One thing I find crazy is the very same institutions that are generally very left leaning, decry income inequality, and espouse generally liberal views then turn around and having tuition costs that having been rising at rates so far above inflation.
Student debt is a major issue in the US and the ever increasing costs of tuition are a MAJOR culprit in pushing this crisis. Where are these costs coming from? How can you politically espouse free college while ratcheting up tuition costs?
I work at one local university, and my wife works at another. One thing we've definitely noticed (and this is a widespread problem) is that the administration is becoming more top-heavy. There are cutbacks in faculty, support, and teaching staff, more reliance on adjuncts (academic temps, basically), and so on, while central administration grows. Expensive new buildings contribute, but less than people suppose. But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds.
I think your impression is generally spot-on although there's nuances and it's more complicated than that.
In general, universities are suffering from many of the same pressures as other fields. Nonprofits are being run as profit-generating centers, and the implicit promotion track goes from faculty to senior faculty to administration, if you're even on tenure track. The administration salaries are increasing, as are the number of administrative positions (deans, associate deans, vice associate deans, assistant deans, etc.), and the structures are becoming increasingly hierarchical. Things are very top-heavy and expensive to run because the salary budget is so disproportionately distributed.
I don't think that's all of it, though. The rest of it is harder to quantify, but is the flip side of the educational bubble coin. Students are rushing to go to college in record numbers, which then puts pressure on colleges to stand out to attract more students and more high-paying students who become high-donating alumni. Institutions that should be getting public funding are not, which then trickles down to students; other private institutions then benefit from the increased tuition norms etc.
It's a complicated problem that involves HR and administrative practices and norms, economic incentives within university funding structures, incentives coming from a broken employment system in the US, problematic incentives coming from federal grant structures, etc. etc. etc. etc.
If I had to complain about things, it would be these:
1. Lack of workplace training - very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience, partly because there's nothing preventing someone from jumping ship for better pay once the training is complete
2. Credentialism - the things that actually matter in hiring are either difficult or illegal to test for (conscientiousness, knowledge, intelligence), and so degrees are used as proxies instead
> very few employers will pay for you to train/gain experience
Yes and no.
Most HVAC shops will pay for technician's training.
Most dev shops pay for technical conferences.
Most managers have access to management seminars and training.
Expecting an employers to pay tens of thousands of dollars seems weird, but many employers do pay on a smaller scale for skills training.
> degrees are used as proxies instead
Though conventional wisdom is that a degree doesn't matter 5 years after graduation.
Nor does it seem that prestigious positions are even that picky in practice. Yes, there are a number of Harvard, Stanford, Yale alumni in Congress, but other seven of the top 10 colleges for Congress members are public state schools. [1]
Dev shops pay for technical conferences but few tech places want to hire fresh, green devs and train them up. They all would prefer experience.
It's why you see so many forums talking about sending out applications to hundreds of places for months when searching for their first job, then never having a problem again after.
The degree you get certainly matters for graduate admissions though. For example, at both MacGill and U of Montreal they don't take any account of industry experience when you are applying for grad school. And they assume grade inflation, so unless you scored A average you can give up.
Schools in QC are a different breed, though. The cost for QC residents is very low, and the cost for non-QC residents is still pretty tolerable. This means there are lot of applicants -- like why not, it's cheap -- and they can be picky.
I've also noticed that Canada and Australia place far more emphasis on formal credentials than US colleges. US Uni's will take you if you can demonstrate competency and can pay; Uni Melbourne won't talk to you unless you have the exact, specific kind of degree. Ditto for UBC, U Sydney, etc.
I'll just throw this out here: for IT you almost don't want your in-house trained people to stay very long because it's pretty important less experienced people to get a variety of different experiences. I would say that people who stick to their first job for a decade or so tend to become under performers and I don't think it's generally because they can't find another job. Breadth of experience is really valuable in this field.
I've often thought it would be amazing if you could do the equivalent of professional football (soccer) lending of players. Lend a developer to another company for a few years with the expectation that they will come back. If they decide to stay then the borrowing company give some compensation. But it would mean having very strict contracts that limit the freedom of workers, so it's almost certainly a no go. I wish there was a way to make it work, though...
I think in general I mean that people are seen as cogs in a machine, rather than individuals to be trained, and there's no safety net from the government, either in terms of real retraining or advanced education or life benefits or anything.
HR gets a million applications, people are evaluated on what boxes can be checked off rather than their skillset, etc.
