In absolute numbers, college is still 100% a good deal, provided you have some kind of scholarship or go to an in-state institution. The problem is that some of these places (and I hate to be that guy), especially small elite liberal arts colleges, seem to exist these days to basically drown young people in debt while they get into a job they could have had with the same English degree from the dependable community college + state school combo. We really need to look at the morality of allowing young adults access to an essentially unrestricted credit line.
The universal credit line was created a few decades ago when Congress decided to make student loan debt very hard to discharge (you basically can only get out of it by dying, becoming so disabled you cannot hold a job, or leaving the country). This encouraged lenders to put money into what is effectively a risk free investment.
Suddenly, everyone had infinite money, and there was no pressure to keep university costs low (as most states don't have the political will to cap their public education costs in a meaningful way). Colleges started investing more into attractions for their students - fancy gyms, rec halls, new dorms, etc. Both combined to "require" that schools raise the price.
And on the other side, now that everyone could afford college, public schools started to heavily encourage everyone to go to college - degree holders make more on average after all. Which is how people go into college for degrees they have no practical use for (picking on philosophy, it is great and gives a very valuable set of critical thinking skills, but do you really need those skills if you're not going to be an author, professor, lawyer, etc?). It also led to lots of folks going into college as "undecided" majors, paying tens of thousands per semester without any plan.
> It also led to lots of folks going into college as "undecided" majors, paying tens of thousands per semester without any plan.
A lot of universities won't let you select a major until you are toward the end of your sophomore year. Many majors have pre-requisites that you have to satisfy, and acceptance isn't guaranteed (even if you are already accepted to the university).
That sounds like a terrible deal - why would someone pay thousands of dollars for the chance to maybe buy the service you wanted in the first place? It only makes sense if it's a prestigious university whose name guarantees you a job or PhD slot somewhere
I'm not sure, many of the flagship universities? I know UW now allows you to enter the CSE program from the start (you apply to UW CSE from highschool), but that wasn't the case when I was in school.
Is it fixable if they simply make the debt dischargeable and impose a tuition ceiling or is that one act sufficient to rein-in the prices without affecting access to what all students basically are: low income future worker citizens just starting out
Ivy League schools are so good at marketing that they have brainwashed the youth into thinking community colleges are worthless.
Spoiler: all bachelors are foundational, meaning they are taught basically the same not only in the US but around the world and don’t require any fancy equipment or laboratory to complete
> Spoiler: all bachelors are foundational, meaning they are taught basically the same
That is just really really not true. Variance in quality of professors is huge. Also they clearly don't all follow the same textbooks or course syllabus.
But are relatively independent of rank of institution (some would say inversely correlated).
I went to a mediocre state school (definitely not in top 100), and a top 3 grad school. By and large, the mediocre school's professors cared more about teaching and put more effort into it.
This is well known in education, that level of instruction is inversely correlated with time spent on pedagogy, and positively correlated with time spent on content. In other words, kindergarten teachers think a lot about how to teach, while professors think about what to teach. The quality of instruction would probably be worse at a research university than at a college focused mainly on undergraduate education.
For the hard sciences things lab lab equipment can matter even for undergrad. The ironic thing here is that in the US large public universities often have far better labs and equipment that the Ivies. A few are decent at science but many others very much not so. I’d take a Chemistry undergrad from a UC Berkeley, UCLA, or Penn State over one from Brown or Dartmouth all day long. You’d literally be paying a ton more for an objectively less good degree.
90% of students are not aiming to go to a top school, and of those that do, they know the benefit is networking with peers at the top schools, not the labs or fancy equipment.
Except, you know, the top tier research labs with the most talented minds working in them. That absolutely has value. Is it worth the money that you are paying for your diploma - I don't know.
The denigration of our best technical programs to say they don't have that much value above and beyond networking benefits really undermines some of the core values of our educational institutions.
I have to disagree. I did both community college and a top ranked tech school for undergrad. I also know someone who attended some CS classes at this school but went on to get a CS degree from a mid ranked school (he was a chem engineering major first).
The difference between the CS classes at the community college and the high ranked university were night and day. If you try at a CC you'll get an A and you really have to fuck up to fail. Those classes were basically lectures, reading and tests. The curriculum at the top ranked school was far far more robust and As were hard earned. The labs, office hours and other learning I did with other people was vital.
The difference between the mid and top ranked program was mostly students. My friend said the curriculum was similar but the curves were different so the expectations were lower.
Fair or not, connections also matter. Interning for Intel was a big deal for future prospects and being at a top university put me in a better position for that. Ivy league isn't dominant in tech but they are in plenty of other fields like law.
Having taken some community college courses and also having audited at an Ivy, the latter really do have superior professors. Whether that improvement is worth it is another question.
Oh, and the community college professors were entirely competent.
Ivy League isn’t going to leave you with crippling debt. The majority of students don’t pay anywhere close to the sticker price, and the network you build is worth the cost of admission.
It’s the lesser known private schools where you can rack up massive debt in private loans that don’t have income based repayment plans. That’s when you get into trouble.
If your household makes $110,000 per year in California, the take home pay I found calculated online was ~$75,000. So that means paying around 22% of take home pay to go to Harvard? Can the average household actually put 22% of their take home pay into tuition without taking on debt?
For a family with an income of $150k and one student in college, they are expected to pay $15k per year.
If they were instead making $110k, they are expected to pay $5k per year.
If they make $85k or less, they are expected to pay nothing.
Harvard also looks at assets but excludes primary residence and retirement savings.
So yes the vast majority of people can afford to attend harvard with almost no debt. Even in the rare situation where you take on large amounts of debt, the connections made there and the brand recognition of the degree are almost definitely worth it from a financial perspective.
> At Harvard, 28% of students receive no aid at all. So they pay full sticker price.
And legacies pay well above sticker price, when you count family donations. Which is why legacies are a thing.
The other reason legacies are a thing is because when you send your first gen Ivy kid to an Ivy, the dream is that they're going to move in those social circles for the rest of their lives. Doesn't work without legacies.
Super-spoiler: This is absolutely, completely incorrect.
1) Teaching quality doesn't correlate much with quality (if anything, the inverse), so an Ivy is likely to have similar or worse teaching than a community college.
2) There is a HUGE difference in a community college bachelor degree and a proper university. Look at the curriculum. Much of what's covered in community college, Ivy students will have done in high school, and a community college will have (quite literally) NO advanced courses, equivalent to what university juniors and seniors might take.
If you want identical, you can compare elite schools to large state universities (University of Texas, University of California, ASU, etc.). At that point, classes are more-or-less identical to elite schools. Major remaining difference is brand stamp and network (which, coming from an elite school, I can say matter a lot).
However, community colleges serve a different purpose, and do not try to accomplish the same thing. They give a leg up into basic professional work. If you work at McD's or the local supermarket, and want a living income as a nurse, IT technician, AV work, or similar, community colleges will do a very good job for not a lot of money and with experience about being practical for people with the kinds of real-world constraints that come with e.g. minimum wage labor.
