges. Expand them to include bachelors programs for popular majors. We're the richest country in the world - there's no reason for education to be as expensive as it is here!
Barely mentioned: state funds (Score:5, Informative)
I worked at a state university (Indiana University) for 7 years, and a private school (University of Chicago) for 5. This subject came up constantly.
I had to read allll the way to the end of the article to get a (passing) mention of state funding:
> At meeting after meeting for decades, Penn State board members complained of the state’s anemic support while they simultaneously approved hundreds of millions of dollars in new construction, according to board minutes.
> The university’s state appropriation fell 39% over the past 20 years, and the school receives among the lowest state support per student of U.S. flagships.
I used to have a better source for this with a graph, but declining state funding is directly correlated with tuition increases over the past 20+ years.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/... [cbpp.org]
The biggest factor is that taxpayers in all states have decided that universities just aren't worth the expense. Second is all those sweet unforgivable, legally mandated student loans which enable all the construction and unnecessary hires.
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While essential correct, it doesn't seem so nefarious. We tell everybody to go to college to have a better life, why should we be surprised they listen. The public schools try to accommodate these students because it's their mission not because they are pocketing the money.
The other issue is the bad faith arguing from the Wall Street Journal. They know why schools cost more. It's well studied. They also know their readers eat up these arguments about student loans and wasting money. Look at all th
Burn em all down and start over (Score:4, Funny)
If a state school is charging five digit tuition to in state students, the system is past the point of repair. Do a controlled burn, and let new, healthier growth rise from the ashes.
State Spending (Score:3)
The report misses one major thing -- contributions from each of the states that sponsor these public institutions has gone down, a LOT. For example, in Michigan, the three public R1 schools used to get about 80-90% of their general budgets from the state. Today that is closer to 15-20%. Spending has been consistent with the inflation index (costs for everything has gone up -- including energy, utilities, food, supplies, etc.). Many of the schools had to defer maintenance on buildings for quite a while, so we are seeing some of that being caught up in recent years. Additionally, there have been a ton of new regulations and compliance issues that have come down in recent years that have caused schools to add administration and compliance officers to their rolls -- mind you that there certainly has been bloat on the top-end, but some of it is required. Many states continue to balance the budgets on the backs of higher-ed.
Now, that does not excuse excessive increases for administration. Football coaches making millions a year, University presidents making nearly a million, etc., while fac and staff have seen 1% to 2% increases at most for a decade.....
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If the football coach is the best paid member of staff at a university, it is not really a university, it as football team with education as a side hustle.
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Those football programs pulling more than enough to pay those coaches and staff and for facilities...AND enough to put into the university to help fund other activities that do not draw in funding.
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So
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Re:State Spending (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, I came to say pretty much that.
the real cause from what I see is that universities have transitioned from a state service to a state-sponsored business.
Universities used to be funded by state dollar mostly. But states pulled back their funding for the good of the state. And they switched the funding to being derived mostly from tuition.
So universities have been pushed to function as companies. And they compete with one another for tuition dollars. So a lot of effort in universities have shifted to be about customer acquisition and retention (called applications, yield, and graduation rates). That's why you get expenses that don't make educational sense, because having a fancy new dining hall, now with kombucha, will lead you to get more students. And getting more student is what you need to keep operating, because the state no longer funds you in any other way. But hiring a new fancy instructor is not something you can show on a college tour, and so that's not a priority.
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Spending has not been "consistent with inflation" -- at all! I used to work for a company that served this market, and literally every single year our lobbyist would throw up a chart of higher Ed costs outpacing inflation by SIX times and say, "folks, this is why we can't get anything done; this is absolutely killing us".
VA Tech spends extra $1-2 million on Hokie Stone (Score:3)
Virginia Tech now spends an extra $1-2 million on each new building to face them with Hokie Stone.
It looks fantastic, but that's a lot of extra money per building.
