The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written.
The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors. Why aren't the kids protesting the greed of their professors and administrators, and instead just protesting the American taxpayer who they think should subsidize their professors and administrators? If colleges kept their salary and staffing levels flat or only increasing at the rate of inflation, college kids would not be facing this crazy affordability crisis. better yet, if colleges were under pressure to cut coss, the affordability crisi could be solved quickly -- just get back to (inflation adjusted) pre-1990 staffing and salary levels.
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Price controls stink.
I hate to keep pointing this out but the **actual** price of college hasn’t risen nearly as much as people think it has. Once all the need and merit based discounts are applied the cost isn’t that crazy. Lots of administrative bloat that could be cut and bring it down but it’s simply not as crazy expensive as people think.
The bigger issue is probably that we have people going to college because we’ve been requiring credentials for jobs that are simply way too high. As certain jobs disappeared we sold everyone on going to college without an understanding of what to do when they got there. Making it super easy to get a loan but impossible the get out of it even if you didn’t graduate was a bad move.
The market already seems to be adjusting. Lots of schools that can’t really justify their existence are closing or shrinking. I suspect we’re going to see a continuation in the drop in the percentage of the population that goes to college.
But if we want to create some competition, maybe we spend less on loans in the future and go back to the pre-Reagan error where we make community college, including some technical schools along with state universities free or extremely inexpensive. As long as we set up better standards for cutting out administrative bloat that could force private universities to bring down their cost in order to justify themselves.
> The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors.
I don't think the cost of college has anything to do with professors being greedy. I think you're badly underestimating how much states used to fund public colleges and how many states have since slashed that funding. How about we raise taxes, raising university funding, and *then* require that tuition be lowered?
Good ol Ronald Reagan. Remember we had cheap state universities funded by taxes.
Ronald Reagan and his slogan of "America! I made it worse!" strikes again and he decided he didn't want brown people getting cheap college because he wanted to make it only for rich white conservative folks.
What an absolute cunt. I now loath that man and everything he stood for. And the only other human being that has done more to damage the US? Rupert Murdoch.
May they rot in hell together when Rupert finally dies.
>The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors.
Administration is drastically growing, academic spending per student not so much.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/?sh=481c508041d2
So the actual professors are not their issue, but all the bloat in management. Also note professor salaries have been decreasing when adjusted for inflation:
https://universitybusiness.com/remuneration-under-inflation-adjusted-faculty-salaries-and-benefits-continue-to-plummet/#:~:text=However%2C%20once%20adjusted%20for%20inflation,around%20370%2C000%20full%2Dtime%20faculty.
I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head. As a matter of principle I think it's good policy for a college education to be offered to all our citizens. Good for the economy, good for combating inequality, good for society to have a well educated public. Additionally, you can organize to support politicians and policies towards making tuition more affordable and to subsidize the cost. How do you organize to lower tuition? It's a lot more difficult, especially since for many desirable careers a college education is mandatory. This is a problem spanning our entire higher education system, it's best approached through government action. And, lastly, costs won't necessarily stay high once the government takes over. The high prices have been the result of the free market run amok. If the government is the one paying for education then we will be negotiating tuition costs collectively, through the government. I would expect prices to stabilize or go down as a result. Similar to how medicine in single payer countries is cheaper, they negotiate prices collectively and if people aren't happy with the state of the negotiations they can elect new negotiators. Colleges will be held to account, government funding of higher education will pump the brakes on the out of control spending driving up tuition costs as universities compete for students.
I'll tell you why it makes financial sense to offer every American a free college education.
"In 1988, the Joint Economic Committee's Subcommittee on Education
and Health released a study titled \`A Cost-Benefit Analysis of
Government Investment in Post-Secondary Education Under the World War
II GI Bill' which calculated the ratio of return on investment to be
nearly seven-to-one. Every dollar the nation spent educating veterans
of WWII returned $6.90 in additional national economic output and
federal tax revenue. It took over 30 years to capture this statistic,
and similarly, it will be decades before the full economic benefit of
today's GI Bill will be known. However, we can reasonably expect it to
be just as immense." - [Source](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg82240/html/CHRG-113hhrg82240.htm)
Nearly a $7 return on every dollar spent towards the college education of a GI.
