Do you mean immeasurable?
Sorry, I was referring to the IQ stuff. He is repeating talking points we’ve heard and discredited before. That’s not what that case is about, and IQ tests are not illegal or even uncommon.
In other words, get rid of the poor’s opportunity to be upwardly mobile so that the middle class can have cheaper college.
I am an nearly-upper middle class professional with a job in public service and an advanced degree.
I grew up in a housing project on public assistance. My ability to get where I am today is 100% dependent on student loans. Without them, I would have not had the option to make the most of myself. I had no choice but to go to a bad high school. But thanks to student loans I could go to as good of a university as anyone else.
Your proposal would have literally ruined my life. Do you really want to make it so that bright poor kids don’t have the opportunity to make something of themselves? Because that’s what it does. I agree that there is probably a better way, but making it impossible for poor kids to get a good education isn’t it.
I have worked at several universities. The last one I was at (up until last year) is a medium sized state university in the northeast. All are facing (to some extent or another) real financial pressure and would never spend money when they did not need to (especially on administrators!).
I never saw or encountered a single overpaid or useless administrator. Every one I knew was crazy dedicated and worked more hours than any one I knew in the private sector. This concept that there are legions of ‘administrators’ that you can just get rid of is silly in my experience.
Cutting tuition in half at the institutions I am familiar with would result in those institutions closing within a year. They simply couldn’t support the contracts, pensions, debt and infrastructure.
I do think we will see an increased number of smaller to mid-sized institutions shut down in the next decade or two.
Most colleges and universities, particularly public ones, are already running a tight financial ship. That’s why so many classes are being taught by adjuncts paid $2,500 per course, why library budgets have been cut to the bone, and why I’m typing this on an ancient computer in a building that no longer gets cleaned adequately because the custodians are insanely overworked.
There are several different factors driving college costs up; which ones are the most important depend on the type of institution, but wasteful spending usually isn’t the most important one:
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Public colleges and universities have generally seen massive cuts to their state appropriations over the last few decades, as government funding of higher education has shifted away from subsidizing institutions toward offering financial aid to students (often in the form of loans that will eventually have to be repaid). I agree that this isn’t a good model for keeping costs low, but it’s the situation we’ve got now, and nobody seems much interested in returning to the high-taxpayer-subsidy, low-tuition model for public higher ed.
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Institutions are in more competition than ever for a shrinking pool of students, and, as even sven points out, colleges need those fancy dorms and rec centers and entertainment programming to attract the kinds of students who are going to pay full freight, especially if they’re lower-tier private schools that can’t really claim to be offering an academically superior product in comparison to the state university. If the campus doesn’t look pretty, and offer the sorts of activities that appeal to eighteen-year-olds, those students are going to go somewhere else.
At the same time, colleges also compete for students by offering them attractive financial aid packages, which means that the sticker price isn’t necessarily going to be the real price. One data point: at the no-name small private college where I used to teach, fully one-third of the students had some sort of athletic scholarship (and this was not a school whose athletic accomplishments you’ve ever heard of). Another 100 or so, out of a student body of around 2,500, were in the honors program and getting merit scholarships. I don’t know how many were getting need-based financial aid, but once you factor that in, it’s safe to say that the majority of the students were probably getting some sort of discount. There are a lot of problems with this system too – among other things, the students who are most likely to assume that the sticker price IS the real price are the non-college-savvy first-generation students who WOULD be getting heavy financial aid, and this often means poorer students are discouraged from applying in the first place. But, again, it’s how things work now.
- Administrative costs have gone way, way up. On the one hand, if you’re going to look for wasteful spending, that’s where you should look. People love to beat up on climbing walls, but those are small potatoes compared to the cost of running entire departments to do things that didn’t have to be done thirty years ago. BUT a lot of those things genuinely do need to be done now – one cannot run a college any more without tech support, or without someone to supply all the assessment data various agencies keep demanding, or without support services for students with learning disabilities or mental health issues. And if you want competent people in those positions (and trust me, you do), you have to pay them the going rate.
That said, it’s still possible to get an affordable education these days. My current university (small, public, not particularly well-known but academically solid) still charges tuition at a level slightly under the maximum Pell Grant rate; obviously, students still have to cover their books, student fees, and living expenses, but none of these things are outrageously expensive. A lot of the rhetoric about rising tuition costs conflates several different types of institutions and focuses on worst-case scenarios (say, people paying full freight at NYU or Bennington, or going into debt for a worthless degree from an online for-profit institution that accepts literally anybody who signs on the dotted line).
Why are you advocating for such a fringe, extreme viewpoint? The evidence that black people have an IQ of 85 and White people have an IQ of 100 is overwhelming and widely agreed upon. While there is no agreement on the nature of this gap (i.e. environment or genetics), its existence is scientific consensus and widely accepted.
But if Sam Stone’s argument is right (and I don’t think it is), then without massive subsidized student loans then college would be so cheap that you could afford it simply by working part-time or taking out a small unsubsidized loan.
I suspect that the part-time employment market is also very different three or four decades on, but that’s not really the point. If college were a tenth of its current cost, you could have found a way.
Can we bring some real numbers into the discussion?
I’m going to use my alma mater, Georgia Tech, which is not a typical school but it’s where I graduated (in 2007), so it’s what I’m going to use. If someone else wants to look up some other schools that would probably add quite a bit to the discussion.
This PDF is the 2015 budget summary.
To summarize the spending:
71% goes to “Resident Instruction” - which includes faculty, administration, facilities, etc.
