The problem is the loans. I have a funny feeling if loans were capped at say, 10k/year, colleges might all the sudden charge 11k/year to attend instead of 30k...
One of the oddities in the college process is how public universities followed the price increases of their private counterparts. Why weren't state governments able to dictate effective cost controls to keep costs down for residents?
Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.
Because many (most?) states have been cutting state funding for public universities for years, IIRC. (See, for example, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/most-americans-dont-r...). It wouldn't have been sensible to impose price caps while cutting funding at the same time.
If I’m a Republican legislator and I’m seeing my kids enroll at a state college where gender and queer studies classes are a requirement to get a computer science degree, I’m going to want to defund too. I remember my Republican high school peers arguing with our liberal debate coach, and he’d just laugh and say “wait until you go to college, then you’ll get it”. Sure enough, she went to Harvard Law and became a Democrat. The indoctrination is there and if monetary compensation isn’t the reason professors get into teaching, what is? If you have a mission to “educate young minds” to reject their “problematic” notions, that can be a strong motivator.
There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
Perhaps if the conservative voices would stop saying stupid stuff like this, they wouldn't be systematically excluded from the conversation. In my particular subfield of CS, there's a "self-identified conservative" who's been more or less utterly rejected from the community because, in addition to their bonkers political opinions, it turns out they also have bonkers scientific opinions. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that they reject the scientific process. It's hard to find that compatible with doing science. Perhaps I have many secret conservative colleagues in my field, but the only one I've seen is not someone who I would ever wish to collaborate with.
State schools in US are often the best STEM schools.
I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).
The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.
It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.
(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).
Basically Harvard, and maybe Columbia and that's it. UIUC, Wisconsin-Madison, Berkeley, Michigan-Ann Arbor are orders better schools in the sciences than Dartmouth or Brown.
Once you're at that level, the differences are marginal. It matters if you want to go to graduate school, I suppose, but we're talking about people who just want to get a degree and go into the workforce here. For them, Princeton vs. Michigan won't matter a bit if they're studying to become an engineer.
If you want to study applied math and go into the workforce, then my point still stands, going to Princeton vs. Michigan simply doesn't matter. If you want to go to graduate school, it's unclear if it matters all that much. Princeton tends to draw the most talented young mathematicians in the world, and has for decades. Presumably if a student of that caliber went to Michigan, they would do just as well, because Michigan also has talented mathematicians who do good research and can write good letters of recommendation for graduate school.
Specialty fields yes. But Princeton engineering is ordinary, and the state schools often have exceptional faculty across multiple departments - leading to way more collaborative, cutting-edge work.
The undergraduate students at Dartmouth and Brown are generally much better than the ones at those large publics. The rankings are largely due to the department size and what the professors and their PhD students are publishing.
FWIW, I was a lifelong conservative Republican but in recent years have slowly become a liberal independent (leaning very much Democratic) because of A) the gradual takeover of the GOP by fact-scorning white nationalists who used to be banished to the fringes of the party; and B) what I've experienced and seen in life over the decades, which has made me much more sympathetic to others who didn't get the breaks that I and my ancestors did.
As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)
Universities are also the place that turn out STEM graduates and Ph.Ds: engineers (the non-software kind, where you actually need and use the education), physicians, scientists and researchers of all flavors (like the kind trying to find a cure for COVID-19), and so forth. These people are the pillars of progress and innovation necessary for a country to be great. Ironically, by defunding universities, culture warrior conservatives are effectively slitting their own country's throat.
(Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
What I read was that the reason for in-state college tuition increasing so much was because of the reduction in property taxes.
Typically property taxes go towards education at the local level, and as property taxes were reduced there would be a shortfall in the budget somewhere. This typically fell on education, which then forced colleges to start raising tuition as there is still a non-zero cost to education.
There was a "print" article about this in the 70's or 80's in a local newspaper in California urging residents to vote NO on lowering property taxes citing the increase in future college education as the main reason. But the vote went through, property taxes were slashed, and then of course ten years later and so forth, tuition had sky rocketed.
Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back. Hard to imagine any real states or large communities raising property taxes significantly to actually reinvest in the local community.
In my state, FL, derives most of it's income from sales taxes and fees. Property taxes are really local, down to the county and city.
> Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back.
Well some voters see the taxes as an investment in their city and community. My city passed a referendum to back a bond to pay for climate change projects and education programs. The state passed a constitutional change that has made it virtually impossible to raise taxes.
When I look at the midwest and the hollowing out of their cities I have to imagine the tax cuts partially contributed. But at the time they passed the politicians believed they would be a net positive.
It's a delicate balance. Taxes too high will drive businesses away. Taxes too low will reduce communal investment and drive people away.
So, to be clear, price controls never work. Prices are determined (mostly and usually) by supply and demand. More demand -> higher price. More supply -> lower price.