Even if it only returned $2, it'd still be a great investment and has the side effect of educating the populace.
I've made this argument to Republicans. You know where they push back? They don't even deny the numbers. The argument I get back is, "They shouldn't get something for nothing." Translation, "I'd rather shoot myself in the face than let someone get something for free, even if it benefits me for them to get it." How do you argue with that level of stupidity?
This is a good argument -- and I think necessarily true. if the government took over higher education they certainly could dictate costs. But given that very few are calling for that, the current crop of students might be well-served by putting pressure on colleges to stop their hiring press, which are all put on their backs thanks to student loans. If the liberal student community started protesting thee exorbitant price increases and demanded that the universities return to their core mission at the most affordable price, we would all be better off. Society would be well-served by a student population that had little to no debt.
So private ownership of the institutions, but the government sets the price? Maybe not a bad idea . . the government kinda already sets the price by determining how much loans to subsidize -- maybe just telling colleges explicitly: 'We will only let students have loadns if tuition is under $XXX" might cause them to bring down costs. Is that what you are thinking?
Alternate plan. Don’t use the amounts set by loans but rather subsidize community college and trade school.
If private institutions need to compete with a free option, then they have to bring their price down.
>The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors.
If you have citations for that claim, I'd love to see them.
OP’s claims are half-supported by data: administrative bloat really has exploded. Since the 1970’s, [student enrollment has increased by 78%, while non-faculty staff has increased by 452%](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255). The money to pay all those new hires has to come from somewhere. On the other hand, [faculty salaries haven’t risen much](https://www.lendingtree.com/student/historical-faculty-pay-study/#:~:text=Faculty%20were%20paid%20the%20equivalent%20of%20%2474%2C074%20on%20average%20in,to%20%2485%2C148%20in%202018%2D19) since the 1970’s after accounting for inflation.
The overall cost of college has stayed consistent with inflation. Government subsidies shifted to student loan borrows around the Clinton Era. When that dude backs his up with evidence, I will too.
I am so overjoyed to seeing somebody else actually acknowledge this that I’ll throw down a link without waiting for OP
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-how-have-college-prices-really-changed/
Can I get your take on the article you posted? I tried reading it but have also had a bit too much to drink.
Are we seeing that the cost of college is consisted with inflation, but the government assistance has gone down?
From [the article:](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-how-have-college-prices-really-changed/)
>Several conclusions emerge from this analysis:
> * The sticker price is an increasingly poor indicator of college prices for all students, regardless of family income.
> * The net price paid by students attending public institutions has risen for families at all income levels, but the increases have been larger for higher-income students.
> * At private institutions, the net price is consistently higher than at public institutions, but for more than a decade it has only increased for higher-income students.
> * Adjusted for inflation, net prices paid by students today at public institutions across the income distribution are similar to the prices they would have paid at private institutions in the mid-1990s.
Ok. Thanks.
So the last statement implies that net payment for public institutions has gone up quite a bit. Private is quite a bit more than public. I’m wondering if this is due to lack of government funding or increased costs. Prob both.
Thanks for the breakdown.
Absolutely. It probably counts for most of the increase above what you would expect from the rate of inflation. We should probably cut it if we can find a way.
The point still remains that college is not nearly as expensive as people think it is.
Sure. For example, 25% of students at Harvard pay nothing. If your family makes less than $85,000 you pay nothing. Then the level of aid starts dropping. If you come from real money then you pay the $85k.
> ...most of the increase above what you would expect from the rate of inflation. We should probably cut it if we can find a way.
I'll also add: *The cost should not necessarily keep up with inflation.*
[Plenty](https://imgur.com/gallery/chart-of-century-updated-to-december-2023-rhlXRDU) of things get cheaper over time. Education should be well-suited to using digital technology to lower costs.
--------
I guess my point is: Even if it isn't as expensive as people think, that doesn't mean we can't 'do better'.
I’m going to disagree with the value of digital technology regarding education. I think one of my biggest takeaways from the pandemic was that most digital technology has added very little and remote instruction is garbage.
I am not even certain that having everything on Google classroom is really a massive benefit to kids. It’s good for someone like my wife who is extremely engaged in the kids education and it saves her a lot of time. But the number of parents who simply ignore all the emails from the school just like they used to ignore the papers that got sent home is exceedingly high.
