Reply to The End of College Life - Wash U Prof's article in the Atlantic

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "The End of College Life - Wash U Prof's article in the Atlantic"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Sorry, but I just don't buy it. In 1997, the most expensive four-year private colleges cost $100,000 for everything. That's $199,000 in today's dollars. Today, the most expensive privates are $360,000. Put another way, if college was as expensive in 1997 as it was today, it would have been $180,000--80% more expensive. Where has this 80% increase in cost gone? Not to faculty--tenured faculty positions have been stable or even cut almost everywhere, replaced by temps. My daughter is a Freshman at a T10 research university and *all* of her STEM profs have been temps so far. The money has gone to three things: Administrative bloat; athletics; and buildings and amenities. It will be hard, but undergraduate colleges can easily find the solution to their problems by cutting the bureaucracy (Deans, Assistant Deans, VPs, etc.), freezing the absurd athletics programs that serve as a weird pipeline for rich kids whose parents can afford travel sports, and stopping new building construction. Kids will be fine--in fact they'll be much better off. They don't need to be bubble wrapped; they can live in crappy dorms like we did and be fine; and parents might realize that the whole travel sports thing for hopes of a D1 admit is an absurd, irrational, and deeply unfair money grab. A correction is badly needed, and college will be better for it when it gets back to its core mission: Education and becoming an adult through controlled adversity.[/quote]

What you don’t get is that this will just kill off most schools.

People struggle to see the value of a degree anyhow; destroy all the fun and you might as well make college into a trade school. [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics