[HN Gopher] Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year - how di...
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Some colleges will soon charge $100k a year - how did this happen?
Author : gnicholas
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-04-05 17:46 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| pydry wrote:
| Staggering levels of wealth inequality
| umeshunni wrote:
| It's amazing how the highest rates of inflation are in the
| industries that are most affected by government intervention
| (housing, education, healthcare)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| They're also the industries whose providers know you can't
| really go without.
|
| US healthcare and education is _abberantly_ expensive
| compared to the rest of the OECD, most of which regulate them
| _more_.
| dwallin wrote:
| I know you only implied it but be careful with causation
| here. We know that there are situations where the free-market
| does not lead to ideal outcomes. Does it not seem likely for
| government to involve itself more in areas where the free
| market is most likely to fail?
| complianceowl wrote:
| You mean like involve itself in housing by requiring the
| industry to grant a certain amount of home loans to make
| the "American Dream" a reality, thereby creating a housing
| market bubble, then when the bubble popped and tanked the
| economy, blamed it on the banks?
| ushiroda80 wrote:
| This happens in the USA. The regulation is pushed by private
| companies to increase cost of market entry ( I.e. decrease
| competition) Japan has none of the crazy inflation in these
| categories. The other key variable is these are core
| essential needs hence people will continue to pay.
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| Staggering levels of debt funding backed by the inability to
| bankrupt one's way out of it.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| subsidized student loans don't make education cheaper, it
| increase the ability to pay (adjusting for demand elasticity).
|
| The same goes for the housing market. Govt interventions has
| only made home prices more expensive vis a vis other items we
| may consume.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| Please explain the details of how wealth inequality causes
| extreme inflation in higher ed prices. I've yet to see wealth
| inequality fingered as the culprit.
| fire_lake wrote:
| Some people have several orders of magnitude more to spend
| giving their offspring an advantage. It's worth it too, due
| to massive inequality in job market.
| skadamat wrote:
| After being frustrated for many years by the rising cost of
| college, I've internally decided to flip the questions.
|
| - Why _would_ college tuition decrease?
|
| - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling their
| tuition in a single year?
|
| - What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their
| tuition?
|
| It's unfortunately really hard to find good answers here IMO with
| the layout of the current "market conditions" for colleges that
| we've setup in America.
| d--b wrote:
| Because not everything in life should be driven by optimizing
| profit?
| stuartjohnson12 wrote:
| This is a normative claim, which therefore cannot answer
| questions about what is, or what could be.
| BriggyDwiggs42 wrote:
| Parent comment is probably not arguing in favor of overpriced
| college, just saying the situation won't resolve naturally
| d--b wrote:
| I'm saying it may resolve naturally, if any of the
| overpriced university decides that over charging for
| education is not in line with their ethics.
| colechristensen wrote:
| Reduce the amount students can borrow for college, that's it.
| If you give people ever increasing amounts of money to acquire
| something that society convinces them they need, the price will
| keep going up as the loan money available goes up.
|
| It's just being sucked into bullshit administration and
| infrastructure costs.
|
| A university could be a few dozen professors, zero admin
| besides secretaries for the professors, and having the
| professors share whatever small organizational tasks are
| actually necessary.
|
| Like think of how you would run a startup university. Do as
| little as possible outside of actual teaching and research,
| charge tuition to cover costs which would be much lower.
|
| There's not any competition though. So it's not happening.
| pc86 wrote:
| I agree with the general thrust of your argument but it's
| oversimplifying the causes. A real university would not be
| able to run with just professors and secretaries, that's
| ludicrous. You need some administration to handle compliance,
| organization, finance, etc. You can both acknowledge the
| objective reality that a university is a complex organization
| that needs administration _and_ that most universities today
| have 3-4x more administrators than they need.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| I studied at a "startup university" that had just a few dozen
| professors. The total number of employees was still more than
| 100, and it wasn't all "bullshit administration".
|
| There were assistants to the professors (1 assistant per 3
| professors), the bigger research groups had post docs and lab
| technicians, there was an IT team (3 people), there was one
| person responsible for the sign up formalities of the
| students, a director of the institute, his assistant, one HR
| person, 3 or 4 people in the cafeteria, cleaning staff, head
| of microscopy lab, some scientific support technicians,
| people feeding rats and mice in the life science facility, a
| few people in the machine shop, a librarian (library was
| digital only; still took a dedicated person who made sure
| everyone got access to the literature they need), and those
| are just the people I met and remember.
|
| That university only offered PhD programs, so there were only
| few lectures. If you wanted to do undergraduate courses as
| well, you'd need a lot more people than that.
|
| Universities just need a lot of staff.
| gnicholas wrote:
| That sounds somewhat like the university of austin, or
| whatever it's called. They're launching this fall and trying
| to get accredited. It will be interesting to see how that
| plays out.
| miki123211 wrote:
| > and research
|
| Why research? Why not go further and cut that bit out and
| just leave teaching?
|
| I'm not convinced that the best place to teach student is
| necessarily the best place to do research at, and I'm pretty
| sure that your competence at being a good researcher has very
| little to do with your competence at being a good teacher.
| pc86 wrote:
| #2 and #3 both have simple answers - "Nothing," and "Eliminate
| the free money buffet of federally guaranteed loans that can't
| be discharged by anything short of death."
|
| "Eliminate 80% of administrators" would also help with #3 but
| there's no incentive to do that, especially without the more
| direct answer to #3 happening first.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| Just in general I would like to say that flipping the question
| like this is a great way to look at all aspects of a problem.
| Similarly "why would the price of housing decrease?" etc
| lukas099 wrote:
| > What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling
| their tuition in a single year?
|
| If a school doubled tuition, it would be less competitive and
| fewer of the best students would choose to apply and enroll
| there. That would make that school less elite.
|
| > What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their
| tuition?
|
| Increased supply and/or lowered demand.
| pc86 wrote:
| Harvard could triple its tuition and the same people are
| going to apply to Harvard.
| gnicholas wrote:
| This would be true for those whose contribution would be
| capped based on parental earnings/assets, since their
| effective price would not increase. And it would be true
| for extremely wealthy folks whose parents can spend $1M on
| college and not worry about it. But for the marginal
| applicants who would be paying full freight under the old
| price but can't easily toss out another $150k/yr on
| tuition, there would definitely be a drop in application
| rates.
| finolex1 wrote:
| They might apply, but certainly won't attend if they are
| admitted to Stanford, Yale, etc. The higher the price
| differential, the more likely people would be willing to
| take a 'prestige' hit and go to the lower cost school.
|
| Anyone applying from a family making 400k a year (top 2%)
| would still be sensitive to an 80k vs 240k/year sticker
| price change.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Operation Varsity Blues
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varsity_Blues_scandal)
| suggests there are plenty of individuals willing to pay
| plenty more. Some would even break the law and risk
| prison. If it were legal, probably many more would pay.
|
| There are just the people who got caught!
| pquki4 wrote:
| Hypothetically -- what if Stanford and Yale etc also
| triple their tuition at the same time?
| bnralt wrote:
| > - What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their
| tuition?
|
| Decoupling education from certification would work. Most people
| are willing to pay so much for college because they need
| certification; they're forced to pay for the education, whether
| or not they actually learn anything.
|
| The Federal government could mandate that any school that's
| eligible for funds has to make the certification open to
| anyone, and also make sure that the certifications themselves
| around coupled together (you don't need a certification in Art
| History to get certified in Biochemistry). If people can pass
| the Harvard certification for, say, Harvard Astrophysics, then
| they get a Harvard Astrophysics degree the same as someone who
| took classes at Harvard and passed the certification.
|
| It's known that bundling items together is usually a good way
| to force people to buy things they don't want. People talk
| about this all the time when it comes to cable bundles. But our
| higher education system is based on bundling a lot of things
| together, so when people are trying to acquire what they need,
| they're forced to pay for many things they don't.