You will NOT be on a path to a job as a doctor, engineer, or similar. However, a community college education can allow you the basic standard of living to provide that kind of socioeconomic mobility to your kids.
Coursework at community colleges often transfers to the basic classes at a state university at a fraction of the cost. A 12-hour undergrad semester at the state school near me is ~$8,200 in tuition alone not including a few hundred dollars in fees and a few hundred dollars in books. 12 hours at the community college nearby is $744 including books, tuition, and fees. The majority of the first three semesters in an engineering degree from the state school will be mostly transferrable classes available at the community college, the fourth semester will be pretty mixed between major related classes that can't be transferred and transferrable classes.
Starting classes at community college and transferring to the state university later is a good strategy but is often ignored.
It's a fine strategy, but the critical words there are "transferring to the state university later."
Critically, a community college will NOT cover beyond the first 2-4 semesters of a university BS degree.
This is also not a sustainable strategy. At an engineering school, 100% of freshman will take calculus, and a 300:1 lecturer to student ratio is super-profitable (even factoring in recitation instructors and TAs). The cost is in the more specialized courses, which have at least as much planning, drafting of homework assignments, etc., and where those go obsolete much more quickly.
If everyone did this, price structures would need to adapt. Universities generally use large freshman classes as moneymakers to support smaller, more expensive, more specialized junior, senior, and graduate courses.
As a footnote, things like AP exams and online courses can do similar, also at low cost.
The better community colleges have honors programs that routinely graduate and then transfer their graduates into the best schools. Makes for quite the tuition optimization.
You can get out your first two years in community college...maybe, it really depends on what you are studying. But surely first year math, physics, chemistry, etc...should be possible. It won't be enriched, and if you are looking for extra credit (or a relationship helping your intro class professor do some research) you are likely not going to find that there. Facilities at a CC are also more geared to commuters, while your big campus will have a real campus experience.
I'll make this very concrete. I mentioned MIT. The largest community college in Massachusetts, Bunker Hill, has the following math courses:
• MAT-093 Foundations of Mathematics
• MAT-097 Foundations of Algebra
• MAT-098 Pre-Statistics
• MAT-099 Intermediate Algebra
• MAT-100 Topics in Career Math
• MAT-133 Introduction to Metric System
• MAT-171 Finite Mathematics
• MAT-172 Contemporary Math I
• MAT-174 Quantitative Reasoning
• MAT-181 Statistics I
• MAT-193 Topics in Algebra/Trigonometry
• MAT-194 College Algebra for STEM
• MAT-197 Precalculus
• MAT-231 Calculus for Management Science
• MAT-281 Calculus I
• MAT-282 Calculus II
• MAT-283 Calculus III
• MAT-285 Ordinary Differential Equations
• MAT-291 Linear Algebra
Of these:
1) I knew all of this except ODEs coming out of high school
2) Most elite university freshman would know all of these except upper level calculus, ODEs, Linear Algebra, and perhaps statistics coming out of high school. A community college can bridge these.
3) However, a typical MIT student will have finished all of these by the end of their freshman year. These won't even bridge into sophomore year.
4) Even a typical high school student will have finished a handful of these in high school
You'll see many levels up, first with intro courses like abstract algebra, real analysis, topology, etc., then upper level courses like algebraic topology, and then a variety of grad-level topics which build on those.
Neither is better nor worse. There is a need for both. Community colleges form a pathway from unskilled labor to professional work, and that's very, very important.
My local community college has no gaps in facilities as relevant to the education they provide. They're cheaper facilities than MIT, but they do fine. Unlike MIT, they don't have a yacht, landscaping, a getaway mention in Dedham, or buildings designed by Frank Gehry and IM Pei. Without those facilities, MIT couldn't bring in families of the social class aspires to compete for, but for most students community colleges aim to serve, there are much better ways to spend tuition dollars.
Personally, I think the right point to aim for is the UMass system. Education is better than MIT, in terms of teaching quality, and the course selection is adequate:
You can't judge course content by their titles. BUT if your kid can get into MIT, they really should go to MIT, not UMass, not Boston Community College, ... Also, MIT isn't Harvard, it is very utilitarian, and ya, some buildings are designed by famous architects, but it isn't a luxurious campus by any means. Like Caltech, it is a complete meritocracy.
CCs serve a role for many people, but if you are (smart, work hard, lucky) you can skip them.
> Personally, I think the right point to aim for is the UMass system. Education is better than MIT, in terms of teaching quality, and the course selection is adequate
I don't know many people who would claim that with a straight face. But it is your right to have that opinion.
> I don't know many people who would claim that with a straight face. But it is your right to have that opinion.
I think you're taking the opinion out-of-context. The question was: "What are good places to get cheap college credit with a quality education?" The question was not: "Where should I send my kid to college?"
The context of the discussion was about finding ways to not pay $60k for freshman year, but to come in with credit.
The answer I'd give to that question is UMass. The tuition is $15k. The educational quality is very high. If MIT allowed it, the best-case option would be to _defer_ MIT admissions, do two years there, and then switch back to MIT. Sadly, MIT wants those dollars, and if you defer, you can't collect credits while deferred:
And no, MIT is not a meritocracy. Look at the new learning initiatives it launched, and look at the qualifications of anyone involved in senior positions. Or the heads of many labs, for that matter. It's 100% about connections at the top.
Admissions is _somewhat_ more meritocratic than Harvard, where >40% of the white students are admitted are ALDC admissions (athletics, donor, legacy, and children of faculty), but the days when MIT was a meritocracy faded in the days of yesteryear. I miss that MIT, but it's dead.
Actually it's the Federal Government who is ultimately backing these student loans, and it is the Federal Government that made student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy.
The best way to deal with it would put colleges on the hook for it. If a student declares bankruptcy their student debt is gone, and the college using their massive endowments can eat it.
Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment.
I do feel where there was a weird transition where small liberal arts schools used to just be for rich people - but then they became for all people (it just meant debt for the non-rich ones)
I come from a highly educated but not super wealthy family. Even 15 years ago, my family told me unless I got into an Ivy or similar school I should just go to my state university. I feel like that, as the starting point for conventional wisdom, would help more people.
First two years in community college, transfer to state university is by far the best return on investment. In part because some kids after two years of college decide it's not for them.
I have a son in a state university now. Unfortunately, things are so competitive even in a state school; I don't believe the community college pipeline is viable. Yes, technically you can go to a CC and try to transfer to a state university. The odds of that happening, is however very difficult. At my son's large state university, it is almost impossible to transfer majors now. The reason being is that there are so many students and applicants wanting to go into the popular majors. The queue does not move. If you are in, you are in. If you are not, you need a miracle to get into a popular major like CS, engineering, biomedical etc.
If you can't make it into a state school of choice after high school, going to a CC, getting good grades in those classes, might give them a second chance to get in. For a state school, and this is hardly guaranteed. One trick is to see if they have quotas based on geography in the state. So you want to get into UW in Seattle, it might make sense moving to Spokane, attending Spokane Community College for a year, and then re-apply to UW as an Eastern Washingtonian! It might work, who knows.
