College is getting far too expensive, and student loans ruin a lot of lives.
No more silly games with giveaways. The college I went to had a lot of scavenger hunts, trivia contests, casino nights, all free. They gave away thousands of dollars in prizes every week!
Slash athletic salaries. High school coaches aren’t paid at all, so there is no reason for college coaches to be millionaires.
No more constant upgrading of athletic facilities. The college I went to was a complete joke athletically, and there were usually more people on the field(players and officials) then people watching. That didn’t stop them from buying a new scoreboard, and converting the field from Astroturf to Fieldturf my freshman year. The next year, they tore down the field to build new labs, and built a new field on a deck over the parking lot. They didn’t even keep the scoreboard.
Make students pay extra if they want cable TV. Our dorms were wired up with cable, which was included in our tuition.
Stop turning the heat up so high. I remember they kept the dorms at 80+ degrees in the winter, and everyone would have all their windows open, even when it was below zero. Quite a few of the classrooms had this same issue. If they kept the heat at a reasonable level, they would save an absolute fortune.
Stop subsidizing movie tickets. Sure, it’s nice to get half price movie tickets, but not when it’s paid for by $45k/year tuition.
Better classroom allocation. I had lecture classes that were in high-end labs for no apparent reason. They weren’t even labs that were related to the class. I also knew people who fell behind in their program because they couldn’t get the lab time they needed.
It’s not as non-controversial as what you mentioned, but reducing federal student loans would help staunch the rise in college prices, and its an action that could actually be performed by government. The downside, of course, is that it makes college a lot more unaffordable for most people in the short term and means fewer people will be able to attend, but maybe that’s the solution we need.
The cure you propose is worse than the disease. We just haven’t kept up with the demand for higher education by increasing the supply of colleges and professors. High demand plus limited supply means high prices.
Those free giveaways are such a small part of the college budget that it would be negligible to get rid of them. Seriously, look at a college’s budget sometime.
2/3. Most athletic programs pay for themselves, and are not paid out of tuition. The athletic fee included in tuition is so students can attend games free. It’s also a laughably small portion of tuition, but if you want to get rid of that and charge students to attend games, go ahead, but you’ll piss off a lot of students doing that.
4/5. Surely that is paid in dorm fees and not in tuition. If a student doesn’t want to pay the dorm fees (they ARE usually overpriced), they can go find an off-campus apartment. If a college requires students to live on-campus, I find that is often not-actually-required, or the student could go someplace else.
What college does this? AFAICT, that is movie theaters doing it as a discount to attract customers. Even if the college is doing that, again, minuscule portion of the budget.
While this may be true, I have a feeling classrooms are likely allocated pretty well as it is, and your complaints are because the college doesn’t have enough space.
If we really want to lower the cost of education, we either:
need states to go back to funding universities (in the economic downturn, many universities lost state funding and made it up with tuition).
stop allowing loans to schools that don’t have a good ROI (I imagine many devry students get loans they can’t pay off with the jobs that kind of degree qualifies you for, and it’s really “burdening student loans” and not “tuition costs” that are the problem. If you got $100,000 in loans to graduate, but your first job was $150,000 straight out of school, you wouldn’t care about the loans. It’s when you have $100,000 debt and a $20,000 job that loans are a problem).
Lower demand for colleges. Supply/demand, lower demand, same supply, price goes down. Personally, there’s a lot of people going to college that aren’t benefiting from it as much as they would trade school or just going into the workforce. Of course, this requires employers to not require degree for jobs that don’t need them.
None of these things are true of all colleges and universities, and prospective students are free to choose. However, students often choose the school with the free entertainment, or the high-profile athletic programs, or the expensive new facilities, or the “free” cable, over the schools without.
What I’ve repeatedly heard is that the cost of college has been escalating in recent decades due to two things:
More and more administrators, and
more and more ‘quality of life’ benefits for the students.
(This is about the actual cost of college, not the cost to the student.)
