Tables CP-9 and CP-10 do indeed show net price going down for the last few years. But the figures aren't expressed in dollars, but in '2022 dollars', i.e. the charts don't show the actual net price, but the net price adjusted by CPI inflation.
This is an important distinction because, when people pay for college, they're not comparing it with the cost of other goods and services (which is what CPI measures), but whether they can afford it, based on their parents' current/past income, or their own future expected income.
If you agree with this perspective, using CPI to make the curves look flatter does everyone a disservice. Wages for many people haven't kept up with CPI, so a higher nominal net cost still makes college less affordable.
Point taken, but it's very common to adjust by CPI (or some other price index) when comparing prices over time.
All attempts to track prices over time have some flaw. But not adjusting for inflation in a chart that goes back ~20 years could also be perceived as misleading.
Moreover, we are starting to see growth in real median wages again. They are already above Q4 2019: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q. So I think it is fair to say in some sense that the real price of attendance has started to go down (albeit not that much).
>> All attempts to track prices over time have some flaw.
The thing to compare tuition to is teacher pay. At today's tuition rates, 10 or less students would pay their professors salary. Average class sizes are much larger, so it's obvious the money is going somewhere else. Done. Forget CPI, the schools are pricing based on perceived value, not cost, and an unlimited supply of government backed loans.
This seems to be the most obvious point to me: at my alma mater, you could literally rent a classroom at the university for $90/4 hours[0], or $7200 for 16 weeks at 20 hours/week. Then we have assistant/associate professors in the college of engineering who have been working at the university for 10+ years making $45k or less[1] for a full time position. One of them could rent a room, charge 10 students $6.7k each, and come away with $60k. They'd make significantly more than they are now, the students would receive better/more direct instruction, and the students would be paying ~half list price ($6700 vs $13200 for in-state students)[2]. Even with merit scholarships, if you had a 3.7 high school GPA, that saves you $5000[3], so you're on the hook for $8k, and 10 kids renting a room with an assistant professor would still be cheaper. The numbers are even more absurd for out-of-state students.
Clearly, the value proposition for a university is not the education it provides. Even if you wanted the atmosphere of being on campus all day, the rent-a-room strategy would give you that for far less with smaller classes. Obviously it would be hard to be taken seriously if you did this, so the issue is that you must pass through the university system to receive credentials, and for many fields these credentials are non-optional.
Even spending $100k/yr on a PhD evaluating students full-time, and spending an entire 1 week per student to rigorously personally evaluate them 1:1, you could charge $2000 total to attempt an evaluation for credentials, allowing non-traditional students to self-study for free. If we want to make education and accreditation more attainable for everyone, we need to separate granting of credentials from studying. Study requirements are redundant with a rigorous exam, and particularly for fields where exams are already in place for credentials (law, accounting, capital-E Engineering, etc.), study requirements should be barred.
Measuring college costs against median household wages (vs. CPI) is a much fairer way to include impacts of inflation. First off, college tuition is part of the CPI, so it's not really mathematically accurate to then discount it based on CPI increases: "College is a lot more expensive, but don't worry, everything is a lot more expensive!"
And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.
> And if you look at any graph of college costs vs wages over the past 40 years or so, they have simply skyrocketed.
Absolutely, no debate there. The particular surprising claim in question though was about whether they have declined in the past couple of years, relative to a peak in late 2010s. And there, measured either in CPI adjusted costs, or relative to real median wages, they have.
But of course, the drops are small, and it's only been about 1-2 years. I'm not sure this really indicates a sustained trend, or just the fact that college cost increases have (for once) lagged inflation over those 1-2 years.
>Measuring college costs against median household wages (vs. CPI) is a much fairer way to include impacts of inflation
"inflation" is by definition CPI. Therefore the claim that using another metric to "include the impacts of inflation" is tautologically false. The word you want is "affordability".
No it's not. There are many different US government measured indexes of consumer price inflation. The linked article discussed CPI-W (used by law to adjust social security payments), CPI-U, chained CPI-U (used to adjust tax rates), and PCE (used by the Fed for interest rate targeting).
There is also PPI for producer prices, and the GDP deflator used for GDP.
If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.
But there's not one single true number, different groups of people are affected by different measures (e.g. the use of CPI-W for social security payments is thoughtfully meant to be more representative of costs incurred by the typical social security recipient than is CPI-U)
>If the US government and law already is using a number of different metrics to account for inflation impacts for different purposes, it absolutely makes sense to debate which particular measure is best for this area.
Fair point, but in the context the previous comment, "wages" is basically never considered a serious contender for measuring inflation in economics.
Tautologically false, has to be one of the oddest things I've ever seen to be so wrong about.
Like, you're using big words to indicate that under no situation is this true, when the reality is that "inflation" is not by definition CPI. CPI is one measure of inflation.
But it just caught my eye that this seems, extra wrong. It's hard to read something extra wrong on the internet, and yet it feels like you've succeeded.
People are wrong on all of the time, but to call something tautologically false when it's trivially true, is peak wrongness.
