Why is college tuition in the USA so expensive?

[Elegiac]

What I'm saying is that such skills and trades should be possible to learn prior to you actually working at the job, especially consideration to what the US pays for education (US is one of the highest paying countries towards education already) . This type of thing does not compromise critical thinking either.

Or we can just focus on critical thinking since education should not be focused on producing 'job ready' skillsets.

[RickJamesLich]

Or we can just focus on critical thinking since education should not be focused on producing 'job ready' skillsets.

Then we hit the problem we have in the status quo, where a high school education generally only lets people get entry level jobs. Why not do both critical thinking and job ready skill sets?

[Felya]

Supply and demand...

[Elian]

because it is a business.

[Theinquisition]

Why on earth should we care what employers think. One of the chief issues with American education is the focus on preparation for a 'career'.



Sounds like we can solve this by just legally mandating lower tuition rates. Say about $0 per quarter.

Yeah...how about no.

I'd rather look into solving problem of prohibitively expensive tuition, not throw more money at it.

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You can go to nearby community college for cheap, usually a couple hundred of dollars a semester.

That's two years.

If you go to your state's school, if you live in Texas say University of Texas at Austin, it's very reasonable too.

Where it get's expensive is when you go out of state or to one of the big private schools like Harvard or Yale. But even there, Harvard and Yale give free tuition to families who make less than $65K a year.

that's what I did.

I finished my AAS at a community college and took a bunch of electives as well. Walking into ASU, I was already over 50% done my BA. I get my GI Bill, so it doesn't matter much either way, but I liked the "community" feel of CC over the massive 4 year university.

[prwraith]

I don't even see why college degrees are required. Almost nobody works in their degree field. Most jobs you pickup what you need to know on your own with the nuances learned on the job.

Seems silly. Just an arbitrary debt causing agency. There's nothing you can learn in college that you can't learn for free on your own from readily available resources.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

I suppose it's just in their best interest to keep expensive and since the purchase power of the average citizen never went up as inflation increased, College became more expensive. IMO it's insulting how books somehow end up being just a bunch of papers put into a binder. I mean ffs talk about being lazy.

[kail]

The US is the richest country in the world, education in the US is the most prestigious and recognized anywhere on this planet. Plus, quality education is mostly private. They never have a shortage of people willing to enroll; when you have a huge demand and a limited supply, you can charge outrageous sums and still be in business.

It is a sorry state of affairs. I think, like with many fields in Switzerland, government in the US should step in and regulate the prices to an extent. I think $60k for one year in Harvard is insanity.

In today's massive communication tech age, there is little reason why education should be as expensive. Here go learn Calculus. It's free!

I find these the main factors to insane education costs and student depts.

1. Archaic teaching methods. We have the internet, we have computers and tablets. Information is soo easy to share the only thing colleges/universities provide is a human to explain the content in person and the tests to make sure you know your stuff. Well, you could still get the human made presentations from videos like the one I linked and tests should not have to be so expensive when they can be proctored en masse. Hands on learning is the only point I give to schools as you can't get that easily online.

To put it simply, we pay for tests and the degree to prove we passed the tests.

2. The government loans. Do they help put students in school? Yes. They are also the equivalent of a blank check for the schools as well. You will get accepted, receive the loan, school gets paid, students end up in dept and so does the government. This is what happens when something like education and health care becomes privatized, you add in the incentives for profits. I believe in a free market, but not for industries that are seen as public services.

[Independent voter]

I paid about $5,000 tuition for a 4 year bachelor's degree, maybe less.

[Auxora]

The third point definitely on wasteful spending. Not just dorms...even class halls, rooms, libraries, landscaping, etc. all have become so competitive between schools that schools overspend there too.

On the professor end, things there have been out of hand for a long time. At big universities, you've got profs giving lecture halls with 500 students who they never know, and the papers are graded by TAs. Also at some big universities, you might not even have a non-TA person leading the class in small 20 or less person classes at least until Junior year. Then combine that with profs that write their own super-overpriced books, which they then require students to get and make huge profits on, and then revise it every other year (juggle chapter orders, juggle homework chapter end questions given for homework) so students can't sell their old or buy cheap used copies. College profs at larger universities definitely have it pretty good, and that's not counting students flirting (or far more - which is *not* uncommon) for grades.

[Spectral]

I don't even see why college degrees are required.

The primary value for positions where the direct application of learned skills isn't necessary is the signaling value. Graduating from a quality institution signals sufficiently high intellect to get in and sufficient conformity and consistency to graduate. These are highly valued attributes for obvious reasons and they're otherwise difficult for employers to measure.

[Elegiac]

The primary value for positions where the direct application of learned skills isn't necessary is the signaling value. Graduating from a quality institution signals sufficiently high intellect to get in and sufficient conformity and consistency to graduate. These are highly valued attributes for obvious reasons and they're otherwise difficult for employers to measure.

