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The Real Reason College Tuition Costs So Much

182 points by colincsl 11y ago

beachstartup 11y ago
what they taught me in econ 1a: 1. limited supply (even when you count the fake for-profit schools) 2. increased demand (EVERYONE wants to go to college) 3. easy financing which increases 2. (student loans) results in inflating prices. not really sure what the mystery here is.
- ta82828 11y ago
  The article is about state schools though.
  - beachstartup 11y ago
    uh, what part of my post doesn't apply to state schools?
    - ta82828 11y ago
      They're a government service, and are not - theoretically - supposed to charge market rates.
      - adventured 11y ago
        They still have to compete on everything from providing good enough facilities to paying professors enough to keep or acquire them. If you inflate half the market when it comes to salaries, the other half either has to compete or will lose all of its talent. If X type of lab becomes standard at non-state schools, then all the state schools must build one too or suffer.
- mark-r 11y ago
  This is the fallacy in government providing low-cost loans to everyone. Unless the supply of colleges increases, it just ends up increasing demand for the same supply, driving up prices - and producing a boatload of graduates with mortgage-sized student loans. All on the assumption that the degree will give them increased earning power, which is increasingly unlikely in today's economy.
  - TronPaul_ 11y ago
    It's not just the fact that they're low-cost loans. They're almost zero-risk loans (you can not declare bankruptcy on student loans), which benefits lenders and encourages schools to increase prices.
- mrxd 11y ago
  Revenue per student (state appropriations + tuition) has been flat for 30 years. What's changed is the proportion of revenue that comes from tuition.
snogglethorpe 11y ago
One thing I've noticed about American universities compared with universities in other countries (Japan, Korea, UK), is that almost every decent American university I've seen seems to be really well-maintained, in that the campus is very clean, in good repair, frequently renovated, etc, even the out-of-the-public-eye spaces (grad student offices and the like). Japanese and Korean universities, on the other hand, are often rather shabby, even the top-tier ones (Toudai etc). They're still perfectly fine places for the intended purpose, mind you, just maybe a little worn. I dunno how much of a part money maintenance and construction play in university costs, but I imagine it's labor-intensive, and so not exactly cheap...
- morcheeba 11y ago
  The author of the article is from Boulder... they just started on a $63M rec center renovation and they have a pool in the shape of a buffalo. There are only 30,000 students, so right there is $2,000 per student on a portion of the facilities that isn't involved in teaching. http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25916902/cu-boulder-buffalo-shaped-pool-opens-monday http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25916902/cu-boulder-bu...
  - jsprogrammer 11y ago
    A rec center lasts for more than a year doesn't it? I'm sure there are (will be) ongoing maintenance costs, but I doubt they are also $63M/year.
    - r00fus 11y ago
      A $63M rec center doesn't maintain itself. I'm sure the yearly operational costs are much larger than what they had before as well.
  - IkmoIkmo 11y ago
    It an expense, not necessarily a cost. Their property values just rose for example. Over time the equipment ages which leads to breaking, and replacement because it's not state of the art anymore. If you expect it to last 20 years, then you can write off 1/20th every year, which are your actual costs. Meaning it's $100 per student per year, which is reasonably cheap because those are essentially your costs to have state of the art equipment available to you every year. Things like heating & lighting, employees, cleaning etc is added to that, but it's mostly independent from renovation as you had to pay that anyway before you renovated. It might go up a bit, it might go down because of more sustainable engineering for example. There's a lot more to it, of course, don't get me wrong. But $2k per student for non-teaching isn't quite the truth, either. But I think the notion of building decent public facilities and amenities is one of the best things we ought to do. It sadly doesn't happen often. But universities do it, libraries, rec centers, I think it's great. It has to happen in a smart way, of course, I don't support some of the ridiculous over the top projects you sometimes see. A pool in the shape of a buffalo, ugh, great example right there. Sadly it's often in the pursuit of collegiate sports and not really providing awesome amenities and facilities to the general student body. Reminds me of the piece about Alabama in this great Last Week Tonight [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0
Animats 11y ago
The short version: "A major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration."
- dikaiosune 11y ago
  At the university where a friend works, a huge amount of the staffing expenditure is on (rarely well-run) IT. Another big chunk of the staff is employed to essentially wrangle the part-time faculty who are on short contracts and don't stay for more than one or two years. I think that in many cases universities have turned to hiring staff to circumvent many of the political problems of trying to manage professors (edit: tenured people are a bitch to manage and will resist any and all changes in most departments, in case this wasn't clear before). It's a poor solution but in some areas it's the only way to make changes. The IT, the slow rate of change among faculty, the part-timers, etc, could optimistically be put down to changing student and market demands. Pessimistically much of it could be put down to an institutional desire to have central control.
  - nhstanley 11y ago
    Someone was arguing to me recently that this has all come about because of some court cases in the 80s and 90s. They claim that one case in particular, between Notre Dame and the faculty, was a turning point. The story has been related to me like this: Traditionally universities were heavily influenced by the faculty, who had big sway over big decisions. This all came to a head in the 80s when faculty and the administration disagreed over some big issue (like who should be the next president, I believe). The faculty and administration went to court, and the court ruled that the faculty were employees and the administration, essentially, had absolute power and could appoint who they wanted. This precedent drastically changed how universities were run, and since then faculty has basically been eviscerated (both from a power standpoint and a pay standpoint, ala adjuncts) and universities are now run like businesses (top down management vs. a more distributed/democratic form previously). I haven't been able to find the court case or citations to back this up (closest is a book[1]), but it wouldn't surprise me if true. It would explain a lot that has happened, and if you combine it with other factors like government backed student loans, it's no surprise universities are cash cows run by feudal lords. [1] https://books.google.es/books?id=PiPktdWvGvkC https://books.google.es/books?id=PiPktdWvGvkC