EDIT: The rest of my comment below is (as pointed out below by gruez) incorrect. The article did say 'in 2021 dollars' in reference to one set of numbers, and it's reasonable to assume they meant that to apply to all the other numbers in the same paragraph.
It's still surprises me that The Economist would use CPI-adjusted figures, but fail to mention the adjustment. Using CPI-adjusted figures is common, but it's not the default, which is why people often add 'in real terms' or some other qualifier.
>It's still surprises me that The Economist would use CPI-adjusted figures, but fail to mention the adjustment
Are we reading the same article?
>A report from the College Board, a non-profit, shows that whereas published tuition and fees for private non-profit colleges increased from $29,000 in 2006-07 to $38,000 in 2021-22 (in 2021 dollars), the net price actually decreased from $17,000 to $15,000.
The figures that surprised me were the ones at the end of that sentence (the 'drop' from $17k to $15k). I reread that part, didn't see anything about constant dollars for those numbers, and then went looking for the source data.
You're probably right, but one caveat: this graph shows average hourly earnings, which may not account for inequality. If some percentage of the population has had their wages rise much faster than everyone else, it could be that most people have had their real wage decline, while the average is still above CPI growth.
Now that I think about it, it also tracks hourly earnings, and if a non-insignificant people work hourly, but have been scheduled less hours (due to automation, or reduced need for labor), then their hourly earnings may have gone up, but their take-home pay gone down.
If anyone has any statistics for either of these, that would be very useful.
>This is an important distinction because, when people pay for college, they're not comparing it with the cost of other goods and services (which is what CPI measures), but whether they can afford it, based on their parents' current/past income, or their own future expected income.
>[...] Wages for many people haven't kept up with CPI, so a higher nominal net cost still makes college less affordable.
I suppose you could claim that wages for everyone hasn't kept up with inflation/tuition rises, but that's not the claim that The Economist is addressing and is basically cherry-picking.
Is it important to point out college like housing and Healthcare increase far faster than anything else? So a recent down trend added to a larger up trend is still net expensive?
> they're not comparing it with the cost of other goods and services (which is what CPI measures), but whether they can afford it, based on their parents' current/past income, or their own future expected income.
Going to university should be viewed in the same light as a financial investment, there is no guarantee it will improve your standard of living, except perhaps through networking, a case of who you know not what you know that matters, the old school tie network, that sort of thing.
For example, the police when charging people dont ask what your educational achievements are or where you studied. So are some university's going to increase your chances of ending up in prison or do they make you an untouchable Clarke in their field of knowledge? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yk4wX4FPRzE&t=6s
In a way, the police are hiding the poor standards of the state educational system by not publishing this data, let alone capturing it for data analysis and they are also protecting the reputation of university's.
Likewise the course offered, is it relevant for today and the future or are they teaching courses on subject matter which is becoming irrelevant? Look at how quickly some things have changed over the last twenty years.
And the obvious elephant in the room, is how many people have studied a degree which is relevant to their current employment and past employment? In other words, does having a university degree show you can play nicely with others and evolve from academic speak to corporate speak?
Again backing up the impression the university's are selling knowledge on the subject matter you want to learn, but its not their job to find you employment pertaining to the subject matter you have studied. This applies to all universities.
So then the networking potential is relied upon and if you happen to work for a business which values university degrees highly, then there is a level of "obedience to authority" which can be applied as a factor to that business.
Take Goldman Sach's, AFAIK their policy is to recruit only graduates and to let a % go every 3 years irrespective of company performance, so this displays an unconscious bias towards university's and their reputation.
Some large companies like a drug company will actively sponsor some aspect of a university in order to influence what is taught on the course and lets them have first access to the students, who show potential, or obedience to the scientific theory of the day, which happens to be lucrative for the business. In biology there are lots of theories, mainly because there is still so much undiscovered potential in the body.
Some university courses will also likely land you a job in a quango, which if your aspirations are muted, will set you up for life because serving on a quango can be highly lucrative, if everyone tows the line.
In my time, none of this was explained to me, and I doubt it is now, but if you have a parent who has been through the uni process, especially one of the more prestigious uni's, you be made aware of what to look for, especially if you are the type that likes to name drop your university name. mic drop....
> Going to university should be viewed in the same light as a financial investment
This is a good way to think about it in the USA, but IMO going to university should be viewed in the same light as going to high school or trade school -- ie, a public good, available to all, and required of some subset of the population to ensure the continuing function of a modern society.
Countries with this system seem to spend less and get better outcomes from their higher education systems.
You fail to draw any attention of the recruiting practices of the security services. They haunt the corridors of learning with the complicit knowledge of the university staff, tapping the shoulders of new recruits. University's also work closely with the security services, professors are often used to manipulate and direct students into lines of research.
So when viewing the damming reports on the police (and military) being institutionally racist, I would go even further to argue that not only are these institutions racist, the university staff appear to enable these criminal practices, fuelling prejudice, discrimination and anti-meritocratic ethos by allowing such relationships to exist.