Doesn't apply to really top schools. You aren't going to transfer into MIT, Stanford, Caltech from a CC, or probably any other university.
did that accidentally via the military. enlisted out of HS -- the post-9/11 US was a weird place -- and CLEP'd out of a few courses, and then did community college until I hit the 2 year mark.
transferred easily to a large state school, and then hit a high-end tech school for grad.
Finished with ~40% of the GI bill money left, and spent that on IT certs and part of the grad school cost. Meanwhile dudes I know from HS dropped 50k a year to go to private schools and are still paying off loans.
I don't think my undergrad courses were particularly bad or good. English 101 has some pretty straightforward curriculums, and US history hasn't changed that much.
You seem to be basing the value of education solely on employability, but that misses a huge amount of the value of a liberal arts education -- not just to the individual, but even more so to society at large.
I mean wouldn’t the better question to ask if it is even good for society? American population is more educated than ever but we still have massive issues of wealth inequality and people still fall for disinformation all the time.
At what percentage do we need for population with degrees to finally tackle the hard problems of our society?
Well, that is a problem with government and banks, not the universities.
I think liberal arts degree is a good thing if you are already set for life. Getting it on credit and expecting to repay that credit with job is of course, crazy.
Well, I'd say that while it might be a problem to be solved by governments and banks, it certainly ends up being egg on the Universities' faces. Anecdotally, almost all of my college friends and acquaintances held the university just as responsible for charging the prices it did, thus requiring them to go into further debt. (It was a technical school and most of my social group had jobs-focused degrees)
None of what you just wrote has anything to do with the students themselves; and that's the problem.
College was 90% a waste of time and effort for my ADHD self. The overwhelming majority of value-to-be-had is gated behind the bureaucracy and traditionalism of the system itself.
The only value I ever found at college was to casually be around people who are in the mindset of learning. That value was minimized by the tedious and time-consuming work that school is designed from the ground up to be.
Forgive my quip but college is the absolute worst way to improve your job prospects except for all the other ways.
I get that if politics is important to you, you won't like a place that includes your political opponents. So some people don't let their kids go, or they resent that their kids have to mix with political opponents.
Though as pointed our here already, most kids are not politically inclined and are trying to have fun.
If they are elite, they should pay for themselves. They are not actually elite. Everyone wants to feel elite, so everyone pretends to have some prestige even if the school is mid/low.
Most of the issue is that unrestricted credit line.
Federal loans aren’t unrestricted. The problem is that private banks are willing to loan large amounts because you can’t bankrupt out of student loans (in most cases).
I’ve been saying that college is doomed, for a while. I say this as a man with 2 graduate degrees so I am obviously not anti education.
Let’s think first principles. A hundred or even 50 years ago, going to college was a real signifier. You were someone who invested in scholarship, survived the rigor, etc. In the absence of other signifiers, that meant something about you. And obviously also you learned something.
Today “everyone” goes to college but it’s also trivial to graduate college with no useful skills or mind expansion because it has become more accessible and the bar is lower. So your degree no longer signifies much about you. It’s kinda sad to see college educated adults working in Starbucks but yeah it’s trivial to be half a million dollars in debt and not come out with much.
So the signifier value is gone. Meanwhile your opportunities to learn and prove yourself outside of a college degree are more present than ever. Online education options, easy testing, online portfolios etc being some examples of that.
So college gives you less, charges you a lot, and competition is rising. That’s not a tenable situation.
And the pill about decreased confidence resonates. In the prior generation maybe you can make some argument about college educated people being smarter (and worth listening to) in contrast to others. But now, it’s kinda obvious that electricians, plumbers etc are pulling in 300k a year are smarter and wiser than a liberal arts grad pulling 45k at Starbucks and yeah it’s becoming hard to justify giving more weight to the later in anything.
I find this a bit sad - I got a lot out of my education and if that was available to my son and daughter in 17 years that would be great but I suspect it will be so watered down if it exists at all that it would be a hard to justify option.
>Today “everyone” goes to college but it’s also trivial to graduate college with no useful skills or mind expansion because it has become more accessible and the bar is lower. So your degree no longer signifies much about you.
In Heinlein's Friday, the heroine visits a future California. The government, having found that those with college degrees earn more money, promptly issues every citizen a bachelor's degree to correct this inequitable situation.
Haha fair enough! Or more specifically - NYU recently (2022/2023) fired an organic chemistry professor for teaching a too-hard course - which he had taught the same way for decades - because now that SATs aren't a must for admissions, the student body can't hack it.
You're not making 300k as a tradie unless you run your own business. I don't know if I'd take it over blowing out my back and knees before I can retire.
Troof. I know a guy, friend's dad, who was pulling north of $300k running his own plumbing company. Corp plumbing, new builds mostly on construction sites. This was Northern VA / DC area.
His guys were making around $50-70k, though friend implied some could pull ballpark of 100k with long hours / 6 days.
I used to run data centers, and the master electricians who worked on my generators and ATS systems would pull 80-120, with no shortage of work. I seriously considered switching at one point, though in the long run network engineering is a better call.
Really? I looked up some data about working in the trades awhile back (so numbers maybe slightly higher in 2022 data than in my comment, but still close).
The U.S. Census Bureau lists the annual real median earnings at $41,535 in 2020 for all workers with earnings[4] and lists the annual median earnings at $56,287 in 2020 for people who worked full-time, year round. [1]
Plumber - median $56,330, demand growth, slower than average [2]
HVAC tech - median $50,590, demand growth, slower than average [3]
Electrician - median $56,900, demand growth average (actually 9%) [4]
Framer(Carpenter) - median $49,520, demand growth, slower than average [5]
Bricklayer(Mason) - median $47,710, declining demand. [6]
Software engineer - median $110,140, demand growth, higher than average [7]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_States
[2] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/plumbers-pipefitters-and-steamfitters.htm
[3] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/installation-maintenance-and-repair/heating-air-conditioning-and-refrigeration-mechanics-and-installers.htm
[4] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/electricians.htm
[5] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/carpenters.htm
[6] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/construction-and-extraction/brickmasons-blockmasons-and-stonemasons.htm
[7] https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/software-developers.htm
Keep in mind inflation biases in wages. Certain jobs, like software, tend to be disproportionately huddled into high inflation areas. So this drives wages up, while jobs like plumbers are spread about everywhere which (relatively) drives wages down.
So for instance Salary.com puts San Francisco skilled plumbers at a $90k median wage [1], electricians at $105k [2], etc.
This feels like a feedback loop where political parties defund public colleges, it becomes worse, they say "look how bad it is" to justify more cuts. It becomes worse...
EDIT. I do think there is also a phenomenon that over time corruption (administration) seeps into organizations. Wish we could tackle that directly instead of defunding which may be short sighted.
Dumping more money into college is like dumping more raw garbage onto your kitchen floor and complaining that it didn't solve the rat problem.
The problem with higher education is that the trough of unaccountable money is bottomless, and it attracts grifters, ideologues, lazy bureaucrats, and all other types of useless drains on society. None of the major problems in higher education are something you can pay to make go away.
This is definitely a problem. But we still need higher education as a society. I think there must be some third way between just throwing money into the pockets of university presidents and defunding it and creating an anti-intellectual society at a crisis point for America.
> But we still need higher education as a society.
This is always claimed, and quite enthusiastically.
I don't ask this rhetorically: what do we need it for? No one can seem to decide. When graduates can't get decent jobs that let them live, let alone pay back the student loans, there's a chorus of "it's not vocational school".
Yet, that's what many are seeking, what they need. If college doesn't serve that purpose, then we should at least reduce capacity by that much, shouldn't we?
Others say that it would be wrong to try to send everyone to vocational training, that the world's so much better when they get some sort of liberal arts education. That they're "better people" and "better citizens". Ignoring how politically fraught that is, and just assuming that it's true, no one can afford that. Only the rich were able to afford that for their children a century ago. We can't afford it as a country, because we're sending x100 more kids to do that, and it costs much more than x100 to send x100 to college. The government can't afford that. And if it tried, it would water down that liberal arts education to make it as cheap as possible, until it's worthless even for what you wanted it to be. It ends up being a way to extend keeping those kids out of the job market, so older people don't have quite so much competition.
If there ever was a third way, I think we missed the opportunity and that it no longer exists.
For me it's not about getting folks better jobs, it's about increasing access to general education. For those motivated, getting broad education makes them much more productive. Someone had to invent the computer, software, etc. It's so much faster to do that if there is a density of people around you with broad knowledge bases.
> It would be wrong to send everyone to vocational school
Agree with you here. Vocational schools are a better fit for many people and we should encourage them. In my experience, college classes are better when everyone is engaged. Likewise, vocational jobs like electricians are necessary and not lesser than college type jobs..
Would love if both paths were equally accessible and people could choose what fits their life.
> We can't afford it as a country
In the 90s we spent more on schools and had governmental budget surpluses. We also had higher taxes, but they werent so high that things were bad. Many people would agree the 90s were better than now.
> If there ever was a third way, I think we missed the opportunity and that it no longer exists.
Change is slow, but I think it's possible (especially on smaller local scales). We don't have to fix stuff 100% but just move in the right direction.
> For those motivated, getting broad education makes them much more productive.
That seems unlikely. It's unclear how the sorts of "broad education" that you mean could make them more productive pouring coffee, or running the cash register at the grocery store. Because that's where a great many of them end up.
Of course, working their barely-more-than-minimum wage jobs, with $40k, $80k, and sometimes far greater sums of student debt... it would have to be some incredible amount of productivity gains. Even then though, it doesn't seem that they themselves get any slice of those gains.
> Vocational schools are a better fit for many people and we should encourage them.
I don't think we can encourage those. I think we've spent decades undermining them, short-shrifting them, and in general, downplaying them. If people did start to want to attend them, it's unlikely that they have the capacity to expand. It's not entirely clear that these work either... much of the industry in the United States has evaporated entirely and there is only so much capacity to absorb additional plumbers and diesel mechanics.
This is a different sort of problem than I hinted at in the first comment. There is a problem of there being no viable paths to success for the majority of high school graduates, whether or not they go to college.
Already set up for failure (to one degree or another), tacking on any sort of educational debt is just chaining the boat anchors to their neck.
The natural reaction is to think about it on an individual level... "well, why can't that kid go get a STEM degree, or become an offshore welder, or become an artist and make a living selling sculptures from their bohemian loft apartment?". And for any single youth, for any 100 of them, these answers can make sense. But for all of them in total, these answers fall far short of what is needed. We can't employ 1% or even 12% of them, and call it a day. We need jobs and careers for 98 or 99% of them. It's fucked.
There's nothing special about higher education. Most departments have to fight for their budget. Higher education should pay more so it can compete. Hell, if you ask me, more universities should act as developers and landlords for student housing.
The Ivy Leagues maybe, but those aren't the schools worried about a lack of public money.
“If money doesn’t solve the problem, you aren’t using enough” seems to be the watchword. I wonder if there is some upper limit of spending where proponents of public schools, transit, police, universities, or healthcare will say “okay, you’re right. Spending didn’t help”.
> This feels like a feedback loop where political parties defund public colleges, it becomes worse, they say "look how bad it is" to justify more cuts. It becomes worse...
What cuts? Spending on public college is up and spending on private colleges is way up.
It's interesting that administration and spending has gone up at the same time funding has gone down.
My argument is that defunding isn't doing anything to combat the higher ed corruption. It's hurting students and leading to folks (rightfully) questioning the value of college. This leads to a society that isn't educated and makes it difficult to compete globally.
Would love if we could have public pressure to both fix higher ed corruption and also fund public schools as an investment in America's future (and maybe even self defense).
>It's interesting that administration and spending has gone up at the same time funding has gone down.
It's because state funding has become a small fraction of total income for many universities. It sounds counter-intuitive but giving universities more money will not solve the cost problem. University spending is out of control
It was “defund education, replace and enhance current funding with students’ and parents’ future funds, enjoy lower taxes (during the first half of scheme)”. During the latter half, you get to watch the purchasing price of the dollar go down as the untenable debt is papered over.
My advice to all high school graduates is that you should not go to college if you don't already know exactly what you want to major on, and have at least some idea of what career path you plan to pursue.
This is how I started my collegiate journey. I made enough money at my minimum wage job to pay for my entire community college's quarter's fees up front. It really helped me figure out how and where I wanted to pursue higher education.
Did my first two years there to get an associate's and then transferred to an in-state school where the tuition was a bit more expensive but much less than the average college student's.
I took an intro to philosophy course in community college where the professor was passionate about teaching it, and would happily play with ideas with students. We had 15 students in our course, and he'd sit us down and discuss our papers on the books and readings assigned for the course, and generally loved it. He had to - he wasn't being paid a lot for teaching at the community college, so it had to be a passion.
I had to take another intro to philosophy course at the university. There were 90 people in the course in a small lecture hall. We were assigned many of the same books and readings, but they weren't discussed in any detail or with any insight, our papers weren't carefully marked, and it felt like not even the professor cared as this was a course that checked a humanities requirement everyone had to take. The professor was tenured, and had to teach at least one course in addition to whatever else he did for the school (which wasn't clear to use as students).
I learned more for less at community college, and some of the readings and discussions we had still float into my mind sometimes. The only thing I remember about my university philosophy professor is that he'd sometimes pace at the front of the lecture hall with a baseball bat and when he made a point he thought was good he'd pretend he was hitting a home run with the bat.
Never say never, but I do agree a gap year working with a bit of travel can help people get a much more realistic perspective on what they are embarking upon before going to college.
