The Pandora’s box here is that far too little of these “fees” actually went to in-person instruction vs. bloated admin and other things not directly linked to core educational activities. Unless universities slash those bloated admin and other costs then they’re not really in a position to be giving everyone a “remote learning” discount.
These fees aren't for bloated admin. They support resources like the library, general student use fitness facilities, techology, and other student focused items. I get why students want to stop paying these fees during the pandemic since they can't use many of the resources. The issue is that most of the costs for these resources are fixed, mainly personnel and facilities. If you cut the fees, the university would have to lay off many of its staff, librarians, IT support, etc. The facilities would also fall into disrepair. There's no easy solution here.
Few would argue about fixed costs of libraries, but you be hard pressed to explain how libraries etc. are responsible for the cost of higher ed increasing far far faster than inflation to levels that are increasingly hard to justify. That has a lot more to do with the number of “Assistant Vice Provost of Underwater Basketweaving” type non-teaching non-research roles and positions that have developed over the years at many schools.
It’s a story similar to Healthcare in the US. It’s so expensive because so little is actually spent on healthcare vs paperwork and administration.
"The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures."
That sounds like a cooked study, although to be honest I don't have concrete evidence, just a hunch based on what I know about the atmosphere in universities. The author of the study is a sort of a think-tank called AIR with representatives of the banking, corporate consulting and finance on the board.
How did they do it before? The fees widely outpace inflation. It’d be nice to see state schools be affordable to kids on a part time job —which used to be the case. That’s not been the case for a few decades.
That’s the thing the puzzles me. Some of these universities’ annual tuition amounts to a healthy 1 year’s salary. How did they operate when this wasn’t the case?
Universities can still cut quite a few costs when facilities are underutilized without letting things decay. Buildings don’t need to be kept at room temperature without people. Most computers and lights can be kept off. Parking lots don’t need to be kept plowed and salted in the winter. Grounds can generally be less immaculate without long term issues. Bathrooms etc don’t need to be cleaned daily when not in use.
But even those services are sometimes questionable in actual value (and overall experience.)
Example: At the college I went to, the food service company that handled the cafeteria had some interesting clauses in their contract that gave them a lot of control over who else could cook food for an 'on campus/university sanctioned' event. It's been a long time so I can't remember the specifics, but I think we had to switch some fraternity events from cooking hotdogs/hamburgers outside to just bringing some Carry Out pizza.
On top of that, the workers for that company weren't paid well, the food was typically about what you'd expect from, say, bulk purchases from Gordon Food Service, and very expensive for students.
Speaking of that, IIRC if you lived on campus you had to have some form of meal plan (I assume that was also in the contract.)
The easy solution is for Unis to take an L for once and to cover costs with their enormous savings from the last 30 years of exponential growth. Those fees obviously are over actual cost to cover contingencies, a pandemic was inevitable on the time scale of a university. They probably should have gotten insurance, what do those admins do anyway if not plan for things such as this?
My university had a dozen computer labs that were never utilized to capacity, (One in a dedicated, multi-story building), and a library that was far bigger than any of the other buildings on campus. And, of course, all the accouterments necessary to run a physics, a chemistry, a biology, an engineering department, etc, etc, etc.
All-in-market-rate-no-discount-no-subsidies-international-student tuition was ~100,000 CAD/4 years.
It's true, though, we did not have a stadium that could sit 60,000 people, or two olympic-sized swimming pools, or four-star-hotel-accomodation dorms that we were for some reason forced to live in, but we also weren't paying $100,000/year in tuition.
Not only that, too many schools are peddling worthless degrees to very unsophisticated buyers. Any other industry would be heavily regulated for such shenanigans. Instead, the government heavily subsidizes the activity and makes special laws allowing students to take on enormous debt that they won't be able to discharge if they get a worthless degree.
The simple answer is to get rid of government backed student loans and have the schools back the loans and aid themselves. That way, they will be incentivized to not indebt 18 year olds when it is unlikely they'll be able to pay back the loan. It will also incentivize them to focus on more important things.
Not to be pedantic, but if anything it's probably the other way around. The fees are the things specifically for academic resources, and the core tuition is what's wasted on administrative bloat.
Well, the article does note universities that are offering discounts. They include Princeton, Georgetown, and Williams. So, it’s possible to give concessions for the short term.
In fact some institutions like my alma mater, University of Michigan, are charging additional remote learning fees on top of the usual tuition increase.
Universities are starting to sound like car salesman.
Look at this great deal! Now we’ll just add on the winterization fee, rust prevention package, delivery fee, admin fee, admin recovery fee, tag fee, boat payment fee, tire rotation fee, coolant flush and closing costs and we’ll get you on the road in a jiffy!
In my country, universities that offer remote degrees (well before covid) all charges additional fees for it. It’s usually not much (something like 200€ on top of the ~500€ typical fee), but some charge per module so it can add up quickly. A few have a dedicated remote learning center, with is own workers.
People just don't understand on here. It isn't like buying a loaf of bread.
Kids want to go to college. It's an exciting time in everyone's life, you get to go away somewhere, meet knew people, all while earning a degree, which because of the corporate worship of our nation, is now required to get a job.