17% goes to the Research Institute, which is funded from grants
10% goes to Auxiliary services - things like the dining halls/parking/housing that students don’t have to pay for but many use
1% goes to Enterprise Innovation, which is the business interaction and startup incubator
1% goes to Student activities - the “creature comforts” like the rec center, student center, clubs, radio station, etc.
Those creature comforts people rail on are a whole ONE percent of the budget. Not sure we’re going to get much cost savings there. Auxiliary/Research/Enterprise aren’t paid from tuition, so cutting those isn’t going to save on tuition costs. In fact, 71% of the budget going to instruction seems pretty good to me. But before we dig into that, let’s look at where the money comes from.
35% comes from “Sponsored Operations”, which is code for grants and contracts. Note this is higher than the 17% spent on research, so research is subsidizing students.
21% comes from tuition. Hmm, way less than the 71% spent on instruction.
16% comes from state funding. Yay tax revenue (I wish this was higher but I am not in charge of the State of Georgia)
9% comes indirectly from grants and contracts.
4% from departmental sales (from services to the public, like continuing ed)
3% “other” (?!)
1% for that Student Activity mentioned earlier.
Digging into the Resident Instruction mentioned earlier, the three largest expenditures by far are instructional costs, plant operation and research spending.
It seems to me that the boogeymen of college spending - the climbing walls and so forth - have little to nothing to do with the increase in cost. Even if we got rid of the things like “Student Affairs” and “provost’s areas” and “president’s areas”, we’re only going to cut the tuition amount by 10%.
Now, Tech is a public school, not a private one driven to make a profit, so that’s quite a difference, and it would behoove someone to look up those numbers because I don’t have the time to do it now. But I think most of the rise in tuition is because state appropriations are down and the cost of instruction is up. Simple as that.
If you want to go back to the good old days when you could get through college with a part-time job, all you have to do is convince your legislators to go back to the good old days of heavy subisdies to higher education.
There are colleges where this is true today, more or less. An AA degree at a community college can be had for under $10,000, usually split over two years, but some people take longer.
Obviously, the Frasier Cranes of the world look down their noses at such people, but they have no problem springing for Harvard.
It’s almost like market forces have identified key areas of demand and provided the desired range of products. Almost as if an invisible hand had arranged it all that way. 
This is a good point. At the state school I was talking about above, many students transfer in from local CCs and commute to campus. Two years of CC would be roughly $8000 and then 2 years at the state school would be about $10,000.
So you would need to make $4,500 a year to cover these costs (working at that part time night job). Not impossible, but it would be much easier to do if min wage was higher
I also grew up in a housing project. No public assistance, because my single mother worked two jobs and both her kids worked part time from age 12. I made it through college by working part-time jobs and throughout the summer. My wife did the same thing. Neither of us had any family help whatsoever.
The current way is to take those poor kids, convince them to ‘follow their dreams’, then give them hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rope to hang themselves with while they ‘find themselves’ in college or study something that has no prospects of earning enough back in income to pay off the student loans.
In the meantime, this system has inflated tuition so much that even kids from middle class families are forced into the student loan system to be able to afford college. Then when they get out of college their debt overhang causes them to delay marriage, families, home purchases, ties them into a job they don’t want because they can’t afford to be mobile with all their debt, etc.
You’ve got a long way to go to convince me that the current system is doing anyone any favors other than the people running the system.
Getting rid of this system does not mean poor kids cannot be educated. For example, online education coupled with apprenticeship programs or work co-ops could bridge the gap. A graduated system that includes a year at a junior college learning a related trade coupled with a followup degree program could be a lot cheaper and help someone work their way through school.
Moving to a ‘lifetime learning’ system where people don’t just got to college for four years and come out prepared for life (supposedly), but instead gradually fill in their educational ‘matrix’ and get intermediate certifications as they go would allow people to move up the ladder gradually and affordably.
There are many ways to educate people, and many ways to signal value to an employer. To assume that our current system of higher education is the only possible game in town is silly.
Try $20k. We just dropped my daughter off at Kansas State. Heres there tution schedule. 15 hours a semester is $4674.80. Add in fees and its well over $5k a semester. With dorms about $20k a year.
http://www.k-state.edu/finsvcs/cashiers/documents/costs/FY16ManhattanUG.pdf
It is possible for a poor student to get a good (and worthwhile) degree with minimal (if any) debt (I believe I outlined how above). It is also possible for a poor student to get into a private out of state college, then go to grad school and rack up 100K worth of total debt. But that was their choice. I would prefer they have more freedom to choose.
The system is far from perfect but deciding to completely drain it of money, at a time when states are already not funding it like they used to, doesn’t seem like a viable option.
Well sure, it is variable depending on the school. I also wasn’t factoring in grants or scholarships since those are also variable.
Judging from my kids and their friends, there aren’t a lot of “follow your dreams” people out there. Kids today are scared shitless of graduating from college with “useful” degrees with lots of debt and no jobs. The kids who graduated during the recession who couldn’t get jobs graduated from such la-di-dah things like law school and engineering.
The Obama Administration’s move against for-profit colleges will help the student loan situation, but certainly not solve it. Interesting how free-enterprise has led to students getting ripped off by these places relative to state-run schools. They sold students on going to colleges to get jobs after - no basket weaving there. They lied.
Why are we debating racial IQ, anyway. This thread is about cutting college costs. Stick to that or start another thread.
Virtually all the money that for-profit colleges earn comes from the federal government, so they’re scarcely an example of free enterprise.
Remember the Bridge to Nowhere? Now the government is giving us education to nowhere.
To a certain extent rich private colleges are doing it anyway, but for those who need it - not rich people.
Many state schools are being forced to raise tuition because of cutbacks in support, so I don’t think cutting tuition without more money from the state is too likely.