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The resulting certifications would be worth approximately the
| same amount as the existing online-only degrees. Basically
| ticking the box for "college educated", but be passed over on
| any further scrutiny than that.
|
| Because the selling point of prestigious schools is the
| filtering and networking.
| totalhack wrote:
| I'm not opposed to any attempt to remove the need for these
| full college degrees as a hiring requirement, but this also
| ignores that the point of many colleges is the network. You
| are paying to be part of a club.
| miki123211 wrote:
| I don't think you're wrong, but I think that food and
| accommodations would be better places to start the unbundling
| with.
|
| A lot of US schools require you to live on campus and pay for
| campus food, which is a perfect example of bundling if there
| ever was one. As a European, the fact this is legal seems
| absurd and ridiculous to me.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _- Why would college tuition decrease?_
|
| in theory, because of a few factors
|
| 1) more kids doing online, or community college, degrees
|
| 2) more people opting to go into the trades, as AI eats
| knowledge workers and the cost-benefit doesn't make sense; or
| else skipping and going straight to certifications for things
| like IT
|
| 3) legal or structural changes impacting how many international
| and out-of-state students are allowed. many public universities
| operate at a loss for locals, but subsidize those costs with
| higher fees for out of state and international students.
|
| 4) the gub'mnt finally gets around to rejecting or capping a
| lot of student loan applications
|
| Been seeing a lot of chat about #1 and #2, but until the last
| two get changed I don't think anything will drastically improve
| nameless912 wrote:
| > - Why _would_ college tuition decrease?
|
| The only answer I can think of is strong and swift government
| regulation, and there's no appetite for that, so...I dunno man.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Tuition could decrease because of the growing sense that
| college is not 'worth it'.
|
| > _A poll published in 2022 asked parents if they would rather
| their child attended a four-year college or a three-year
| apprenticeship that would train them for a job and pay them
| while they learned. Nearly half of parents whose child had
| graduated from college chose the apprenticeship._ [1]
|
| > _Nearly half of parents say they would prefer not to send
| their children to a four-year college after high school, even
| if there were no obstacles, financial or otherwise. Two-thirds
| of high-school students think they will be just fine without a
| college degree._ [1]
|
| When there is a large change in the demand for a product, the
| price often drops.
|
| 1: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/why-americans-have-
| los...
| Manuel_D wrote:
| You'd think that college tuition would decrease in the US
| because university enrollment has actually been on a downward
| trend for over a decade. However, in the US university
| primarily serve as social signalling and an elite prestigious
| university is a very different type of product than a typical
| university (most of which are not particularly exclusive,
| admitting over 70% of applicants).
|
| Presumably, competition prevents this. It would really depend
| on the applicants' other options. Between attending Vanderbilt
| at $200K per year and a moderately less prestigious state
| university for about an order of magnitude less a lot of
| students would pick the latter. The university could admit more
| students that are willing to pay the doubled tuition, but
| that'd probably result in lower graduate quality.
|
| I'm not sure what could make elite universities lower their
| tuition save for legislation. As the Varsity Blues scandal
| demonstrated, families are willing to pay huge sums of money to
| get their kids into elite university. Besides laws, the only
| other answer I can think of is to reduce the prestige of elite
| universities. If an Ivy League, Stanford, or MIT diploma ceases
| to confer so much advantage in academia and the labor market
| then their ability to charge large sums would go down.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| This is a great question.
|
| - Why would college tuition decrease?
|
| 1) College tuition would decrease if it led to increased profit
| for the college. This could happen for many reasons including
| the case that they can't find enough students willing to pay.
|
| - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling
| their tuition in a single year?
|
| 2) Mostly the fear that it would reduce profits - for example
| through bad publicity, increased regulation, or an inability to
| find students willing to pay
|
| -What forces would actually cause colleges to lower their
| tuition?
|
| 3) market forces - on the demand side a decrease in students
| willing to pay, or maybe on the supply side an increase in
| competition for students. Or maybe government/regulatory
| interventions. Or possibly even a reduction in the costs of
| providing education.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| What does it mean for a school like Harvard to make a profit?
| Why do they want to do that?
| StressedDev wrote:
| They won't call it a profit. What they will do is spend as
| much as they can on salaries (especially for the senior
| employees), increasing the size of the administration (more
| jobs for insiders), buildings, sports, etc.
|
| Basically, people think non-profit means the organization
| works for the public or puts the public first.
| Unfortunately, what it often means is money goes to
| employees and insiders instead of shareholders. For
| colleges, it means the students (and the Federal Government
| which issued the student loads) comes last and the
| college's employees come first. Not great public policy.
| kristopolous wrote:
| This is why running things that aren't a business "like a
| business" is profoundly dangerous and destructive and
| anybody advocating it should be dismissed as
| ideologically driven.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| I can see the logic of administrators wanting to spend
| money on their own remuneration, but why should they care
| about building new buildings?
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| https://finance.harvard.edu/financial-overview
|
| "The University ended fiscal year 2023 with an operating
| surplus of $186 million compared to $406 million in fiscal
| year 2022, on an operating revenue base that increased 5%
| or $262 million, to $6.1 billion. The reduced surplus was
| not unexpected and was driven primarily by expenses
| associated with renewed return to campus activity and
| strategic investments in our workforce, with increased
| compensation for faculty and staff, a decrease in vacancy
| rates, and overall growth in new workers across campus."
| dan-robertson wrote:
| Sure, but that money isn't going to shareholders is it?
| Why would the school's management want to make that
| number bigger?
| quickthrowman wrote:
| > - Why would college tuition decrease?
|
| The single change that would cause the largest downward
| pressure on college pricing would be removing federally
| subsidized student loans.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| >> - What's actually stopping the elite schools from doubling
| their tuition in a single year?
|
| It is effectively double -- the rest of the "tuition" is legacy
| contribution. There is an entire standard contribution schedule
| based on how many years out of college you are. Many legacy
| parents pay hoping this gets their children into the school
| when the time comes.
| tekla wrote:
| Mostly because we allow easy loans for students who don't read
| the paperwork.
|
| We need to stop giving out easy loans to anyone who asks. The
| schools will lower prices if people can't afford it via a loan.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > We need to stop giving out easy loans to anyone who asks.
|
| Right, by not having student loans backed by the federal
| government. As it stands now, if you put glasses on a dog he
| could get a student loan because lenders have no incentive to
| scrutinize the debt. The federal government collects for them.
|
| We're pushing people with absolutely no financial experience
| and no financial training to sign up for debt they can never
| get rid of without what's effectively economic indentured
| servitude.
| nothercastle wrote:
| I don't have any issue with easy loans just make them
| dischargable so banks have skin in the game
| tekla wrote:
| Why would ANYONE agree to service that? It's an insane
| proposal.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Federal student loans broke the market. People became price-
| inelastic.
| silverquiet wrote:
| What is your price elasticity for your childrens' future?
| cj wrote:
| > What is your price elasticity for your childrens' future?
|
| This is a silly question.
|
| Silly answer: I would want my kid to be able to retire
| happily. If college debt prevents that, let's ditch it.
| brk wrote:
| Your comment highlights what I personally think is some of
| the reason for the extreme tuition increases: too many people
| believe that college is the singular best path for their
| children's future.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Including, unfortunately, the vast majority of employers
| and human resources people those children will encounter
| when attempting to get a job.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I don't have kids, but I believe it. I have several close
| family members whose biggest regret is that they didn't go
| to college.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| It (still), mathematically is.
|
| The return on the investment of a college degree is
| absolutely worth it.