One thing people always seem to overlook is that college is really, really, really super fun. I'm not being facetious! It's uniquely fun and interesting opportunity that was easily worth the ~$100/mo I'll be paying for the rest of my life.
So is maxing out your credit card and going on an epic Spring Break, but we don't pretend that those kinds of vacations should be subsidized by the state and given special tax privileges like Colleges.
Many more people enjoy the four or five year paid holiday component than enjoy the intellectual stimulation component.
> “Research on college boredom is thin but confirms the continuity of pain. A study of British college students found 59% were bored in half or more of their lectures. Only 2% claimed to find none of their lectures boring.34”
Excerpt From
The Case against Education
Bryan Caplan
“34. Mann and Robinson 2009, pp. 249–50.”
Most people I know treat a 4 year degree as some form of blue collar work placement program. There is no consideration for education, but instead just minimum required criteria to qualify for a job exactly matching the educational major. No wonder so many people are disappointed and that they lack passion and competence for their work.
This is why I tell people if they really want to learn to program learn on their own. Get a degree in the humanities (English, Art History, Literature, History) to learn composition and more formally correct communication. If they really want to learn computer science theory do it as a masters. I get the feeling most people don't really want to learn to program as instead they want to jump straight into higher paid employment.
I had this mindset when I went to UNC Chapel Hill 20 years ago and studied humanities. As a software engineer for 15 years now, I wish I'd studied something more in the vein of your work placement program. Having in-person instruction and academic rigor for a subject like Chemistry, Engineering or Computer Science is the key to really mastering it. Everything I learned in my Philosophy and Art History courses I could have gained independently through reading, debate, and conversation with friends or in other extra-curricular settings.
If I'd pursued a career in academia, or maybe law, I might feel differently but even then I'm not sure an undergrad English or Art History degree is worth anything approaching the typical cost.
Before everyone starts hyperventilating, based on the data Pews provided, the biggest reason for this drop was because trust in higher education from individuals with no college education dropped from 54% in 2015 to 29% in 2023, and primarily Republicans from 59% in 2015 to 19% in 2023.
It looks like a feedback loop caused by culture wars and anti-elitism.
In addition to the reasons others have mentioned (high tuition costs and political and social indoctrination) a separate reason is universities are failing at providing useful, practical skill sets. A course on how to use a spreadsheet and other business software has much value, especially to those from disadvantaged backgrounds. A basic statistics course that includes, say, Darrel Huff’s “How to Lie with Statistics” has value to both the individual and society.
It would interesting to see if the reputation of community colleges have held up, as they have a bigger focus on offering practical courses and at a lower price point.
A strong case can be made, i think, for people who are struggling with the cost of education, to consider trades, now more than ever. especially in electrical. Trades people are aging pretty significantly as a group, and there is going to be a surge in electrical that will need lots of people. This is true in general, but especially electrical. I went to college when it was cheap and so there really wasn't much of a concern. If i were a young person now, i doubt i could afford it, and trades would likely be a big win for me. Many a day, even now, i wake up and wish i had taken that path.
My tradespeople relatives; uncles, my brother, etc... tell me they wish they had gone to college. My brother actually did and went from a (quite good from what I could tell) general contractor to an engineer (not the software kind). He couldn't believe that he could get a day off work and still get paid for it, and he got health insurance for the first time in his life. They also make money that's much more in line with the national averages (like $60K/year; a number that would be scoffed at here) than the wild several hundred thousand dollar fantasies I see people here engage in.
And yet if you look at teachers, parents and the general milieu, there is an idea that everyone should go to college, and that going into the trades or working immediately after completing highschool makes you lesser than.
Having any degree and some social skills can get you a white collar job. While not glamorous it beats shoveling holes (unless you're smart/practical/brave enough to make good money with some sort of physical labour).
That's useful to you since you can make a somewhat easy living. Useful to society? I mean sort of, in most jobs you achieve _something_. The fact that we're inefficient and often build the wrong thing that's useless is more of a failure of the human race in general..
That's credential inflation. Saying we require any degree to do this job means the degree is irrelevant. It's like Occupational licensing. Putting up barriers between people with low paying jobs to pursuing higher paying jobs which cannot be overcome without sinking a lot of cost. This country in the past did fine without requiring that license, as do many competing countries today.
I don't think it's purely inflation. A degree shows you can show up to a place for 3-4 years and do something. That's all you need for a lot of jobs so preferring those who have a piece of paper saying they can do that makes some sense.
I live in Europe where university is free or quite cheap so asking young people to do it for a couple years isn't the worst.. it's quite fun. And I say this as someone who dropped out to work in software engineering instead.
I suppose there's a difference when many educational programs in the US leave students with 6 figure debts that saddle them with the equivalent of a mortgage before they ever enter the labor force.
Previous Gallup polling found that Democrats expressed concern about the costs, while Republicans registered concern about politics in higher education.
I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration. However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views.
I went to university 20 years ago, and it was common for people to challenge one another, regardless of their views, and not get punished for it. You can't seem to do that anymore, at least safely and without punishment. If you can't challenge your professors, can't challenge one another, are you learning or just being indoctrinated?
I think the people concerned about the price of college are basing their opinions on actual contact with the educational system: they generally have kids and paying for education is a serious challenge most families face. I wonder how many of the “college is politically intolerant” opinions are based on actual student dissatisfaction, and how much of that is based on sensational news reporting? (The same news reporting that has half of America convinced that you’ll be cut down by gunfire five minutes after arriving in any American city.)
My experience from having conservative friends with kids in college is that the kids are mostly concerned with work and having a good time, and the parents are mostly concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.
> I wonder how many of the “college is politically intolerant” opinions are based on actual student dissatisfaction, and how much of that is based on sensational news reporting?
> More than 80% of students report self-censoring their viewpoints at their colleges at least some of the time, with 21% saying they censor themselves often.
> Two in five (40%) students say they are comfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor, down 5 percentage points from last year.
> Two-thirds of students (66%) say it is acceptable to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus, up 4 percentage points from last year.
You make a good point that news reporting tends to exaggerate the frequency of sensational events, which includes cancellations. But that's sort of how censorship and chilling effects usually work: make an example of someone who sticks his head up, and intimidate a hundred others.
> My experience from having conservative friends with kids in college is that the kids are mostly concerned with work and having a good time, and the parents are mostly concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.
That doesn't mean the parents are wrong. "Eat your vegetables" and "Engage with your political opponents' views" are both healthy and possibly-unpleasant things, which it wouldn't be surprising if kids didn't appreciate the importance of.
> how much of that is based on sensational news reporting? (The same news reporting that has half of America convinced that you’ll be cut down by gunfire five minutes after arriving in any American city.)
You’re even less likely to die in a mass shooting event than a random criminal act. Do you think that people who make a big deal about mass shootings and say that it’s extremely important that we address the issue are also being driven by “sensational news reporting”?
Absolutely, yes. Especially when you consider that the definition of mass shooting changes depending on the database being used and activists in the anti-gun lobby will shift between them when its politically convenient.
https://www.policemag.com/patrol/news/15310860/half-of-surve...
