Comment by nuancebydefault
1 day ago
Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
It isn't solely the government's fault. Most American universities are corporatized and exist primarily as money printers for the admin staff. The purpose of an adjunct professor is to cost the institution as little as possible while passing as many marginal students as possible so they can maximize profits with sheep that keep coming back to the trough.
This only works if students have the money though - which the government helpfully provides. The Universities are just milking the system - which isn't their fault - it's ours as the voters.
European colleges are incredibly thrifty, though. German universities for example can lack dorms, student unions, and professors lack TAs to grade homework (so homework isn't graded) and your entire grade depends on one final.
We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.
I can't agree with your experience regarding German universities. Usually dorms are offered by the university but students usually just rent a room in the city.
I've had to submit weekly sheets that were graded in almost all courses and these qualify for the final exam (in STEM). There were two exercise groups with competent ta to ask questions..
What's missing is some kind of Disneyland experience, student unions also exist to some degree but it's more low key.
Not saying that German university is better or worse - I'm convinced it has it's own problems that only will get worse if nothing is changing but it's not like it's subpar and you are alone with your book.
> your entire grade depends on one final
This isn't due to staff shortages, it's more of a difference in tradition/philosophy of teaching
That varies a lot between countries in EU. I live in Finland and my country has student unions, and professors are quite free to choose how they do the grading, so it's not always just one final exam per course. There are no dorms, but there is cheaper only-for-student housing. There are also really cheap state-subsidized meals in student restaurants on campus.
the real issue in american universities is that the tuition largely goes to paying for administrators. they do no teaching and largly dont' add much value to the experience. if we capped administratiors to 1 per 5 professors, that would go a ong way towards paying for tutors and services that actually do help students.
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This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.
Increased tuition is not primarily going to pay higher salaries to professors. It's mostly going to hiring lots more administrators. https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulweinstein/2023/08/28/admini...
You’re going to have to qualify where you are talking about. Where I am, California, that only describes community colleges. Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation. Very little of your tuition at these schools goes towards teaching salaries.
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When you compare the campus of MIT or Harvard to the average university anywhere else, you’ll find… excess. Lots of it.
> If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive.
e.g. "Adjusted for inflation, $1.00 in 1960 is equal to $10.43 in 2024" according to https://www.dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1...
Sure, but education (and healthcare) costs grew much faster than the inflation.
"The average annual cost of tuition at a public 4-year college is 40 times higher than tuition in 1963.
(...)
After adjusting for currency inflation, college tuition has increased 197.4% since 1963."
https://educationdata.org/college-tuition-inflation-rate
Tuition is like 3–5 times the price even adjusted for inflation though
Costs ballooned in real terms.
> and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement
This here is where the money is... college degrees are a very effective dull-weeder for job applications. It filters out people of lower social classes (because they cannot afford college or effects of their social status like having to work jobs next to school to help their family make rent prevent them from getting good enough grades), it filters out people with unmanaged mental health issues, it filters out young parents (good luck managing to get a degree parallel to raising a child), it filters out people with disabilities... and all of that without violating a single anti-discrimination law.
Because education is largely an afterthought, and universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.
High cost and exclusivity is the entire point.
A university open to all with a fraction of the price would be a poorly ranked one in every competitive measure.
> universities primarily compete on entertainment and prestige.
I like to call this "resort-style education".
Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe?
I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
Good question. I wonder if labor competition in Europe is less reliant on University names and reputation? IT could also have to do with cultural difference is what students look for in a university.
My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience.
The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
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actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.
They’re also significant funded by the state particularly as they’re the two federal universities. The figure I heard while there, although I can’t find actual numbers online, was in the low tens of thousands in subsidies that may otherwise mostly be collected through tuition.
Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.
Education quality, especially adjusting for tuition, doesn't correlate to prestige. Which, after WWII, almost required "Anglophone" as the language of instruction.
I was speaking to the US situation, and agree most European schools are quite cheap in comparison. Not only in tuition, but in terms of their budgets; US schools spend 4-5X as much per student- so it isnt just about state funding.
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>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
I live in Belgium, we earn quite a lot less on average indeed. However why would we need so much money? We can go to hospital, or even 20 times visit a dentist for that matter, without expensive insurance and without the fear of bankruptcy. We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kintergarten.