Either that or they signify you're wealthy and well connected enough to pull sufficient strings.

Pretty much translates to 'lazy HR practice' in both cases.

[Spectral]

I think $60k for one year in Harvard is insanity.

You'll be happy to know that tuition at Harvard scales with ability to pay. Many students at Harvard pay little or nothing. Head over to their financial aid page for a helpful calculator. Low-income students immediately drop tuition to low levels and tacking on a small federal Pell grant takes it to completely free.

Almost no one's missing out on Harvard because of money.

[Zelk]

They exist primarily to make money rather than educate and research.

[Elegiac]

WoW Guild: "Recruiting good players is so hard!"

Me: "Well, what have you done to recruit?"

WoW Guild: "I put up a web form so people can apply, and looked at their gearscores!"

--------------------

Business: "Finding good employees is so hard!"

Me: "Well, what have you done to find new employees?"

Business: "I put up a sign asking for applications and then looked at their degrees!"

Pretty universal thing, I guess.

Degrees as the real life equivalent to Gearscore. Just fuck me up.

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They exist primarily to make money rather than educate and research.

You mean like pretty much every other institution in this blasted country?

[PC2]

Have you thought about going to college in Latin America, Europe, Africa, or Asia instead?

[ArguesWithStrangers]

So im writing a paper on why college is so expensive in the U.S. The research I've done so far points to a few major concepts

Baumol's cost disease - While productivity has been rising steadily in most sectors of the economy, teaching has not seen similar improvements. One professor can only teach a class of so many, and higher level classes are expected to limit attendance in order to ensure student access to the faculty. Rising wages without associated productivity gains raises cost disproportionately.


Perverse incentives - US schools all crave high ranking from the US News and World Report publication's annual listing of colleges. One of the primary metrics used is money spent per student. This actually incentivizes schools to spend as much as they can on as few students as possible to increase their ranking. The exact opposite of what we should want to see.


Wasteful spending - Related to the last point, schools now hire an army of administrators that have nothing to do with educating students. Reports have many schools spending more on administrators than on faculty! Dorms are now lavishly appointed and look more like luxury apartments than the kind of simple no-frills housing familiar to people who attended schools decades ago.

Government subsidies - There is no getting around supply and demand. The US government subsidies college tuition because it's expensive, but that causes a malicious cycle. Subsidies raise demand for college, which in turn results in increased tuition, which results in increased subsidies to counteract the higher cost, which raises demand for college, and so on.

Expectation of college degrees - The idea that everyone needs a college degree has become immensely popular in the past decade or two. Students who are not a good fit for college are pressured to go anyway. Many do, since other valid options are not as available as they once were, such as trade schools. (Meanwhile, welding jobs that pay six figures go unfilled while college grads work at Starbucks for lack of better options) Employers require college degrees as a proxy for finding good and reliable employees, despite the fact that many jobs could be ably performed by people without a degree. This raises demand for college unnecessarily, which results in additional price increases.

I was curious as to how MMOC feels about these theirs so far. I'd say the biggest contributing factor that I've seen, is the price increases associated with subsides.

While your other points certainly contribute to the problem, the one I highlighted is far and away the greatest contributor. Whenever tax-payer money enters a commodity market, that market immediately inflates. It does not matter if the commodity in question is education, healthcare, housing or barbie dolls. If people are able to buy it, finance it, or insure it on the tax-payer dime producers will no longer have to compete for customers and will do the logical thing and start charging insane prices. The only way out is to either keep tax-payer money out of the market entirely or create a single-payer system where the government is the only customer for a good or service and pays for them at a set price mandated by law. That has its own issues but that is a topic for another discussion.

[Spectral]

Degrees as the real life equivalent to Gearscore. Just fuck me up.

Another fun addendum to this similarity:

LFM 10M Heroic Big Dragon, must have 10M Heroic Big Dragon Achievement

Looking for Manager of X, must have 5 years experience Managing X

Oh. OK then.

[Masark]

Another thing is that state governments have been slashing funding to public universities and it really ramped up during GFC when they suffered from financial shortfalls.

[Elegiac]

While your other points certainly contribute to the problem, the one I highlighted is far and away the greatest contributor. Whenever tax-payer money enters a commodity market, that market immediately inflates. It does not matter if the commodity in question is education, healthcare, housing or barbie dolls. If people are able to buy it, finance it, or insure it on the tax-payer dime producers will no longer have to compete for customers and will do the logical thing and start charging insane prices. The only way out is to either keep tax-payer money out of the market entirely or create a single-payer system where the government is the only customer for a good or service and pays for them at a set price mandated by law. That has its own issues but that is a topic for another discussion.

Which is precisely why the nearly entirely private healthcare system in the United States costs an order of magnitude more to run per capita than socialist Britain or Australia.

The subsidies really aren't a factor, and if they are they're more symptomatic of the fact that for-profit anything is by nature looking to gouge consumers while giving them as little as possible.