And you wonder why fees are so high? And tuition skyrocketed?
No one shows anger towards the corporations which don't train anymore for their BS job in their BS department which doesn't do much of anything. We ignore the corporate bloat and regulatory capture across the entire spectrum for the select few corporations that have our politicians in their back pocket.
Certainly every university should cut them if they’re no selling brand and access to an alumni network.
Harvard/MIT/Stanford can get away with it because they can get you into Google/Goldman/McK purely based on their screening. The market pays a high price for that.
Schools with more open admissions policies can’t expect to charge much more than Coursera for similar offerings.
It’s unreasonable and counterproductive to call for bandaids when the jugular is bleeding out.
What a time to be alive when a functioning educational system with universal access and financial support is spoken about as “a pet political cause.” Some of us consider it a foundational component of a developed country, and the pandemic has laid bare the need.
Wouldn't it make financial sense for the great majority of people to take as many loans as possible and then immediately declare bankruptcy the day after graduating? Most people don't have any meaningful assets at the end of university, so bankruptcy would be about as painless as it's possible for a bankruptcy can be.
Which is why I said stop government-backed student loans. And any effort by a Democratic administration to forgive student loans would be absurd without stopping new ones.
In my state, most of the programs the community colleges offer are aimed either at credential acquisition or for transfer to a university; there are no four year programs. However, many of the teachers at these schools are also PhDs moonlighting from local universities where they teach upper-level subjects and the community college offers a handful of classes that are at the 300/junior level for certain subjects. The thing that's really missing from the community college curriculum that would shake up the university pricing model is the ability to get a Bachelor's degree. At least in my state, it doesn't seem like there would be too much of a stretch to accommodate the additional educational resources it would require. Some people go to a university because they want access to first-class facilities, professors, student networking, and the like. In fact, the tuition at my local university more than doubled after they managed to get their basketball team into the NCAA Final Four one year. But many people don't care about this kind of thing; they just need their 'certificate of passage of this particular social ritual'.
Comparing tuition at Cabrillo College (community college for Santa Cruz, CA) and SJSU (California State University in San Jose), it looks like a "normal" course costs $574 at the bottom-tier 4-year university vs $230 at the community college. If you take 2 or fewer classes in a semester at SJSU (as a full-time student, you're supposed to take 5), tuition falls nearly in half to $333 per class.
$6000 tuition per year is high enough to be prohibitive for some people. But those people are the focus of intensive recruitment and financial aid efforts by universities all up and down the hierarchy of status. That isn't the first place I'd look if I were seeking to answer "why aren't more poor people going to college?"
I agree they're relatively cheap, but I think they could go a lot further and just be free. A few hundred dollars for a class is still a lot, and we all benefit from people being able to get educated.
Community colleges don’t offer much value. Even a few hundred dollars is way over priced because the degree won’t open hiring doors except in an extremely narrow set of jobs, like nursing and related care-giving - which would be better off as a standalone trade school.
The value of a college degree is networking and the brand name recognition that the university has, which opens doors when your resume is churning through automated recruiting systems.
Nobody expects that you exit college with training, skill or knowledge to be an effective employee, beyond basic life skills and vague understanding of how to comply with professional standards.
Using college to actually learn stuff is down to a personal preference. You absolutely don’t need to spend time that way, but you can get extra value if you choose to.
But the bulk of the intended value is to give yourself branding and signaling for marketability in employment.
You can think of a college degree similar to a “certified organic” label on food. It doesn’t really mean anything, but you’d be a complete moron to misjudge the fact that everyone else will believe it does mean something and shift all kinds of economic facts of life around that entrenched, generational belief, and use lobbyists, regulatory capture and media to constantly reinforce that stranglehold.
Community colleges offer value to people like myself, who for whatever reason did not succeed in high school and would have no other access to higher education (and perhaps couldn't afford it even if they did). In my case, a few semesters of good grades allowed me to transfer to a state university that I was previously rejected from, and with a scholarship that allowed me to be able to afford it in the first place. I was then able to leverage the benefits of the networking you refer to, and was able to drop out and become a well paid programmer rather than a perpetually broke student who wasn't even learning much because I had to work full time to be able to attend in the first place.
>You can think of a college degree similar to a “certified organic” label on food. It doesn’t really mean anything
Not sure where you're from, but in the US this is not true at all. There are strict requirements for something to be certified organic. As of 10 years ago when I last worked on a farm, it was actually quite difficult to get certified.
That’s a valid point. If you can use the community college to transfer to a school with a brand name, it can help a wider variety of people be able to get to that brand name school.
My comment is only in reference to fully completing your degree and getting a diploma that goes on your resume from a community college. You’re better off skipping college and going straight to work in that scenario.
Where my family is from in the Midwest, this is very common. People who get paid more and rise to management jobs in the local blue collar workforce are the ones who just start in the stockroom or doing admin work right out of high school (or otherwise make careers in factory work, trades like welding or go to the military).
They make more money and have higher ranks than people with community college degrees working the same jobs because they have so much lead time in years of experience, while the positions rarely if ever need or care about college degrees.