With regard to the educational system, the problem is that degrees are seen as signals or credentials (to use the language of the article) rather than as a background. That's admittedly a fuzzy distinction, but it really reduces the degree to the degree per se rather than the host of courses and experiences the person during college. So, we talk about "useless degrees" without recognizing that someone might have had equivalent coursework and experience without majoring in something else per se. In the end it doesn't matter.
I worked for five years at a private university a few years ago, and my experience is similar, although to add a little:
It never felt like a plan or conspiracy to make administration costs bigger. It's just very easy to do when you have more money coming in, year after year. In another economic environment, you'd get a "hard no" because the money isn't there. But when there is, expenditures become just another bargaining chip. Maybe you get your seventh librarian this year, and I get my fifth network guy next year.
New buildings (as you stated) aren't as big of a contributor as expected due to the convoluted role of donations, grants, etc. But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years. And even then we were getting projections of our "debt capacity" and always riding that line, so it's debt on top of debt all the way down.
I don't know about big schools, but for a smaller one like ours, there was no visible bad faith. These kind of things just happen when you can keep bringing in more and more money and so can your competitors.
I work in academic IT. My job is mission critical to the existence of 3 other project manager jobs. The bureaucracy grows to meet the needs of the growing bureaucracy is not a joke.
>But another big factor for those buildings is that we were getting loans for them, too, and those were based on (big surprise) long term forecasts presuming this gravy train is going to keep on chugging for the next 30+ years.
Harvard got spectacularly burned by the genius planning of Larry Summers in that regard.
Are the people who actually teach the classes (professors who teach and TAs) getting raises matching the tuition raises in your school? Or, is all of the money diverted to administration?
I wasn't in a position to be explicitly told, although I did at one point see an anonymized list of faculty salaries and they did not seem unreasonable (only one in six figures). This school is about 40 minutes away from a city with an international airport.
I think "diverted" is perhaps a strong word here. The way administrators see it, the administration is necessary to even reach the point where faculty can teach classes, and provides a significant role in empowering them to do so.
And there's some validity to it. Besides, students' expectations with regards to faculty haven't changed nearly as much over the last ~20 years when compared to administrative departments. Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff. Colleges are implicitly competing with other colleges with things like on-campus events, residence halls, modern cafeterias, online course registration, athletics... all kinds of stuff. There's a lot of money involved in these expectations that has outpaced the faculty side.
But it's cyclical. We pump money into those things to keep retention up because we need to because the other schools are doing it.
> Students absolutely expect good WiFi, good Internet speeds, Google Apps-quality e-mail, and that's just tech stuff.
My personal internet with Comcast is ~$60/month, so assuming universities have greater bargaining power due to scale that shouldn't make much of a dent in tuition. And my college email interface was clunky but I just set it up to forward everything to Gmail, which is free.
It's not really reasonable to compare a residential ISP to one for a college campus. It probably is cheaper if you count only the Internet service itself, but everything between that ISP and each end user's device has significant fixed and maintenance / upgrade costs attached. Your residential ISP can give you an all-in-one modem / WiFI router and you're good to go.
I lived at home, with my parents, and went to a state school and paid in-state tuition. Found online PDFs of all my textbooks, and I'm still just barely scraping in at under 40,000. This is from 2016 to 2020 (finishing up my last few courses over the next 6 months.) And the administration is still considering (aka going to pass) an 11% tuition increase, after a 9% increase just 2 years ago.
It's even worse for people who don't live near a university and need to live on campus, pay for meal plans, etc.
Yes, admin is a problem, but its not just admin. If you are a professor making 150k+, you have to ask yourself how much of your salary is being funded by rampant, unsustainable borrowing.
Colleges need dramatic, across the board cost cutting including professors, admins etc.
Colleges are in for a world of pain in the next 50 years.
If that is what they are earning without burdening thousands of students with unsustainable debt over their careers than I'd argue nothing is wrong with it.
For example if the salary is 100% from NIH grants and the prof makes 500k, more power to them.
If the prof makes 100k and all their salary is funded by student loans, then they should decide whether their livelihood is worth the externalities they are creating.
150k/year. Let’s assume the professor teaches 4 units per semester and maybe 2 in the summer (or research or some equivalent). Comes out to 15k/unit. Let’s say 15 students per unit just to represent smaller classes comes to $1k/unit/student/year. Each unit is like 3hrs/week for 12 weeks on average. So comes out to something like $28/hr. Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
Average course load for a student is like 6 units a semester so using the back-of-the napkin math above it should cost roughly $6k/per semester for students to have a full course load of $150k professors. $12k/year + other expenses is a far cry away from $100k that is being charged.