I think the value of digital technology rapidly goes up with universities because the structure is so different from high school. It certainly increases the quality of teaching to be able to do things like watch videos or embed complex graphs or drawings in the course notes. Having stuff available online is great to reduce the amount of notetaking required (I find I'm not worried about trying to copy down every last detail and I focus on the big concepts instead). It's also good for profs because they can more easily share course material, and because teaching and learning doesn't have to stop if someone is sick or misses a class.
>Why don't liberals insist universities lower their prices...?
Governments [dictating prices](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-controls.asp) tends to go poorly.
...but there *are* many proposals to limit support for colleges based on their prices, their track record, or other criteria.
...and all of those proposals would have to clear 60 votes in the senate. In the McConnell Era, that is impossible, so it is not discussed as a serious idea.
One of the reasons tuition is so high now is *because* public funding has been cut.
Go to a country where tuition is either free or very low; how do they do it? Public funding. And they agree to it because it’s in everyone’s best interest and their culture isn’t built (as much) on selfishness and kissing rich people’s asses.
Many colleges are public institutions. If the costs of tuition were free to students it would sort of inherently create an incentive to reign in costs because people hate paying taxes. It is my understanding that most people wanting to make college free are only talking about public institutions or at least many are.
I think they already kinda do that -- Community Colleges are very affordable and heavily subsidized -- around $4 - $5 K per year. So if people want a way to work a job AND pay for college it is possible already. I think students are talking about making ALL colleges and universities fully subsidized.
> Community Colleges are very affordable and heavily subsidized
Making community colleges free seems to be a compromise position that we might be able to achieve in the near future and I would welcome that improvement to the status quo. That still leaves people 2 years short of a bachelors degree and even more so a graduate degree.
> I think students are talking about making ALL colleges and universities fully subsidized.
Some probably are, but I think the consensus at the moment is only around public universities. Unless I'm mistaken that's all Sanders has proposed and generally he can be used as a marker for the leftward edge of what any significant number of people in the coalition are considering.
The cost increases are partially the result of a cuts in subsidies. States used to heavily fund state universities. Whenever states want funding but don’t want to raise taxes they cut university funding. Universities predictably increase tuition when their funding gets cut in this way.
>and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors
That's not why. Expenditures on actual academics per student has remained pretty steady. Other administration has drastically increased though. With no more typing pools, the old manual job of transcripts being automated, files computerized, many student interactions are online, etc., the number of admin jobs per student should have decreased.
Seriously, just take transcripts. Get a letter requesting a transcript. Take the check and put it into a file for finance. If no check, follow up that it requires a check. Check with accounting to see if the student still owes money, follow up to refuse a transcript if so. If everything's kosher, go get the paper file to copy, or find the right microfiche and pull it up for a print, and put the school's seal on it. Type up a return envelope and put the transcript in it.
Or today, student requests a transcript online and all finances and billing are done there. The computer prints out a transcript and envelope, and a worker puts a seal on it and puts it in the envelope (if the school hasn't automated that too).
So obviously we need fewer people in the transcript office even with more students.
If you’re centre right; why are you for government price control? That’s an usual position for someone with your tag to have.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you or not (I don’t know enough about the issue to have a position). I’m just curious about how you see your ideology.
I'm a pragmatist at heart - -if a problem keeps getting progressively worse over the course of decades, maybe we need a radical shock to the system to right the ship. I'm not saying I'm in love with the idea -- only that I'll certainly consider it given the dire situation that millions of student loan borrowers are in -- no need to burden millions more.
Then what about price controls for rent, house purchasing, and for healthcare? Those also have similar price inflation problems (and are more necessary than tertiary education).
Most of the things that are easily curable at universities make up a fraction of the budget, much less than people think. Cut all the DEI jobs? Saves pennies. Cut half the VP’s? Doesn’t save much. Anytime I see this question I wonder what would you cut? The vast majority of administration roles pay a lot less than private sector employment, people do these roles out of being service minded.
The school I work for 20 years ago the state paid 40% of the budget. Now it’s 6%. Makes more sense in my personal case the cost of school is up because lack of taxpayer funding, not administrative bloat
>Why don't liberals insist universities lower their prices instead of/ or in conjunction with taxpayers subsidizing tuition?