pacifist 11y ago
It didn't make sense to me until I read this: from the article: "Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college." from the comments: "The money PER STUDENT was slashed. That is what matters for the cost to each student."… "This is an elaborate lie, to justify what is indefensible without the help of such lies."
- ta82828 11y ago
  Well the article disagrees with that claim, "Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today." so I guess it would be time to go to the references/data if we had them.
  - pacifist 11y ago
    Here you go. Data from the internet: [1]"States are all over the map on their retreat from higher education. At one extreme are the two states that have managed to maintain their fiscal 1980 investment through 2011: Wyoming (+2.3 percent) and North Dakota (+0.8 percent). But these are the exceptions. All other states have reduced their support by anywhere from 14.8 percent to 69.4 percent between fiscal 1980 and fiscal 2011." This covers roughly the same time period as in the article. Only there is something different going on: state appropriations for higher education is going down. [1] http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pa...
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- pdkl95 11y ago
  This article seems to have gone out of its way to list a lot of aggregate numbers that increased while comparing it to per-student tuition. Also, there could be more factors than just the increased percentage of people who go to college. The tuition increase could also include increased administrative costs or spending on extracurricular activities such sports. I know that when I was attending UC Davis, we saw an increase to pay for the new computer labs that were being installed.
ForHackernews 11y ago
Part of it is also a social signaling factor. Because eduction is a superior good and a positional good, there's pressure for it to get ever more expensive (at least on paper). After all, if the Johnsons' kids are going to a $40,000/year school, you want to make sure your little darling goes to at least a $45,000/year school. The secret is that many elite colleges give such generous financial aid that only the extremely wealthy are paying full freight. But it still makes the college looks good to have an astronomically high sticker price.
- krat0sprakhar 11y ago
  > The secret is that many elite colleges give such generous financial aid that only the extremely wealthy are paying full freight. But it still makes the college looks good to have an astronomically high sticker price. Unfortunately, this is not at all true for grad school. I'm from India and a large swathe of my friends from college are studying in the US without any sort of aid.
  - jeffwass 11y ago
    What subjects are your friends studying? I did my PhD in physics in the USA, and for all of my fellow physics grad students, we not only had free tuition but we were given jobs (they didn't pay much but it was enough to live on). Ie, students were either given Research Assistant roles from their Adviser's funding, or Teaching Assistant roles by the department. The lucky ttudents with fellowships didn't need to teach at all and could focus full time from day one on research. (Of course this gives those fellowship students more ability to write papers early in their career, boosting their ability to win more fellowships later on, creating academias's own 1%/99% inequality, but that's a separate issue). This was physics, and my understanding is that this is the case for most of the sciences.
    - itg 11y ago
      He probably means masters degree. I was looking at a few and couldn't find any that were fully funded. This was in stem programs at top schools.
MCRed 11y ago
I think a more interesting question is, how has the ROI of college changed over the past 40 years? The cost has gone up much faster than inflation. The number of people going to college has also risen dramatically. This means there are a lot more college educated peers competing with you in the workplace. This means that the college degree is not as rare, and thus has lower scarcity value. Finally, I think it's quite possible the quality of the education has declined significantly in the past 40 years. When I was in college, almost 30 years ago, I was appalled at how the university focused and spent so much of its money on a losing football team (in a zero sum situation where the other schools were always going to be abel to massively outspend it and had larger pools of students to recruit from) ... and in the decline in the education. I remember sitting in a class and learning about how universities were started by tradesman who banded together and hired experts to teach them, and I thought "Man, I wish I could go to a school like that". Since then I've seen nothing but an increase in these efforts... I've see the quality of a CS degree (based on the people who I interview for jobs who have them) decline. So the formula is: More Cost, Less Value, Lower Quality = Lower ROI. If things don't turn around, at some point College will be a losing proposition. Of course, this presumes that the education colleges give can be obtained elsewhere. Which brings up another point MOOCs, and online access to open source frameworks have really changed things in the past 30 years. 30 years ago we were buying our compilers (CodeWarrior for life!) now they and our frameworks are open source and well documented. The books are cheaper-- $40 to Oreilley rather than $120 to the campus book store (or are my prices out of date?) You can learn more modern technologies better than going to college and spending 4 years on Java and C++. Then there's the MooCs. you can learn CS fundamentals by video, along with people all around the world. I think we're close to that tipping point.
- hacknat 11y ago
  Agreed. One thing people usually don't take into account when they talk about current College ROI is the opportunity cost. Especially at non-first tier private schools the opportunity cost must be considerable.
- nickysielicki 11y ago
