NWR: Searching for a College

originally posted by Zachary Ross:
The main problem is a bottleneck phenomenon - there just aren't enough good universities for all the qualified students. Supply and demand. Free availability of student loans has also helped pump up the prices, but it's a secondary cause.

Enrollment over time:

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nces.ed.gov
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Sorry, but the biggest factor driving up prices is the out-of-control growth of administration at most Universities. Over the past 5 years at my employer, faculty has shrunk by 2% and student enrollment has remained flat, while administration has grown by 20%. And those salaries are not small. This is not an isolated case, either. Here's a treatise on the topic:

Fall of the Faculty

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by VLM:
I'd like to be clear that I don't think the purpose of en education is to get a job. It is a good in and of itself. I'm an academic for fuck's sake. Not sclerotic tenured faculty like Prof. Loesberg (my salary is mainly covered by grants), but I have pursued a "life of the mind" and have found it rewarding in many ways.
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I may be sclerotic, but not because I'm tenured. Most tenured scientists have salaries produced largely by grants. This is better for universities, but it is hardly a socially different form of support. And I do suppose that you would take tenure were it offered to you.
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Tenure here means 250 square feet of office space and 10% of your salary. I'd prefer to be staff rather than faculty, but it was very important to the powers that be that I was faculty. I guess it is a prestige thing from a bygone era.
 
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Zachary Ross:
The main problem is a bottleneck phenomenon - there just aren't enough good universities for all the qualified students. Supply and demand. Free availability of student loans has also helped pump up the prices, but it's a secondary cause.

Enrollment over time:

Loading…

nces.ed.gov
Click to expand...

Sorry, but the biggest factor driving up prices is the out-of-control growth of administration at most Universities. Over the past 5 years at my employer, faculty has shrunk by 2% and student enrollment has remained flat, while administration has grown by 20%. And those salaries are not small. This is not an isolated case, either. Here's a treatise on the topic:

Fall of the Faculty

Mark Lipton
Click to expand...

Yeah, it is unfuckingbelievable. I'm not even sure what most of those douchebags do. When I'm philosopher-king, they'll all be in work camps. I trace all of this back to the university as business idea. I put that misguided bullshit squarely on the Clinton administration and that fuckwit Rubin. May he rot in hell.
 
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by VLM:
I'd like to be clear that I don't think the purpose of en education is to get a job. It is a good in and of itself. I'm an academic for fuck's sake. Not sclerotic tenured faculty like Prof. Loesberg (my salary is mainly covered by grants), but I have pursued a "life of the mind" and have found it rewarding in many ways.
Click to expand...

I may be sclerotic, but not because I'm tenured. Most tenured scientists have salaries produced largely by grants. This is better for universities, but it is hardly a socially different form of support. And I do suppose that you would take tenure were it offered to you.
Click to expand...

Tenure here means 250 square feet of office space and 10% of your salary. I'd prefer to be staff rather than faculty, but it was very important to the powers that be that I was faculty. I guess it is a prestige thing from a bygone era.
Click to expand...

Are you saying you get less office space and a lower salary if you are tenured? Trust me, that is not the way it usually works.
 
I don't have recently written books and studies to support what I'm about to say about rising costs, just some experience with my own university's budgetary choices. I think Mark's statement about administrators plays a role, though not a determining one. And I don't believe that competition to get into the best schools is significant. Unless you are one of the handful of very prestigious institutions, the competition is all in the other direction.

Over the last 20 years there has been a substantial change to the fixed costs of running universities. To give an example that is not determinative, but also not trivial, when I was hired, 30 years ago before the age of PCs, one was given an office (a shared office) and a desk. If you wanted a typewriter, you brought your own in. Now all tenure-line faculty members have their own offices, each one equipped with an up to date PC. They are updated every 3-5 years. The University has a very complicated campus network that supplies us with our own clouds, plus various teaching programs such as Blackboard. One can order books from our library and a consortium library through a library program, and if one orders articles, they are emailed to you. Students are guaranteed access to computers because they are expected to be reachable through email, Blackboard, etc. I am only scratching the surface of all this. Needless to say, we have increased our IT employees from 0 to multitudes in those years since all this stuff demands considerable tech support. All of that is a substantial addition to the University budget that never even existed 30 years ago.