|
| What's becoming much less clearly worth it is the value add
| of going to an elite school over a state school.
| tekla wrote:
| College was/is/remains one of the biggest factors in
| determining incoming levels and general success in life.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I can think of a much better use of 400k. I went to community
| college and a cheap state school and I make good money.
|
| Colleges don't refund you if you can't finish or get a decent
| job afterwards.
|
| The system as is doesn't make alot of sense. Just running
| though Harvard's cost calculator, if you have a family income
| of 300k you're out 86,666$. Drop that down to 175k and it's
| only 26k.
|
| Given how bad the tax rates are at that level you might as
| well have one parent play golf all day.
|
| 300k is a very reasonable amount for two typical people.
| After income taxes takes 100k off top( assume a high tax
| state like Hawaii), you're talking about spending more than
| 1/3rd of your take home on one child's education.
| silverquiet wrote:
| > 300k is a very reasonable amount for two typical people.
|
| It's literally four times the median household income of
| the US. (And even after inflation, bananas still don't cost
| anywhere near $10 two decades on after that joke was made).
| This sort of statement is a bit out of touch if you ask me.
|
| Here's where I'm certainly willing to accept that I'm a bit
| out of touch - I don't have children. So my question is,
| how much would you be willing to pay if you _thought_
| something would give them a significantly better future?
| 999900000999 wrote:
| How will anyone have an extra 86k on a 300k a year salary
| ?
|
| The numbers just don't make sense. I don't have kids so
| I'll probably cross that bridge if I get to it, but
| there's a limit.
|
| You can have a great future with community college +
| state school.
| silverquiet wrote:
| If I math this out right $300K - $100K taxes (your
| estimate) - $86K tuition = $114K which is still a lot
| higher than the median household income (which I'm pretty
| sure is still pre-tax). That said, I think you are onto
| something - these schools are for the elite; not the
| merely well-to-do or below.
|
| I also went to state school, so I'm not really dissing
| the thing, though people here would probably laugh at me
| if I said how much money I make, so maybe your mileage
| may vary on that one. But my perception (which could
| certainly be mistaken) is that the elite degrees actually
| have a huge premium, which is why there is so much
| competition for them.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 114k isn't going very far in an expensive city. Plus a
| ton of people aren't doing great.
|
| For example in LA the average income is only 76k.
|
| https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/losangelesci
| tyc...
|
| At that point you'll never be able to afford to buy a
| home which used to be a Hallmark of the middle class.
|
| It wouldn't be possible for a family making 300k to pay a
| mortgage in LA and send a kid to Harvard.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Then they'd have to choose one or the other. My parents
| told me in no uncertain terms that there was no money to
| send me to private school, so I didn't apply to them; I'm
| also quite allergic to debt.
|
| I had a paper pointed out to me recently that I found
| enlightening.
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5222535/
|
| > The recent proliferation of studies examining cross-
| national variation in the association between parenthood
| and happiness reveal accumulating evidence of lower
| levels of happiness among parents than nonparents in most
| advanced industrialized societies.
|
| It seems that the pressures we place on parents as a
| society have grown as we've advanced. I certainly am not
| built to deal with that kind of stress, and given the
| dropoff in fertility, I think that that's a more common
| view these days.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| I took a much different route. I barely got out of
| highschool ( although I was at the point where I would of
| taken a GED test and walked out).
|
| Then I did well in community college, couldn't afford my
| last year of college, dropped out. Worked for a very cool
| startup for a bit, and I was making a very respectable
| salary without a degree.
|
| Eventually I finished my degree at a very cheap state
| school, but it hasn't really mattered. My major is in
| some unrelated non sense. Gets me past HR filters though.
|
| Ultimately I just really love programming, I learned
| enough to get my first job with an old laptop. I reckon
| anyone with a 100$ laptop ( install Linux on whatever you
| can find on eBay) can learn programming for free.
|
| My real belief is college is a nice to have, but
| shouldn't be required to start a career. If anything I
| think most people should take a bit of time to work and
| figure out what they enjoy before commiting to school.
| astura wrote:
| >This sort of statement is a bit out of touch if you ask
| me.
|
| Just a bit? It's wildly out of touch, $300,000/year is
| literally the 95th percentile of income for families[1].
| Dude called income that's more than 95 PERCENT of the
| population "a very reasonable amount for two typical
| people."
|
| Fucking hell!
|
| [1] https://dqydj.com/household-income-percentile-
| calculator/
| giantg2 wrote:
| "People became price-inelastic."
|
| Isn't it the opposite? The tutution became increasingly
| inelastic. Consumers would technically be more elastic given
| the higher credit available.
| t_mann wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_elasticity_of_demand
| giantg2 wrote:
| "A good's price elasticity of demand"
|
| Yeah, so the tuition is more inelastic, not the people.
| t_mann wrote:
| technically, it's demand that is meant here by what's
| elastic (or not). there's also a price elasticity of
| supply (eg, if tuition goes too low, some colleges will
| close).
|
| the way the GP used the term was understandable to me,
| and how I'm used to seeing it used. it's basically
| shorthand for 'people's [demand for college degrees]
| became price-inelastic'. if you want to use it
| differently in your communication, it's up to you. just
| remember that people might understand something other
| than what you meant.
| skhunted wrote:
| Last year about 7.5 million people attended public 4 year
| institutions and about the same number attended public two year
| institutions. Around 5 million attended private institutions.
| Over the last 25 years there has a been a steady decline in the
| public funding of public higher education on a per student
| basis.
|
| Higher education is a large market and there are many, many
| forces at play. Blaming a single item is too simplistic an
| analysis.
|
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_303.70.a...
| pc86 wrote:
| The number of students is irrelevant. The government will
| secure your student loans and the only way you can get rid of
| them _is to die_. When a school can basically decide how much
| money they want, wave a magic wand and the money arrives in
| their bank account, it 's going to skyrocket exactly like it
| has.
| skhunted wrote:
| The number of students at public institutions vs. private
| institutions does matter. You do not know much about how
| higher education works. Public institutions generally can't
| just raise tuition as they see fit. They usually need the
| approval of state governments. Tuition has gone up at
| public institutions as state funding has gone down.
| jdeal wrote:
| Federal loan limits for the first year of undergrad are $5,500
| for dependents and $9,500 for independents, so they can't be
| blamed for a single year costing $100K.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Private loans aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy.
| acchow wrote:
| Student loans became non-dischargeable. That broke the market.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| Wanna share why having loans make people price-ineslastic?
| Mortgages are a thing and people aren't indifferent to house
| prices.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Mortgages don't qualify for income-based repayment schemes or
| forgiveness for govt/nonprofit employees.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Mortgages must be paid on time or your lender will foreclose
| on your home and liquidate it to pay off your debt.
|
| That is impossible to do with an education. Add in loan
| forgiveness and income based repayment from the sibling
| comment, and the fact that a mortgage is securitized by
| collateral and it's almost like a student loan and a mortgage
| have nothing in common aside from being loans.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| This problem would be solved immediately by making student
| loans dischargeable in bankruptcy. The easy money would
| evaporate and a lot of colleges would have to figure out how to
| make money on lower tuitions.
| spike021 wrote:
| That's on top of every other expense like books, scantrons (not
| sure if those are even used anymore), and whatever else.
| Everything adds up for students.
| jer0me wrote:
| That price is inclusive of room, board, and other expenses.
| spike021 wrote:
| In my experience whenever prices were calculated that way
| there would still be unexpected expenses.
| leplen wrote:
| Price discrimination in the form of scholarships and the "show us
| exactly how much money is in your wallet" scam they call "need-
| based-aid" allowing universities have essentially perfect price
| discrimination and to gobble up the entire consumer surplus is
| definitely a big part of it.