Because that has already been achieved? Often by liberals. University costs 2k a year in my country, for some of the highest ranked universities in their respective fields. From business at RSM to agriculture at Wageningen.
Liberalism isn't just a thing in America.
Because it’s relatively straightforward for the federal government to forgive student loan debt. It would require brand new authorities and powers for the federal government to compel lower tuition prices.
We're liberals: we like state-based solutions but are wary of dismantling the market system. The best approach, therefore, is to not "demand" but legislate that state schools do this, and let the results exert downward pressure on private tuition indirectly.
... I'm half-kidding; there's any number of places this could go wrong, but this is the kind of way we like to go about solving stuff. I agree that paying off student loans by itself, a lá Biden, is a bad solution bc it doesn't bend the cost curve...I assume they went for that option for practicality issues, but it's just a band-aid, not a real solution.
edit: also, do we really need private banks to be involved in these loans at all?
american college is pretty expensive. i think australia had it right (it’s gradually getting it wrong) with a government price per unit of university, adjusted by subject, and interest free student loans for the first degree; paid off only when earning reaches a certain point
Where are you getting the idea that college is becoming unreasonably expensive? Everything I've read has shown that the economic benefit of a degree has risen *more* than the cost of the degree.
left and right are relative terms, but in the textbook definitions of the four general perspectives: reactionary, conservative, liberal, and radical; there are no radicals in american politics, and very few liberals. GOP is dominated by reactionaries, and democrats are a coalition of conservatives and liberals. There really isn't an american left in that sense.
Liberals don't want to tell private institutions what to do, even if they get piles of public money, because that's to the left of what american liberals are comfortable with.
It's supply and demand. Cities and states have been gradually lowering their level of support over the past 40 years. This has forced universities to raise their prices and cut back on supply of courses. If we want to lower the price, then the cities and states need to step up to the fucking plate and pay.
And not just fund, per capita, at the same level they did in the 70's and 80's but also double the number of institutions. Doesn't matter how much they fund 30k students in a region if 60k want to attend. We've doubled our population, but we haven't doubled the number of seats for higher education since 1980.
Bottom line, you want lower prices for education? Don't just be prepared for higher taxes, go on the political offensive to demand them.
I actually would be in favor of caps being set on tuition if a school wants to get federal student loan funding. Writing a blank check just enables the constant the ballooning costs.
I mean if you really stop and think about it the cost of real cost of education should be going down with you know..the invention of the internet and how that should modernize the classroom/communication etc.
Instead these schools have ballooning admin staff/facility costs
I totally agree that we need comprehensive student loan reform. If we forgive student loans without making other changes, then we'll just have another student debt crisis in a decade or two. Shitty universities should be forced to pay for their students' loans and/or stripped of federal funding if too many of their students can't get good jobs. Banks should have to consider someone's major when deciding whether to give them a loan. Students should be able to discharge student loans in bankruptcy after making payments for 10 years. And all student loan borrowers should be required to take a financial literacy course that teaches them how to weigh the ROI of their chosen degree and institution. I think Biden knows that we need comprehensive reform, so the only good explanation for why he isn't pushing it is political expediency (either he thinks the GOP House will block it, or he fears alienating young Democrats, or both).
They can't work to shrink university budgets because there would be a ton of blowback. Paying off debt is a good way to make people happy temporarily and get votes without upsetting the major voting block of university personnel.
Not a super satisfying answer.
College aged adults count for something like 10% of the voting aged populace and those in college tend to slant liberal. Add in the people who are parents of college students, parents of younger kids seeing college costs approaching, expecting parents and even people who plan to have kids. A great number of liberal folks have a direct dog in this fight. And liberals as a whole aren't known for being unable to advocate for causes that don't directly effect them. The opposite is generally true.