It will crash and burn (Score:3)
Because it's becoming rapidly clear to Gen Z and Alpha that it's not worth it. A good chunk of Gen Z is still not college age. Most are, but some aren't. None of Alpha is. By the time they're 18, only a moron would go these routes rather than working on their own path.
It is predatory in the name of helping them (Score:5, Insightful)
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So, why are kids NOT working today?
Hell, I had a W2 job pretty much as soon as I turned 16yrs old....and before that, I babysat and mowed lawns and other stuff around the neighborhood to make extra money.
At 16yrs, I got a job starting to wash dishes in a moderately higher end
A(nother) Special American Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had to put a filter on my news - not on my computer, just in my brain. I get a paragraph into a news story and ask myself "Could this problem even happen anywhere else, or is it just one of those "American Problems" that they invent for themselves? It's become like reading some news from Uganda that a rural person was accused of calling upon evil spirits, and 12 dead in the ensuing riot.
Canada stretches its resources to take in immigrants, over 500,000 last year, as if America took in 5 million, or Britain, nearly a million. Our housing is stretched to breaking, but our culture appears to be in zero danger of turning Asian or African or Hispanic.
We never really accepted the notion that there are special grades of education that equip employees with superpowers, (well worth spending quadruple upon) and while we have a few high-priced universities, mostly it costs under $5000 American for Canadian tuition.
I'm personally sure I was about as well-instructed as the American engineers I worked with, and Canadian regulated-professions of medicine, engineering, teaching, accounting all do about as well as Americans, and have little trouble being certified if they migrate. So I just don't know what your $35,000 average tuition in private colleges is buying your students.
It's just an American problem, like spending $11,000/per-capita on health care, and getting less than all the countries (like us) that average $5K-$6K per capita. There's no reason for foreigners to be briefed on it.
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It's just an American problem, like spending $11,000/per-capita on health care, and getting less than all the countries (like us) that average $5K-$6K per capita. There's no reason for foreigners to be briefed on it.
If US healthcare is just the same as what the rest of the world gets, then why do rich people from all over the world come to the US for their health care?
Other People's Money (Score:2)
It ain't yours so why bother being accoutable?
Inevitable (Score:2)
This is the inevitable consequence of treating education as a tradable service commodity. Few students can judge the quality of research and education, but they can see shiny new buildings. So shiny new buildings it is, because that attracts students and generates income.
I am not sure there is a way back to the "good old days", but we should consider universities again to operate in the knowledge sector, and not the service sector. They offer so much more than just a piece of paper, and that is often lost i
forgive the debt! (Score:2)
And? (Score:2)
I recently read a book on venture capitalism that opened my eyes to how some of these scho
Only one school spent less than the median?! (Score:2)
This means only one school spent more. Perhaps somebody found a magic number and all schools simply followed suit. That's actually plausible; while colleges tend to lean liberal in US politics, they're extraordinarily conservative on their own internal politics and spending.
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END FEDERALLY BACKED STUDENT LOANS (Score:2)
The government shouldn't be in the business of student loans. The risk should be carried by banks like all other loans and forgivable in bankruptcy like any other loan. This will effectively cause the education industry to fix their costs and pricing as no sane bank is giving a 17 year 40k in loans without collateral.
Terrific example of Prasad's Law (Score:2)
https://boingboing.net/2019/12... [boingboing.net]
Prasad's Law is about health care spending, but it clearly applies at least as well to education. "There's always enough money to concentrate wealth, never enough to diffuse it."
The other complaint about universities is that they don't pay the actual educators well, the teaching assistants. There's never enough money for them, even when it's raining $100 bills, and they're renovating monasteries...I bet the teaching assistants were still scraping by on ramen.
http://brande [brander.ca]
tax rates (Score:2)
Of course they do. All the incentives are there. (Score:3)
High turnover among administrators jumping from institution to institution? Check.
Diffuse revenue stream where no one paying customer can really complain about how his money isn't being put to good use? Check.
The political/moralizing aspect where questioning the spending gets you branded as an anti-intellectual? Oh yeah.