  One criticism I have of education systems is that they structurally encourage only superficially studying content. Let's take my compilers class as an example. I go to a 75 minute lecture 2 times a week and I do about 4 hours of homework a week. I do this over 18 weeks. That's only roughly 120 hours of study over the course of a semester. That's only as many hours as most full time employees work every 3 weeks! And the sad thing is, I imagine if I spent 3 weeks reading a compiler book, reading though the source of lex and yacc, and implementing some kind of basic compiler using them, I'd be a much better programmer than what we're doing-- implementing a C compiler for MIPS in java, using a shitty lex library and only implenting the parts the professor thinks is important. This brings me to another point. Programmers are necessarily autodidacts because shit changes incredibly fast. You can't be a one trick pony. So if we're pushing kids through these incredibly formulaic methods of learning, what are we really preparing them for? A life of being an enterprise code monkey? The student who taught themselves anything, even if they are missing a few core details, are more equipped to fix those gaps in their understandings. I did a hackathon a couple weeks ago that had a sort of business spin on it. There was this group of 4 guys that made a college choosing application based off your GPA, as a desktop java application with a GUI that had background images and looked like an early 2000s keygen program. The thing is, I have absolutely no doubt that these guys are good students and they'll probably find an alright job out of school. But all they know is java development. I think that students that want to be more than that probably shouldn't go to school. Here's a question to you: if I handed you a résumé, without a bachelor's degree, but instead included my github profile and a list of books I've read cover to cover and some open source contributions, am I going to get the salary I am worth?
graycat 11y ago
The OP keeps talking about the tuition increases. But as far as I could tell, the OP was considering only, call it, tuition list prices. But, with scholarships, various forms of financial aid, etc., maybe often the list price is not the actual price, that is, what the school actually receives from the student (and their family). So, the OP didn't explain how much the actual price has changed over the decades. E.g., recently Stanford announced that the tuition will be $0.00 for any student whose family earns less than $125,000 a year. Sure, maybe the list price tuition at Stanford is ballpark $50,000 a year. But the actual price is sometimes zero. And some scholarships also cover room and board making the actual price negative. It was long the case that the tuition for a student paid only ballpark 1/3rd of the full school budget per student. So, maybe what's happened is that the schools decided to set the list price to be the full cost per student, maybe plus some, and have students from wealthy families actually pay that price. Then nearly all the rest of the students get a significantly lower actual price, maybe even $0.00. Further, given that there are student loans available to cover the list price, then maybe just go ahead and charge list price for students using student loans. Then we have the issue of, with so many students getting student loans, maybe they are not very good students and wouldn't even have been accepted at the school back decades ago. Maybe. Or, if some money sources are eager to pay or loan list price for some not very good students, then colleges can be tempted to go ahead and take the list price easy money and let the students attend the classes.
- nkassis 11y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say. But I challenge your argument that schools are listing the full cost per students. One reason I doubt current list price of tuition covers 100% of the cost per student for the vast majority of schools (which are public and receive state funding). Students with student loans aren't bad students. Depending on you parents salary they might not qualify for any other type of need based financial aid except student loans. Also, merit base aid is limited and can't be extended to all students with academic standing that usually leads to them successfully completing college with high grades. In the end, a large amount of students pay for college entirely with student loans and don't realize the cost until they are in repayment. They pay the list price and more due to other costs of going to college. To successfully be able to pay for college without aid and loans a student today would need to have a full time job while students in the 1950-60... could generally pay the full amount with a summer job. Edit: Also, price per students vary between faculties, a engineering student might cost 50K+ while a arts student would cost half or less of that. Some students end up subsidizing others.
adrusi 11y ago
> For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times > higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative > appropriations to higher education are more than 10 > times higher. This isn't the relevant statistic. I'm going to guess that the size of the national student body has increased since 1960, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was by more than a factor of ten. I'm not saying that therefore lack of government spending is the cause of high tuition, but this article dismisses it too quickly.
- nulltype 11y ago
  Well the article addresses that point like a paragraph or two later.
kelukelugames 11y ago
Going to plug Bill Gates' recommendation again. I enjoyed reading and thought the data was eye opening. http://www.trustmedia.co/test/Books/Why-Does-College-Cost-So-Much.html http://www.trustmedia.co/test/Books/Why-Does-College-Cost-So...
cm2187 11y ago
I would say quantitative easing has a lot to do too. It didn't create the broad inflation everyone expected. Instead some sectors went into high inflation: housing, stocks, tuition fees, etc.
marincounty 11y ago
The real reason college tuition costs so much=because they can! (Most schools found that students/families will find ways to come up with the money. These schools will blame everyone, and everything, but they still raise tuition. When questioned, they brag about the scholarships. I understand some state schools, but really question schools like Haarvard with a billion/year coming in through endowments.)
reuven 11y ago
American universities aren't just about education. Or even research, for that matter. They're often about providing a "life experience" for undergraduates. So you have a huge investment in sports, entertainment, and living facilities that are basically unheard of in other countries. Plus, all sort of administrators and advisors who help students in a variety of different ways. These add up to a great experience, and arguably make the education better. But they also reflect how little the US government provides vs. other countries. And how much students depend on the university to provide services that in other countries would be provided by other agencies. And how an American university is expected to provide much more than just classrooms, lectures, and research. I graduated from two American universities (MIT and Northwestern). Each of these had an on-site medical facility (unnecessary in countries with nationalized health insurance), financial aid offices (unnecessary in places where the tuition is lower, or handled by centralized government agencies), student-only shuttle services (unnecessary where public transportation is good), sports teams (unheard of outside of the US), and a wide variety of extra-curriculars (again, basically non-existent outside of the US). Each of these requires a bunch of administrators. The building in which I did my PhD had a huge support staff. In an Israeli or European university, I think that the 15-20 secretaries, planners, and managers would have been replaced by 3-4 people. Overworked and underpaid people, mind you, but that's how you keep costs low. And my office (as a graduate student) in the US was positively opulent compared to what you'll find abroad. I used to think that student aid in the US was a great thing. But I do believe that American universities have basically decided that they can raise tuition without any penalty, because almost no one pays that sum out of pocket -- and everyone else just takes on crushing debt for many years to follow. Now, the fact is that I had a blast in my undergrad years, and my experience editing the student newspaper led directly to my current career. But having met many students and graduates in Israel (where I live), where universities are places to learn and do research, rather than have "life experiences," I'm not at all convinced that the added expense and overhead are worthwhile.
- gumballhead 11y ago
  I upvoted this comment because this is all very true and gets to be very expensive as enrollment rates increase, which was also mentioned in the article. But, despite all of this expense, I don't feel like I got a great education while I attended a public university. My classes were taught by grad students and adjuncts in 400 person auditoriums. I ended up transferring to a small private school about the size of my high school. The tuition was about four times what I was paying at a public school (though I didn't pay near that much out of my own pocket) and the quality of teaching was night and day.
chucksmart 11y ago
"Entrenchment of the bourgeoisie"
kylered 11y ago
I wrote a post about this same issue a year ago. It's sad that debt is fueling the growth of administration staff. Some interesting charts are here: http://kylethered.tumblr.com/post/37790176790/data-says-higher-ed-destroying-value-by-passing http://kylethered.tumblr.com/post/37790176790/data-says-high...
melling 11y ago
We should all try to remember this because it's not what we've been told: "What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts."
bawana 11y ago
time to take action: kill -9 all_administrative_positions
- muzz 11y ago
  Do you even know what these administrative positions are? I would love to see a breakdown of these, if you have a source.
bawana 11y ago
the same malady affects health care. corporate-itis
guelo 11y ago
One of the big crimes of these administrators is that it's so hard to get accurate numbers when trying to have this debate. Has the funding per capita gone down proportionally to the tuition increase? Is the increase in administration and facilities proportional to the increase in enrollment?
chisleu 11y ago
I find it interesting that the article takes every step except for the very last one. The increase in public funding of universities has inflated the enrollment, decreased the quality of education, and increased the pricing by allowing sub-par schools to survive. In any economic situation, an increase in the quantity of money trying to consume a restricted quantity of resources increases the price. This is an economic fact. How does the article simply make the point that the increase in public funding isn't why the costs have increased but not even bring up the correlation between the increase in funding and the costs going up?? If we have 100 apples of production a year at the current price, and someone comes along and gives people who want apples some money to buy apples, the apple seller can increase the price without much resistance. Everyone who wants apples pays more because the money in this market is inflated. Government has inflated the market. As a 34 year old college senior about to graduate with honors, I see this every single day at school. The failure rates for the low levels classes is ~50% and even THAT is inflated because the teachers are frowned upon if they fail to pass students. When teachers fail to pass students, students drop out and the college stops getting money. So they string them along into higher and higher levels classes hoping they catch on and catch up. This has led to me being in 300-400 level computer science classes with people who have absolutely no business being in college at all, let alone anywhere near a computer. They have no functional knowledge of computing, and have no chance of getting a job even if they manage to get through college with a C average. Unfortunately, the higher level teachers bend to the lower capability in the class as well... I had a 425 advanced database class where the teacher told us that some people still had not managed to install mysql after the midterm... The only reason kids were passing with C's is they were googling for answers on the open-laptop tests. By subsidizing the marketplace, the government is allowing schools that should close or be radically reformed to continue chugging along. Another tangental issue is college sports. Colleges can play all sorts of games with the way money is spent on college sports and athletes. Companies can donate huge sums of money for sports complexes that are suppose to benefit the entire student body, but the athletes at my school have a separate gym with high end amenities where the regular students use a cheaper gym with normal gym equipment. I pay for classes, but people who run faster than me get in for free, get easy A classes, and get high end amenities. They get free food, special athlete lodging, and the list goes on and on. All of this is coming out of the general coffers. While they have both hot whirlpools and cold tanks to aid in their workout recovery, I'm in a "computer science" building rented off campus, with no place to plug in a power cord. I'm really shocked to see the NYTimes go as far as they did. Certainly, the article will be met with spite from the left as well as the right.
brianbreslin 11y ago
My father is a university administrator, and he told me this theory years ago, that the costs were due to excess bureaucracy.
- sytelus 11y ago
  What would be an example? What these administrators are doing anyway to destroy so much of value?
m3talridl3y 11y ago
Someone needs to build a "spartan" college. Use the cheapest construction materials+. No sports teams++. No extracurricular activities+++. No degrees that aren't in STEM.++++ + - Does the round glass section contribute to learning in some way? What am I missing? http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/downloadables/photo/20120914CBAdraw3.jpg http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/downloadables/photo/2012091... ++ - If your sports team starts to win, people will wonder why your crappy 10-year-old sports stadium hasn't been demolished and rebuilt. It's 10 years old already! We need at least 30% glass panel coverage on the exterior! Get with the times already! +++ - You want a robotics club or a harry potter reading club or a javelin-throwing club? Fine, but find your own funding. ++++ - If you really think you're the gods' gift to mankind when it comes to ancient Egyptian art, then by all means, get admitted to an ivy-league-status establishment. The last thing the world needs are more junior-league art majors.
endzone 11y ago
as he admits, per capita funding has indeed fallen. the problem is an over expansion of higher education. what proportion of the population can really benefit from a full time residential degree course? much less than 50%
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182 points by colincsl 11y ago

what they taught me in econ 1a: 1. limited supply (even when you count the fake for-profit schools) 2. increased demand (EVERYONE wants to go to college) 3. easy financing which increases 2. (student loans) results in inflating prices. not really sure what the mystery here is.

ta82828 11y ago
The article is about state schools though.
- beachstartup 11y ago
  uh, what part of my post doesn't apply to state schools?
  - ta82828 11y ago
    They're a government service, and are not - theoretically - supposed to charge market rates.
    - adventured 11y ago
      They still have to compete on everything from providing good enough facilities to paying professors enough to keep or acquire them. If you inflate half the market when it comes to salaries, the other half either has to compete or will lose all of its talent. If X type of lab becomes standard at non-state schools, then all the state schools must build one too or suffer.
mark-r 11y ago
This is the fallacy in government providing low-cost loans to everyone. Unless the supply of colleges increases, it just ends up increasing demand for the same supply, driving up prices - and producing a boatload of graduates with mortgage-sized student loans. All on the assumption that the degree will give them increased earning power, which is increasingly unlikely in today's economy.
- TronPaul_ 11y ago
  It's not just the fact that they're low-cost loans. They're almost zero-risk loans (you can not declare bankruptcy on student loans), which benefits lenders and encourages schools to increase prices.
mrxd 11y ago
Revenue per student (state appropriations + tuition) has been flat for 30 years. What's changed is the proportion of revenue that comes from tuition.

snogglethorpe 11y ago

One thing I've noticed about American universities compared with universities in other countries (Japan, Korea, UK), is that almost every decent American university I've seen seems to be really well-maintained, in that the campus is very clean, in good repair, frequently renovated, etc, even the out-of-the-public-eye spaces (grad student offices and the like). Japanese and Korean universities, on the other hand, are often rather shabby, even the top-tier ones (Toudai etc). They're still perfectly fine places for the intended purpose, mind you, just maybe a little worn. I dunno how much of a part money maintenance and construction play in university costs, but I imagine it's labor-intensive, and so not exactly cheap...

morcheeba 11y ago
The author of the article is from Boulder... they just started on a $63M rec center renovation and they have a pool in the shape of a buffalo. There are only 30,000 students, so right there is $2,000 per student on a portion of the facilities that isn't involved in teaching. http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25916902/cu-boulder-buffalo-shaped-pool-opens-monday http://www.dailycamera.com/cu-news/ci_25916902/cu-boulder-bu...
- jsprogrammer 11y ago
  A rec center lasts for more than a year doesn't it? I'm sure there are (will be) ongoing maintenance costs, but I doubt they are also $63M/year.
  - r00fus 11y ago
    A $63M rec center doesn't maintain itself. I'm sure the yearly operational costs are much larger than what they had before as well.
- IkmoIkmo 11y ago
  It an expense, not necessarily a cost. Their property values just rose for example. Over time the equipment ages which leads to breaking, and replacement because it's not state of the art anymore. If you expect it to last 20 years, then you can write off 1/20th every year, which are your actual costs. Meaning it's $100 per student per year, which is reasonably cheap because those are essentially your costs to have state of the art equipment available to you every year. Things like heating & lighting, employees, cleaning etc is added to that, but it's mostly independent from renovation as you had to pay that anyway before you renovated. It might go up a bit, it might go down because of more sustainable engineering for example. There's a lot more to it, of course, don't get me wrong. But $2k per student for non-teaching isn't quite the truth, either. But I think the notion of building decent public facilities and amenities is one of the best things we ought to do. It sadly doesn't happen often. But universities do it, libraries, rec centers, I think it's great. It has to happen in a smart way, of course, I don't support some of the ridiculous over the top projects you sometimes see. A pool in the shape of a buffalo, ugh, great example right there. Sadly it's often in the pursuit of collegiate sports and not really providing awesome amenities and facilities to the general student body. Reminds me of the piece about Alabama in this great Last Week Tonight [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX8BXH3SJn0

Animats 11y ago

The short version: "A major factor driving increasing costs is the constant expansion of university administration."

dikaiosune 11y ago
At the university where a friend works, a huge amount of the staffing expenditure is on (rarely well-run) IT. Another big chunk of the staff is employed to essentially wrangle the part-time faculty who are on short contracts and don't stay for more than one or two years. I think that in many cases universities have turned to hiring staff to circumvent many of the political problems of trying to manage professors (edit: tenured people are a bitch to manage and will resist any and all changes in most departments, in case this wasn't clear before). It's a poor solution but in some areas it's the only way to make changes. The IT, the slow rate of change among faculty, the part-timers, etc, could optimistically be put down to changing student and market demands. Pessimistically much of it could be put down to an institutional desire to have central control.
- nhstanley 11y ago
  Someone was arguing to me recently that this has all come about because of some court cases in the 80s and 90s. They claim that one case in particular, between Notre Dame and the faculty, was a turning point. The story has been related to me like this: Traditionally universities were heavily influenced by the faculty, who had big sway over big decisions. This all came to a head in the 80s when faculty and the administration disagreed over some big issue (like who should be the next president, I believe). The faculty and administration went to court, and the court ruled that the faculty were employees and the administration, essentially, had absolute power and could appoint who they wanted. This precedent drastically changed how universities were run, and since then faculty has basically been eviscerated (both from a power standpoint and a pay standpoint, ala adjuncts) and universities are now run like businesses (top down management vs. a more distributed/democratic form previously). I haven't been able to find the court case or citations to back this up (closest is a book[1]), but it wouldn't surprise me if true. It would explain a lot that has happened, and if you combine it with other factors like government backed student loans, it's no surprise universities are cash cows run by feudal lords. [1] https://books.google.es/books?id=PiPktdWvGvkC https://books.google.es/books?id=PiPktdWvGvkC

pacifist 11y ago

It didn't make sense to me until I read this: from the article: "Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college." from the comments: "The money PER STUDENT was slashed. That is what matters for the cost to each student."… "This is an elaborate lie, to justify what is indefensible without the help of such lies."