Thats the last thing I would want from a UK university, but the security services are hardly stealth or intelligent about their recruiting practices, perhaps demonstrating their hubris and pride before a fall.
I could argue that the USA approach to only having loyalty to money, breaks down these criminal institutions that masquerade as the pillars of society that think of themselves beyond reproach, an idea that cant be killed, because if you only have loyalty to money, you hold neither prejudice, racist or discriminating views of someone so long as their money is good.
So can you really sit there and argue the UK model is ethically better, unless of course your idea of a functioning society is one that secretly harbours racist, prejudicial, anti-meritocratic, royal right to rule characteristics?
Eventually this becomes an issue of national security. If your brightest minds are categorically excluded from education in the service of maintaining the American class structure and quarterly profit margins, if debt cripples to such a degree that it disenfranchises anyone from considering education in the first place, then it becomes increasingly difficult to engage in the type of research and development that keeps and maintains your nations elite status.
A parasitic idiocracy ensues from which the prospect of recovery at all is grim at best.
> If your brightest minds are categorically excluded from education in the service of maintaining the American class structure and quarterly profit margins
Why would corporations wish to exclude the brightest minds so they can increase profits?
Its more efficient for them to satisfice through obtaining graduates with good signalling factors (good schools) than sort the wheat from the chaff themselves
Ensuring opportunities for working class and marginalised people is an issue that can only be addressed by community or government
> Its more efficient for them to satisfice through obtaining graduates with good signalling factors (good schools) than sort the wheat from the chaff themselves
I find that unconvincing. Aren't progressives constantly talking about how corporations are exploiting workers by paying them less than than their productivity? In other words, each employee makes money for them on net. All things being equal, it's in corporate america's interest to have as big of a workforce as possible, because more employees = more productivity extracted. Even in a situation where corporations aren't labor limited, they'd still benefit from increased competition on the labor supply side driving down prices for them.
If you're accruing massive debt attending college, you're doing it wrong. Community colleges and state schools exist. You can work part-time during school too. Its like buying anything - there's a spectrum of cost. You don't need the $60k/year school.
Also, if anything, the education system is contributing to our future idiocracy - esp. the public school system, which is a complete and utter failure.
Come on, we are relying on 17/18/19 year olds to do a proper financial risk analysis on _debt that can never be bankrupted_? Adults have created this mess, don't put the blame on students 'doing what they've been told' e.g. go to college (more prestigious the better, too)
Colleges have a literal vested interest in keeping kids stupid about loans and debt. There should be a million places you have to sign, with big red disclaimers about the responsibility you're about to undertake. Who else is to blame? You signed the paper work. I was once that age, and decided not to go into crippling debt. Many, many young people decide not to fall for the trap. Alot of naive ones fall for it tho.
How is anyone excluded from education? What you are saying is the exact opposite of what is happening. A far higher percentage of Americans are getting degrees than 30 or 60 years ago.
Yes, more Americans are getting degrees now than in previous generations. However, if the cost of getting a college education continues to grow and if it becomes increasingly difficult to get a college education without taking on crippling levels of debt, then more people will choose not to go to college in order to avoid heavy debt burdens. This will mean fewer college-educated individuals.
The worst case scenario is that we return to the pre-GI Bill status quo, where generally only those from wealthy families could afford a college education unless they won scholarship money. There was a period from the late 1940s until roughly the 1980s or 1990s when college opportunities were extended to the middle class and the poor through the expansion of public university systems that offered low (or even no) tuition, extended merit- and need-based scholarships that are funded publicly and privately, and student loans. Tuition and other expenses were low enough to where it was possible for many students to cover some or all of these expenses by working a part-time job during the school year and/or by working full time in the summer, and for those who needed to take out student loans, debt levels were not crippling. But in the past few decades, the cost of college has risen to levels where working part-time during the school year and full-time during summers just doesn’t cover costs like it used to, and where people are graduating with increasingly burdensome student debt loads. The high cost of housing isn’t helping matters.
I see a few potential solutions:
- Price caps imposed by the federal government as a condition for accepting federal student aid, though this could mean cuts to services.
- Upstart colleges and universities forming that offer a reduced-cost college experience by being “no frills” and focusing on teaching without offering the wide array of services that even the most modest universities offer (e.g., no career centers, no well-equipped fitness centers, no luxury dorms, no on-campus health centers, etc.). However, some of these services may be mandated as part of accreditation standards, though I don’t know much about this.
- A concentrated effort to improve the nation’s K-12 education so that way high school graduates are equipped to perform a wide array of jobs that don’t require higher education, along with an effort by Corporate America to hire high school graduates for jobs that truly don’t require a university education.
The article shows that the cost of going to college is not growing significantly though. Only the sticker price is growing, and Americans are not aware of (or just underappreciate) the significant value of a higher education.
Doesn't that mean that the main problem is a marketing/information issue, and less of an actual affordability one?