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Americans earn more than Swiss people after taxes according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
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Yeah indeed a giant part (75 percent or so) of what the companies pay, does not directly go to the workers bank account.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
A few weeks ago apparently, the 'promise less taxes->everybody happy' magic spell has once again worked.
Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a world power and a great place to live.
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And it looks like we'll have a WWE co-founder with no education experience in charge. That should work out well for students.
Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.
The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
> the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people. american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
this is partly true. it is cheap / free for very low income -- if you qualify for a Pell grant you can usually get additional financial aid from your state university that can bring your cost down to zero.
But if you are above the low income line, but by no means wealthy -- so if you're a household making say $100K a year, then college is extremely expensive and unaffordable especially if you have several kids. You're not poor enough to qualify for substantial financial aid, and you're not wealthy enough to afford tuition. Yeah, your kid can get into Harvard or Stanford for free, but the chances of them being accepted are vanishingly small no matter how smart they are.
The saving grace is community college -- enroll at the local CC for 2 years and then transfer to the state school.
Why should college be very expensive for rich people?
Because they can afford it. It's a redistribution tactic. You can also phrase it like this: college should be free for all to attend. Then, as long as you have a progressive tax scheme, the outcome is the same. Cheap for the poor, expensive for the rich.
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According to the old story, the New York Times asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks. The answer: Because that's where the money is.
The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.
Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.
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This is an excellent summary of the Harvard University tuition strategy for the last 20 years.
But this strategy only applies to the wealthy universities, like Harvard, which are extremely difficult to get into -- and that is by design (Harvard could expand its student body), since what Harvard is selling these days, above all, is exclusivity.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
Dunno where you got this "ideal".
the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away
..."fading away", to the tune of (at last glance ) one and three quarters of a trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible
The ability of US higher ed to raise tuition prices will always overwhelm the ability of US taxpayers to meet those prices. The phrase "utility monster" comes to mind.
but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work.
Private, in the sense that nobody who answers to someone who must win an election is directly in charge of running them, but, who operate as charities for the purpose of donations, pay no taxes on either capital gains or real estate, and are permitted to act as government contractors skimming up to 85% of grant money they're tasked with administrating.
so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
The flaw being that...the school is allowed to have total knowledge of a customer's ability to pay before it chooses to do business with them. Imagine if you had to give three years of your tax returns to the person you were trying to buy a house from.
Wait so US colleges are allowed to require any kind of real financial information from you all? Shouldn't they just say if you're accepted or not, then send you the bills? And for any financial aid program, shouldn't someone else review that instead of them directly having access to all that financial data of students without being any kind of financial institution? Let's say some kind of government letter instead giving them your income statements.
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> Dunno where you got this "ideal".
I wonder if people like you just lack the imagination or system thinking or equate poor with useless or are just afraid of thinking people? From the perspective of the state and the society it’s beneficial to have an educated population, unless you think you won’t have enough stupid people to man the factories?
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We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but not 5X (it's more like 2.5X).
The cheapest you're going to get is $10K a year (and that's hard to find), and that's just tuition. If it's not near your parents' home then you're looking at $25K/year bare minimum (as in living off ramen packs and peanut butter). So that's $100K that your parents have to have saved up (per child) or which you have to take on as debt.
Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.
It is possible to go to a top-100 school for under $5K/year tuition. Tens of thousands of people do it every year.
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Education in the US isn't cheap but those are elite colleges. The price tag is mostly for the networking.
I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined
Funnily enough, if you think about for networking you'd much rather be surrounded by kids who can afford that 200k price tag upfront.
Networking is a way to maximize your optionality. If you limit your network you limit your potential options. Rich kids have more options and there’s absolutely zero downside to being exposed to some of them. (Don’t confuse with actually exercising them when they appear, I’m just talking about having them.)
That depends who you are. You want to be surrounded by kids who have assets you don't. If you're there on an academic scholarship, you want rich contacts. If you're there on family prestige, you want capable contacts.
If you're there on a need-based scholarship, you need both kinds, but neither of them need you.
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
30 minutes does not seem too bad. Unless you paid a lot for the dorm.
It wasn't meant as a complaint. 30 minutes is fine, even though the route led through some less-beautiful parts of Prague.
Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
I really think Freedom, the American way, is super overrated. If the cost is misery, fear of loss of health or job, what's left of Its benefits? "I'm the chosen one protected by God"? Or does social security still have this huge connotation with communism?
Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.
America is “free” might be one of the funniest things Americans believe…
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