The Rising Cost of Public Higher Education

[Fraggle145]

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1291

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[SoonerInKCMO]

What's causing the cost to go up more quickly than inflation or even presidents' salaries? Greater bureaucracy? Increasing amounts of technology? Extravagant athletic facilities? I really have no idea...

[Leroy Lizard]

Let me guess: A federal takeover is in the works?

[soonerinkaty]

I can vouch for this. The reason I'm not in college at this moment is because it turned me into a broke-*** hippie. Now I'm working like a good American to pay for it.

[Sooner Eclipse]

When will lefties figure out that when the government gets involved in subsidizing a service or product it creates inequities in that market and causes increasingly unsubstainable price increase and bubbles like, housing, healthcare, and education.

[SoonerInKCMO]

When will lefties figure out that when the government gets involved in subsidizing a service or product it creates inequities in that market and causes increasingly unsubstainable price increase and bubbles like, housing, healthcare, and education.

So, the government wasn't involved in public higher education before 1980? That's when the education costs began to grow at a much higher rate than inflation in general. What happened then that caused that?

[Sooner Eclipse]

They weren't involved to the extent that they are now. Now you cant throw a rock on campus without hitting someone who isn't on some sort of govt program to subsidize their education. You gonna make the same argument on housing or healthcare? That is the root cause of all these problems. I'm sorry, but no one is guaranteed a higher education, a home, or healthcare.

[Crucifax Autumn]

Yeah, but without some college Americans will be even more stupid than they are now!

[Curly Bill]

Yeah, but without some college Americans will be even more stupid than they are now!

That's hard to believe.

In fact I'm not sure it's even possible.

[Ike]

They weren't involved to the extent that they are now. Now you cant throw a rock on campus without hitting someone who isn't on some sort of govt program to subsidize their education. You gonna make the same argument on housing or healthcare? That is the root cause of all these problems. I'm sorry, but no one is guaranteed a higher education, a home, or healthcare.

While thats a nice story, and has some basis in fact, it's not as cut and dry as you might think. Yes, there is a lot of money that these schools are chasing around in higher ed, but the vast majority of it is not public funding. The vast majority of the money they are chasing are the hard earned dollars of middle class americans who know that for their kids to have a chance in the world, they are going to need a college education, and the better the education they get, the better they will do.

All fine and good if the increases in price were really tied to increases in the quality of education. But in the world of higher ed, the student or parent trying to decide where which school out of thousands will provide the best educational bang for their buck is wholly and completely outgunned. They might, as millions do, choose to prioritize the schools they seek to get into based on US News and World Report's college rankings...or some other similar ranking of colleges in this country. But for all the good USN&WR is trying to do, they might as well simply throw darts at a board. Their rankings tell you absolutely ZERO about what actually happens in the classroom, ZERO about what kind of material they will be expected to get through and at what pace. ZERO about how rigorous an institution is. ZERO about how well graduates do after education. Colleges and universities are the only system we have in America where an entire company/institution is judged 100% on the quality of it's inputs. Average SAT/ACT scores of students, prestige of the faculty (which by the way, tells you nothing about how effective they are at teaching...It does tell you a little bit about the quality of hands on experience kids will get, as high profile profs will often have a handful of undergrads working on cutting edge experiments...but even this can be highly variable within a given institution), class sizes (not really as important as you might think, and again highly variable within a given institution), and of course 'facilities'. Oh, and cost.

Anyway, while all of these things are certainly useful information, they are not the kinds of things parents and students trying to decide on a college really want to know. And the Universities know this. They also know that there are a few pre-existing beliefs we all have as Americans. Belief #1 that they will seek to take advantage of: Prestige = Better. Prestigious faculty (even if they have a gig that requires they teach 1 year out of every 4, or only teach graduate level classes...and how many professors have you had that just had no idea how to teach?) draw in students. Keep churning out those papers and you can 'advertise' on that. Be more selective so you only have higher scoring freshmen coming in, and your rankings go up. More prestige. Which means you can charge more because of Belief #2 that they will seek to take advantage of: You get what you pay for. If I were to create a college tomorrow which had a per-semester tuition of a million dollars, I'd likely have a crapload of matriculation applications before I even started interviewing for faculty (assuming I advertised well enough). It's expensive, ergo, it must be higher quality. And because everyone wants higher quality in education, people will fall for it....for a while at least.
(n.b., this doesn't mean I'd be maximizing profits, unless I was actually trying to commit fraud)

So the colleges are going to try to drive costs up as much as they can to keep their student capacity at a maximum. And to keep getting those students in, they need more prestige. So they try to get high quality students in. And what a lot of colleges have found is that if they can't improve their actual rankings much, building a crapload of new facilities can give prospective students the perception of more prestige than maybe a university should really have. Which further drives up the costs, because those construction projects are expensive. They like to say that those costs are paid for entirely through alumni donations, and they may make up a some fraction of them, but thats another part of the game too. "We have alumni well off enough to help us build all this ****. And if you come here, one day you will be rich enough to help us build this **** too"

The sad thing is that there really is something to the prestige aspect of education, at least as far as test scores of the incoming students. Being around lots of smart people builds lots of contacts that will span lots of industries. The smarter those people are, the more likely that you'll know a guy in a key position somewhere when such knowledge would really be helpful. But it's only something. A kid who is really really bright will do very well for him/herself whether he/she even goes to college or not. But colleges will fight tooth and nail for him/her because that helps up their average incoming test scores.


It doesn't cost nearly this much to actually provide an education. But it does cost that much to provide an education and build lots of new facilities, and give tons of handouts to the best students, and...well, add whatever you wish...


I paid ~$400 per semester while I was a grad student...as did nearly every other grad student in our department (they list grad hours as costing more, but then at least for the physics department, they waive all of that, and you only wind up paying select fees.). Had I not been on a baseball scholly as an undergrad (at an NAIA school where at the time, the limits were much less draconian than the NCAA), I would have paid something like $4,000 to $5,000 per semester...as it was, I paid closer to $1,000, averaged over all semesters.

And you know what? The education I received as a grad student demanded far more time from the faculty than did my undergrad education. Not even close. In terms of faculty hours, I probably 'used' 10x the number of faculty hours as a grad student (while I was taking classes....I used much fewer faculty hours when I was sent away to FNAL for my thesis research), and paid 10x less. How on earth does that make sense though? Should it really be this way?

[Ike]

Wow...I got a little ranty there.


Sorry. Good night now.

[PDXsooner]

When will lefties figure out that when the government gets involved in subsidizing a service or product it creates inequities in that market and causes increasingly unsubstainable price increase and bubbles like, housing, healthcare, and education.

yes, we should stay out as much as possible. for example, look at wall street...wait never mind.