I dunno man, I took the community college route, $2k/semester on average. If I was a traditional student I would've been eligible for free tuition on the basis of my ACT (27) score — I graduated with a 1.89 GPA. University is only $3k/sem, but I've managed to secure funding despite my mediocre college GPA. Assuming that continues my average tuition cost will likely dissipate to nothing.
While I was at the college I was living on my own, working full time for $15/h - entry level shit - and throughout that period I stayed close to breakeven with zero external funding and that's with a 1yr COVID-hiatus and relatively high food expenses.
University is a different, but nonetheless, similar story. Grants have magically become available to me transitioning from the poor-school to the university. I will say the property rates here are off the chain, similar to what I'd expect in an economically booming metropolitan. But that leads me to my point:
I can't tell you whether or not somebody from Yale or the University of Nebraska is going to get hired based on their school, however I'll go out on a limb and say that if the UN gal was even remotely prudent she'd be able to skate out with pretty minimal debt, if any.
A lot of people are chasing experiences and prestige, and those things cost money. Unfortunately, out-of-state charges are actually obscene. However there are programs that exist to except certain regions from those. Working to expand those and distribute the student population, I believe, would be generally more favorable than other interventions. Maybe I'm wrong, but the only thing that changed from college to university was the textbook publisher but more importantly - people doing the work we're supposedly being trained for in class.
Moving people around with economic incentives that will, I would presume, bolster the number of participants available on smaller campuses would do a lot to improve things all around. I've seen even modest labs put together some pretty impressive research.
And another nit to pick is that colleges very exclusively target fresh-outta-high school kids. And that is in and of itself pretty predatory, but more importantly it's putting half-baked people in a system they are not equipped to deal with, and with long-run non-trivial consequences if they fuck up - and there's quite a few ways to fuck up. And maybe that's orthogonal to my point above, but at least it would be an available option for those willing to scrutinize the risk/reward proposition, and maybe a basis for restricting funding to individuals.
I would expect a more mature population, on average, to be more diligent in every facet of their education, but especially when it comes to fiscal responsibility and the willingness to hold the system accountable - something which I've been made to do in a couple of instances, which I don't expect I would've done as a kid. My intuition tells me "they" don't want actual adults in, though. Kind of a liability seeing how all the shit works when you've been in the real world, unsheltered for a decade, and coming into the domain of a bunch of pretentious airheads that can't organize their head from their ass.
The question how this is compared to peers, and if it is actually brightest minds who have opportunities, or those who have monetary support from parents.
The only perspective in society from which it appears that Academia does more R&D than the private sector is academia itself. Academics in this respect have their eyes wide shut.
At mot, publishing in academic conferences at private companies is namesake. But academic publishing in general is a shadow of its former self in terms of dissemination power, both because most academics are horrible writers and also because a product you can buy (with a support contract) or a well-documented software package is many orders of magnitude more impactful than a paper no one will read.
And even then, many companies publish far more than even highly productive research universities.
Consider AI. There are little pieces here and there that you can attribute to academia. But for the most part, over the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI.
over the last two decades, the enabling big steps happened at TSMC+NVIDIA+Google+OpenAI
Those big steps are standing on the shoulders of decades of academic work, and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia.
> and were carried out by people who had spent a great deal of time in academia.
Right. Who then promptly left academia when they needed to start doing R&D at a meaningful and consequential scale.
The academic contribution to chip fab R&D today is nearly inconsequential compared to private sector investment, both in raw dollar amounts and especially in terms of impact per dollar spent.
This is like saying that academia is responsible for Google because its founders spent a couple years on an NSF grant. Yes -- but then they left to do the real R&D work at scale.
Academia plays and important role in training people. But the R&D component is -- with some exceptions -- mostly a matter of "training young people for the real work by messing around on toy problems".
This YouTuber[0] does an excellent job recreating chemistry research from papers and improving on the techniques to be accomplished with household materials. He documents his failures and takes an empirical approach to arriving at his successes. I’m not sure of his background, but it’s certainly research that he’s doing. Watching his channel always reminds me that the scientific method does not have “first obtain an expensive degree” as one of its steps.
It's hard for me to tell if this article is being intentionally disingenuous, or if it's just missing the forest for the trees.
Take a look at this graph of college costs vs salaries for young people over time: https://image.cnbcfm.com/api/v1/image/106968880-163579955995... . It's really hard to look at that graph and make the argument "No, no, expensive college costs are basically all in your head." The other thing I think is insane, which I see often, is to compare salaries of college grads vs. HS grads to make the argument that college is "worth it". But why is it a moral argument that colleges should have a right to "capture" as much of this increase in earnings as they can? After all, a huge reason for the discrepancy is that people who are inclined to go to college are more likely to get higher paying jobs in the first place. It's kinda like how I see some marketing departments that try to ascribe every single purchase to their efforts (and winning a larger budget in the process), when their "science of marketing attribution" is often a lot of hand wavy BS.
