What state are you in? Google “[state] university budget” and see what comes up - I found an operating budget for my state in about two minutes.
I pour over the budget of a University every year. Yes, they are very expensive to run. Personnel and physical space are expensive. IT is expensive. Our professors are not well paid, and we rely on adjuncts as well. Our institution as extra capacity, so we could significantly bring down the cost per student if we could get enrollment higher. That’s not true at every institution, of course.
Figure 5 is the most useful - it shows growth from 5 to about 7 back office employees per 100 students from 1987 - 2007 for private 4 year non-profit colleges. Fewer for public colleges - which are bigger and more efficient. Hardly enough to explain tuition hikes of the magnitude we’ve been seeing.
The part time instructor problem is something else again - but it shows that colleges are trying to save money, if on the backs of those who could be faculty in the old days.
My son-in-law screwed up his early exams, and got tracked away from academic colleges. He was a lot smarter than the test showed and wound up going to a secretarial school which he leveraged into a real college, and then went to grad school. That is a downside.
I don’t know all the details, but my daughter spent a year abroad at a good German university. There were no dorms, but rather apartments for students. Not fancy, but no worse than her dorm at Maryland. I didn’t sense massive concern for grades among the students.
Take a look at community college graduation rates. It is possible, but those with the motivation to do well there could do well anywhere. Private schools may allow you to change majors, but not some public schools. At Berkeley for example if you don’t get into EE on admission you will never get into EE. And you have to change early enough to get the basic classes in. I don’t know if things are that different in Europe.
I’m not sure many students paying tuition would tell you they have lots of power, especially at big schools.
I teach in the CSU system, and there has certainly been a significant increase in the number of well-paid administrative staff in the last decade. The number of Admin III and Admin IV positions, paying six-figure salaries, have increased 30-50 percent at some CSU campuses over the past eight or ten years. SDSU, for example, had 28 Admin IV people and 44 Admin III people in 2007, and 41 and 67 respectively in 2013.
This book, The Fall of the Faculty, is an interesting look at the administrative bloat that has become part of higher education. This is not to say that all administrative expansion is bad or unproductive–the growth of student numbers requires some administrative growth–but the percentage of spending on administrative staff has increased at lots of universities recently. It’s a point of contention for members of faculty unions, which argue that, given the primary mission of the universities is education, we should be hiring more faculty rather than more administrators.
This report (PDF), which covers the decade up to 2008, notes:
I think the poster meant the student has the power to choose what schools they apply to, rather than that being decided for them like happened to your son-in-law.
This is very well-put.
I’m with you guys, I really am.
But I don’t think the problem is that 18 year olds lack the intellectual capacity to sign contracts and know what they’re getting into. They aren’t children. Nobody is saying they can’t get married or vote or join the military because they’re too immature to know what their decisions mean, and I think it is patronizing at best to say they can’t understand what they’re getting into when they sign for a student loan.
It isn’t their fault. Plenty of adults fall prey to payday loans and other types of predatory lending, too. Lenders have a responsibility (in my opinion) to ensure their borrowers have a reasonable likelihood of paying back their loans without going bankrupt and ruining their lives in the process.
To further compound the problem by telling them from birth that college – any major at all – is the fast track to financial success, and that of course you’ll be able to pay back those loans with the proceeds of your six-figure social work salary, is almost criminal. To specifically carve out an exception for student loans in the bankruptcy laws shows they’re doing it on purpose. I know people who took years worth of classes (for their minors :smack:) after they could have graduated, simply because their loans paid their rent, and they knew that as soon as they graduated they would be kicked out into the street and forced to repay their loans with no job prospects because they picked a major with zero value to any employer.
Am I against social work or theater as college majors? No. If you are financially independent, by all means get a PhD in basket weaving. We need all the knowledge we can get in this world, and I celebrate all the academics right now researching the minutia of whatever ivory tower pursuits tickle their fancies. But should the government freely hand out $60k to an 18 year old pursuing studies in art history? Do you think a bank would consider that a good investment?
If the government wants to fund college, they should fund it, straight up, with no expectation of repayment. If they want to tell us it’s an investment, then they should treat it as such, passing on the bad ones. The government will be better off, the taxpayer will be better off, and most importantly, the students will be better off. Colleges might lose money in the short term, but I think they’ll be better off in the long run as well.
If student loans are ruining your life, that’s nobody’s fault but your own. There are 7 repayment plans, including very generous income-based plans. I have ridiculous, crazy, six figure loans and my payments are extremely reasonable. I’ve had to use deferrals and forbearance at times (as a Peace Corps volunteer) and it was a painless process. They really do have a lot of ways to work with you to make sure you can pay something.
Yes, it’s not ideal to have massive debt. But people perpetuating the scare tactics are either massively misinformed or have some other agenda.
Different universities have different purposes. Yeshiva was not created for the same reason as Ohio State.
I am sympathetic to the romantic pictures of universities where students strive for a broad education that will help them thrive as humans, rather than merely prepping for a job. At the same time, I understand financial reality. We all know loans are spiraling out of control. Were I an advisor to high school seniors, I would advise them to weigh financial factors and not focus only on attending the highest-ranked school possible.
I agree. That’s why I didn’t propose any salary cap, but rather proposed eliminating useless departments.