Other costs are also unacceptable. Colleges charge $500+/month for shared rooms. And require freshman to stay in them.
Nevermind the fact that your math misses several major cost categories like building maintenance, fringe benefits for professors (+30% of salaries at least).
In your hypothetical example, students are paying $20k/year before getting ripped off on the cost of the dorm and meal plan.
If a prof is making 150k, class sizes need to be 300+ and they need to teach 1,000 kids a semester
Do colleges make their budgets public? When a program is taking too long to run the first step is to profile. What does the data say on college costs?
> But that is a tangential problem, in that wealthy donors want to give big gifts for vanity projects rather than to, say, scholarship funds.
In the past I've felt quite motivated to give to scholarship funds. It resonates a lot if you yourself relied on scholarships to go to college. But I feel somewhat more cynical about this since I've seen costs spiraling out of control. The actual price of college can have anything bundled in there. I want to support students, but I feel less good about supporting ballooning costs that are twice inflation when I haven't heard a good reason for this.
You're right that they're libertarian/conservative in this regard. But they've published a number of articles with relevant facts about the growth of administrative roles in higher ed, and the associated costs. I haven't seen those facts questioned anywhere — have you?
Arguably those are the only ones we should care about -- they're getting our state tax funds.
Private Uni's are, well, private. They can charge what they want, and if the average Pell Grant or other DoE loans aren't enough that's not the Uni's problem.
This comment is sadly familiar to me - it sounds exactly how my friends in healthcare describe the state of their industry (more admin, fancy buildings, less focus or spending on patient care).
The tuition price being talked about is the top sticker price. If you care about inequality, that isn't the metric to care about. You should instead focus on something like median tuition paid since financial aid can mean that any individual student is paying anything from zero up to the full tuition costs. The concept of the richest students paying a six figure sticker price in order to help compensate for the students on the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum who can't afford it is the exact type of thing you would expect from a "left leaning" institution.
But as the article says, low income students are scared away by high tuition. My fiancee was raised poor and I kind of understand the mentality -- when the tuition is a multiple of what both your parents make in a year, you say "this place isn't for me" and move on. You've been told in various ways throughout your life which places aren't for you (there are a lot of them), and a $100k sticker price is a pretty damn good signal.
And besides, no one wants to rely on the generosity of paternalistic college administrators. That's not safe. You don't want to wake up and suddenly find due to some technicality you again owe more money than both of your parents make in a year. And you don't want to feel like a charity case.
(If you think that's a remote possibility, think of the people who went into teaching with the promise of debt forgiveness, and found it revoked. They don't have any choice in the matter -- they're totally screwed.)
Better to go to the local city college. Your cousin went there and a few other people from your school go there, too. It's a safe choice, and there are people like you there.
> One thing I find crazy is the very same institutions that are generally very left leaning, decry income inequality, and espouse generally liberal views then turn around and having tuition costs that having been rising at rates so far above inflation.
It's weird you chose to make this comment on an article about the University of Chicago, the home of Milton Friedman, Supply-side economics, "no safe spaces"[1] and so on.
Has the University of Chicago ever advocated for free college? Their economics department, home of the late Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, is among the most right-leaning in the country.
This really isn't true anymore, but people keep regurgitating it. Chicago has a lot of behavioral economists like Thaler/List/Levitt, a lot of people who work on econometrics or mathematical economics like Harberger/Uhlig/Stokey/Tesler. There are still some Chicago school of economics folks at the university, but increasingly "the Chicago school" is an independent beast. There are a few emeritus professors in the old guard, but claiming that the department is one of the most "right-leaning" in the country is wrong.
Given that most (yes, most) students at the University of Chicago receive financial aid, what you're seeing is a sticker price. The school is using the high sticker price + financial aid to perform very efficient price discrimination[0], so they can get a lot of money from people who can pay.
That is part of it, but the term "financial aid" is usually trotted around to make people think that the less wealthy are getting "aid" but in reality, the majority of that "aid" is in the form of non-dischargeable student loans.
I don't consider a loan "aid". Especially since that loan has interest.
Yes, this. The nameplate tuition is paid by a vanishingly small percentage of students. What I think each school should do is publish data showing what the median tuition paid is, and the quartiles. That would help a lot to fight this perception that "tuition is going up every year!"
If its about the claim that this is an example of price discrimination:
that is an opinion I formed while I was at the University and spoke with some folks in the economics department about it. There is a class offered in econ about the economics of education, and that certainly hit the point home that financial aid is a type of price discrimination. I couldn't have paid for the tuition in full, so I myself received significant financial aid and supplemented with some student loans, so I got to see a bit of it first hand.
