Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years, and why the benefits of a degree have gone down. Then, neither debt nor debt collection would be an issue.
After all, the reason people can't pay back their debts is 1) even state colleges are expensive, and 2) the job market doesn't reward degrees. It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues.
1 - There are an amazingly large number of well compensated overhead positions and offices compared to the 90s.
My alma mater, a large state university literally had to buy a 9 story office building to house administration.
2 - They spend money like water.
Example: The student internet network was run when I was there in 1996 by three telecom/network guys and a little army of student helpers who did installs and support for $4.25/hr. Now the costs are 25x, and the contractor has also built a small office building next door to house their people.
Example: Capital costs run amok. My alma mater has built a Tier-4 data center that is 15% occupied, a football stadium, a monumental second library that doesn't contain many books but does contain a lot of marble, a business school building, an art building, a bunch of extra dorms, and a gas fired power plant.
Example: New dorms are hotel like, with multiple fitness centers, TVs approximately every 10 linear feet, and associated parking structures.
The school I'm thinking about is doing well, but they've probably bonded nearly a half billion worth of capital projects alone that are not research funded. If you had 0% 30 year bonds that's over $1500 a student alone for 30 years assuming 10,000 students.
I agree that the system doesn't reward degrees. It merely requires them as a ticket to ride.
I'd say that we're getting less productivity gains out of degrees these days likely because a lot of people get a degree, then get a job that uses absolutely nothing they learned from that degree.
In that case, the degree is more or less worthless, and only proves to the employer that you can jump through the hoops. And between a known hoop-jumper and some random person, most companies would rather take the hoop-jumper.
sounds suspiciously like the advertising landscape, where it's a zero sum game. You pay $X to advertise to obtain Y% marketshare gain, but if your competitor also spends $X, it nullifies your Y% marketshare gain.
Replace the above with a college degree and job, and it seems the same.
Except that neither is actually a zero sum game. If Pepsi and Coca-Cola both spend $1B in advertising neither may gain any proportional market share but they would still expect to collectively benefit from converting some coffee/tea/juice drinkers to their product.
In the case of raising the bar for a basic education across the board, at least in theory, we would expect to increase national/global GDP.
I'm not saying the increase in either case warrants the respective cost, but dismissing improvements in education on the grounds that life is just one big zero sum rat race seems overly simplistic.
I've a friend who teaches electrical engineering at K-State University. He says that a pretty good number of his students are merely trying to get a degree, not actually learn/understand it. The minimum required to pass is all they would know at their peak.
On one hand, you really need to get a basic grasp of the fundamentals of a lot of areas. Even if you forget it, I like to think it's all in there somewhere, and would at least require less time to re-study it.
On the other hand, when you are actually working on a project, or at a job, typically you zoom in on one area of focus. For example, I have a Comp E degree from UIUC, and I had to take analog signal processing. Got a C, and never used it in my professional career.
But subjects that I have used, the course material was such a survey over the problems that it's only the very beginning of what you might need for the work. Therefore much study is required anyway on the job.
Then the practical experience, with test equipment, devices, best practices, isn't even usually taught in college.
I mean, is this surprising? Despite the original purpose of college, today the majority of people only go to college because they want a decent job.
If your best shot of getting a decent job requires you to first get a 40k piece of paper, many people will do this and they will put in the minimum amount of work to get what they want. I mean, it's efficient after all isn't it? Why work more for the same result?
This idea is formalised in the concept of "positional goods" [0]. Fred Hirsch coined the name in his book The Social Limits to Growth, which I definitely recommend - it contains a lot of interesting discussion about the place of positional goods in the economy, and how the rising share of consumption of positional goods affects welfare.
> Before we start paying for it, we should ask why the costs have increased so dramatically in the last 10 years
When I started college in 2000, in-state tuition at my alma mater (a major state university) was $3,021 for 2 semesters. I just looked and it's now $10,968 for the same 2 semesters. In 17 years, tuition went up 263%. From what I can tell, inflation over the same period was 42%.
At this rate, I'm scared that I will literally never be able to save enough to put my daughter through college without taking out loans, assuming tuition continues this trend. Something has got to give.
If she's young enough to learn another language well in time, you could consider sending her to Europe. All in all, it's still cheaper and possible to get by with summer jobs and some help from parents.
It seems to me the answer isn't all that difficult: colleges in other countries are much cheaper, or even free. So just move to someplace like Germany.
Oh, it does. The schools and banks have just positioned themselves to capture as much of the added value as they can - which might take away a lot of the financial upside, but the difference in unemployment rate is still quite significant.
> but the difference in unemployment rate is still quite significant.
I was expecting significant to mean more than 1.3 percentage points[1] over the entire population of the same age[2], especially given those who have certain difficulties will most likely never attend college, and will struggle in the workplace because of those difficulties (think mental disabilities as an example). Handing a degree on a silver platter to someone in that position isn't really going to help them.
Knowing that such people exist and need to be accounted for, while seeing how close the numbers really are, I'm even less convinced that the market rewards degrees than I was before I read these comments.
Sorry for the lack of clarity, I was referring to the combination of unemployment rate and workforce participation rate (which is 74% with bachelor's degree or higher, 58% with high school only). There's doubtless some confounding factors there, but it shows where the jobs are going. I don't think those inherent difficulties for certain people you mention don't need to be considered separately because the market doesn't care why you didn't attend college - part of what the market is rewarding is, frankly, either not having or being able to overcome inherent difficulties.