ta82828 11y ago
Well the article disagrees with that claim, "Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today." so I guess it would be time to go to the references/data if we had them.
- pacifist 11y ago
  Here you go. Data from the internet: [1]"States are all over the map on their retreat from higher education. At one extreme are the two states that have managed to maintain their fiscal 1980 investment through 2011: Wyoming (+2.3 percent) and North Dakota (+0.8 percent). But these are the exceptions. All other states have reduced their support by anywhere from 14.8 percent to 69.4 percent between fiscal 1980 and fiscal 2011." This covers roughly the same time period as in the article. Only there is something different going on: state appropriations for higher education is going down. [1] http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pages/state-funding-a-race-to-the-bottom.aspx http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pa...
- deleted 11y ago
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pdkl95 11y ago
This article seems to have gone out of its way to list a lot of aggregate numbers that increased while comparing it to per-student tuition. Also, there could be more factors than just the increased percentage of people who go to college. The tuition increase could also include increased administrative costs or spending on extracurricular activities such sports. I know that when I was attending UC Davis, we saw an increase to pay for the new computer labs that were being installed.

ForHackernews 11y ago

Part of it is also a social signaling factor. Because eduction is a superior good and a positional good, there's pressure for it to get ever more expensive (at least on paper). After all, if the Johnsons' kids are going to a $40,000/year school, you want to make sure your little darling goes to at least a $45,000/year school. The secret is that many elite colleges give such generous financial aid that only the extremely wealthy are paying full freight. But it still makes the college looks good to have an astronomically high sticker price.

krat0sprakhar 11y ago
> The secret is that many elite colleges give such generous financial aid that only the extremely wealthy are paying full freight. But it still makes the college looks good to have an astronomically high sticker price. Unfortunately, this is not at all true for grad school. I'm from India and a large swathe of my friends from college are studying in the US without any sort of aid.
- jeffwass 11y ago
  What subjects are your friends studying? I did my PhD in physics in the USA, and for all of my fellow physics grad students, we not only had free tuition but we were given jobs (they didn't pay much but it was enough to live on). Ie, students were either given Research Assistant roles from their Adviser's funding, or Teaching Assistant roles by the department. The lucky ttudents with fellowships didn't need to teach at all and could focus full time from day one on research. (Of course this gives those fellowship students more ability to write papers early in their career, boosting their ability to win more fellowships later on, creating academias's own 1%/99% inequality, but that's a separate issue). This was physics, and my understanding is that this is the case for most of the sciences.
  - itg 11y ago
    He probably means masters degree. I was looking at a few and couldn't find any that were fully funded. This was in stem programs at top schools.

MCRed 11y ago

I think a more interesting question is, how has the ROI of college changed over the past 40 years? The cost has gone up much faster than inflation. The number of people going to college has also risen dramatically. This means there are a lot more college educated peers competing with you in the workplace. This means that the college degree is not as rare, and thus has lower scarcity value. Finally, I think it's quite possible the quality of the education has declined significantly in the past 40 years. When I was in college, almost 30 years ago, I was appalled at how the university focused and spent so much of its money on a losing football team (in a zero sum situation where the other schools were always going to be abel to massively outspend it and had larger pools of students to recruit from) ... and in the decline in the education. I remember sitting in a class and learning about how universities were started by tradesman who banded together and hired experts to teach them, and I thought "Man, I wish I could go to a school like that". Since then I've seen nothing but an increase in these efforts... I've see the quality of a CS degree (based on the people who I interview for jobs who have them) decline. So the formula is: More Cost, Less Value, Lower Quality = Lower ROI. If things don't turn around, at some point College will be a losing proposition. Of course, this presumes that the education colleges give can be obtained elsewhere. Which brings up another point MOOCs, and online access to open source frameworks have really changed things in the past 30 years. 30 years ago we were buying our compilers (CodeWarrior for life!) now they and our frameworks are open source and well documented. The books are cheaper-- $40 to Oreilley rather than $120 to the campus book store (or are my prices out of date?) You can learn more modern technologies better than going to college and spending 4 years on Java and C++. Then there's the MooCs. you can learn CS fundamentals by video, along with people all around the world. I think we're close to that tipping point.