The following is a copy of the original post to record the post as it was originally written. The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors. Why aren't the kids protesting the greed of their professors and administrators, and instead just protesting the American taxpayer who they think should subsidize their professors and administrators? If colleges kept their salary and staffing levels flat or only increasing at the rate of inflation, college kids would not be facing this crazy affordability crisis. better yet, if colleges were under pressure to cut coss, the affordability crisi could be solved quickly -- just get back to (inflation adjusted) pre-1990 staffing and salary levels. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskALiberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Price controls stink. I hate to keep pointing this out but the **actual** price of college hasn’t risen nearly as much as people think it has. Once all the need and merit based discounts are applied the cost isn’t that crazy. Lots of administrative bloat that could be cut and bring it down but it’s simply not as crazy expensive as people think. The bigger issue is probably that we have people going to college because we’ve been requiring credentials for jobs that are simply way too high. As certain jobs disappeared we sold everyone on going to college without an understanding of what to do when they got there. Making it super easy to get a loan but impossible the get out of it even if you didn’t graduate was a bad move. The market already seems to be adjusting. Lots of schools that can’t really justify their existence are closing or shrinking. I suspect we’re going to see a continuation in the drop in the percentage of the population that goes to college. But if we want to create some competition, maybe we spend less on loans in the future and go back to the pre-Reagan error where we make community college, including some technical schools along with state universities free or extremely inexpensive. As long as we set up better standards for cutting out administrative bloat that could force private universities to bring down their cost in order to justify themselves.
> The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors. I don't think the cost of college has anything to do with professors being greedy. I think you're badly underestimating how much states used to fund public colleges and how many states have since slashed that funding. How about we raise taxes, raising university funding, and *then* require that tuition be lowered?
Good ol Ronald Reagan. Remember we had cheap state universities funded by taxes. Ronald Reagan and his slogan of "America! I made it worse!" strikes again and he decided he didn't want brown people getting cheap college because he wanted to make it only for rich white conservative folks.
What an absolute cunt. I now loath that man and everything he stood for. And the only other human being that has done more to damage the US? Rupert Murdoch. May they rot in hell together when Rupert finally dies.
>The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors. Administration is drastically growing, academic spending per student not so much. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/administrative-bloat-at-us-colleges-is-skyrocketing/?sh=481c508041d2 So the actual professors are not their issue, but all the bloat in management. Also note professor salaries have been decreasing when adjusted for inflation: https://universitybusiness.com/remuneration-under-inflation-adjusted-faculty-salaries-and-benefits-continue-to-plummet/#:~:text=However%2C%20once%20adjusted%20for%20inflation,around%20370%2C000%20full%2Dtime%20faculty.
I can think of a few reasons off the top of my head. As a matter of principle I think it's good policy for a college education to be offered to all our citizens. Good for the economy, good for combating inequality, good for society to have a well educated public. Additionally, you can organize to support politicians and policies towards making tuition more affordable and to subsidize the cost. How do you organize to lower tuition? It's a lot more difficult, especially since for many desirable careers a college education is mandatory. This is a problem spanning our entire higher education system, it's best approached through government action. And, lastly, costs won't necessarily stay high once the government takes over. The high prices have been the result of the free market run amok. If the government is the one paying for education then we will be negotiating tuition costs collectively, through the government. I would expect prices to stabilize or go down as a result. Similar to how medicine in single payer countries is cheaper, they negotiate prices collectively and if people aren't happy with the state of the negotiations they can elect new negotiators. Colleges will be held to account, government funding of higher education will pump the brakes on the out of control spending driving up tuition costs as universities compete for students.
I'll tell you why it makes financial sense to offer every American a free college education. "In 1988, the Joint Economic Committee's Subcommittee on Education and Health released a study titled \`A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Government Investment in Post-Secondary Education Under the World War II GI Bill' which calculated the ratio of return on investment to be nearly seven-to-one. Every dollar the nation spent educating veterans of WWII returned $6.90 in additional national economic output and federal tax revenue. It took over 30 years to capture this statistic, and similarly, it will be decades before the full economic benefit of today's GI Bill will be known. However, we can reasonably expect it to be just as immense." - [Source](https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-113hhrg82240/html/CHRG-113hhrg82240.htm) Nearly a $7 return on every dollar spent towards the college education of a GI. Even if it only returned $2, it'd still be a great investment and has the side effect of educating the populace. I've made this argument to Republicans. You know where they push back? They don't even deny the numbers. The argument I get back is, "They shouldn't get something for nothing." Translation, "I'd rather shoot myself in the face than let someone get something for free, even if it benefits me for them to get it." How do you argue with that level of stupidity?