Government bailouts, both accute in the form of actual big money grants and chronic in the form of subsidized tuition, subsidized student loans, and continuing stream of research grants, about 30% or which gets sliced off as overhead? Double and triple check.
Embedding with big-city machine politics in many places that sees useless make-work projects happening all the time to keep the local chapter of the trade unions happy? And how! Back when I was in college, the main pedestrian drag through campus was dug up and repaved (by hand!) what seemed like every fucking summer. The one summer they left it alone was when they built new brick paver paths in another part of campus to replace a set of asphault paths.
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On the whole, people with college educations make more money [forbes.com] than those who don't have a degree. As the article relates, there are a number of variables to incorporate, but the general rule is the more education you receive the higher your earning capacity/potential.
Re:Cheep Money and Sure Thing (Score:5, Interesting)
People think a College Education is a guaranteed path to a better life
On the whole, people with college educations make more money [forbes.com] than those who don't have a degree. As the article relates, there are a number of variables to incorporate, but the general rule is the more education you receive the higher your earning capacity/potential.
This is one of those "lies, damned lies, and statistics" cases though. Yeah, you can make considerably more lucrative income than a high school grad... IF you have a valuable major. A Chemical Engineer is always going to make bank over, say, a hairdresser. But it's different if you have a low-demand degree, and take whatever job you can get to pay the bills. While a company might pay that Sociology major a bit more to staple cover sheets on to those TPS reports than a High School grad, the later also isn't saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of school debt that'll take decades to pay off. Even though College Guy is making more money in terms of salary, he very well could be worse off than High School guy in terms of total accounting.
Expensive colleges and huge student loan debt only make sense if you're in a very high demand major that results in very high paying jobs. And too many college students are NOT in those majors. That Sociology major is paying the same amount as the Chemical Engineer, but getting much, much less. A huge number of kids would frankly be better off skipping college and learning a skill or a trade instead. A skilled blue collar professional... a plumber for example... is going to make more money over his lifetime than someone with a low-demand degree from a college. But we've been preaching to kids for decades that stuff like plumbing, steel work, masonry etc, is beneath them. Only the stupid kids are relegated to those futures, you see. Never mind that many of these trades require a good bit of math in their training, not to mention the use of computers at times. But we still look down at those jobs, and our kids see that.
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University could not care less if its students declare bankruptcy. Why would it affect their pricing?
If nothing else, it's a selling point. Borrow thousands and just bankrupt it away!
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Why would it affect their pricing?
By affecting the "supply" part of the supply/demand equation. If student loans become subject to bankruptcy the banks are going to be way less willing to give a 18 year old $100,000 in loans. In the current system they have absolutely zero incentive to NOT do that, it's basically free money at a rate better (for the bank) than most car/home loans. If the banks are less willing to shell out risky cash the only only option for the colleges is to lower the price to fill seats.
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There is no incentive because banks don't own most student loans. The government does.
From Forbes:
"Federal student loans make up the vast majority of American education debt—about 92% of all outstanding student loans is federal debt. The federal student loan portfolio currently totals more than $1.6 trillion, owed by about 43 million borrowers."
And since the government has an infinite supply of money and doesn't want to hurt the students who made bad decisions, they just forgive loans so no pressure o
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That is a fair point. Given that the maximum Federal student loans you're able to get maxes out at 12,500 annually, well below the average public 4-year university tuition, I had assumed the remainder was made up with Private loans. I forgot that Federal Parent Plus Loans exist.
However, given the amount of venom put forth regarding cancelling $10,000 or $20,000 of student debt I sincerely doubt the American populace would sit idly on their hands if large chunks of that debt started getting wiped out via
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I don't understand why you would need to cancel the $10-20K. If you graduated with a reasonable diploma it would seem to me that this would be reimbursed to you over time due to the premium you earn for the rest of your life. Did people force others to choose a particular field? Did someone else make the decision for you? Why is everyone else to blame?
I know this sounds like trolling but are they not your choices? How did others pull the wool over your eyes?
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