How are you establishing causation here? Of course, older generations are far more likely to have only high school, if that. It seems likely that older generations are less likely to be participating in the workforce. I'm not sure if this data includes beyond retirement age, but certainly early retirees would be included in the participation rate.
More interesting would be to narrow our criteria down to ages 25-34 to see how the rise in postsecondary schooling has changed the employment landscape over time. My opinion is that the unemployment rate is on trend[1], and while participation is unfortunately skewed from the 60s to the 90s due to rising of women coming into the workplace, since the 1990s there is little change in participation despite rising rates of postsecondary attainment[2]. If the workplace valued college, shouldn't we see a more obvious change over time corresponding with rising rates of postsecondary attainment?
Nobody has ever asked to see my degree or if I have one. They only care what I can do and how much it will cost. I looked into taking a few classes but saw that tuition has quadrupled making 2 classes cost more than an entire semester when I was in school only 10 years ago. Not only that, there are fewer professors and more non-professors teaching. Professors still do not make 100k even if they teach all day every semester so all this extra money isn't going to them.
>Professors still do not make 100k even if they teach all day every semester
That's not true at all. When I was in school, I used the state's public employee salary lookup to checkout how much my professors made. Almost all of professors (all of the professors and associate professors, and several of the assistant professors) in my department were making more than 100k. In addition, I was in a low cost of living area compared to most of the US.
I looked outside of CS as well. Humanities departments weren't paying that much, but most 100k pretty normal in most of the hard science departments, and the business school professors were making even more than the CS department.
Sure the adjuncts and grad students weren't making anything, and there are too many of them.
Also no one has ever asked if I had a degree either, but that's because it was on my resume. Without a degree you're going to get screened out before you even talk to someone a lot of the time.
There are different strata of academic. The adjuncts make peanuts and are either people who are stuck with a vision of being in academia or outside professionals earning a buck.
Tenure track professors end up making good money, which imo is well deserved.
Now you also have this middle tier of professors who are wandering nomads on 2-3 year contracts. They have a professor title, make better money than adjuncts, but tend to get dropped at the end of the contract. My neighbors boarder is one of these folks -- she commutes about 200 miles from her home and stays in my town for 2-3 days. This is her third contract like this.
At large state universities pay is good. It goes down dramatically when looking st regional state universities and community colleges. Also over 50% of higher education is taught by non-tenured or tenure track faculty. Pay for such workers is low and frequently don't include benefits.
I wonder if anyone has done an itemized breakdown of where each dollar of tuition goes to? How much to the teaching staff, how much to building maintenance, etc. Would be interesting.
I don't have the numbers with me right now (on phone), but the ratio of administrators to professors has gone through the roof over the past few decades. This is where a lot of the money is going.
Facilities have also improved quite a bit at many schools.
Over the same period, the ratio of adjunct faculty to permanent faculty has also increased. Meanwhile, the permanent faculty are burdened with even more administrative duties (e.g., committees).
The administrators learned that they could eat high on the hog on the government's dime, and they have done so with a frightening degree of efficiency.
Then that brings up the next issue -- would students choose the simple college over the more expensive one? After all, they can get a loan for both, and many 18-year-olds make different (less beneficial) choices then they would later in life.
That is part of the issue, but it is also an excuse so that universities can hire vast numbers of administrative staff that they have historically never hired. Why should a small satellite campus of a major university have 2 officers on duty 24/7, when they respond to anywhere from 5 to a dozen incidents a month?
That is 8 full time employees plus space & equipment doing a BS job that should be handled by local police (who also happen to be overstaffed). Should a university really be blowing that much cash needlessly?
Security officers might not be the best example. A university needs insurance and chances are the cost of setting up and maintaining a security force is less expensive than paying a higher insurance premium.
I've not had much luck finding historical tuition data, but was able to get some Stanford data going back to 1920. Here is a graph of Stanford tuition from 1920 through 2011: http://i.imgur.com/fXnjDNn.png
The data from 1920 through 1990 was only for every ten years, then it becomes yearly after, which is why the first part of the graph has more straight segments. Note the tuition axis is on a log scale.
Comparing Stanford tuition growth by decade to inflation, here is how much Stanford tuition every 10 years was above the inflation adjusted tuition from 10 years earlier:
From this, it appears that if government loans affected Stanford tuition that did not manifest as a long term change in the growth rate. It looks like the long term growth is about 30ish% a decade in reasonably "normal" times. If the loans affected the growth rate it seems to have mostly been confined to around the time the loans first became widely available. In other words, if the loans had an effect, it seems to have been more of a level shift than a growth rate shift.
Ah yes. Like setting a price ceiling? Adding more administrators, managers, and bureaucrats to "find where all that money is going"? By paying teachers less?
It's not an easy task to reduce the cost of something... this is even more so when the government is the one doing it.
When you pass laws to force government organizations to be wasteful, they will comply. Outside of that, not wasting taxpayer dollars is generally a high priority.
A great example of laws purposefully foot binding & hobbling organizations is USPS, who is not allowed to up the ante and offer any modern services, and has to severely overfund their pension obligations, to the point that they are funding pensions for people they haven't hired.
OK, but I don't think it holds up. The US has one of the systems of education (and healthcare, too) with the least government interference and it's wildly expensive. As far as I am aware the biggest drivers for rising tuition costs are construction and increasingly large administrative departments.
After all, the reason people can't pay back their debts is 1) even state colleges are expensive, and 2) the job market doesn't reward degrees. It's not like changing the payer of tuition from the individual to the government is going to change either of those issues.