Have some examples? People making money in colleges are football coaches superstar faculty, who pull in research money and students, and presidents. But the president of a university’s job is to get donations.
Where would we find these millionaire paper pushers? Maybe in the passenger seat of that welfare Queen’s Caddy, with the basket weaving major sitting in back.
There is a whole bestiary of made up bad examples, isn’t there?
Sure it is. Student loan money serves a good purpose, usually - is it not free enterprise to start a company to take advantage of an existing situation? If the government loan program was started to support these colleges it would be one thing.
If government money makes a company not part of the free enterprise system, there is precious little free enterprise in the US. There go banks. There goes the housing industry. There goes most of the transportation industry.
These colleges were clearly operating to maximize the profit of their shareholders, not for the benefit of their customers as anything but a way of maximizing profit - just like they should.
You’ll find them in the diversity administration and victim’s studies departments.
Not to put words in Sam’s mouth, but I think the point that he’s trying to make is that with millions of dollars in loan money coming into most schools, it distorts the market mechanisms by which the schools set tuition and fees and by which they provide services and amenities.
That distortion is not all that different in concept from the distortion that health insurance money causes in the healthcare system.
In both cases, a lack of the insurance/loan money would force the institutions to price their services more appropriately to what people can actually pay, and it would open things up for lower-cost providers- I could totally see a no-frills university being a thing if this was the case.
But it’s hard to argue that plentiful student loan money doesn’t help the schools have absurdly nice services and immaculate grounds and maintenance that aren’t integral to the primary missions of research and/or education.
There are very, very few administrative costs associated with running a program in, say, gender studies or African-American studies, which is what I assume you’re referring to as “victim’s studies departments.” And nobody involved with such programs is a millionaire. Typically, these are interdisciplinary programs. They won’t even have a secretary of their own. The faculty are regular faculty members in humanities and social science departments, drawing the usual (not lavish) salaries for faculty members in these fields, and teaching courses that are usually cross-listed, so that students can take, say, African-American Literature as either a regular English course or an Af-Am Studies course. In other words, the course is part of the faculty member’s regular teaching load within his or her discipline, and, in most cases, one that would be taught anyway; cross-listing it attracts a few more students from outside the major and actually makes the course MORE cost-efficient to run. The program coordinator might, if they are lucky, get a course release, and paying an adjunct $2,500 or $3,000 to cover that course is literally the ONLY cost associated with running the program. The real reason why every little podunk college offers a minor in gender studies is that it’s dirt cheap and easy to run with the resources the college already has.
But, you know, don’t let the facts get in the way of your preconceptions.
I mostly feel that you didn’t answer the question, instead you answered a question designed to support your economic belief.
The question was “how much?” not “should they?”
Personally, I think colleges can cut their tuition by a lot. Rates go up higher than inflation and there’s no reason that rich ones, even with restricted endowments, cannot make themselves affordable to everyone. How much exactly is different, obviously, for each school, but I don’t think that going to school should cost more than an average person makes in a year, or even half that.
Again, in the truly top, highly private, expensive Ivy league schools, the poor students who apply and are considered worthy of them usually get a free or almost free ride. The rich smart students who apply will have little trouble of paying if accepted. The middle class smart students may be the ones who “suffer” most, but again most of the top, well-endowed colleges try to make it as affordable as possible to those students they want.
There are private, for-profit, not well endowed universities who do NOT offer that, and students who go there end up taking student loans. They in general ARE more “no-thrills”, and they do not showcase “basketweaving majors” like some argue. These are the group that are currently being under pressure from the federal student loan programs.
There are also the private, not for profit, but not well endowed universities, usually small liberal arts. They cannot give full rides to most of those who apply, even if they want. Students may also have to get a student loan to finish a degree here. They may or may not have “thrills”.
There are the big state public universities who have faced problems with reductions in budget from the state, and need to at the same time appeal to what even sven mentioned.
Lastly, really, how “no thrills” can you go? Or would you be willing to go? Example: As a graduate student, my health insurance (yay for not having universal health care insurance in the US!) was pitiful, and yet, I needed (as other students needed) a place to get checked and treated for my health problems. My graduate school (UGA) thus had a very complete and thorough health center. I’m sure some may think that was a useless thrill. For me and for others like me, it is and was a lifesaver.
Nm
But what Sam actually proposed was a two-tier higher education system, which if implemented would have been a major barrier toward my ability to reach my full potential. It would have given me a second-tied education when I wanted, was willing to pay for, and in fact have enormously benefited from was a top-notch one.
For poor kids, there is in fact value to the “college experience”-- in fact, it’s more essential to poor kids than anyone else.
Going away to college helped me get away from my neer-do-well high school friends and brought me in to a new world entirely structured around academics. It got me in to a supportive atmosphere, where studying was not “strange” or “a waste of time” but rather a normal thing that everyone does. It exposed me to career paths, including my own, that simply did not exist in my old neighborhood. It taught me a new “normal”, one that has enabled me to prosper.
