I'm a professor at an ivy league university who has gotten some insight into the budgets. There's a few things that are often not reported in the media:
1) The tuition sticker price is going up, but the actual price paid remains about the same due to increasing financial aid given to students.
2) The largest cost driven in the past decade is partially due to a successful increase in recruiting+admitting underrepresented minorities and low-income students. Because of a program called "need blind" among many universities, students are admitted regardless of ability to pay. So when more of these students come, not only are they unable to pay tuition, but the university pays them a stipend which results in a double financial cost.
3) There are administrative programs that cost money and are not flat screen TVs and new buildings, and actually benefit students at the same time! This includes funding for student organizations, undergraduate research or teaching assistantship programs, writing centers and tutors, etc.
Can you break down the numbers for #1? If Stanford is $60,000 how much if that is the actual sticker price? How much of that is being given to other students in free financial aid? As a follow-up, how fucking INSANE is it for someone who can't afford a school to take out a loan to pay for that school and a portion of that loan pay for someone else who also can't afford to go? For me to take out a loan to pay for someone else is fucking ludicrous.
On you third point, that's true but in theory those costs should not have increased 12x in 30 years. That would be remarkably hard to justify.
It says tuition=fees is 43K/year, and Stanford provides 126M in institutional financial aid (i.e. not from the government). They had about 7K undergrads, so it looks like 18K/year per student. That's just my guess because I don't know how graduate students are counted, or other accounting anomalies.
Thanks for your comment - it's great to get some real insight here.
#1 and #2 raise a lot of questions and I'd love to hammer it out a bit more.
Total financial aid is increasing (#1), but that makes sense given that the number of low-income students is also increasing (#2).
The better metric is financial aid per low-income student (not just per student, since that is also expected to increase given that low-income is a higher percentage of the class each year). Is that number increasing year over year? If so, shouldn't that lead to a decrease in tuition, not an increase?
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At my university, I'm convinced #3 is the real driver of tuition increase. The number of administrators and staff is increasing spectacularly, but from the student perspective, it's not helping anyone but instead increasing frustration (e.g. if there's a problem, we're stuck escalating through more people until we reach a Dean who can actually do something). Thoughts?
#1 is essentially third-degree price discrimination. College tuition is effectively "sliding scale" with wealthiest students pay full sticker price and poor students paying little or nothing
You forget that most wealthy people do not have a "direct" income and have the ability to redirect tax obligations. So, like in Europe, most wealthy students have a very strong case that they're really poor : just look at their tax statements, nothing on there. Never mind the BMW.
(In Europe anyone who is a kid of a company director or some such who is paid mostly in options or company shares to a "management company" effectively earns nothing. Sometimes their income is a loan with the management company as collateral. This enables them to get a full scholarship financial aid for their kids university education)
so that would imply that college is then made affordable to both low income students and wealthy students alike since they can hide their assets. what a bonanza!
1) Source? I can't believe that the sticker price has gone up this much and that financial aid went up in essentially the same amount. Let's see data on this.
2) Again, source? What I get from this is that minorities are financial leeches, then. Is that a correct reading? (No of course not, but that seems to be a correct interpretation of this insane premise the OP stated; one I do not agree with at all)
3)Again, source? So, get rid of the student's needs and you get rid of the costs? Really, this says that needy students are the reason costs have gone up. Did you even read the original article at ALL? Over 30 years of needy students have pushed the costs up this much? That is blatantly false.
The source is me attending university budget meetings, discussions with the provost, etc. University administrators are obviously not going to be saying this in public (exactly because of how it looks, as you note). If you think you're going to see the accounting books of a private university on such a sensitive topic, you may be waiting a while. But feel free to continue believing online columnists in the meantime; it seems like you've already made up your mind.
For 3), I think you misread my statement. I just said that there are useful programs to students that cost money, and not just the usual useless examples provided by journals. The other stuff is your creative interpretation :-)
I don't want to disparage a new user on HN, but your account was created 2 hours ago as of this writing. Please, do continue to use this site, but to make such broad claims about insider access and then claim that you cannot provide sources does stretch the veracity of your statements. Thomas Frank at Salon has his 'spit-bio' stating:
"Thomas Frank is a Salon politics and culture columnist. His many books include "What's The Matter With Kansas," "Pity the Billionaire" and "One Market Under God." He is the founding editor of The Baffler magazine."
You, however, disparage him as an 'online columnist' and say that I have already made up my mind. Well, with no proof provided to your examples, even after asking for it, I must make up my mind in Thomas Frank's favor. You cloak your data with the caveat that you can never provide sources for it. This forces me to not use you as a reliable source for information. At least tell us your university or job title.
Still, thank you for providing a different alternative to the OP. Please do not let my diatribe for sources distance you from commenting on other stories here in HN. I myself am guilty of doing just what you have done on here as well, ie. not posting sources outside of my own experience. Still, if you ever do find sources for your claims outside of your own experience, I would love to see them and be able to let others see them as well.
I was referring specifically to private research universities, which maybe account for 1% of students. Public universities have gotten more expensive, and there have been a lot of students enrolling in for-profit colleges. There's plenty of ways you can count the numbers.
But while nobody's publicly saying so, it is true that the (not really) "poor" homeowners are responsible for the 2001 crisis. The cause of the crisis was, after all, that >2% of homeowners (mostly poor ones) stopped paying their loans because (partly it was no longer in their financial interest to do so). Which cause banks to sell CDOs that were valued on the assumption that this would never happen. Which caused some banks to get stung with CDOs.
The great crime of the elite was to offer loans to people bigger than what they could reasonably pay back. Nobody forced anyone to take the money, or hid the fact that it needed to be paid back. Too large a percentage of people just didn't abide by contracts they signed.
And they failed to abide by those contracts for the exact same reason banks try to get out from under obligations : there were losing a little bit of money.
I don't think people are blaming the poor. People are blaming homeowners who overextended themselves, or simply walked away from their loan obligations. And this is justified. They caused the crisis. Yes they were pushed into it. Does that excuse it ? I don't know.
1) The tuition sticker price is going up, but the actual price paid remains about the same due to increasing financial aid given to students.
2) The largest cost driven in the past decade is partially due to a successful increase in recruiting+admitting underrepresented minorities and low-income students. Because of a program called "need blind" among many universities, students are admitted regardless of ability to pay. So when more of these students come, not only are they unable to pay tuition, but the university pays them a stipend which results in a double financial cost.
3) There are administrative programs that cost money and are not flat screen TVs and new buildings, and actually benefit students at the same time! This includes funding for student organizations, undergraduate research or teaching assistantship programs, writing centers and tutors, etc.