This article does make some fair points: public colleges tend to much cheaper than private ones, and most colleges give substantial grants. But even then it's leaving out some vital details (e.g. I didn't hear it mention room and board or obscene textbook prices). I think the thing that is most frustrating to me about the general college cost debate is that the thing that is most out of whack is giving giant, non-dischargeable student loans to students in non-lucrative majors. The reason lenders are willing to give hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans to someone who studies poetry is they know either the government has their back, or the student will be paying off their loan until they die - and colleges know this, too, which is why they feel so little downward pressure on pricing.
Let me stop you right there. The fact that the graph doesn't show the dip in actual tuition costs that the article mentions, and the fact that other commenters have corroborated the dip does indeed exist, makes me think that the chart you linked is talking about the wrong metric. I suspect that the prices are "sticker prices", not actual costs, which the article specifically addresses:
>Sticker prices are rising while net costs remain steady and, in some cases, drop. A report from the College Board, a non-profit, shows that whereas published tuition and fees for private non-profit colleges increased from $29,000 in 2006-07 to $38,000 in 2021-22 (in 2021 dollars), the net price actually decreased from $17,000 to $15,000.
That's the trick. They need to stock these colleges with smart and interesting kids in order to attract the sheltered idiots with wealthy upper middle-class parents. A lot of very talented broke people I know got full rides to mediocre schools that normally cost twice as much to attend as actually good schools. The school was taking absolutely no risk with them, they were proven prodigies that didn't really need school (and didn't have great grades.)
Anyway, the best schools are free to attend (at least until the loan payments start.) You get showered with grants and loans if they accept you. It's the worthless ones that benefit from signalling their cost. Those are the schools paying smart (and culturally interesting) kids to attend, as atmosphere for the real customers.
It’s like buying used cars. As a parent you have to shop around and pit different colleges against each other for the best deal. No one knows what the real price is. And you may get a good deal, but the terms require a GPA that 85% of students fall under so mathematically the college knows they only pay the merit scholarships mostly for the first year.
Undergraduate is a racket. If my kids choose to get into tech I will use my connections to get them a job, either working for one of my companies or for a friend of mine, or start a company with children of friends. Now that is how the real world works - not handing 6 figures every year to a government sponsored scam.
>Undergraduate is a racket. If my kids choose to get into tech I will use my connections to get them a job, either working for one of my companies or for a friend of mine, or start a company with children of friends. Now that is how the real world works - not handing 6 figures every year to a government sponsored scam.
Your solution to the "racket" that is undergraduate education is to... engage in nepotism? What exactly is that supposed to mean in terms of policy implications? Rather than paying tens of thousands for an undergraduate degree, students should just ask their parents to vouch for them instead? What if their parents don't have the connections? And what about the flip side? Should your friends oblige you and hire your children without any credentials just because you're their friend?
It seems reasonable to me that if a child wants to get into the same trade as one of their parents, that parent should be happy to teach them directly and help them get work. If a parent is skilled in a trade, teaches it to their children, and vouches for them, that's not "without any credentials". That's a skilled practitioner vouching for having personally taught them, which is better than a university credential.
That's not just acceptable, but ought to be considered a moral obligation as a parent.
You're both not wrong. That's the beauty of this "problem" which isn't a problem but just nature.
Parents feel morally obligated to set their children up for success via generational wealth transfer of ideas, skills, and dollars.
My dad taught me to read before I landed in kindergarten. I'm convinced that as a result (compounded..) I was intellectually years ahead of my cohort until University (where I met everyone else who also was in their high school).
I was at a tailor in Italy and genuinely asked how I could learn what he knows (I'm a self taught amateur right now). He said he just worked in his dad's (now his) tailor shop since he was a boy. Out of reach for me!
I think most people help their friends get jobs. I’m 1000x more incentivized to help my own children over a friend. Same story for everyone, it’s part of human nature.
When reading your original comment, it sounds like you're saying that the solution is to avoid undergraduate college and leverage connections to immediately get a job. While that might work for people with those connections, how is that a solution for people without connections?
The system is seems designed to screw the middle / upper middle class. My son is going to college next year. I make enough that my son will not qualify for aid, but I'm not a billionaire, so the sticker price that I'll have to pay will be enough to be painful for me.
Using the calculator at https://www.savingforcollege.com/calculators/financial-aid-c..., and setting no savings and no 529, it appears you're expected to pay about 1/4 to 1/3 of your AGI (checked at $50k and $500k and several points in between). Which basically means no relief from the sticker price at private schools if your AGI is over ~$250k, and no relief from the sticker price at even the least expensive public schools if your AGI is over ~$80K.
I'd say the middle has it the worst. By the time you get to those much beyond 80k (you're going to have to regionally adjust that, remembering the median US household income is 70k) 1/3 your AGI still leaves you with more remaining income than those in the middle started with and by the time you hit 250k I think you should be hard pressed to try to find a reason to complain about lack of financial relief beyond it not being a fully subsidized system for all or similar (in which case you're still paying anyways, just differently).
The middle class has it the worst because their kids will have a lot of trouble getting accepted to prestigious universities due to the quality of their education + "non-academic factors" that heavily bias towards the upper classes ( see https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/C... ).