|
| Imagine any other service where they demanded your bank
| statements before they told you what they would charge you, and
| the impact that would have on sticker price.
| fishpen0 wrote:
| Funny enough this is exactly how vendor engagement goes when
| you are publicly traded. They can see your books more or less
| and charge wildly different numbers to different companies. It
| has nothing to do with how much you use the product or the
| resources you'll use and everything to do with what they think
| you are worth. We've had so many calls where we're like "brand
| new product with team of 10 wants your thing" and they come
| back with a high 6 figure saas contract. It's so fucking
| annoying that they don't have to show their prices online and
| can make all their customers sign pricing NDAs
| exe34 wrote:
| I suppose it's karma for all the companies that refuse to
| publish the salary being offered for jobs upfront.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| I've always wondered why the family that pays full price for
| tuition does not get the tax credit for their charitable
| contribution to some other student whom they subsidize.
|
| If I donated $20k to a university, I'd get to write that off as
| a charitable contribution in my taxes. If I pay full tuition
| and 1/3 of that goes to a student needing aid, I get no
| deduction.
| vernon99 wrote:
| That's the only thing that bothers you? :) How about we
| outlaw the price discrimination described in the parent
| comment? I think everything else just pushed the conversation
| deeper in the weeds and does us all a disservice.
| gnicholas wrote:
| So no more youth ticket prices, senior discounts, etc.?
| Price discrimination is a very commonly-used tactic, and it
| goes by many different names.
| rendang wrote:
| It's typically the opposite of what you say - the true
| expenses/student that a private university pays is much
| higher than even the richest kid pays (difference made up for
| by the endowment's income)
|
| So the better question is why they don't raise prices such
| that the rich kids have to pay the true full price & have
| more money for aid for the less-rich.
| floor2 wrote:
| No that's not the better question.
|
| If private universities are truly spending so irresponsibly
| and profligately that their sticker price isn't covering
| their expenses, then their entire administration should be
| thrown out and replaced. It's only incompetence or
| corruption that could excuse such costs.
| AgentOrange1234 wrote:
| Throwing out the entire administration and then only
| replacing a small fraction of it would work even better!
| StressedDev wrote:
| I have a hard time believing this. Every course I took in
| college had at least 15 people and usually 30-50 people.
| Large classes like Calculus 1-2, Linear Algebra, and
| Differential Equations had at least 300 people. There is no
| way you cannot pay the salary + legitimate overhead for 1
| profess, and 1-10 TAs with these class sizes. My guess is a
| lot of the money does not go to instruction but goes to
| administration, sports palaces (stadiums), luxury dorms,
| etc. Colleges used to be MUCH cheaper in the 1950s, 1960s,
| and 1970s. The education was just as good but cost far
| less.
|
| The big problem with colleges today is they are "non-
| profit" in name only. Instead, of giving profits to
| shareholders, they are giving them to employees and
| insiders. This hurts students and the United States.
| However, colleges do not care because they, their
| employees, and friends benefit.
| lukev wrote:
| Given a typical professor's salary, it is... difficult to
| imagine that this is true, at least not without
| fantastically bloated administrative and overhead costs.
| CPLX wrote:
| > fantastically bloated administrative and overhead costs
|
| Indeed. Go check the trends on the ratio of non-teaching
| staff to students at these major name colleges.
| ckrapu wrote:
| "non-teaching staff" includes all the research
| scientists, postdoc, and techs that help make the
| research happen. These universities are not especially
| good at teaching compared to SLACs. They are
| exceptionally good at research.
| weitendorf wrote:
| It's not just price discrimination, but the process of applying
| and choosing a college is essentially an auction process
| designed to benefit colleges over students. US colleges all
| band together to participate in a single coordinated system
| (FAFSA, college ranking systems, the common app, Early decision
| rules, etc.) , acting almost like a cartel, so they get away
| with it. If you view the college application process through
| the lens of Mechanism Design you can see that colleges hold all
| the cards and so the entire system is designed to their
| benefit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanism_design
|
| What exactly is unfair about the process?
|
| 1. The colleges which most heavily implement price
| discrimination are the most desirable to attend and also tend
| to accept large portions of their student body through Early
| Decision applications that don't allow apply to most (not all)
| of the other most desirable colleges. This means that accepted
| ED applicants have no recourse beyond either accepting or
| rejecting the proposed "aid package".
|
| 2. Highly desirable colleges aim for high applicant "yield" for
| rankings/planning, which in aggregate makes it so most of their
| accepted students only get into one highly desirable college.
| Even outside of early decision applicants, this puts applicants
| in a bad bargaining position - they must choose between either
| paying more for the ~single highly desirable college they got
| into or less for a less desirable college.
|
| 3. You cannot generally bid between colleges even if you got
| into comparably desirable/expensive desirable colleges (you
| can't tell Dartmouth and Brown that each is proposing a cost of
| $40k/y and have them bid against each other). This is because
| they essentially operate as a cartel. This limits downward
| pressure on prices.
|
| 4. The application process operates in rounds with fixed dates,
| there aren't really do-overs within a given year, and waiting
| for the next year changes the process (you're either a transfer
| or gap year applicant). This puts a lot of pressure on
| applicants to accept the least-worst option and doesn't give
| them the ability to react to a bad outcome by eg applying to
| more places after the fact.
|
| 5. The acceptance criteria are opaque and in many cases
| subjective (eg your application essays). Applicants need to
| hedge their bets and deal with a lot of uncertainty. Any
| accepted offer from a highly desirable college then feels like
| a gift and not worth squandering/negotiating.
|
| 6. As you mention, colleges know exactly how well you'll be
| able to pay, and because they act as a cartel that disallows
| bidding wars or negotiation + all the other forced
| scarcity/time pressure I mentioned, they can essentially
| extract as much from applicants as they want, up to their
| sticker price.
|
| It's worth mentioning that not all competitive colleges
| participate in the cartel to the same degree as the Ivy League.
| When I was applying to colleges, I remember MIT and Caltech had
| Early Application (not Early Decision) processes, didn't make
| applying in those rounds as beneficial as ED colleges, and
| didn't have as many athlete/legacy "backdoors" as the Ivy
| League.
|
| I also remember that Duke and Vanderbilt offered full merit
| scholarships to some students who might've received no need-
| based aid, which I was fortunate enough to benefit from and am
| extremely grateful for, even if it was probably a self-serving
| policy to poach applicants away from the Ivy League/improve
| yield.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| Beautiful reply. #3 can be pushed by aggressive negotiators,
| but requires "like for like" schools to make a mistake. Then
| you can leverage one school to ask for more money from
| another.
| meetingthrower wrote:
| 100%. There are revenue management consulting firms that boast
| of increasing price realization by 15%+ by managing admission
| rates, communication patterns, and "scholarship grants" to
| optimize bottomline price.
|
| When the marginal cost of each student is probably $20K,
| anything over that is awesome. So even if you give a $30k
| "merit scholarship" to a full pay student you are making bank,
| as you are still clearing $50K+ as a university.
|
| Perverse outcome of this is that the richer students will get
| more "merit aid."
|
| Also, Ivy leagues + Stanford and MIT are a cartel, and don't
| give merit aid. So they use the "need based" aid system to even
| more increase their price realization from the richest folks.
|
| (Ask me how I know: parent who went way too deep on this, and
| is now stroking a $85K check to an ivy.... lol.)
| gnicholas wrote:
| What makes you say the marginal cost of each student is $20k?
| danielheath wrote:
| That number is preceded by the word "if", right?
| gnicholas wrote:
| It is not. I don't think it said "if" before, but it
| certainly doesn't say it now:
|
| > _When the marginal cost of each student is probably
| $20K_
| happytiger wrote:
| It's the same system California is putting in place with
| income-based energy billing.