Half of Survey's Very Liberal Respondents Believe 1,000 or More Unarmed Black Men Killed by Police in 2019
The Washington Post database says the number was 12. The Mapping Police Violence database say the number was 27.
As a parent, my son and I are both mostly concerned with his ability to learn and that he has a good college experience.
Of the two of us, he's more concerned that I am about the indoctrination in some of his required courses. Then again, he's significantly more conservative than I am. And he's also the one who has to go through it.
In the last few years, a lot of parents have struggled with children having bad thought patterns that lead to mental health problems. Including me.
I am fine with my kids disagreeing with me politically. I encouraged them to explore the world, and encounter different ideas. I didn't realize the full extent of what they were encountering until the general mental health trends showed up in my house.
A lot of the same bad ideas that are spreading on social media, are also rampant at college campuses. My son is required to take courses that promote ideologies which both of us see as being tied to becoming suicidal and depressed.
And then people like you show up and laugh at people like me for being concerned about the ideas that our children are being indoctrinated with. Next time, do you want to be the one to pick your daughter up from a psych ward after a suicide attempt? How would you like to get a call from the FBI about the self-harm video that your child posted to TikTok?
I've had to deal with both of those things. The next time you feel tempted to laugh, put yourself in my shoes. Ask yourself what I should think of your laughter.
Agreed. The conservative persecution complex is a real thing you see all the time. The media is biased! The justice system is biased! The education system is biased! Big pharma, the UN, social media, big tech, all biased against conservative ideas.
Convincing people that these biases are real allows conservatives to prop up their own purposely-biased alternatives. Fox News and OAN to counter the liberal media. Private Christian schools, home schooling, and for-profit schools to counter the liberal education system. Truth Social and Elon Muskification of Twitter to counter liberal big tech.
Read https://www.thefp.com/p/you-are-the-last-line-of-defense for a perspective from a liberal lesbian Jew who is concerned about censorship and current progressive ideologies. She opposes most of the alternatives that you criticize.
Admitted. That speech was given to a conservative audience. But she remains firmly liberal in the same sense that it was generally understood back when Bill Clinton was President.
Frankly, I can’t deal with the likes of Bari Weiss, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jordan Peterson, etc, who’ve basically cashed in on their “I’m a progressive, bro!” creds to grift conservatives by telling them things they want to hear. They’ve made very successful careers out of both sidesing everything under the sun.
There’s a reason Weiss was invited to talk at a Federalist Society event here. And it’s not because the Federalist Society is open minded to progressive ideas.
I read that as you're so firmly into an us vs them mindset that you slot everyone into one of those buckets. And so anyone with a dissenting opinion becomes either an evil conservative, or a stooge of the evil conservatives.
What does a dissenting opinion look like? We've literally gotten to the point where MLK Jr's "I have a dream" speech would have gotten him kicked off of campuses for being racist. No seriously, https://pacificlegal.org/martin-luther-king-jr-would-have-fa... discusses a legal case which makes that clear.
For my part, I'll gladly stand with MLK. These days, that means I can no longer be a Democrat. I'm obviously not a Republican either, which leaves me as an Independent.
As I said, there really are more than 2 sides here.
Well, as a moderate MLK fan, let me share one of my favorite MLK quotes with you :)
"First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councillor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action'; who paternalistically feels that he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time; and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a 'more convenient season.' Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
Since the 1980s, the black-white income gap has been rising. Two contributing causes are racially biased law enforcement outcomes (particularly from the escalation of the drug war), and the abandonment of school bussing.
When I've talked with progressives about the importance of fixing inequities in education, I've generally received excuses about how expensive and unaffordable that is. Yes, it is expensive. But because we choose not to deal with it, the ones who bear the real cost are the blacks who can least afford it. See https://darrellowens.substack.com/p/half-of-black-students-c... for more.
Democratic policies have focused on things like affirmative action, and equity in hiring.
I see affirmative action as virtue signaling tokenism. It is far cheaper to admit a few more blacks to universities than to fix schools.
I see equity in hiring as sheer cynicism. We have chosen to not fix our schools, but we can force companies to treat blacks that we failed to educate the same as whites who did learn. And then we can punish companies again for failing to promote underqualified blacks as fast as qualified whites. If we as a state taught the blacks, and offered them support services for the gaps that we left, then it would make sense to penalize companies for any difference in outcomes. I'd be happy with that outcome. But when it is the state that failed, we are shooting the messenger to penalize companies who notice that the emperor has no clothes!
The state should find ways to fix its own failures. If it did, perhaps it would realize that it's cheaper in the long run to not fail in the first place!
I could go on. For example San Francisco is currently facing the results of the BLM slogan, "Defund the police!" BLM protesters were happy to amplify any black who was willing to repeat that message. But surveys of blacks found that most DIDN'T want the police defunded! I've heard interviews from blacks who tried to say that. They reported that they were shouted down by whites.
Apparently, in the name of recognizing that black lives matter, we're supposed to only listen to blacks who say things that whites approve of?
Now bring that thought I told you to hold back, and re-read. Who sounds more like they have the shallow understanding of MLK's white moderates? Me, or progressives?
Yep there's a baffling disconnect between widespread reporting on college "intolerance" and the reality. "Coddling of the American Mind" has a lot of mindshare but cites stupendously low numbers of "attempted disinvitations" as evidence of widespread left wing intolerance among students while moving the discussion right past actual nazi groups flyering Evergreen College and sending death threats to students.
My alma mater is the University of Virginia. A wealthy conservative was so incensed by a sign saying "Fuck UVA" on a lawn dorm room that he went to campus to physically tear it down. This man was later appointed to the university Board of Visitors by the governor.
My wife is a professor at a different university. There are groups of trained reactionary students who very carefully harass some of her colleagues and friends for being trans, for teaching african american history, and for teaching climate science in ways that ride right up against the edge of legal protection. 18 year olds don't know how to do this without help.
If universities are commie monocultures, then why would these things be happening? And surely if universities were commie monocultures, we'd see the boogeyman departments like history and gender studies getting all the funding they want when what I actually see is these departments being completely unable to hire and all of the growth going to computer science programs.
I think perhaps the grandparent commentator MUST be referencing the right-wing founding of alternative universities due to their anger that their worldview doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Surely they aren't supporting the notion that universities are commie monocultures.
I don't think that's true. The quote says "Republicans registered concern about politics in higher education" and then the post says "I think both parties are right" and then describes "a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views" in parallel construction to the left concern that the "cost of a university education has skyrocketed."
This very clearly talking about conservatives being concerned about left wing political indoctrination on campus. I think that this is blown wildly out of proportion.
It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian views,” it is only to the extent that the rest of the students get behind it.