The price of an education (regardless of cost structures, public funding, or whatever) is going to dominated by demand, since supply is relatively fixed. It takes years or decades to increase the supply of qualified instruction following typical university models.
In this case Federal dollars guarantee a massive surplus of demand, while Federal accreditation limits supply (rightly or wrongly).
"Public" schools are paid by students, just like private, as a fee-for-service product. For most educations at most universities, this service is largely indistinguishable. Some of the University income comes from tax offsets, but the product they provide is the same service and on the same market as private universities - fee-based educational services.
The price is therefor entirely determined by the amount of supply (relatively fixed) and the amount of demand for fee-based education. Demand has risen dramatically since WW2 due to a bevvy of Federal programs designed to underwrite and promote post-secondary education.
No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions.
The actual oddity is not that public education pricing keeps rising to private institutional pricing, but that it is not already at the same price.
Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
For extra credit, this is largely the same process that drives healthcare pricing in the US. A relatively fixed supply of a specialized service and a price-insensitive buyer pool largely underwritten by massive Federal programs.
> No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions.
This is an interesting claim, because tax-offsets of tuition have been going down over the last 30 years, not up. Look at the percentage of educational costs covered by state general funds in the late 60s compared to today. It's night and day different.
> Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
This is a interesting point, but the data doesn't back it up. We have data from the Department of Education on expenditures by universities. It doesn't show dramatic expenditure increases. The prices went up because state legislatures cut higher ed funding, and universities had to raise tuition to balance the books. Here's that data:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
If you have data showing that universities are spending dramatically more in expenditures on a per-student constant-dollar basis, I'd love to see it.
This is true for free-market goods, however there is no fundamental reason a state run institution should be beholden to such rules. In the case of public transport the state dictates the price and to some extent capacity, and the local authorities find the right set of tradeoffs to make it work ( with mixed results ).
In the case of a state university, it's odd that we don't see at least one example of this approach. Why isn't there an example of a state university with fixed admissions capacity, poor dorm/ student life quality, low cost, but with good academics?
We generally see the same set of tradeoffs across the entire industry with no student cost considerations in university planning to speak of.
If you can figure out the reasons for university price increases, good luck. It's a combination of a variety of things.
One is that increased demand for employers for "certification" of ability pushes demand for degrees among students. Every recession there's articles showing that those with a college degree fare better than those without. We can argue about why that is, but that's what the average 17 yo sees, along with their parents, and they don't want to be left behind, regardless of the details.
Another is that loans basically prop that up and facilitate it. So schools don't lose money on people who say "I can't afford it" because they find a way.
Another is the increasing administrative bloat at universities, which are now largely run like for-profit institutions even when they are not on paper. I think this is similar to a lot of fields, but my sense is that (based on personal experience) things are much more hierarchical now, with more of a focus on exploiting the university for personal gain than anything else. So administrative salary costs, and administrative costs in general, drive up the need for costs.
The public colleges have to compete for private colleges for faculty, administrators, etc. which then increases their costs, which then drives them to bigger need for more tuition.
At the same time, states have been cutting their funding. If they cut funding and unis have all these fixed costs, where else are they supposed to get money from?
A major dynamic between public universities in the US and political circles in the last couple of decades has been an increasing pressure for them to operate as revenue generating, profit-making institutions in every aspect. At the state level, the idea is that their role is to bring in money, at less cost (an alternative is to see them as providing a service to the state and country -- can you imagine wanting K-12 schools to be treated as profit-making ??? ). As a result, what we've ended up with are institutions with a lot of profit-seeking administrators, pyramid schemes, taking advantage of federal funding loopholes at every chance to bring in money, etc.
Public universities should be able to offer a good value to students, but they're being run as profit centers. If you think of it that way, it's no surprise tuition isn't competitive.
Also have you seen how much reporting requirements have increased for faculty? How much paperwork is needed for grants?
Just today there was a story I read about a Georgia Tech professor who is under federal investigation for misrepresentation on her continuing NSF grant. And the money involved was $40,000. And one of her defenses is that Georgia Tech provided very little secretarial services to her. Which may very well be true.
Everyone cribs about increased administrative bloat at universities, but given how massively paperwork requirements have ballooned, nobody is willing to point the figure also at that. Universities are hiring more admin because professors are often overwhelmed with paperwork nowadays.
This is all true. The cost of research is high. And although there are some additional costs involved in educating a more broad student body, it's nothing compared to the disinvestment in higher ed by state governments. Here's the ed department's data on expenditures. It doesn't show huge increases:
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
I don’t think secretarial services would help with misrepresentation.
And how much more help would she need?
Georgia Tech has really high admin costs with fees per semester above $1000. That’s just the explicit fees and doesn’t include the admin costs that are included in tuition.