|
| Income-based billing is rife for abuse!
| kristopolous wrote:
| Traffic citations in some municipalities do this.
|
| College shouldn't be structured like a punitive sacrifice for
| poor behavior
| xnx wrote:
| We are at peak college tuition. AI is coming for higher
| education. Not Ivy League at first, but starting with community
| colleges and working its way up.
| SkipperCat wrote:
| I think it won't be AI that causes the collapse of university
| attendance. It will be people deciding not to go to college.
|
| Most people just want jobs. Many employers are finding out that
| people with or without college educations can perform at their
| tasks, think critically and do all the same functions at most
| jobs. Ergo, folks will choose not to go into student debt
| purgatory and just dive straight into the workplace.
| tqi wrote:
| > AI is coming for higher education
|
| As long as hiring managers continue to give more weight to
| resumes with name brand colleges, these universities will never
| be threatened.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Some places like Google and many state governments are
| publicly removing all requirements for college degrees.
| Whether they still choose degree holders anyways is an open
| question, but some are very openly proclaiming that it's not
| a requirement.
| xyst wrote:
| the internet already made college irrelevant. The second wave
| of AI is just cleaning it up.
|
| While I was attending college in the 2010s. They were always
| pushing "new buildings", "new rock wall climbing", "renovations
| to college housing", "lazy river!". Apparently funded through
| higher tuition and fees.
|
| At some point, a college degree will no longer be required
| which will be the death knell.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| The point of college is signaling. The internet has no answer
| for how to signal to employers.
| tacocataco wrote:
| How about employers pay to train their own employees?
| api wrote:
| How did this happen? Subsidizing demand without addressing
| supply.
| topspin wrote:
| Subsidizing and augmenting demand. The State Department grants
| about 500,000 F-1s every year. COVID curtailed that a little,
| but the numbers have since recovered.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| "How did this happen?" -- because the market will bear it. High
| sticker price + financial aid for 65% of students just makes it
| easier for a college to price discriminate, which is overall a
| good thing. And as the article points out, most students don't
| pay anywhere near as much as a Vanderbilt full tuition, so in a
| sense it really doesn't matter. The article does a good job of
| explaining this.
| complianceowl wrote:
| You can't say the market is bearing it when the college market
| is being sustained by government-backed funding via student
| loans. If the market were really bearing it, government's
| involvement would be minimal to non-existent.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| The people paying $100k are not doing so via government-
| backed student loans.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I don't understand this. When Harvard or CalTech says that
| anyone admitted will not be turned away due to financial
| hardship, it's because the loans are issued with a
| qualification based on their admission. 100k or any other
| price, the current financing structure remains the same.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I believe Harvard also guarantees some students (from
| families below a certain income level) don't need to take
| out loans.
| bfrink wrote:
| At Caltech, students from families making $90K or below,
| will receive a no loan financial aid package (package
| will consist of grants and work-study).[0]
|
| [0] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| How did it happen? Education in the US works on a freemium model.
|
| The pay-to-win aspect is more obvious at the university level,
| but it occurs at K-12 too: it's just that there the cost is not
| directly charged by a school district, but occurs via the premium
| for housing in that district.
|
| (take a null hypothesis: a world where school districts all offer
| the same education. Even in this case, should parents somehow
| agree on which the "good" district were, it would have a premium
| reflecting how much parents who care about education are willing
| to pay to live somewhere where their children's likely friends'
| parents also care about education. "the mother of Mencius chose a
| neighbourhood")
| uejfiweun wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like college tuitions and need based aid
| programs are specifically calibrated to fuck over the "upper
| middle class." It's completely ridiculous that households making
| 300K or whatever (which is barely enough to support a family in
| many cities in the nation) are put into the same financial aid
| category as billionaires (that is to say, no financial aid at
| all). It's a hoop that you have to jump through so that the man
| can keep you tied to your desk working throughout your entire
| life.
| iamthirsty wrote:
| > It's completely ridiculous that households making 300K or
| whatever (which is barely enough to support a family in many
| cities in the nation)
|
| ...Is this /s? $300k is sufficiently enough to support a family
| of 4 in literally any city in the U.S., including NYC & LA.
|
| Outside of those 2 major cities, $300k/y for a family is _more_
| than enough.
| tstrimple wrote:
| I lived comfortably in SoCal making around $160k/year with a
| family of 5. These were in family friendly neighborhoods with
| low crime and good schools, so definitely not the cheapest
| areas either.
| complianceowl wrote:
| Posing this question almost feels insulting. How did this happen?
| As with so many (not all) things that government gets involved
| with, Uncle Sam did it.
|
| Why on God's green earth would colleges lower their prices when
| they have guaranteed funding via guaranteed student loans? If
| anyone could get a loan for a house, the same thing would happen
| to the housing market. Cough Cough...2008. Government placed
| quotas on the industry to make the "American Dream" a reality for
| everyone.
|
| I get it. Government-backed student loans does indeed give
| opportunities for many less fortunate people. But does giving
| opportunities to the less fortunate, which is a much, much
| smaller percentage than those who are not in that category,
| justify making college unaffordable for the entire country? Keep
| in mind that most people fall into a middle category where they
| are not poor but still don't have enough for college and have to
| find a way.
|
| And sure, call me a conspiracy theorist, but at the end of the
| day, the Government doesn't back student loans because they want
| to help. They do it because it serves their special interest
| groups.
| jppope wrote:
| "Its not about what you can afford, its about what you can
| borrow"
| cjpearson wrote:
| Very few students will pay that price. Even those above financial
| aid thresholds will typically be offered a ~~sale price~~ merit
| scholarship. Also, if they have other offers they can try and
| price match. The sticker price is so high because it feels nice
| to get something for 50% off. Much more so if it was due to your
| "merit" rather than your coupon clipping prowess.
|
| College tuition is expensive, much more than it should be, but
| the obsession over a sticker price that is almost never relevant
| is silly. People should be more concerned about the actual cost
| of attendance.
| bandrami wrote:
| Why is this presumed to be a bad thing?
|
| College attendance and graduation rates are higher than at any
| point in the past, so the cost isn't actually keeping people from
| going to college (or at least, isn't keeping people from going to
| college more than they were kept from going to it 50 years ago).
|
| In general, the income premium from a college education is much
| greater than the debt accrued to get that education, which is why
| people still take the deal. (There's people on the margins for
| whom that _isn 't_ true and I think most of the reform/bailout
| effort should involve them.)
|
| Is this actually something that needs to be "fixed"?
| pc86 wrote:
| For the sake of argument let's say college triples your income
| potential. To make the math easy, let's say instead of earning
| $1M over your life you'll now earn $3M.
|
| We shouldn't look at a school charging $400k and say "well
| you'll make more than that so it's a good deal." We should look
| at what you're actually getting. A cinder block dorm, mass-
| produced assembly line food, a professor making $80k a year
| telling you to write a paper on a book that's in the public
| domain. None of that is worth $400k.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > We shouldn't look at a school charging $400k and say "well
| you'll make more than that so it's a good deal." We should
| look at what you're actually getting. A cinder block dorm,
| mass-produced assembly line food, a professor making $80k a
| year telling you to write a paper on a book that's in the
| public domain. None of that is worth $400k.
|
| If passing this exercise in docility gives you the mentioned
| 2 million USD over life: why not?
| gnicholas wrote:
| You don't seem to be concerned at all by the ballooning student
| loan debt.
|
| Also, it's not clear that the wage premium from attending
| college has to do with what is learned in college. Some
| scholars believe that it is largely a signaling device. Others
| believe that it is used as a proxy for general intelligence
| tests, which companies try to avoid using when hiring employees
| (due to a SCOTUS case from several decades ago, dealing with
| disparate racial impact).