But I also think the punished views are at most socially punished in all but outlier cases. Having worked in higher ed for a bit and then transitioned into tech, I can say that students are over quick (on both left and right) to chalk up a bad score (read: “b” when I thought I deserved an “a”) to a biased attitude toward content rather than a substantive objection to the quality of argument. One thing that is true of humans in general: we will more easily find the holes in the arguments we disagree with, and what’s more, most students have similar ish ideas (especially the “contrarian” ones), so after two years of teaching a class on (say) the history of the civil war or gender in 18th century literature, the arguments are going to be familiar enough that you can just pattern match on them.
It's more than that. And it's not just a "last 20 years thing", it probably goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, if not before.
There is a subtle selection bias going on. Like-minded people congregate together. A college professor will favor students who are agreeable to his politics, and will offer encouragement and extra effort. Those students are likely to go into academia themselves (and those who don't act as casual/amateur recruiters out in the private sector, to that university and even to the professor). Balances shift, glacially. At some point, it becomes perceptible enough that some students actively avoid those professors, programs, and universities. It's polarized (the polarization was noted decades ago, before our current mess).
The side that favors this process gives its biggest shit-eating grin, says that there is no such thing, and if there is, isn't it the other side's fault? The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s).
It's very real. It's not a good situation. It's not very "diverse". It leads to warped perception from both camps. One now thinks it is the champion of reason and logic, of science (and it's not). The other side grows to distrust those very same things (we'll all feel the damage from that, if it's not already happening).
> The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s).
People have been complaining about schools indoctrinating children for thousands of years. Nothing is actually new.
God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. Red Scare nonsense got lots of faculty members fired for being communist sympathizers in the 50s. Students were shot and killed by the national guard in the 60s.
The fun thing is that none of that makes claim that they weren't communist sympathizers. Saying anything about bad regarding soviet internment camps was likely to get you some very funny looks in more than a few circles well into the 80s. The people that knew about them, and knew how things were over in the USSR would literally drop down to a whisper when discussing these things at the dinner table even in private company.
Was it right to fire the professors? Debatable. Were they communist sympathizers? Most likely, considering the influence of the USCP and the money that Moscow was pumping into it.
Remember, until the late 40s, or even the early 60s, Socialism, and it's final "logical conclusion" Communism was regarded as potentially sound political and economic theory by a majority of intellectuals, and most definitely Hollywood. (To be fair, Hollywood was pretty staunchly pro-soviet from the 20s onwards).
This is such a strange comment and is so removed from my lived experience that I question whether its even real. Where is this indoctrination happening? The vast majority of my classes were dedicated to learning the subject and there was rarely any room for deviation. Especially not deviation that turned to religion or politics. Even when discussing religious texts in my philosophy classes, it was through the lens of an academic. The same way that we discussed plato and aristotle. There was open discussion and if the conversation turned aggressive or wasn't going anywhere it was quickly shut down. We all had a curriculum to follow and certain debates can be taken anywhere or happen outside of class.
If you wanted to challenge your professors, it was about your grade and that was usually done during office hours. Professors are humans and they all have their quirks but I didn't experience anything out of the norm while talking to them or hearing about their interaction with others.
As for challenging each other, I think we did more learning from each other than anything else and our opinions did change over time but that's not indoctrination, just part of growing up.
You say you went to university 20 years ago but did you end up going back afterwards? If so, what are the differences you've personally noticed?
Education is indoctrination. [0][1] It is what you sign up for when you take a course. It is trivial to reject the principles of any college course on legitimate grounds; for one thing, you can just reject the axioms. Some degree of belief is required to accept any form of human knowledge.
Maybe the problem is that indoctrination often goes beyond the scope of the course. If that is indeed happening, many would agree that it should stop.
[0] Merriam-Webster:
Indoctrinate:
1
: to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle
2
: to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH
[1] Wikipedia:
Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies (see doctrine).
There must be some “law of bureaucratic empire building” that discusses the inevitable headcount bloat caused by no accountability and ever increasing budgets.
It's not that hard to see parallels between economies with near-zero interest rates and academic institutions that have an equal almost-unlimited money supply with near-zero risk (one cannot get rid of student debt in bankruptcy court).
They hired a lot of admins because that’s how they make money?
If you’re President heading a department of 10,000 vs a department of 5,000 it’s much easier to justify doubling your salary relative to what you were earning just a few years ago even in what has historically been a very low inflation period.
I think bloat like that just happens in successful organizations due to internal empire building. They aren't going to return that money to the investors, and aren't going to lower their prices, so that money is just there for the taking. Someone justifies it with whatever project they think helps them politically and voila.
> They hired a lot of admins because that’s how they make money?
That's nonsense.
They hired lots of admins, because they had lots of projects needing managing. They had lots of projects because they were building more buildings, bigger buildings, installing computer labs, high tech equipment, bootstrapping new schools, and a thousand other things. They had more groundskeepers, more janitors, new catering services (for all the other departments who were constantly doing things). On and on and on.
They were doing all these things to make the university look more attractive to students. Students who would choose another university, if theirs looked like the dumpy little hovel it was back in the early 1900s. Students who would take their tuition and fees with them to the other universities.
But in doing so, they were increasing the cost. But the students didn't care, someone else was paying for it, not the students themselves. Except then, the students were on the hook for it, because we slipped in student loans and took away the federal grants. (This, by the way, goes down in the history of the universe of the most evil grift ever... the students were paying for it, in the future that they were too short-sighted to see, with interest, and no bankruptcy protection.)
Yet it's still worse than this. Because those buildings and labs and fancy dorms that seem like resort hotels... those weren't paid for in cash. They were financed too. So the university is on the hook for decades to pay for this shit. And those buildings will require expensive maintenance for decades, so they're on the hook for the much-embiggened staff just to maintain them.
Not only did they bloat out the cost of education for each student that attends, they've done it in a way where they can't ever un-bloat it. For one, doing so means enrollment would drop (they're no longer the fanciest, glitziest university), but also that campus would literally fall apart and become unusable like some movie set for a post-apocalyptic thriller.
It was never greed. It was bad planning by people who think they're great at it.
Are you saying the bloated administration in a symptom of the political and social indoctrination going on in Universities? That's interesting. Can you elaborate?
Presumably they mean that universities now hire lots of 'Deans of Politically Correct Thing' whereas when I went to school 30 years ago we had basically 1 dean per college.
Yes. These administrators are not teaching classes, they are not marking papers/exams.
It's not unlike the Soviet Commissariat. They exist to enforce a political ideology, not do anything productive in reality.
"which I believe is due to bloated administration."
In my state's public university system, the amount of funding provided by the state to that system per full-time equivalent student has dropped to its lowest level (in 2017 according to the source I checked) since 1995. So the state commitment to funding is lower on a per-student basis. Universities have responded by raising tuition and other costs. All of those facts mean that the real, out-of-pocket cost to students has gone up.
Looking at what information I can find on staff counts, the flagship state university data report in 1999/2000 shows a "grand total" of 10,000ish employees and a quick web search shows 13,000ish in 2023. I think we would have to slice and dice those numbers much better to see what the actual cost differences were for those two time periods.
The number of students seems to have grown to about 128% of 1999/2000 total enrollment numbers to today's total.