The financials are almost secondary to that, although there's also a lot of bad targeting by kids in those (where you'd go out of state / private instead of going to your flagship public and save a lot of tuition $$$).
LMAO no. Everyone has this idea, and if it were allowed, who wouldn't do it? The way that financial aid works (albeit this is based on a few years ago), it's very very hard to get out from under your parents. It's so extreme that it hurts people.
It's not that unusual to find wealthy parents that refuse to help their children at all, even though they didn't do anything, and are fine people. I'm a bit unsympathetic to OP, but the young adults that have literally nothing thanks to the whim of some asshole... that's really tough, and a flaw in the system.
Anyway, there are rare cases, I believe, but the government makes this very difficult. If you grew up in a normal household, live an ordinary life, but your parents refuse to pay, you're out of luck. You will struggle to get this even if you're estranged from extremely abusive parents.
It hurt me while I was in school in the late 80s. I applied early decision to CMU, and was accepted. My parents were older, and very financially conservative, and were not high income. When I got the aid package, I found out that I qualified for basically 0 aid, and my parents were expected to re-mortgage their modest house to pay for my education (which I would not have asked them to do). I withdrew and attended a state school where I got a merit scholarship (but had to start 1 semester late, due to early decision).
It seems like home equity does not count these days, which is an improvement I guess.
I don't think "disown" is the word you want to use here. In English, "disown" means that you refuse to acknowledge that he is your son at all, not in a legal sense, but in a social sense, i.e. "I hate you so much I no longer consider you my son". I think you probably mean, "Can you declare your son as not a dependent", not "Can you disown your son" :)
Go to community college for 2-3 years, then matriculate from the university. Way cheaper, better teacher/instructors, more time to mature, start early in 12th grade, and the diploma is from the university.
What do you lose? 2-3 years of goofing off at a country club.
I would argue for many people the value of a college education is not so much the education. Fraternities/sororities/equivalents, for example, are often seen at some schools as more important to social mobility + marriages and more exclusive than the schools themselves– mostly in the South, but also at some other schools, say University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Not just, those, of course, really but any shared activities+clubs for practically any niche– college could be considered one of the last places where everyone has normalized openly seeking groups of friends based on common interests, to the point most throw extracurricular fairs at the beginning of every year. Not saying those don't exist after college, but finding e.g. a truffle mushroom foraging group is a lot harder in your 30s if you've never met anyone who does it before.
Exactly this, I grew up very rural and studied computer science in college, since I didn’t have any connections to companies needing my skills through parents, friends, etc. these interactions in college with kids from cities and making friends with them netted me my first job out of college.
This isn't universally true, CA and NY have good community colleges where this works, but if you're from Mississippi or somewhere similar it's likely your community college won't be great and might not have good transfer agreements with state universities.
>"What do you lose? 2-3 years of goofing off at a country club."
Now that I've been living in the real world for quite some time, I yearn to return to the goof off at the country club. I acknowledge that I am definitely looking back at my university days with rose colored glasses, but I still vividly remember the lifestyle I had while attending. I can't say the same thing for most of the education I received there. That's not to say it was bad, or that I didn't apply myself, just that we tend to forget the majority of things we're taught.
That being the case, while it is true that I would have probably gotten a more straightforward education at a much lower price by attending a community college, I would have also probably forgotten just as much of it. That being the case, I'm glad the extra money spent went towards the things I look back fondly upon.
You underestimate the value of being able to "goof off" as a young adult. Focusing 100% on studies and friendships, likely moving away from your hometown, and living what may for many be some of the most free (liberal) years of ones life before being put in the machine of economy.
Not to be dramatic but those first two years were probably the best 2 years of my life so far. And I built friendships and connections that would have been a lot harder to build coming in as a junior transfer. Similarly I could take classes as a freshman (not Harvard Math 55, but same concept elsewhere) that were well past the level most community colleges would offer
I’m not saying don’t go to community college by any means. I think for people who still need to mature more before becoming independent, or who are especially price sensitive (remember there are many colleges in the US that will give you a full ride just for good test scores, or there were a few years ago at least) it’s a good choice.
But just because the sticker price is a little lower doesn’t mean it’s better for everyone
Yeah. If you have the opportunity to do the "Harvard Math 55" thing in your field, you need to take it.
But most people take community college courses for the first two years of university. At every non-elite university I've worked at or had a family member work at, the most-subscribed Mathematics courses are College Algebra and Calculus I -- ie, high school-level courses where the instruction is probably better in community colleges.
Also: Mathematics is an outlier in that the instructional staff is fucking amazing at community colleges because of the dismal job market. The situation is quite different in CS. But, again, it doesn't matter, because most people at most universities are taking high school and CC level material their first 1-2 years.
" Go to community college for 2-3 years, then matriculate from the university. Way cheaper, better teacher/instructors, more time to mature, start early in 12th grade, and the diploma is from the university.
What do you lose? 2-3 years of goofing off at a country club.