|
| It may be true that the wage premium has outweighed the cost of
| attendance in the recent past, but this could easily change as
| tuition continues rising, and critically as interest rates are
| much higher than in recent years. The discount rate to which
| future earnings are subject is much larger than in the past 30
| years, which means that the required wage premium has to be
| much larger than if the interest/discount rate were closer to
| zero. Basically, ZIRP was a boon for colleges, not just
| startups.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| There an easy way to fix this:
|
| Have a set price per semester hour that the college/university is
| allowed to charge.
|
| Colleges/universities are free not to abide by this, but in that
| case they get zero federal funds, including research grants or
| student loans, and they get treated like a for profit which means
| no more tax deductible donations.
|
| Once you set a limit on how much they can charge, the colleges
| will iron out the inefficiencies themselves.
| janalsncm wrote:
| Something that would cost virtually nothing compared with the
| cost of tuition is for the IRS to connect with the department of
| education and help students as consumers to make an informed
| decision about schools and financial outcomes.
|
| An opaque system will never lead to price reductions. I want to
| know average salary 1, 10, and 20 years after graduating for each
| school and each major at the school.
|
| Some might think it's a bit too on the nose to think in purely
| financial terms about education. Fine. They can ignore the price
| tags. But let's not pretend there's no relationship between
| software engineering salaries, companies' almost uniform
| requirement of a CS degree, and the thousands of students lining
| up for said degrees willing to pay whatever it takes.
|
| Here's another idea. How about the billionaires who say America
| doesn't know how to build anymore, how about they create a new
| computer science university? Undercut the competition, give
| students an education at scale. Hire leading researchers to teach
| classes. Students who want to pay full sticker price at a legacy
| school can continue to do so.
| janalsncm wrote:
| One thing I have noticed in these conversations is some who say
| government-backed loans are the root cause of price increases.
| Even if this is technically correct, it ignores how we got here,
| which is also why going back on that is non-negotiable.
|
| And from the other side, public college was never free in the US,
| but it didn't have to be free to be affordable. We don't have to
| make it free to solve the problem. In 1970 tuition at University
| of California schools was about $1000 in today's dollars. It's
| not nothing, but it also means you're not making a huge financial
| mistake by going to college and not getting a degree.
|
| Without student loans, a lot of families simply wouldn't be able
| to afford to send kids to college. Meanwhile, as government
| (especially state governments) cut funding to schools, sticker
| price has skyrocketed even at public schools.
|
| So really the only solution is more public funding for public
| universities. This will force prices down and force private
| schools to compete. Vanderbilt wouldn't list their tuition at
| 100k if in state was $1000.
| redserk wrote:
| I believe a number of states trimmed state-run college and
| university funding during the 2008 housing crisis to help
| balance the books.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| Not at all.
|
| Go to one of those almost-free european colleges, and then
| compare the experience to a US college. The US colleges expect
| most students to come from far away, live on a big, expensive,
| beautiful campus and have massive efforts in student lifestyle.
| Sport facilities, museums, academic support, actual office
| hours... it's closer to expensive, private EU universities.
| Most EU universities don't do that, and they are ran to cut
| costs. The expense per student is low, on purpose.
|
| They might both be called universities, but it's completely
| different goods. The transformations of European schools to be
| available to the masses just didn't happen in the US, and
| therefore the prices are through the roof. Give any American
| university the budget per student than a German or Spanish
| university has, and they'd have to just close, because they
| aren't built for it.
| floor2 wrote:
| But this misses the fact that a huge, huge percent of the cost
| is going to luxuries and things that have no benefit to 99% of
| students.
|
| The dorms, gyms, cafeterias and student centers built in the
| last decade are luxurious spaces compared to prior decades.
| Perfectly good buildings are torn down and rebuilt so that a
| new donor can put their name on the building. Budgets for
| sports, clubs, and other programs have skyrocketed.
|
| If you were to start a new school from scratch and ask the
| question "How can we give students the best education for a
| reasonable price?" you could do so with a university with
| 1/10th the headcount of staff and a correspondingly lower
| tuition.
|
| You just wouldn't have a 15-person committee meeting weekly to
| decide if the company the university hired to perform an audit
| of the mission statements of the companies the university hired
| to provide consulting services to the student affairs staffers
| were properly recorded in the new document management system
| that was transferred from the homegrown IT solution to the new
| vendor.
| totalhack wrote:
| Loans. Loans are how this happened.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| The schools are not free of blame. These are non-profit
| institutions, supposedly they have 0 incentive to be raising
| prices like this.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| If there is effectively unlimited ability to pay, and the
| additional revenue can be used for higher-quality services
| (and since its free money for the institution, the marginal
| quality per dollar hardly matters) there is little reason,
| even as a not-profit-seeking institution, not to raise
| tuition.
|
| The way to stop it is to turn off the unlimited ability to
| pay, which is tricky to do while maintaining both independent
| private education institutions _and_ a desire to promote
| access the way federal aid was intended to, but it probably
| can be done by cost caps for institutions to be eligible for
| aid (which can apply only for students with federal aid, so
| long as there is no negative discrimination rule for such
| students).
| brigadier132 wrote:
| > there is little reason, even as a not-profit-seeking
| institution, not to raise tuition
|
| Except the well-being of the students? Not for profit
| institutions are supposed to be immune to this kind of
| behavior.
|
| Also I agree with you that the way to stop this is to end
| student loans.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Except the well-being of the students?
|
| The long-term well-being of the students is not what most
| educational institutions frame as their charitable
| mission, and even if they did they don't have a good way
| to assess marginal impacts on it the way they do other
| things, so its unlikely to get factored in consistently
| even if there is an intention to respect it.
|
| > Not for profit institutions are supposed to be immune
| to this kind of behavior.
|
| No, charitable non-profit institutions are supposed to be
| immune to seeking returns to investors, not from seeking
| money to serve what they have defined as their charitable
| mission. Quite the opposite.
|
| > Also I agree with you that the way to stop this is to
| end student loans.
|
| I _very specifically_ did not say the solution was to end
| student loans, I said it was to condition aid (including
| whatever combination of grants and loans) on cost caps.
|
| (I think aid should be mostly or all grants and not
| loans, but that's unrelated to the cost of tuition
| problem.)
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| Schools should be on the hook if students default on their
| loans.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| Businesses will charge what the market will bear. And if 'the
| market' can get government loans to pay for tuition, then the
| market will bear an awful lot.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| One major reason is the college rankings which are based on how
| much the college price gouges and how many prospective students
| it rejects after stealing an application fee from them.
|
| Another one is the federal student loan program which makes it
| possible for students to borrow whatever the college wants to
| charge even if it is obvious they'll never be able to afford to
| repay it.
| hbosch wrote:
| It's actually incredible how many engineers and designers I have
| met personally who believe that college was a waste of time, in
| comparison to the knowledge that can be gained just through
| internships, mentorship and forms of apprenticeship. Do you think
| someone with 4 years of interning around major tech companies is
| better equipped to work for those companies compared to a person
| who came directly out of college?
|
| The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people 80%
| of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions of
| the cost as well. Are university educations really that much
| better?
|
| To me, the value of the university system seems to be the
| connections and networking that form rather than skills and
| acuity.
| life-and-quiet wrote:
| I think it really depends on what your goals are. If you're
| just aiming to get a job or make as much money as possible,
| then yeah I think college is often overrated. But as somebody
| who took the nontraditional route and is now interested in the
| "harder" aspects of computer science, there are absolutely gaps
| where my formally trained colleagues have a leg up. Formal
| academic bodies of knowledge, and getting exposure to them,
| absolutely have a use. But you for sure don't need them in many
| day-to-day jobs or to advance as a professional much of the
| time.