Assuming the accuracy of this claim, ISTM that the answer would be for states to have some universities that were stripped down to the basics: professors, classrooms, offices, and research facilities for the scientific disciplines. No sports teams, no student recreational facilities - hell, no dorms, just find a depressed city in your state that has a surplus of housing, locate the university there, and let the students find their own housing.
How it would save money on #2 is obvious, but it would deal with #1 too, since less stuff to administer would mean a need for fewer administrators.
Larger states could each have such a university of their own, and smaller states (e.g. the New England states) could form consortia to create one such university that they share.
Obviously this wouldn’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Parents who fondly remember their college days would probably send their kids to traditional universities. But if you’re a first-generation prospective college student from a working-class family, the existence of such an institution might be the difference between being able to afford college, and either not being able to afford it, or being able to just barely afford it, but having no idea whether it’s worth the payoff.
Also, the very existence of such places would provide a check on traditional universities’ tuitions getting too out of line.
No, a tiny fraction of athletic programs pay for themselves. Much of the money comes from boosters and not directly from college budgets, of course, but I can’t help wondering how much more those boosters would be donating to endowments if they weren’t giving Nick Saban eleventy billion dollars.
agreed. The sad truth is, schools are competing for the top students and they (and their parents) expect a certain level of perks when they’re choosing colleges. It wasn’t like that in “my day.” I had never even seen my campus until the day I arrived as a first year student. But, as others have said, none of the OP’s suggestions will reduce the tuition rate. Tuition rates have only a slight connection to the cost of the education, and cutting movie tickets and turning down the heat (while perhaps a good idea) are not going to lower the costs to the students.
You mentioned Alabama specifically, so I suppose I should point out that the Alabama athletic program receives no funding from taxpayer dollars. Although this ESPN page indicates they got a “subsidy” from the university. I guess this is one of those posts where I started making a cite to support myself and ended up more confused than before.
When you consider that “most athletic programs” include smaller schools and minor sports—the kind of thing you never see on TV—I have a hard time imagining where they’re making enough money to “pay for themselves.”
ETA: But those are also not the ones where the coaches are millionaires.
For anyone saying that college sports pay for themselves, the athletic program at my school was a financial disaster. Hardly anyone at the school even cared about it at all. Nobody went to our games. They still spent lots of money on the facilities. The fact that they kept upgrading the field, that was about to be torn down is absurd. The athletic director and a few coaches were actually fired for stealing money from the school and fixing/gambling on the games.
I think using a school where the AD and coaches were actively embezzling money is a bad example to argue for the abolition of athletic programs in general. I would wager that the vast majority of ADs are not stealing money from their schools.
Yeah, that was pretty much my response.
“Our school lost money! All college sports programs are a waste!”
“Your athletic department’s budget was being embezzled.”
“And they lost money! See?”
The reason those things exist is to lure students into stuff to do on nights and weekends. Without those things, you end up with a number of alternatives, some of them very, very bad (e.g. wild keg parties where everyone gets drunk, instead of just the fraternities or something).
The supporting data is in fact incorrect. Many high school coaches are paid a stipend to coach. It’s why many of them do it - to get the few extra grand to help support their families.
I’ll give you it’s not much on top of not-great-salaries-to-begin-with (but that’s another discussion), and it’s definitely not the millions you see Big 10 or SEC head coaches making, but it’s not “aren’t paid at all”.
On the whole, I do agree that college coaches shouldn’t make that, I disagree with all the “But alumni pay for it!” sort of reasonings, but if you’re going to discuss these things, it’s good to get the facts straight.
I went to a 4 year “___ Institute of Technology”. Our sportsball fields weren’t all that great, and they definitely didn’t upgrade them.
Same point as #1 to begin with. But more importantly, this isn’t in your tuition. Cable TV would be a part of your “Residence Life” fees. Speaking as someone who got cable to their dorm 1/2 way through my 4 years, it was a lot nicer to have it.