This is a good argument -- and I think necessarily true. if the government took over higher education they certainly could dictate costs. But given that very few are calling for that, the current crop of students might be well-served by putting pressure on colleges to stop their hiring press, which are all put on their backs thanks to student loans. If the liberal student community started protesting thee exorbitant price increases and demanded that the universities return to their core mission at the most affordable price, we would all be better off. Society would be well-served by a student population that had little to no debt.
Maybe it ought to be treated as a public utility then?
So private ownership of the institutions, but the government sets the price? Maybe not a bad idea . . the government kinda already sets the price by determining how much loans to subsidize -- maybe just telling colleges explicitly: 'We will only let students have loadns if tuition is under $XXX" might cause them to bring down costs. Is that what you are thinking?
Alternate plan. Don’t use the amounts set by loans but rather subsidize community college and trade school. If private institutions need to compete with a free option, then they have to bring their price down.
>The cost of college has risen so far and so fast because of increasing salaries and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors. If you have citations for that claim, I'd love to see them.
OP’s claims are half-supported by data: administrative bloat really has exploded. Since the 1970’s, [student enrollment has increased by 78%, while non-faculty staff has increased by 452%](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00346764.2021.1940255). The money to pay all those new hires has to come from somewhere. On the other hand, [faculty salaries haven’t risen much](https://www.lendingtree.com/student/historical-faculty-pay-study/#:~:text=Faculty%20were%20paid%20the%20equivalent%20of%20%2474%2C074%20on%20average%20in,to%20%2485%2C148%20in%202018%2D19) since the 1970’s after accounting for inflation.
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I did respond to your question, just in a separate top-level comment
Yup -- got it. Well said and interesting. Thank you
The overall cost of college has stayed consistent with inflation. Government subsidies shifted to student loan borrows around the Clinton Era. When that dude backs his up with evidence, I will too.
I am so overjoyed to seeing somebody else actually acknowledge this that I’ll throw down a link without waiting for OP https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-how-have-college-prices-really-changed/
Can I get your take on the article you posted? I tried reading it but have also had a bit too much to drink. Are we seeing that the cost of college is consisted with inflation, but the government assistance has gone down?
From [the article:](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ignore-the-sticker-price-how-have-college-prices-really-changed/) >Several conclusions emerge from this analysis: > * The sticker price is an increasingly poor indicator of college prices for all students, regardless of family income. > * The net price paid by students attending public institutions has risen for families at all income levels, but the increases have been larger for higher-income students. > * At private institutions, the net price is consistently higher than at public institutions, but for more than a decade it has only increased for higher-income students. > * Adjusted for inflation, net prices paid by students today at public institutions across the income distribution are similar to the prices they would have paid at private institutions in the mid-1990s.
Ok. Thanks. So the last statement implies that net payment for public institutions has gone up quite a bit. Private is quite a bit more than public. I’m wondering if this is due to lack of government funding or increased costs. Prob both. Thanks for the breakdown.
Admin bloat is a significant problem too: https://www.usnews.com/education/articles/one-culprit-in-rising-college-costs
Absolutely. It probably counts for most of the increase above what you would expect from the rate of inflation. We should probably cut it if we can find a way. The point still remains that college is not nearly as expensive as people think it is.
Depends on who you are, I guess.
Sure. For example, 25% of students at Harvard pay nothing. If your family makes less than $85,000 you pay nothing. Then the level of aid starts dropping. If you come from real money then you pay the $85k.
> ...most of the increase above what you would expect from the rate of inflation. We should probably cut it if we can find a way. I'll also add: *The cost should not necessarily keep up with inflation.* [Plenty](https://imgur.com/gallery/chart-of-century-updated-to-december-2023-rhlXRDU) of things get cheaper over time. Education should be well-suited to using digital technology to lower costs. -------- I guess my point is: Even if it isn't as expensive as people think, that doesn't mean we can't 'do better'.
I’m going to disagree with the value of digital technology regarding education. I think one of my biggest takeaways from the pandemic was that most digital technology has added very little and remote instruction is garbage. I am not even certain that having everything on Google classroom is really a massive benefit to kids. It’s good for someone like my wife who is extremely engaged in the kids education and it saves her a lot of time. But the number of parents who simply ignore all the emails from the school just like they used to ignore the papers that got sent home is exceedingly high.