|
| EDIT: this response assumes a good program / department. There
| are absolutely subpar college programs that are a giant waste
| of money and time.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| I totally feel you on this. One time I spent three nights
| writing a language parser before my Google wormhole showed me
| I was writing a lexer/tokenizer. My colleagues with CS
| degrees just looked at me like I was an alien when I shared
| my excitement.
| dan-robertson wrote:
| It's not too hard to imagine what it's like when someone spends
| four years interning at tech companies. That's basically one of
| the computer science courses at Waterloo. So you can just find
| people who graduated from those courses and see how it worked
| out for them. Though obviously there's a lot of selection bias
| there.
| ta_1138 wrote:
| Yet many people leave college with few connections and little
| networking ever done. So by your standards anyone without those
| social skills should consider college as a total waste of time
| and money. College: only worthwhile for extroverts.
| alphazard wrote:
| > The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people
| 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions
| of the cost as well. Are university educations really that much
| better?
|
| This is the wrong comparison IMO. All of the good engineers
| I've come across are autodidacts. This makes sense when you
| think about it. You aren't going to be among the best by
| learning at the pace of a class. Many of them went to college
| because culturally that's what smart people do in the US
| (hopefully this changes). They acquired their competency
| despite--not because of--being preoccupied with useless
| coursework.
|
| Bootcamps and micro-certifications don't produce competency
| either, but the stakes are much lower, and it's much less time
| and money wasted.
|
| > To me, the value of the university system seems to be the
| connections and networking that form rather than skills and
| acuity.
|
| Yes some of it is networking, but it's really that universities
| function as rating agencies for humans. Getting into the
| university is the most important part. If everyone switched to
| putting the best school they got into on their resume instead
| of where they graduated from, very little would change. And it
| would provide roughly the same signal to employers.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _Getting into the university is the most important part. If
| everyone switched to putting the best school they got into on
| their resume instead of where they graduated from, very
| little would change. And it would provide roughly the same
| signal to employers._
|
| I understand some entrepreneurs who pitch VCs do just this. I
| know the practice is common among HS tutors and admissions
| counselors. Their resume includes all the schools they got
| into, not just the one where they enrolled.
|
| I would be slightly more impressed by a kid who got into some
| Ivy but went to UCLA to save money (or even a lower-ranked
| private school with a huge scholarship) rather than just
| going to the Ivy.
| weitendorf wrote:
| Personally I believe that theoretical CS/mathematics in college
| was a great use of my time, and that those subjects are hard to
| learn and truly internalize on the job. I've got a lot of value
| over the years from that kind of education, not only from the
| specific things I learned, but the way of thinking it ingrained
| and the broad exposure/skills it gave me (eg I might be able to
| recognize some problem as control theory and find and
| understand papers about it).
|
| However, most of the practical skills I learned in college were
| not good uses of time. Classes in general weren't structured to
| teach you the kind of skills being an actual fulltime SWE gives
| you. Plus the industry changes so fast, and college is so
| unrepresentative of what actual problems people work on in the
| real world, that you may learn something soon/already obsolete.
|
| So my advice, especially for people going into the software
| industry, is to learn as much foundational and theoretical
| content as you can. You may never get a better chance to learn
| graph algorithms, real analysis, abstract algebra, or theory of
| computation after college. Your professors may be experts on
| compilers or programming languages, and able to teach you the
| theory behind eg LISP better than you could teach yourself
| later.
|
| Signup for the classes that will remap your brain and pay
| dividends for decades instead of "web dev 101", and you might
| find your college experience worthwhile (beyond the fun,
| personal growth, and networking - all important too).
| strangattractor wrote:
| If your lens views Universities as a work training substitute
| their view would be accurate. If you view the University as
| Universus (Latin for Universe or everything) then what they
| offer is quite unique. Arguably all do not fulfill all of
| these.
|
| 1. A kinder gentler form of kicking your child out of the nest
| and learning to be on their own.
|
| 2. A no mac-education environment were students can participate
| in research and learn how to answer question that are not yet
| answered as opposed to regurgitation.
|
| 3. Learning to socializing as adults.
|
| 4. Meeting groups of people that spend their days thinking
| deeply about specific subjects. These people can then be used
| as resources for society as a whole to solve problems and make
| decisions.
|
| 5. Exposure to just about everything we know or think we know
| about everything.
|
| If you do not view them as such then I would agree they are not
| worth the effort or expense. Industry can afford to train their
| own automatons. Which is one of the reasons they are salivating
| over AI at this very moment.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Even universities advertise the job placement rates for their
| various majors. Kids aren't told by parents, teachers or
| counselors to go to college to become well rounded, they're
| told to go because they'll earn more money if they have a
| degree.
|
| As for #2, that's a very rare thing to encounter in an
| undergraduate degree. Most of your classes are being fed
| information, then asked basic comprehension questions about
| it. Maybe some creative authorship skills in the form of
| writing courses, but nothing groundbreaking there either.
|
| Many degrees are luxury goods that you either get paid for by
| someone else or become a wage slave to pay off in a decade or
| three, depending on how much you borrowed.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| > The rise of bootcamps and micro-certifications teach people
| 80% of the stuff in 20% (or less) of the time, and at fractions
| of the cost as well.
|
| It really depends on what you sorts of jobs you're talking
| about. There's a bunch of work available in the vast realm of
| "computer jobs" that are essentially on the intellectual level
| of plumbing or hvac repair and indeed, college is a waste of
| time for those sorts of jobs and boot camps are fine. I'm not
| denigrating it, that's mostly what I do. I wire together
| systems that other people mostly developed and do a bunch of
| troubleshooting and most of the value I bring is on-the-job
| experience with the systems involved.
|
| There's also a lot of cutting edge R&D and dev work that does
| indeed benefit from an academic background, and you don't
| really have to look any further than open ai for that. But even
| outside of machine learning, a lot of people have built
| companies on taking academic research papers and turning them
| into products.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Those cutting edge jobs are not using material from
| university classes, they're inventing it whole cloth.
| University education, particularly undergraduate education,
| is a socioeconomic filter. It proves that you have some
| combination of family connections or money sufficient to be
| admitted and graduate.
| BigToach wrote:
| Taking those students out of the college pool might also
| decrease the overall cost of college.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A bootcamp gets you the requisite education to be an entry-
| level engineer at a place like Google or Facebook. However,
| these jobs are mostly training (like a bootcamp) for you to
| become a more senior engineer, where you will actually be
| designing systems and coordinating with others. In a senior
| job, your job is more about communicating with people and
| making predictions about what will happen when you eventually
| build something.
|
| The skills bootcamp graduates don't pick up are things like
| math, writing, and research skills. You don't use those skills
| as a code-slinging junior engineer, but when you start
| coordinating with other people and doing things like designing
| large-scale systems, you may find yourself doing a lot more
| math and writing than you think.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Social connections/networking are part of it, but so is the
| social/professional/international cachet of having a degree.
| Many people who express (quite legitimate) doubt about the
| value of their degree as an educational experience are
| oblivious to the numerous filters that get in the way of people
| who don't have a degree.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| The purpose of college is to show people you can jump through
| four years of bureaucratic hoops with a smile on your face for
| no guaranteed reward.
|
| This is actually a fantastic test for working in a large
| company. I always worry that anyone who can't finish college
| may not be a good fit for a large organization. I'm not always
| right but I'm right a lot.
|
| Also it really does teach you how to learn. The content doesn't
| really matter.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Surely we can create a cheaper networking event if that's the
| main value.
| ars wrote:
| This is why I'm so against the government forgiving education
| loans. All that will happen is the money will go to colleges, and
| they'll raise tuition.
|
| Instead put the schools on the hook for the loans - if someone
| doesn't pay, well, it's the school that has to eat the cost.
| jollyllama wrote:
| You're against a particular kind of loan forgiveness, where
| it's assumed the schools are made whole. As you note, there's
| another kind of loan forgiveness where the obligations simply
| evaporate.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The schools are already whole; the schools aren't the loan
| issuers for the loans at issue, the federal government is.
| The schools already got paid.
| empath-nirvana wrote:
| The US already has a 'loan forgiveness program' that works for
| every single loan _other_ than student loans, called
| "bankruptcy". It's worked for hundreds of years, and we used to
| allow it for college loans.
| gnicholas wrote:
| There is one difference: student loans that are being
| "forgiven" are being put to taxpayers, whereas in bankruptcy
| the loans are absorbed by banks that lent money (and to a
| lesser extent, to parties with outstanding debts, such as
| vendors).
| ramesh31 wrote:
| I've always deeply resented this "personal expenses" cost being
| lumped into tuition prices. Yeah, living and existing as a human
| being for a year costs about that much, whether you are going to
| college or not. It makes no sense whatsoever how that got
| conflated. And that's exactly how a huge portion of our entire
| generation got to enjoy a four year free for all party sabbatical
| in the prime of their lives, as the rest of us struggled at entry
| level jobs through global recessions, for which they now want
| forgiven on the backs of taxpayers.
| redserk wrote:
| It's not _that_ uncommon for a university to require you live
| on-campus the first couple of years unless you live locally. On
| top of this, it 's not uncommon for universities to mandate on-
| campus students pay for meal-plans and a lot of other
| potentially unnecessary garbage.
| ars wrote:
| One way this happened is that schools are including all sorts of
| useless, but expensive, frivolities.
|
| Why do school have ultra fancy sports areas? Why do they need 15
| different restaurants?
|
| Go visit a college - they are basically little resort towns, or
| cruise ships on land.
|
| Instead they should focus on education, and let other companies
| do the rest of that, if students want them.
| maestroia wrote:
| I was talking to a college professor I know a couple weeks ago
| about this exact thing. And what they said comprised a
| substantial amount of the expenses of their 4 year private
| college made perfect sense, because it's happening to every
| business.
|
| Health insurance costs.
|
| Now, add to this: _salaries and other benefits to both staff and
| educators._ liability insurance. _increased food costs._ I'm
| certain facilities have increased costs also, from new
| construction to utilities. *Plus anything else I've left out.
|
| Let's face it, everything has become more expensive. The Five
| Guys meal of a little cheeseburger, little fries, and regular
| drink which cost me $12 4 years ago in March, 2020 (I keep
| records), would cost me $17-18 today (I checked the prices today
| at noon and walked away). That's a 40-50% increase.
|
| Why would we expect higher education to not be effected?
| brigadier132 wrote:
| Salaries are the primary cost not health insurance. There are
| more administrators than students. Also there is no excuse, the
| educational institutions are incompetent at managing their
| finances.
| maxlybbert wrote:
| I don't think anybody is surprised that college tuition has
| increased. They're surprised it's increased faster than the
| prices for almost every other service. So have health care
| costs. And in both cases, the system is designed to make it
| difficult and pointless to shop based on price.
|
| I have a hard time believing health insurance costs have driven
| the drastic increase in college costs. They've certainly played
| a role, but I don't see any reason they would increase the cost
| of education more than they've increased the price of
| everything else.
| jmmay wrote:
| https://archive.is/3bUf5
| lulznews wrote:
| Thanks
| thephyber wrote:
| In high school, I only worried about what college I could get
| into and what was the reputation of the college. Cost was
| irrelevant because I had no job (I had worked, but for only
| around minimum wage) and didn't know what kind of job I could get
| after I graduated.
|
| I had no ability to effectively price shop, to compare the value
| of the degrees of different colleges, and the ability to get
| reviews of each college seemed "impossible" (opaque and/or
| difficult to get started).
|
| In retrospect, I was a terrible consumer of the college product,
| but I don't know how I could have changed it at the time, given
| my situation. I know the US federal government required colleges
| to publish key metrics such as the average salary by
| degree/program and specific costs like tuition. Those are
| incredibly valuable compared to the info I had, but I'm curious
| if high school students today are any better at making value
| judgements before they have had a non-trivial paycheck.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah, I didn't give sufficient weight to the cost difference
| between the top-ranked college I attended and the top-10-ranked
| college I passed on. It would have cost about $40k less over 4
| years, but it was located in a less desirable location and was
| somewhat less prestigious/well-known.
|
| When it came time to go to law school, I wised up and chose a
| state school where I qualified for in-state tuition and merit
| scholarship. I sometimes wonder about what my life would be
| like if I had attended the higher-ranked school that I turned
| down. Having fewer loans definitely made it easier for me to
| jump from law to bootstrapping a startup.
| oneplane wrote:
| Commercial goals and no regulation that desires everyone to pass
| the same accreditation, and only that same accreditation.
|
| In theory, doing it 'better' than the competition is good, in
| practise this just means there will always only be a handful that
| are actually better and they will capitalise on that as much as
| possible. But purely regulating everything into the ground also
| doesn't help.
|
| Not sure if this is even fixable, because it is a complete
| ecosystem that is highly lucrative (money, status, offloading HR
| to the schools) for everyone except the students and teachers
| (professors). You can also wonder if the goal of just providing
| good education is something people are even interested in, it's
| so much more geared towards a 'future fabrication factory' where
| the learning stuff part is secondary to the "follow this track go
| get a shot at job XYZ" part that everything is minmaxing for.
| brightball wrote:
| Student loans that removed any incentive to keep it affordable?
| recursivedoubts wrote:
| Usury.
| ilamont wrote:
| In 2022 one of my kids wanted to take college classes online over
| the summer. We created a spreadsheet with the costs for each
| school, and what was surprising was the range of prices, from
| $900 per class for MassBay Community College and UC Berkeley, to
| $7,000 for Babson (a private college near Boston). The state
| universities were all over the map - UConn and UVM are both big
| flagship universities but UVM was >2x UConn, and even more than
| private colleges like Brandeis. We went with UC Berkeley.
|
| UVM online $4,800
|
| MassBay $900
|
| Harvard Extension $3,500
|
| Lasell online $1,600
|
| Brandeis $3,290
|
| Babson $7,000
|
| B.C. Woods College $2,200
|
| UConn online $1,800
|
| Berkeley extension $900
|
| Umass Boston $1,500 (in state rate)
| vsuperpower2020 wrote:
| Half the money goes to administrators. This is also anecdotal,
| but it's hard not to notice that my university constructed a huge
| building exclusively for DEI. Not sure what it did that wasn't
| done before.
| tacocataco wrote:
| People in debt are more easily manipulated.
| amateuring wrote:
| Government
| cyclecount wrote:
| Higher education in the US is hardly about learning the skills
| for a particular discipline or trade. The American university
| system is a class differentiation mechanism, and students are
| paying for access to the managerial professional class, often the
| highest class one can achieve without family connections.
|
| Even if tuition costs more than can be earned back in wages, it's
| still a good investment because the alternative is lower class
| jobs or unemployment. (There are a few counter examples of
| professions which pay well and don't require a university
| degree).
| lukewrites wrote:
| I love living in the land of opportunity to accrue debt. Student
| debt, medical debt, it's all Freedom Debt(tm) to me!
| contemporary343 wrote:
| Worth remembering that ~2/3 of U.S. students in college are in
| public colleges and universities, not private ones like
| Vanderbilt. Prices have gone up there too (especially since state
| governments subsidize their public universities significantly
| less than they used to), but they are still pretty good deals
| given U.S. GDP per capita. In many states they can also be
| practically free depending on income level and typically provide
| excellent educations and career opportunities for most students.
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