What do you gain? time and money. "
This really isn't one-size fits all - it's great for the typical college kid who has no idea what they want to do and isn't all that mature or academically inclined. But it's terrible advice for those who are academically ambitious (aside from taking CC classes while still in HS). You can quickly tap out CC curricula if you're advanced, and there are still lots of merit scholarships available in many state and private schools that will have you end up paying even less at a 4y college than a 2y.
Also, regarding instructional staff, it kind of depends. The failure modes are different. At a CC you're a lot more likely to get someone who wants to help but is just incompetent or has a lower bound on their knowledge (for math - can they prove something like the Intermediate Value Theorem and really understand it?). At a university you'll get professors who are terrible teachers, and don't want to teach, but usually aren't ignorant. If you're testing out or skipping massive oversubscribed intro/weeder classes you may not run into that much at a 4y. If you are taking those kinds of classes you'd be better off at a CC though.
As a way of reducing the costs of higher education in America, I’m wondering how well a “no-thrills” model of a university will be received by students, faculty, employers, and other stakeholders? Today’s universities in America arguably have far more amenities than they did generations ago. My undergraduate institution, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, had in the mid-2000s (and still has) a police department, a large student union building complete with a bowling alley, a career center, many sports and recreation facilities, a health center offering many services, dormitories ranging from classic dorms to relatively fancy shared apartments, and many non-faculty employees offering a wide range of services to their students, from academic counselors to those that watched over the university’s many fraternities and sororities. I’m grateful for these services, and I used many of them. But I wonder how much this costs the university to run, and I also wonder if the addition of such services at universities throughout America, as beneficial as they are, helped contribute to the escalating cost of college?
A good teaching-oriented university needs dedicated faculty, dedicated students, and facilities that help the faculty teach and help the students learn. Some costs are unavoidable, such as hiring good faculty, running a library, maintaining facilities, etc. However, if we eliminate the “frills” and pare a university down to its essentials, will it be affordable? I’m very curious if this is one of the major factors, or are there more significant factors leading to exploding costs?
Isn’t this just the German model? They go a bit further: no TA-led sections, homework isn’t graded or checked (so no TAs)k and your entire grade is based on just your final (no mid-term).
That's not the German system I remember. In physics at least there was graded homework, it was just not required. The grading was actually invaluable because they prepared you for the actual exam you were going to get (can vary a lot between professors even for the same subject).
I got my information from only one data point (a friend at MSR, who went to university close to after reunification), so I'm sure experiences would differ. The point was, that students were left mostly on their own to consume the material provided by the professor and prepare for the single high stakes exam. Some professors were better than others, and I guess there were higher end university experiences available (e.g. German top universities). American students are much more coddled in comparison, they are given a ton of resources, many of which are used and provided inefficiently.
Kids with no credit history can borrow limitless money that’s backed by the government and not discharged in bankruptcy. Is anyone surprised to see the prices rising to slurp up as much of that cash as possible?
Federal loan programs (subsidized, unsubsidized and direct PLUS loans) still means that the average student is able to borrow a substantial amount of money without really considering their eventual ability to repay. True, it's not "limitless", but I think that's fair use of hyperbole.
I went to college at 27, and the money was sort of limitless. The free money was pretty limited (grants and direct loans), but there were enough usurious private lenders to keep you in debt for the rest of your life.
My son qualified for $100 a year in federal loans. To my dismay, he actually took that loan. I had to have a conversation with him that it is better to just pay the $100 and not have the possibility of missing payments, getting interest and penalties, etc... Everything he has is a private loan which I cosign for -- and with an 850 credit score, I didn't get anywhere close to the advertised interest rates.
I have a child starting college next year. One thing that surprised me is the number of extra fees. It very much reminded me of ticketmaster, comcast, or airbnb hidden fees. Adding them all up for starting next semester the fees are over $1000. This article does say 'tuition and fees' so it's probably taking this into account. Still it surprised me and feels like a pretty scummy practice.
This depends on the school. One of my kids is at a college where there are very few if any itemized extra fees, not even room and board (all students live on campus). Another went to a school where there were at least half a dozen fees in addition to the tuition, as well as room and board.
Administrative positions have grown faster than student bodies, from grade school to public universities. Teacher/lecturer wages have not gone up with enrollment increases or administrative overhead. That is where one needs to first look for cost savings.
Firefox wouldn't connect to the site, talking about how the connection is not secure. It turns out the I was accidentally using cloudfare DNS, and they won't resolve archive.is, and their landing page triggers this. Switching back to nextdns fixes it..
I agree that costs are overstated but it’s a significant downside to confuse the populace (and your customers) by being so misleading about the cost of education (their service).
I guess it’s kind of like enterprise pricing, in reverse. Rather than the rich outliers getting the extortionate pricing, it’s the average consumer who has to request the real price. That lack of transparency makes making a rational choice harder for the average person.
It's surprising, but tuition is only half the story. The cost of everything else for students is going up quickly, including room and board, food, and textbooks. Textbooks particularly have risen much faster than the rate of inflation over the last thirty years. Meanwhile, the wages paid by assistantships and work study programs have barely budged.