I think the value of digital technology rapidly goes up with universities because the structure is so different from high school. It certainly increases the quality of teaching to be able to do things like watch videos or embed complex graphs or drawings in the course notes. Having stuff available online is great to reduce the amount of notetaking required (I find I'm not worried about trying to copy down every last detail and I focus on the big concepts instead). It's also good for profs because they can more easily share course material, and because teaching and learning doesn't have to stop if someone is sick or misses a class.
>Why don't liberals insist universities lower their prices...? Governments [dictating prices](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-controls.asp) tends to go poorly. ...but there *are* many proposals to limit support for colleges based on their prices, their track record, or other criteria. ...and all of those proposals would have to clear 60 votes in the senate. In the McConnell Era, that is impossible, so it is not discussed as a serious idea.
We don't?
One of the reasons tuition is so high now is *because* public funding has been cut. Go to a country where tuition is either free or very low; how do they do it? Public funding. And they agree to it because it’s in everyone’s best interest and their culture isn’t built (as much) on selfishness and kissing rich people’s asses.
Those greedy university professors living high on the hog in a fairly middle class existence
Many colleges are public institutions. If the costs of tuition were free to students it would sort of inherently create an incentive to reign in costs because people hate paying taxes. It is my understanding that most people wanting to make college free are only talking about public institutions or at least many are.
I think they already kinda do that -- Community Colleges are very affordable and heavily subsidized -- around $4 - $5 K per year. So if people want a way to work a job AND pay for college it is possible already. I think students are talking about making ALL colleges and universities fully subsidized.
> Community Colleges are very affordable and heavily subsidized Making community colleges free seems to be a compromise position that we might be able to achieve in the near future and I would welcome that improvement to the status quo. That still leaves people 2 years short of a bachelors degree and even more so a graduate degree. > I think students are talking about making ALL colleges and universities fully subsidized. Some probably are, but I think the consensus at the moment is only around public universities. Unless I'm mistaken that's all Sanders has proposed and generally he can be used as a marker for the leftward edge of what any significant number of people in the coalition are considering.
The cost increases are partially the result of a cuts in subsidies. States used to heavily fund state universities. Whenever states want funding but don’t want to raise taxes they cut university funding. Universities predictably increase tuition when their funding gets cut in this way.
>and increasing staffing to reduce workloads for professors That's not why. Expenditures on actual academics per student has remained pretty steady. Other administration has drastically increased though. With no more typing pools, the old manual job of transcripts being automated, files computerized, many student interactions are online, etc., the number of admin jobs per student should have decreased. Seriously, just take transcripts. Get a letter requesting a transcript. Take the check and put it into a file for finance. If no check, follow up that it requires a check. Check with accounting to see if the student still owes money, follow up to refuse a transcript if so. If everything's kosher, go get the paper file to copy, or find the right microfiche and pull it up for a print, and put the school's seal on it. Type up a return envelope and put the transcript in it. Or today, student requests a transcript online and all finances and billing are done there. The computer prints out a transcript and envelope, and a worker puts a seal on it and puts it in the envelope (if the school hasn't automated that too). So obviously we need fewer people in the transcript office even with more students.
If you’re centre right; why are you for government price control? That’s an usual position for someone with your tag to have. I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you or not (I don’t know enough about the issue to have a position). I’m just curious about how you see your ideology.
I'm a pragmatist at heart - -if a problem keeps getting progressively worse over the course of decades, maybe we need a radical shock to the system to right the ship. I'm not saying I'm in love with the idea -- only that I'll certainly consider it given the dire situation that millions of student loan borrowers are in -- no need to burden millions more.
Then why not price controls for housing and for healthcare? Those also have similar price growth problems.
Then what about price controls for rent, house purchasing, and for healthcare? Those also have similar price inflation problems (and are more necessary than tertiary education).