hacknat 11y ago
Agreed. One thing people usually don't take into account when they talk about current College ROI is the opportunity cost. Especially at non-first tier private schools the opportunity cost must be considerable.
nickysielicki 11y ago
One criticism I have of education systems is that they structurally encourage only superficially studying content. Let's take my compilers class as an example. I go to a 75 minute lecture 2 times a week and I do about 4 hours of homework a week. I do this over 18 weeks. That's only roughly 120 hours of study over the course of a semester. That's only as many hours as most full time employees work every 3 weeks! And the sad thing is, I imagine if I spent 3 weeks reading a compiler book, reading though the source of lex and yacc, and implementing some kind of basic compiler using them, I'd be a much better programmer than what we're doing-- implementing a C compiler for MIPS in java, using a shitty lex library and only implenting the parts the professor thinks is important. This brings me to another point. Programmers are necessarily autodidacts because shit changes incredibly fast. You can't be a one trick pony. So if we're pushing kids through these incredibly formulaic methods of learning, what are we really preparing them for? A life of being an enterprise code monkey? The student who taught themselves anything, even if they are missing a few core details, are more equipped to fix those gaps in their understandings. I did a hackathon a couple weeks ago that had a sort of business spin on it. There was this group of 4 guys that made a college choosing application based off your GPA, as a desktop java application with a GUI that had background images and looked like an early 2000s keygen program. The thing is, I have absolutely no doubt that these guys are good students and they'll probably find an alright job out of school. But all they know is java development. I think that students that want to be more than that probably shouldn't go to school. Here's a question to you: if I handed you a résumé, without a bachelor's degree, but instead included my github profile and a list of books I've read cover to cover and some open source contributions, am I going to get the salary I am worth?

graycat 11y ago

The OP keeps talking about the tuition increases. But as far as I could tell, the OP was considering only, call it, tuition list prices. But, with scholarships, various forms of financial aid, etc., maybe often the list price is not the actual price, that is, what the school actually receives from the student (and their family). So, the OP didn't explain how much the actual price has changed over the decades. E.g., recently Stanford announced that the tuition will be $0.00 for any student whose family earns less than $125,000 a year. Sure, maybe the list price tuition at Stanford is ballpark $50,000 a year. But the actual price is sometimes zero. And some scholarships also cover room and board making the actual price negative. It was long the case that the tuition for a student paid only ballpark 1/3rd of the full school budget per student. So, maybe what's happened is that the schools decided to set the list price to be the full cost per student, maybe plus some, and have students from wealthy families actually pay that price. Then nearly all the rest of the students get a significantly lower actual price, maybe even $0.00. Further, given that there are student loans available to cover the list price, then maybe just go ahead and charge list price for students using student loans. Then we have the issue of, with so many students getting student loans, maybe they are not very good students and wouldn't even have been accepted at the school back decades ago. Maybe. Or, if some money sources are eager to pay or loan list price for some not very good students, then colleges can be tempted to go ahead and take the list price easy money and let the students attend the classes.

nkassis 11y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to say. But I challenge your argument that schools are listing the full cost per students. One reason I doubt current list price of tuition covers 100% of the cost per student for the vast majority of schools (which are public and receive state funding). Students with student loans aren't bad students. Depending on you parents salary they might not qualify for any other type of need based financial aid except student loans. Also, merit base aid is limited and can't be extended to all students with academic standing that usually leads to them successfully completing college with high grades. In the end, a large amount of students pay for college entirely with student loans and don't realize the cost until they are in repayment. They pay the list price and more due to other costs of going to college. To successfully be able to pay for college without aid and loans a student today would need to have a full time job while students in the 1950-60... could generally pay the full amount with a summer job. Edit: Also, price per students vary between faculties, a engineering student might cost 50K+ while a arts student would cost half or less of that. Some students end up subsidizing others.

adrusi 11y ago

> For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times > higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative > appropriations to higher education are more than 10 > times higher. This isn't the relevant statistic. I'm going to guess that the size of the national student body has increased since 1960, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was by more than a factor of ten. I'm not saying that therefore lack of government spending is the cause of high tuition, but this article dismisses it too quickly.

nulltype 11y ago
Well the article addresses that point like a paragraph or two later.

kelukelugames 11y ago

Going to plug Bill Gates' recommendation again. I enjoyed reading and thought the data was eye opening. http://www.trustmedia.co/test/Books/Why-Does-College-Cost-So-Much.html http://www.trustmedia.co/test/Books/Why-Does-College-Cost-So...

cm2187 11y ago

I would say quantitative easing has a lot to do too. It didn't create the broad inflation everyone expected. Instead some sectors went into high inflation: housing, stocks, tuition fees, etc.

marincounty 11y ago

The real reason college tuition costs so much=because they can! (Most schools found that students/families will find ways to come up with the money. These schools will blame everyone, and everything, but they still raise tuition. When questioned, they brag about the scholarships. I understand some state schools, but really question schools like Haarvard with a billion/year coming in through endowments.)

reuven 11y ago

American universities aren't just about education. Or even research, for that matter. They're often about providing a "life experience" for undergraduates. So you have a huge investment in sports, entertainment, and living facilities that are basically unheard of in other countries. Plus, all sort of administrators and advisors who help students in a variety of different ways. These add up to a great experience, and arguably make the education better. But they also reflect how little the US government provides vs. other countries. And how much students depend on the university to provide services that in other countries would be provided by other agencies. And how an American university is expected to provide much more than just classrooms, lectures, and research. I graduated from two American universities (MIT and Northwestern). Each of these had an on-site medical facility (unnecessary in countries with nationalized health insurance), financial aid offices (unnecessary in places where the tuition is lower, or handled by centralized government agencies), student-only shuttle services (unnecessary where public transportation is good), sports teams (unheard of outside of the US), and a wide variety of extra-curriculars (again, basically non-existent outside of the US). Each of these requires a bunch of administrators. The building in which I did my PhD had a huge support staff. In an Israeli or European university, I think that the 15-20 secretaries, planners, and managers would have been replaced by 3-4 people. Overworked and underpaid people, mind you, but that's how you keep costs low. And my office (as a graduate student) in the US was positively opulent compared to what you'll find abroad. I used to think that student aid in the US was a great thing. But I do believe that American universities have basically decided that they can raise tuition without any penalty, because almost no one pays that sum out of pocket -- and everyone else just takes on crushing debt for many years to follow. Now, the fact is that I had a blast in my undergrad years, and my experience editing the student newspaper led directly to my current career. But having met many students and graduates in Israel (where I live), where universities are places to learn and do research, rather than have "life experiences," I'm not at all convinced that the added expense and overhead are worthwhile.

gumballhead 11y ago
I upvoted this comment because this is all very true and gets to be very expensive as enrollment rates increase, which was also mentioned in the article. But, despite all of this expense, I don't feel like I got a great education while I attended a public university. My classes were taught by grad students and adjuncts in 400 person auditoriums. I ended up transferring to a small private school about the size of my high school. The tuition was about four times what I was paying at a public school (though I didn't pay near that much out of my own pocket) and the quality of teaching was night and day.

chucksmart 11y ago

"Entrenchment of the bourgeoisie"

kylered 11y ago

I wrote a post about this same issue a year ago. It's sad that debt is fueling the growth of administration staff. Some interesting charts are here: http://kylethered.tumblr.com/post/37790176790/data-says-higher-ed-destroying-value-by-passing http://kylethered.tumblr.com/post/37790176790/data-says-high...

melling 11y ago

We should all try to remember this because it's not what we've been told: "What cannot be defended, however, is the claim that tuition has risen because public funding for higher education has been cut. Despite its ubiquity, this claim flies directly in the face of the facts."

bawana 11y ago

time to take action: kill -9 all_administrative_positions

muzz 11y ago
Do you even know what these administrative positions are? I would love to see a breakdown of these, if you have a source.

bawana 11y ago

the same malady affects health care. corporate-itis

guelo 11y ago

One of the big crimes of these administrators is that it's so hard to get accurate numbers when trying to have this debate. Has the funding per capita gone down proportionally to the tuition increase? Is the increase in administration and facilities proportional to the increase in enrollment?

chisleu 11y ago

I find it interesting that the article takes every step except for the very last one. The increase in public funding of universities has inflated the enrollment, decreased the quality of education, and increased the pricing by allowing sub-par schools to survive. In any economic situation, an increase in the quantity of money trying to consume a restricted quantity of resources increases the price. This is an economic fact. How does the article simply make the point that the increase in public funding isn't why the costs have increased but not even bring up the correlation between the increase in funding and the costs going up?? If we have 100 apples of production a year at the current price, and someone comes along and gives people who want apples some money to buy apples, the apple seller can increase the price without much resistance. Everyone who wants apples pays more because the money in this market is inflated. Government has inflated the market. As a 34 year old college senior about to graduate with honors, I see this every single day at school. The failure rates for the low levels classes is ~50% and even THAT is inflated because the teachers are frowned upon if they fail to pass students. When teachers fail to pass students, students drop out and the college stops getting money. So they string them along into higher and higher levels classes hoping they catch on and catch up. This has led to me being in 300-400 level computer science classes with people who have absolutely no business being in college at all, let alone anywhere near a computer. They have no functional knowledge of computing, and have no chance of getting a job even if they manage to get through college with a C average. Unfortunately, the higher level teachers bend to the lower capability in the class as well... I had a 425 advanced database class where the teacher told us that some people still had not managed to install mysql after the midterm... The only reason kids were passing with C's is they were googling for answers on the open-laptop tests. By subsidizing the marketplace, the government is allowing schools that should close or be radically reformed to continue chugging along. Another tangental issue is college sports. Colleges can play all sorts of games with the way money is spent on college sports and athletes. Companies can donate huge sums of money for sports complexes that are suppose to benefit the entire student body, but the athletes at my school have a separate gym with high end amenities where the regular students use a cheaper gym with normal gym equipment. I pay for classes, but people who run faster than me get in for free, get easy A classes, and get high end amenities. They get free food, special athlete lodging, and the list goes on and on. All of this is coming out of the general coffers. While they have both hot whirlpools and cold tanks to aid in their workout recovery, I'm in a "computer science" building rented off campus, with no place to plug in a power cord. I'm really shocked to see the NYTimes go as far as they did. Certainly, the article will be met with spite from the left as well as the right.

brianbreslin 11y ago

My father is a university administrator, and he told me this theory years ago, that the costs were due to excess bureaucracy.

sytelus 11y ago
What would be an example? What these administrators are doing anyway to destroy so much of value?

m3talridl3y 11y ago

Someone needs to build a "spartan" college. Use the cheapest construction materials+. No sports teams++. No extracurricular activities+++. No degrees that aren't in STEM.++++ + - Does the round glass section contribute to learning in some way? What am I missing? http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/downloadables/photo/20120914CBAdraw3.jpg http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/downloadables/photo/2012091... ++ - If your sports team starts to win, people will wonder why your crappy 10-year-old sports stadium hasn't been demolished and rebuilt. It's 10 years old already! We need at least 30% glass panel coverage on the exterior! Get with the times already! +++ - You want a robotics club or a harry potter reading club or a javelin-throwing club? Fine, but find your own funding. ++++ - If you really think you're the gods' gift to mankind when it comes to ancient Egyptian art, then by all means, get admitted to an ivy-league-status establishment. The last thing the world needs are more junior-league art majors.

endzone 11y ago

as he admits, per capita funding has indeed fallen. the problem is an over expansion of higher education. what proportion of the population can really benefit from a full time residential degree course? much less than 50%

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