Interestingly enough, many elite schools have need-blind admissions and excellent aid if you are poor. If you are rich, it's affordable. As usual, it's the middle class that gets screwed.
I went to Stanford. My mom did part time office work and my dad was the director of planning for a local city government. It was very affordable for us.
Right, I also assume a lot of these MSRP prices are what they want wealthy foreign nationals to pay, not necessarily a US citizen. We really need the data on the average cost and what the distribution curve looks like.
It's pretty clear how these schools operate. They charge high tuition for people with a lot of money and cover the costs for people that can't afford it.
>With over $159 million in financial aid distributed this year, UChicago is committed to ensuring that its students graduate debt-free and prepared for lifelong success, no matter their chosen major or background prior to enrolling in The College. UChicago is a need-blind institution, which means we make admissions decisions independent of a family’s financial circumstances[0]
That seems like a hallmark move of progressivism, no?
No, especially at well-funded not-for-profit private universities, “financial aid” often includes generous need-based grants (not scholarships, which are merit-based) that reduce the amount that must be met from student/family resources (including loans) substantially for non-wealthy students (not unheard of for it to be down to $0 for the poorest who manage to get admitted, and that's not just tuition but sometimes housing, books, etc.).
Not at the Jesuit college I went to, which I’m still pretty bitter about. I got cheated out of grants because I qualified for “financial aid”—loans which I am still paying off.
> Guaranteed Free Tuition
Families earning less than $125,000 per year (with typical assets) will receive a financial aid award that covers the full cost of tuition. Families earning less than $60,000 per year will have tuition, fees, and room and board covered by financial aid. UChicago’s need-based financial aid involves no loans and is awarded as grants, which do not need to be repaid.
Looking at the sticker price can be confusing, when the majority of students are receiving some financial aid. You'd need to look at the average tuition paid by students at different family income levels. But is that data even publicly available?
That is definitely the way to look at it although there is a middle class where family income is more than what qualifies for financial aid but far lower than tuition being "affordable".
> the very same institutions that are generally very left leaning, decry income inequality, ...
These schools are price discriminating, which means only the richest families are paying the full price. This kind of heavily graduated pricing where the wealthy pay for most of the cost of the school is very much in line with their principles.
Yeah they’re not left leaning at all, they’re completely corporate and plutocratic. The highest paid state employees are university presidents and college sports coaches.
Has it occurred to you that maybe the state can handle the cost? Compare to how much we spend buying fancy equipment to kill people. (Military spending if that is too indirect a description.)
Consider also that a large amount of student loans are already from the government, so in a default...
You might see people rallying for forgiving debt, but not for increasing enrollment, which is what caused high debts in the first place. It s impossible not to call this hypocritical
While this is true of its peers, no one has ever accused the University of Chicago of being left leaning. The unrestrained neoliberalism (deregulation of consumer protections, unwinding of antitrust policy) that characterizes our time is literally called the "Chicago School" of economics.
I think most people would say you're correct about the Econ department, but that isn't the whole university. Plus, it's not like U Chicago is that far off from other universities when it comes to tuition and fees. They cost $58k, but Columbia University is already above $59k, Dartmouth is $55k, Penn is $56k, Duke is $56k, Brown is $55k, Tufts is $56k,
There are plenty of liberal schools whose sticker price is going sky high.
> One thing I find crazy is the very same institutions that are generally very left leaning, decry income inequality, and espouse generally liberal views then turn around and having tuition costs that having been rising at rates so far above inflation.
Eh...the UChicago economics department and the people of Chile would like a word with you on that.
- Rampant cronyism in the administrative bureaucracy. Too many inflated titles with ~$200k yearly compensations.
- Building architecturally impressive (but questionably prudent) faculty buildings/dorms/libraries/etc. in hopes of luring prospective students, many funded by alumni looking to stroke their ego via their name on the structure (reminds me of that scene from House of Cards when Kevin Spacey's character does this very thing)
- Federal government showing no signs of abating the giving out free money to attend college, which enables the entire cycle to continue
Assume that inherent skill is evenly distributed, Assume that the environment to foster that skill is not. Why would we not make college affordable if we can produce high quality college graduates. The US isn't a closed system, we make a lot of money in the knowledge economy, a fight we're slowly losing to China and India.
Student debt is a major issue in the US and the ever increasing costs of tuition are a MAJOR culprit in pushing this crisis. Where are these costs coming from? How can you politically espouse free college while ratcheting up tuition costs?