Faculty salaries went up a lot in the 70s and 80s. After that, they mostly kept up with cost of living. But the cost of research faculty has gone way up. At research universities, we teach fewer courses and have more leave time through access to various granting organizations. Time away from teaching is the direct cost of research, and it is costly. Tuition, at teaching colleges and community colleges at which faculty teach 4 large courses a semester is much less expensive (and frequently, though it pains me to say it, the education one gets there, though basic, is quite strong).

Any of you who were undergraduates 30 years ago or more can also tell where some money is going by walking into student housing and cafeterias. The mass produced mystery meat dinners of our nostalgic memories no longer exist. The eateries aren't three star restaurants, but they are the equal of most budget restaurants. Living conditions have also improved considerably over my freshman dorm, which had little over a minimum security prison cell.

I won't even start on the cost of bringing classrooms up to date for the expectations of current teaching methods. Suffice it to say that one thing one sees less of is audio-visual people since one's computer, plugged into the classroom can do far more than they do.

Multiply all this by everywhere you look (and especially science labs, VLM). The expectations on institutions that charge the kind of tuitions talked about here are pretty high. I don't know if it's worth it in terms of what students get educationally, but the only way to change it is to change the expectation of what goes on in the student experience of costly private universities.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
originally posted by VLM:
I'd like to be clear that I don't think the purpose of en education is to get a job. It is a good in and of itself. I'm an academic for fuck's sake. Not sclerotic tenured faculty like Prof. Loesberg (my salary is mainly covered by grants), but I have pursued a "life of the mind" and have found it rewarding in many ways.
Click to expand...

I may be sclerotic, but not because I'm tenured. Most tenured scientists have salaries produced largely by grants. This is better for universities, but it is hardly a socially different form of support. And I do suppose that you would take tenure were it offered to you.
Click to expand...

Tenure here means 250 square feet of office space and 10% of your salary. I'd prefer to be staff rather than faculty, but it was very important to the powers that be that I was faculty. I guess it is a prestige thing from a bygone era.
Click to expand...

Are you saying you get less office space and a lower salary if you are tenured? Trust me, that is not the way it usually works.
Click to expand...

No, I'm saying that is what tenure means now at universities like mine in schools of Public Health and Medicine. It's actually probably a lot less than 250 square feet, the salary coverage is accurate, though.

In the humanities (and maybe Colleges of Arts & Sciences in general), tenure seems to exist as it has, for the time being. I'm not sure it will for much longer.
 
originally posted by VLM:
I'd like to be clear that I don't think the purpose of en education is to get a job. It is a good in and of itself. [...]
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Well, it's dual use. I agree with most of what you say after.

Bill's in a good position: backing up his daughter as she thinks through her goals in attending university, and then researching the resources and costs of her candidate universities, will help her to vest in the process over the long-term, setting her up to make her education work well for her in both ways. Attentive (but not excessively controlling) parents count for a great deal, imho.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I don't have recently written books and studies to support what I'm about to say about rising costs, just some experience with my own university's budgetary choices...
... I don't know if it's worth it in terms of what students get educationally, but the only way to change it is to change the expectation of what goes on in the student experience of costly private universities.
Click to expand...

I think the fixed costs have changed, but the IT infrastructure reduces other costs. Maybe not to the point of balancing out, but somewhat.

The last question you raise really gets at something very important. Are universities there to expand knowledge or to teach students? IME, most students are poorly motivated, vapid, incurious, and really only at university so that they can get a job when they graduate. So part of me says, fuck 'em. Let's funnel their tuition dollars towards someone with brains and motivation. Who cares who teaches them since they really ruin university for the rest of us. I'd like for universities to be solely about learning and knowledge. No professional schools at all. Let's have something else for those (lesser) people. Something between community college and a true university, where they can drink beer, watch football, and then go back and run their dad's insurance company. Then I realize that I am nostalgic for something that never existed, nor ever could. How lame is that?
 
