Reply to When will the college tuition bubble burst?

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "When will the college tuition bubble burst?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I'm in academia. There are a lot of factors at play here of course.[b] On the spending side, potential students show up and want to see how nice our non-academic facilities are, like the student center, cafeteria, dorms, and athletic facilities. That all costs money and drives our costs up.[/b]

Then on the consumer side, it's sort of a moral hazard. Student loan money is basically free, with no thought given to your ability to pay it back later. You can get just as much student loan money if you are studying social work or elementary education as if you are studying computer science. I'm leaving the societal benefit of each aside -- just it's a fact that some professions pay more than others. Colleges can raise tuition, then the student loans will rise to cover that increase. Not much incentive to keep tuition down.

Then you have foreign students. By law, they are not eligible for financial aid. The middle class in China (for example) is larger than the entire US population. It's very prestigious for your kid to study in the US, even at third-tier schools. Universities love them because they pay the full tuition. The number of these students has increased greatly over the last few years. That means you have a bunch of foreign students ready to pay full fare, along with well-off American residents ready to pay full fare, and lower income level students armed with student loans ready to pay slightly discounted tuition (the university will find some financial aid, often from hapless donors, to cover the difference).

I can see that for some fields, you’d want state of the art equipment for technical studies such as science, film, engineering, etc.  But what’s wrong with just retooling/updating equipment rather than building completely new buildings??  Would be a fraction of the cost.

Where I think we will see _some_ focus on value is at 2nd and 3rd tier schools. There's less of a "name" to sell on, and they tend to draw only regionally not nationally.

The fix is to limit student loans, but that's politically untenable. [/quote]

Those are easy targets to pick on, they don't actually make up a significant portion of spending by colleges and universities.  And they're typically paid for with fees, rather than tuition itself.  I'm sure they do play a role in the cost of college, but[b] instruction itself is still what's driving the costs.[/b][/quote]

Somewhere between half and three-quarters of the instruction is done by adjuncts who are paid an average of $3000 per three-credit class. That's not what is driving the costs. [/quote]

Perhaps I was loose with terminology.  I meant the overall costs to provide instruction, including institutional support and academic facilities.  Not just the cost of instructors/professors/etc.[/quote]

+1 My spouse works at a private college, and salaries/spending were being slashed even before the pandemic to cover the costs for a new STEM building.   When I toured schools with my high-school kid last year, every school was bragging about shiny new science buildings, so it is obviously an important marketing point.  [/quote][/quote]

Look up the income of the some of the college presidents' salaries; look at what they are paying for new buildings; and some colleges try to get top names for professors.  Colleges do not cut at the top, they make cuts at the bottom.  It is absolutely backwards. Colleges also have boards, and I would be interested to know if they get paid - some of their input and proposals are worthless, because the boards are completely out of touch. [/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