Maybe there are people stronger than me who don’t need that, but I did. I needed a crash course not just in my subject, but in how ambitious middle-class people people organize their time, interact with each other, plan their lives and otherwise live.
I pay for that education every month when I make out my student loan check. And every day when I walk in to a job I love and come home to a happy, prospering household, I understand I made the right choice and it was worth every penny.
Excellent - thank you.
This basically amounts to an explanation that minority studies departments have parasitically spread their worthless courses throughout other, more reputable departments. There’s no possible way in which offering an “X’s studies” degree is free for a university: either it requires new, meaningless victimhood classes to be added, or it is emblematic of existing intellectual rot within the university.
I’ll continue to maintain that the growth ofendless diversity initiatives and anti-discrimination task forces has greatly bloated the administrative costs of college.
Dude. Breathe.
When I went to college, back in the late Stone Age of the late '60s at CMU, tuition, room and board for four years cost about what you would get as a salary in the first year of employment. I strongly doubt that is true today.
Recently, Rubio and the Economist have been pushing ‘equity funding’ instead of college loans. In that plan, investors would fund an education in return for a percentage of your pay after graduation - collected along with income taxes.
Why not cut out the middlemen and let colleges fund themselves by means of a slice of your income?
Most people, in this thread and elsewhere, agree that colleges and universities could cut costs a lot if they wished to. Fire a few hundred useless administrators, stop building climbing walls and dorms that look like luxury hotels, trim the fat and focus on academics, and prices could go down quite a bit.
Most people are also aware, at least somewhat, that by providing massive money through grants and subsidized loans government has caused prices to soar and schools to waste tons of money.
If government cut education funding, schools would not fire useless administrators or stop building ridiculous luxuries. Instead they would cut classes, trim scholarship money for poor students, close labs, reduce library hours, and do other things intended to hurt students. They would also raise tuition. We already saw some of this in 2009 when many state governments slashed university spending. It’s a classic demonstration of the Firemen First Principle.
Berkeley’s ‘Vice Chancellor of Diversity’ started with 14 employees in his ‘immediate office’, and within 3 years the number of employees had risen to 24. The vice chancellor has a salary well in excess of $200,000. A number of the people in his office carry executive titles and must be making somewhere north of $125,000.
The diversity office runs the following programs., all related to ‘diversity’:
Academic Achievement Programs
African American Student Development
American Cultures
Asian Pacific American Student Development
Athletic Study Center
Chicana/Latino Student Development
Center for Educational Partnerships
Disabled Students’ Program
Educational Opportunity Program
Gender Equity Resource Center
Graduate Diversity Program
Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society
Multicultural Community Center
Multicultural Education Program
Native American Student Development
Postgraduate Diversity Initiatives
Professional Development Program
SAGE Scholars Program
Staff Diversity Inititatives
Student Learning Center
Transfer, Re-entry, and Student Parent Center
Undocumented Student Program
Vice Chancellor’s Immediate Office
In 2012, UC Davis spent $662,000 on a ‘campus climate survey’ to track down and extinguish 'racism that could put “UC’s most marginalized and vulnerable populations at risk”. UC Davis’s own chancellor of diversity has a base salary of $250,000, plus received $60,000 in moving expenses and a $13,500 real estate allowance. That’s more in pay than their top faculty members - in fact it’s more than twice what senior faculty earn.
Syracuse University has had to eat crow and start early retirement proceedings for many managers after an external audit found that 211 managers in the university had only one direct report each, and another 134 had only two, and 93 had 3.
Syracuse has a total enrollment of 15,097 students, who pay an average of $41,000 or so for tuition. That’s one ‘manager’ for every 34 students (not including the other 50% that actually have a few direct reports). Assuming that these ‘managers’ earned on average $100,000, the cost to the students of just this group of light-working managers is $2,941 per year per student.
How would you feel if you were a poor student saddled with an extra $11,764 in student debt to pay for those people?
Actually there is a college called College of the Ozarks in Branson Missouri LINK that charges no tuition. BUT, the students do many campus jobs and run profitable campus businesses. I dont see why more colleges cannot use this model.
Your lame assertion is not a cite.
I know $125,000 American is a lot of money where you come from, but that is not much more than starting salary for new PhDs around here. The median salary in Santa Clara county is $100K and Berkeley is just as expensive.
I’m not privy to what similar senior execs in industry make, but it ain’t less.
Universities always claim the lack of funding from the state as the culprit for higher tuitions but as the above examples illustrate, even if the states would increase fundng it most likely would all go to staff salaries.
It’s a lot of money for a make-work sinecure. Considering that the position doesn’t actually benefit anyone in any way, you would be just as well off hiring a minimum wage worker for 12K a year.