By which I mean that in France, higher education costs just about nothing, is highly divided as to subject matter, and schools are stratified by level of students' performance. There are many technical schools for the under- or unmotivated or simply lesser wattage kids. What goes on in the bastions at the top is exciting, intellectually. There is almost no "campus life." University = place to sit in classroom and learn.

The downside is the extreme pigeonholing the system fosters. Try changing career paths in France, just you try...
 
originally posted by SFJoe:
Some of you had much better college counselors than I did.

Mine was an obvious idiot.
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Ah, so your high school obviously got the more intelligent counselors.

The only "advice" mine gave was to not apply to any competitive schools. He had good words for the local community college though.
 
originally posted by Jay Miller:
originally posted by SFJoe:
Some of you had much better college counselors than I did.

Mine was an obvious idiot.
Click to expand...

Ah, so your high school obviously got the more intelligent counselors.

The only "advice" mine gave was to not apply to any competitive schools. He had good words for the local community college though.
Click to expand...

My school had a good college counselor, but I guess that's what you get when you go to a fancy shmancy private school.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
By which I mean that in France, higher education costs just about nothing, is highly divided as to subject matter, and schools are stratified by level of students' performance. There are many technical schools for the under- or unmotivated or simply lesser wattage kids. What goes on in the bastions at the top is exciting, intellectually. There is almost no "campus life." University = place to sit in classroom and learn.

The downside is the extreme pigeonholing the system fosters. Try changing career paths in France, just you try...
Click to expand...
you mean differently motivated. Vocational educational seems largely forgotten except by profit seeking corporations: ITT, etc. It's an area the US should put more emphasis on with the alleged return of manufacting.

The University of Phoenix has changed things, maybe for the worse. Some traditonal universities are trying to compete. All institutions need to remain solvent, but universities chasing dollars with full blown marketing staffs isn't likely to turn out well.
 
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I don't have recently written books and studies to support what I'm about to say about rising costs, just some experience with my own university's budgetary choices...
... I don't know if it's worth it in terms of what students get educationally, but the only way to change it is to change the expectation of what goes on in the student experience of costly private universities.
Click to expand...

I think the fixed costs have changed, but the IT infrastructure reduces other costs. Maybe not to the point of balancing out, but somewhat.
Click to expand...

I would wager there were more secretaries who did typing for professors back in the old day.s
 
originally posted by Cole Kendall:
originally posted by VLM:
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I don't have recently written books and studies to support what I'm about to say about rising costs, just some experience with my own university's budgetary choices...
... I don't know if it's worth it in terms of what students get educationally, but the only way to change it is to change the expectation of what goes on in the student experience of costly private universities.
Click to expand...

I think the fixed costs have changed, but the IT infrastructure reduces other costs. Maybe not to the point of balancing out, but somewhat.
Click to expand...

I would wager there were more secretaries who did typing for professors back in the old day.s
Click to expand...
But not with BAs, I'd wager. Today new secretarial hires at universities frequently have bachelors. Likely they take the job with paid graduate studies in mind. Which leads me to speculate about benefit costs as a driver of costs. Some universities offer free tuiton to dependents after five years of service.
 
originally posted by Tom Glasgow:

The University of Phoenix has changed things, maybe for the worse. Some traditonal universities are trying to compete. All institutions need to remain solvent, but universities chasing dollars with full blown marketing staffs isn't likely to turn out well.
Click to expand...

An interesting case study is underway right now in the UK. The Tory's proposed education "reform" has been done at least in part with an eye to fostering competition between for-profit Universities (or something equivalent) and traditional Universities. To say that those proposals haven't met with universal enthusiasm would quite the understatement.

Mark Lipton
 
I thought the jump in college costs came down to two things:

(1) Fifty years ago it was not obligatory to get a college degree to get a good job. But now it is, by middle class lights. So, there is a lot more demand.

(2) A bigger endowment is a better endowment so, like CEO salaries, all the effort goes into persuading rich alums. This results in fancy cafs, new halls, big labs, etc.
 
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