I wholeheartedly agree with this one, but I wonder how many dorms are actually on “boiler”-type systems that have two settings: “ON” and “OFF”. I know my freshman dorm did and come nicer days in winter (e.g. when it was above freezing), windows would be open all over the place. I don’t know the engineering or science behind it, but it seemed as if the school couldn’t do anything about it.
This is completely the movie theater or whatever trying to attract business and I doubt part of what the school’s paying for.
“Labs” is such a generic word. Were they chemistry labs? Physics? Electromagnetic? Computer?
As noted above, it’s probably from a lack of space for classes that they were trumped, but that depends on your school, I guess.
College is getting expensive, but I don’t think it’s the cost of tuition per se that’s doing it. Or the cost of benefits to the students. It’s the other costs … and probably, as noted above, the ratio between “cost of a degree” (e.g. loans) and “how much you’re going to make”.
My opinion - that’s where we need to continue to focus attention. Taking on $150k of debt to get a BS and Masters in social work because you need a Masters to do be able
to get any sort of decent job in that field … and then only paid $40k for the rest of your life is … not great*.
*Numbers probably aren’t accurate, but I have a couple social worker friends who complain about this a lot.
More ways to prove knowledge, skills, abilities, and achievements outside the classroom could help. Most colleges have laughably little tolerance for smart people trying to “jump ahead” of the curriculum or get around taking classes for which they already know the material. Yes, I know that college involves an experience of learning - so assess whether the student has done that, and then grant the credit for a small assessment fee. Don’t make students sit for hours in Calculus II because they couldn’t transfer the credit in due to a catalog quirk or because they learned it at an “unaccredited” school. If they say they learned it, assess it. Give exams, review past work, perhaps assign a final paper. If the student passes, give them the credit.
Also, the whole system of university accreditation may be due for a review. One of the things that the system does is block newcomers to teaching. Yeah, you might be a m4d 1337 3ngl15h l173r4t|_|r3 3duk470|`, but without a horrific multi-year ordeal, your credits and degrees are worth squat. Students can’t even go and get reassessed by State U next door- they have to take it all again from scratch. See part 1 of my answer for why that’s problematic.
Here is the story about the climbing walls and premium cable.
There are two kinds of students- those that pay full price, and those that don’t. The ones who pay full price are essential, because they ultimately pay for a chunk of everyone else.
Here’s the thing- schools offer scholarships to excellent students in order to boost their ranking. So excellent students are generally not the ones paying full price. It’s mediocre students from well-off families that pay full price.
And mediocre students are generally not overly attracted to new physics labs or world class lecturers. They are attracted to water slides and smoothie bars.
So universities install these things to attract the full price students, who then bring in money for the labs and professors that everyone else wants.
It’s a stupid system, but as long as funding is low, it’s what we’ve got.
There’s another group that is paying into the American college system: foreign students. There’s a huge amount of non-American students attending American colleges. They’re generally ineligible for financial aid from American sources so they’re paying full tuition and the money’s coming from either their families or their home country’s government.
And there’s a hidden “tax” operating as well. A substantial number of these foreign students decide to stay in America rather than go home. Other countries are sending us some of their smartest children, paying us to educate them, and then losing those children to us once they’re educated.
I agree that there should be ways to get around taking classes where you already know the material. Thing is, that already exists at most major universities. At Georgia Tech, where I matriculated, you could test out of most of the 1000 level classes for a nominal fee. Plus they accepted AP/IB credit for a great deal of the intro classes. Plus the transfer list (I looked it up one time when I was flirting with a double major) came in an enormous booklet, and part of that booklet was how to petition to get a class that wasn’t in the list on the list (so if you went to school, say, in Romania, you could get the credits transferred).
There may be some exceptions (like, at Tech everyone had to take English 2 and couldn’t test out of it, but that was sortof understandable as they were heavy on discussion), but in general if you know a lot of the material you don’t have to take the actual class.