Obviously it’s a matter of opinion. I merely said that universities could save money by eliminating certain departments. My father works in a humanity (history) at a big public university. He readily admits that the student/faculty ratio is lower for history than for departments like chemistry or psychology. So in effect, students majoring in chemistry and other technical fields are subsidizing humanities departments.
As for categorizing women’s studies and suchlike as “useless”, well, what are they useful for? Everyone I know sees the practical value in majors like biology, chemistry, and engineering. Students who learn those things can build bridges, cure diseases, or invent products. What can a graduate of a woman’s studies department do that’s of comparable value?
Further, when a professor doessomething really stupid, it’s most likely to be a professor in one of these useless fields. I’ve never heard of a physics professor disgracing her school by committing a violent crime on campus in public. Several folks in this thread have mentioned declining public funding. If you want to convince taxpayers to spend more of their money on universities, it would be helpful to have fewer idiots on the faculty.
In my field (international development) gender expertise is pretty marketable.
We used to fund development projects primarily for men, under the theory that they would raise household income and thus women and children would benefit as well.
Eventually we figured out that some of the projects we thought were successful were actually only benefiting men, and sometimes even left women worse off. We also found that basic improvements to women’s health and education had a huge ripple effect on the entire family. And sometimes we found just ridiculous mistakes, like a refugee camp I know of where they decided to build the women’s safe space (primarily used by domestic violence victims) across from a huge open field in view of the whole neighborhood by day and dark and isolated at night.
We also found some unexpected results. I know of a person who worked on a vocational training project for women, and years down the line he kept getting women calling and thanking him-- for making it possible for them to get divorces.
So now gender specialists are a part of basically every development project. They are people who know how to predict the impact of gender dynamics on a project. They know the literature and they know what has worked well and what has failed to show results. Usually they act in a consulting role during project planning, and they help the monitoring and evaluation people make sure they are measuring the right things. They may also work in explicitly gendered programming like rehabilitation for child soldiers or maternal health.
Doing really stupid things seems to be an interdisciplinary activity.
Engineering
Communications
Business management
Accounting
Public administration
Neuroscience
Constitutional law
Not to mentionPhysics
Curiously, I’ve been doing this for kids and their parents for the last month. One of the things I do is help parents arrange college savings plans for their children. It really boils down to a few things:
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Be wary of debt if you don’t have an absolute vision of what you want to do.
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Do your first two years at a technical or community college. Why pay full freight for your intro classes when it’s much much cheaper to do them and live at home. Your parents won’t mind.
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Parents, start saving early.
The thing is, we don’t need to abolish student loans. It’s going to happen - it IS happening - on its own.
The cost-benefit on a college education is beginning to run into the negatives. A great many kids can have perfectly good careers without ever attending a four-year college. I’ve seen a great many get trade education and they seem to be doing well. Will they be high-paid professionals? No. But, then again they don’t need to.
Look, I’ll be willing to say it: too many kids are going to four-year schools to obtain a degree that won’t pay itself back in any short- or medium-term. Colleges and universities are pricing themselves out of the market and community and trade colleges are taking up the slack.
Best guess? The closure of a bunch of private four-year colleges and the consolidation of public colleges in each state as geography and finances permit. Does Maryland - as an example - need my alma mater Frostburg State University as a part of its system? Could Frostburg be closed and its function (principally training teachers while I was there) replaced in College Park? Almost certainly. The same likely applies at most schools in most states.
The thing is, we don’t need to solve this. The market will do that just fine. All loans/grants/scholarships are doing is forestalling the inevitable. There will eventually come a point at which the average student will not be able to afford it even when all other sources of assistance are accounted for. At that point a tipping point will be reached and what is euphemistically called a ‘market adjustment’ will occur.
I wonder if the expectation of college hasn’t changed the landscape in high school for students, teachers and parents.
When its clear you coming to the end of formal education I think theres a little more immediacy in what and how much is learned.
help protect women from discrimination and oppression???
Well, anyone can apply to Harvard, but few will get in. I’m not saying the European system is good in this way - it sets a kid’s path way too early.
When I was in high school the size of our school meant that I was only allowed to apply to three places, plus the City University of NY which had a one page application. I’m not sure applying to 20 is better. It’s kind of like spamming resumes to hundreds of companies and then getting disappointed at not getting a personal response.
Maybe. Some might be skeptical as to whether a women’s studies degree helps anyone do that. It’s certainly not necessary. Oppression of women occurs mainly in places such as Saudi Arabia and Nigeria. I can’t recall ever encountering an academic feminist focused on assisting women in those places, though it may happen. Instead I hear more about women on campus who can spot a “microagression” anywhere or who are fighting the “rape culture”.
[QUOTE=ITR champion;18211459
I am sympathetic to the romantic pictures of universities where students strive for a broad education that will help them thrive as humans, rather than merely prepping for a job. At the same time, I understand financial reality. We all know loans are spiraling out of control. Were I an advisor to high school seniors, I would advise them to weigh financial factors and not focus only on attending the highest-ranked school possible.
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I think the ripoff isn’t about attending highly ranked schools, it is getting sold on expensive but mediocre schools that pretend to be good because they are expensive. My company recruits at the top schools, not the expensive schools.
I’m glad to hear it. I could have used such advice when I was 17. Every adult seemed to take it for granted that the only goal was to get into an elite private school; no one suggested skipping the chance to do so for financial reasons.