Meanwhile, other than specific trades which are basically only nursing and elder care, community college grads cannot compete with state school grads for positions that do require degrees, like work in local government, upper positions in law enforcement, teaching at local schools, etc. Community college will never get you those jobs.
I’ve seen a lot of people banking on community college degrees opening doors for them thinking it’s the same as a state school degree but lets you save money & live at home. They end up still with small amounts of debt and absolutely nothing to show for it job-wise.
Really the only exception is if you transfer to a brand name school and you can ensure the degree you’ll have carries brand name signalling.
Nothing like a two step plan where the first step alone would cause a wide divide in educational opportunity between the wealthy and the poor and the second step is a half baked attempt to fix the obvious problems with the first despite it being insanely difficult and costly to implement.
I read this article a different way: instead of being under pressure to cut tuition, schools just realized they can cut a bunch of amenities and students will still pay their tuition, and even more. With that knowledge, they might as well keep it that way forever and pocket the extra income. Students will complain, but until they start dropping out, tuition can apparently be driven up endlessly. It's a lucrative business.
They can keep their tuition rates high, but online only schools should be allowed regional accreditation. Massive open online courses (MOOC) and other disruptive EdTech can offer equivalent educational instruction for a lot less money than traditional higher-ed options.
This problem is not complicated. If students don't like the fees - don't go to school there! A little more price-shopping in higher education would go a long way toward reducing the tuition.
Many career paths have gatekeepers who expect new entrants to follow same path as they had 20 years ago (and the generation or two before that), which means alumni from specific schools will get the advantages, not because of any actual different in the quality of the education, but because of bias - concious and unconcious.
Companies who have gatekeepers that bias toward (or away from) certain groups of people will tend to perform more poorly than peer companies that don't. They will pay more for similar performance, or fail to hire better qualified candidates. This is not perfect, and takes a lot of time to play out - but it does play out eventually.
Sometimes you have to wait for those gatekeepers to retire, so it might take a generation, but it will happen over time. Sometimes it can happen much more rapidly due to innovation and new industries replacing old very quickly.
In the meantime, focusing on acquiring useful skills as cheaply and efficiently as possible is a winning proposition. Much more likely to be winning than spending a whole bunch more money on a less valuable educational product.
I think you are confusing schools like Harvard with your run of the mill state university. The latter rarely has much of an endowment to fund itself with.
My run of the mill state school has an endowment larger than than $500 million and still sent out emails begging alumni to donate to a fund to make sure students didn't go hungry in the early days of covid.
"A typical endowment consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individual
funds. In most cases, the donors who have created these funds have set restrictions on how their donations may be spent. In 2007-8, about 78 percent of endowment assets at public institutions were under such restrictions; an average of 55 percent of the resources contained in private university endowments were restricted (See National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) 2008 Endowment Study). In such cases, money restricted for research in a specific subject, for example, may not be applied toward student financial aid, and vice versa. Donations are typically restricted to fund student scholarships, conduct specific kinds of research, finance specific programs to enhance undergraduate and graduate education, create professorships in specified fields, develop or maintain teaching and research facilities, or improve a wide range of campus activities, including the arts, public service, student housing, and athletics."
However, other articles go on to note that money is fungible, making the restrictions less onerous than they appear. If, for example, a specific restricted endowment fund is restricted to providing scholarships, it still reduces the amount of scholarship money the university has to provide out of general funds by the amount the restricted endowment provides, freeing up that money to be used elsewhere.
Profit. It's always profit. Higher education is nearly mandatory to get a good position and good salary. It's nearly a gateway. 30% of the population has a university degree in first world countries.
Forcing multiple thousands of dollars is a toll for a bridge where few alternatives exist. And in a country that considers so many things a business, this is of course run like a business ergo profit is very important.
We should have strict price controls on university tuition and fees. Roll them back a couple decades, and cap compensation at $250k a year for all employees and contractors.
State universities — the bulk of public universities in the nation — are already subject to control by state legislatures. The problem is that this central planning capability is not in practice used to improve education and its affordability, but rather to enrich and empower the university staff (and occasionally faculty) as they siphon off public funds, loans, fees and tuition, in a classic illustration of the principal-agent problem. Even the retirement systems seek overtly political ends with their investments.
Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!
(Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.)
> Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.
Thanks for the chuckle.
> Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!
I reject the framing that this system is promoted or even protected by university staff. It is of course in their interests to keep it largely intact but the true system facilitators have been in place for centuries perhaps with different names and agendas.
One thing that has been discussed here is removing government backed loans. Doing so would perhaps reduce overall population exposure to higher education. I think the trend of expanding costs of education will continue without government help via positive feedback loop from parental investment and other society wide changes happening today.
So in essence university value is being justified each day without a thought of future consequences. To that end the government may act for increasing government sponsorship loan forgiveness where you work off your loans at a discount rather than a dead stop bailout of loans that may never be repaid in a lifetime. The government could probably make a variety of optional part time/full time 'loan forgiveness' programs for the public good. Unfortunately assigning the public good would probably be too hard to decipher in a bipartisan manner.