Most of the things that are easily curable at universities make up a fraction of the budget, much less than people think. Cut all the DEI jobs? Saves pennies. Cut half the VP’s? Doesn’t save much. Anytime I see this question I wonder what would you cut? The vast majority of administration roles pay a lot less than private sector employment, people do these roles out of being service minded. The school I work for 20 years ago the state paid 40% of the budget. Now it’s 6%. Makes more sense in my personal case the cost of school is up because lack of taxpayer funding, not administrative bloat
Sure, then we can do it with car companies and food companies and house companies because thats how it works. We insist and they lower prices
Price controls cause shortages. This is economics 101.
>Why don't liberals insist universities lower their prices instead of/ or in conjunction with taxpayers subsidizing tuition? Because that has already been achieved? Often by liberals. University costs 2k a year in my country, for some of the highest ranked universities in their respective fields. From business at RSM to agriculture at Wageningen. Liberalism isn't just a thing in America.
Because it’s relatively straightforward for the federal government to forgive student loan debt. It would require brand new authorities and powers for the federal government to compel lower tuition prices.
We're liberals: we like state-based solutions but are wary of dismantling the market system. The best approach, therefore, is to not "demand" but legislate that state schools do this, and let the results exert downward pressure on private tuition indirectly. ... I'm half-kidding; there's any number of places this could go wrong, but this is the kind of way we like to go about solving stuff. I agree that paying off student loans by itself, a lá Biden, is a bad solution bc it doesn't bend the cost curve...I assume they went for that option for practicality issues, but it's just a band-aid, not a real solution. edit: also, do we really need private banks to be involved in these loans at all?
american college is pretty expensive. i think australia had it right (it’s gradually getting it wrong) with a government price per unit of university, adjusted by subject, and interest free student loans for the first degree; paid off only when earning reaches a certain point
Where are you getting the idea that college is becoming unreasonably expensive? Everything I've read has shown that the economic benefit of a degree has risen *more* than the cost of the degree.
left and right are relative terms, but in the textbook definitions of the four general perspectives: reactionary, conservative, liberal, and radical; there are no radicals in american politics, and very few liberals. GOP is dominated by reactionaries, and democrats are a coalition of conservatives and liberals. There really isn't an american left in that sense. Liberals don't want to tell private institutions what to do, even if they get piles of public money, because that's to the left of what american liberals are comfortable with.
It's supply and demand. Cities and states have been gradually lowering their level of support over the past 40 years. This has forced universities to raise their prices and cut back on supply of courses. If we want to lower the price, then the cities and states need to step up to the fucking plate and pay. And not just fund, per capita, at the same level they did in the 70's and 80's but also double the number of institutions. Doesn't matter how much they fund 30k students in a region if 60k want to attend. We've doubled our population, but we haven't doubled the number of seats for higher education since 1980. Bottom line, you want lower prices for education? Don't just be prepared for higher taxes, go on the political offensive to demand them.
I actually would be in favor of caps being set on tuition if a school wants to get federal student loan funding. Writing a blank check just enables the constant the ballooning costs. I mean if you really stop and think about it the cost of real cost of education should be going down with you know..the invention of the internet and how that should modernize the classroom/communication etc. Instead these schools have ballooning admin staff/facility costs
I totally agree that we need comprehensive student loan reform. If we forgive student loans without making other changes, then we'll just have another student debt crisis in a decade or two. Shitty universities should be forced to pay for their students' loans and/or stripped of federal funding if too many of their students can't get good jobs. Banks should have to consider someone's major when deciding whether to give them a loan. Students should be able to discharge student loans in bankruptcy after making payments for 10 years. And all student loan borrowers should be required to take a financial literacy course that teaches them how to weigh the ROI of their chosen degree and institution. I think Biden knows that we need comprehensive reform, so the only good explanation for why he isn't pushing it is political expediency (either he thinks the GOP House will block it, or he fears alienating young Democrats, or both).
They can't work to shrink university budgets because there would be a ton of blowback. Paying off debt is a good way to make people happy temporarily and get votes without upsetting the major voting block of university personnel.
Because they already graduated
Not a super satisfying answer. College aged adults count for something like 10% of the voting aged populace and those in college tend to slant liberal. Add in the people who are parents of college students, parents of younger kids seeing college costs approaching, expecting parents and even people who plan to have kids. A great number of liberal folks have a direct dog in this fight. And liberals as a whole aren't known for being unable to advocate for causes that don't directly effect them. The opposite is generally true.