If universities stuck to their core mission and shed their dead weight, bloat, and misappropriation of tuition dollars, I guarantee you that you would see a huge decrease in cost. It's become a circus and a racket that doesn't even deliver on the core mission, and even actively harms students. Unfortunately, the market has played a role in creating incentives to measure college quality according to the wrong factors.
In any case, the thicket of incentives is so dense, and the interests so mutually intertwined, that any reform would be met with kicking and screaming (and lots of rationalization, of course). This university lobby would work overtime against successful attempts to educate the public about what it means for a university to be good, and what sorts of gimmicks make them more expensive. But it is still important to try. It is important to counter the misinformation that's taught in primary school about what universities are about, but that would also entail a reform of primary education by implication, another milieu that would resist reform. It is important that we try. We need a clear and correct notion of what education is for, and then what primary, secondary, etc. education is for. Once there is clarity, it becomes easier to make decisions about how to structure education, what to keep in, and what to keep out. It is easy to see why some may not want to resolve the ambiguity.
One avenue that's being pursued is the founding of new colleges that demonstrate what is possible. This is the long haul, but in an environment as entrenched as this one, it may be the only realistic solution.
Amazed that the author can even make this claim without affecting his/her reputation/credibility more broadly. Simply if that were the case we could’ve afford to pay for college from fixed income without the need to access loans. Second you wouldn’t have the loan crisis where the debt accelerates way above income. This is just plain dumb.
Anecdotally, I was able to negotiate a merit scholarship to a top college - not based on merit, totally, but based on alternative offers from other schools.
The price discrimination approach is a really effective method for pricing, and I'd be all for it (progressive taxation, basically) if not for the shoddy implementation leading to a student loan crisis.
College is expensive because there’s so much demand for their services (education is important in developed economies) coupled with the moral hazard of guaranteed loans and voila - we have the situation we have today.
It’s this simple. I don’t know why we need think pieces on this topic. Either make college a true market product (loans would change based on expected return), make it free for all (bad idea mainly), or create an economy where education isn’t needed (regressive and not practical without “make work” which is cruel).
This seems like such an old train of thought. There are full lecture series available from a large number of prestigious lecturers at highly accredited universities. There are thousands of creators/hackers/researchers that have spun up every manifestation of creation you can think of and many of them publish the how-to in the process. You can get digital copies of textbooks, there's a whole open source encyclopedia which is competitive with proprietary encyclopedias. All the knowledge has been democratized. Causing a recession of the institutions at this point would be progressive. By all means I think the most progressive thing would be a move back to the apprenticeships of yore, even in STEM. A lot of people are going into specialist fields anyways, you may as well learn to make bespoke rats from somebody that's been doing it their whole career, nobody needs all the tangential shit when there's a straight, well-trodden road to the end product.
We need to loose the grip of these institutions on our economy, they're - very evidently - a trillion dollar sink.
1) they cherry pick the timeframe for historical comparison and conclude college has gotten cheaper (a more honest analysis for that period is that it stayed flat). What about 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago? The silence sure is loud.
2) Good for them using inflation-adjusted prices. Too bad incomes haven’t kept up with inflation. If we’re going to discuss “affordability” we probably need to include the income side, hmm?
3) I’d hoped that my initial comment was worded closely enough to the headline for the tongue-in-cheek to be more blatantly obvious. Alas.
> 1) they cherry pick the timeframe for historical comparison and conclude college has gotten cheaper (a more honest analysis for that period is that it stayed flat). What about 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago? The silence sure is loud.
The exact quote from them is:
"Sticker prices are rising while net costs remain steady and, in some cases, drop."
I guess you can call that cherry picking, but they're not exactly taking that data and concluding everything is fine. The following paragraphs go through the various reasons why the high prices are bad.
>Yet even with decreasing costs and with discounts, college can still feel unaffordable to many.
>2) Good for them using inflation-adjusted prices. Too bad incomes haven’t kept up with inflation.
Source? At least according to this graph from the BLS[1], incomes have generally kept up with inflation. There are periods where that's not the case (eg. post 2020), but that's likely due to lockdown effects (eg. service workers, who are typically low paid, were laid off, so they were excluded from the average, which bumps it up).
They cite a College Board report, but don't specify which one. I suspect it's this one: https://research.collegeboard.org/trends/college-pricing
Tables CP-9 and CP-10 do indeed show net price going down for the last few years. But the figures aren't expressed in dollars, but in '2022 dollars', i.e. the charts don't show the actual net price, but the net price adjusted by CPI inflation.
This is an important distinction because, when people pay for college, they're not comparing it with the cost of other goods and services (which is what CPI measures), but whether they can afford it, based on their parents' current/past income, or their own future expected income.
If you agree with this perspective, using CPI to make the curves look flatter does everyone a disservice. Wages for many people haven't kept up with CPI, so a higher nominal net cost still makes college less affordable.