There is a deeper discussion to be had about the policy of funding state universities. Polls like the article show all segments of the public surveyed have declining confidence in higher education. That suggests to me that in general, people will be less inclined to have tax dollars invested into the public university system because they may see it as wasteful or not efficient.
There is some much to unpack around universities and cost . . . and, of course, private university tuition costs have exploded. Although at those types of institutions, I think many non-name-brand (or non-ivy-ish) schools have a very high "sticker" cost that maybe no students actually pay . . .
You've been out of university 20 years. Is it possible your impression of today's university experience is biased by "the media", i.e. whatever makes for the most clickbait headlines?
I also went to university 20 years ago, and don't really remember challenging professors or other classmates. You largely showed up to the huge lectures, turned in your solved problems, and took exams. The oddest experience I remember having was that we used US units in the thermodynamics class, which was a first for me (high school science was all metric). I also paid $750/semester because it was a state school and I was a resident.
I really don't understand what people think goes on at universities. Sure, some students in their personal time have controversial takes on things. The vast majority of students are just doing their coursework, though. (And things are probably different if you are going for a more liberal arts-y education instead of a state-school engineering degree.)
I think your view of current state of higher ed is distorted by the media you consume, and what stories make click-worthy headlines. Students challenge their professors all the time, probably more than they did 20 years ago. Just because certain news outlets and social media make sure you hear about a handful of students who had a bad time with one professor, often because they themselves were picking a fight rather than trying to have a fair conversation. But those stories have always happened. And likewise there's plenty of healthy discourse in college classrooms that you don't hear about or experience, since you aren't actually in college.
> I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration.
I think you're mistaking the how for the why. Prices raise as long as customers tolerate it, often for lack of competition — e.g. the low number of prestigious universities to land a good job. They raise costs through bloated administration, but if customers simply stopped paying, they would be forced to become more efficient and spend less on that.
In fact, giving students more options to pay tuition over time indirectly increases prices, since they become capable of paying more — hence taking more debt — than they would otherwise.
Can you say more about what you've observed around "can't challenge your professors"? My professor friends would all be delighted to be challenged more in class. (The problem they're having now, especially post-Covid, is more often lack of engagement from their students.)
And my memory of college from 30 years ago is that the debate about what we now call "cancel culture" was just as fraught; it's just that it was called something different by US conservatives back then: "political correctness".
I think the misunderstanding here is that there is no campaign of 'indoctrination' -- rather both are caused by the same phenomenon.
As universities increasingly operate like businesses, their administrations create business cultures -- stage-managed PR, no 'offense', etc.
The issue in both cases is that universities are supposed to operate outside usual market forces and be run for the sake of inquiry, to the (very long run) benefit of society.
There's a lot of irony in right wing people decrying allegedly 'left wing' campus policies which are none other than the symptom of applications of a right wing economic agenda.
Such is the irony always here with market solutions proffered by people with values: market mechanisms do not operate on values; and without regulatory floors, tend to dispense with them rapidly.
This is what has happened to universities over the last decade: the throwing away of high-risk, low-(market)-reward institutional values
I finished my masters quite recently and this has not been my experience, although I'm german. I wonder if you have real experience or if it's just what you've read/heard?
Because if you've ever taken any social science/philosophy seminars, they don't do anything else then arguing. Arguing about texts, arguing about each others opinions etc. Also arguing against the professors opinion.
I don't agree at all about the indoctrination part.
The idea to keep politics and higher education separate is laughable. You either create engineers without ANY exposure to social issues or you have politics in higher ed. Having political opinions is not doing science but trying to find scientific evidence is.
The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past.
The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely.
Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2.
Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago.
And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus.
The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face.
The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.
In the past students were not only for free speech, but actively fought for it. By contrast older individuals tended to be less supportive of such. Now those roles have largely swapped where age is, by far, the biggest predictor of somebody's position on freedom of speech (younger = less). And so the widespread censorship on college campuses is met with relatively little opposition.
If there's a protest related to speech on college campuses now a days it's more like to be calling for more censorship, or cancelling somebody who said something perceived as offensive, rather than opposition to such behaviors. Hence one of the many reasons confidence in higher education is collapsing. In my mind higher education with censorship is teetering on being an oxymoron.
The "widespread censorship" is not widespread. The number of "attempted disinvitations" (not even actual disinvitations) is not even visible on a chart of invited speakers at college campuses across time.
There's quite an excellent poll on free speech on campuses available here. [1] And by every reasonable datum students feel that free speech on campuses is dying. For instance some 65% feel that "the climate at their school or on their campus prevents some people from saying things they believe because others might find it offensive." There's a million other interesting and informative datums in the survey as well. Notably it was also held after 2020, so we get the COVID impact as well.
And now it is right wing actors getting blackballed.
It is people who don't agree with gay marriage like the former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich getting ejected.
The funny thing is you had discrimination against Jews on Campus a hundred years ago, and today, on entirely different premises
I agree with both, but the "indoctrination" isn't some liberal political plot for censorship. Because colleges are not educational institutions, they are investment businesses first and foremost with a side gig as a research institution that just so happens to teach people.
They're going to censor any reputationally damaging speech like any and every business in the US. It just so happens that a lot of the right-wing talking points aren't attractive to a left-leaning student body. It's all brand protection, and we see that now with a lot of colleges struggling to find a way to handle campus talks, orgs, and protests about the Israel-Palestine conflict since the public left-leaning response is not lining up with the political left-leaning response.
>The cost of a university education has skyrocketed
Citation required ... the headline prices for colleges have gone up considerably, but so has the amount of scholarship and grant funding (i.e. universities discounting from publicly advertised prices).
In fact, the average net cost-of-attendance (including tuition, fees, housing and food) for private, four-year colleges in the US is - in inflation-adjusted dollars - slightly lower now than it was in 2006-07 and has been trending down since 2016-17.
This is also the reason why annual student loan borrowing peaked in 2010-11 (again, in inflation adjusted dollars), has been reducing year-on-year, and is now down over 35% since then.
People obsess over the headline prices, which are almost never the prices actually paid. Any kind of sensible comparison has to be done on the basis of actual net cost-of-attendance.
Is there some place off Earth away from all these lessers you have to slum it with?
What puts you above the other billions on the planet that they should validate your sensibilities and engage in vacuous rhetorical debate when we can all clearly see how day to day life works?
Really tired of the puerile role play output of Karens, Special Boys, “free thinkers”. This planet and day to day is it.
You’re not that smart or saying anything that novel.
> However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views.
There is a world of difference between a "campaign of political and social indoctrination" and "worldview that doesn't hold up to the barest of scrutiny."
Unless you're referencing the clear bias in universities in the US founded by GOP folks upset their particular indoctrination (religious or political)doesn't stand up to scrutiny, then not that were there were an organized campaign of political and social indoctrination for leftists that academics would lead the charge to attack it and get funding to both study it and find alternatives to it.
Turns out when you encourage people to think for themselves they do.
