Comment by paulpauper

20 days ago

What the college tuition debate overlooks is that for costs to go down, so does the quality of the experience. this means college is more barebones and less handholding, like in Europe.

Maybe for the costs to go down, the administrative fat could be trimmed instead.

  • Especially when you consider that it's gotten to the point where at many schools with the worst and most extreme administrative bloat, there is one non-teaching, bureaucratic administrator for every student.

I'm saying the opposite has been my experience.

There's plenty of ways for Universities to lower costs without hurting quality.

There are plenty of open resources nowadays. Many of the paid online only textbooks with inconsistent tooling and accessibility for starters could be eliminated.

Expensive corporate software contracts is another. Access to MS office is nice in theory but in practice many students rely on Google instead AND there are open alternatives that don't have unreliable authentication problems.

University tuition here is state sponsored, the difference is not that great (everything over 10k a year is a cashgrab anyway) You have the "institution rate" aka real cost + milk foreign students tax, and the European cost aka affordable. The university gets a yearly allowance per European student plus a lump sum on graduation (yes this brings graduation rates up and quality down).

The end result is that the average money received is about 60% (give or take 5-10 percent depending on left or right wing politics) of the institution rate so you now know the foreign "tax". If you are over 32 you should also pay the institution rate but it is almost fully tax deductible.