I wonder how it can be determined that tuition wouldn't have increased as much as it has in the absence of eussidized loans. Would salaries be even lower than what they are? Would administration not have increased as much?
We aren't frivolously spending money. We raise tuition because the bills have to be paid.
The ballooning of the 'administration' staff at my wife's university over the last 20 or so years is the same type of staff explosion seen at larger public companies. Except that those companies are responsible to share holders, and thus constrict when profits cannot be maintained. Whereas the University can forgo layoffs by increasing tuition, and know that the federal (and private) loan system will fill the gap. I cannot remember there ever being even a 2% layoff of staff at the university, let alone something you'd see from MS/IBM/etc.
1. state budgets for universities are cut for political reasons not having much of anything to do with the university itself. budget shortfalls must be made up from other sources, primarily from tuition increases.
2. increased student enrollment due to increasing economic and social pressure for people to get a college degree. more students requires more facilities and more staff, which requires more funding.
3. natural aging of physical plant of university facilities, combined with other long-term maintenance costs (pensions, for example) that have historically been underfunded and now need more funding.
4. a price spiral relationship between availability of student lending and tuition costs. tuition costs increase so student lending amounts increase so tuition costs increase etc.
5. real actual greed. this isn't universally true but it can't be dismissed. some universities will just raise tuition simply because they can.
Increasing Fed subsidies tends to de-fund Colleges at the State budget level..its very counter-in-thinking as the more Fed subsidies the greater the student enrollments..
Thus if the Fed decreases student subsidies student enrollments will decrease and thus serve to reverse de-funding colleges at the State level..
ITS NOT ANY INDIVIDUAL BUDGET ITEM FOLKS..that is an illusion
At a community college, you won't see any of this.
Community colleges are not representative of bigger colleges. They aren't supported as much (as you say), and tuition is drastically cheaper.
Given that this is a global audience, and that even within the US the salary disparity across regions and industries is tremendous, could you be more specific than "not exorbitant"? My guess, from having a parent who taught at a likely even lower paying institution in rural Wisconsin, is that real numbers would make your case better than a euphemism to which people will attach their own expectations.
This was pretty obvious over the past 10 years in the University of California system -- every time state funding was cut or tuition was raised, the availability of financial aid, including loans, was used to defend the decision.
How many qualified people - currently working as PTLs or postdocs - would happily take your place for 10% less money? [1]
If the answer is 10+ (from what I recall of the academic job market, that seems accurate within STEM, outside of STEM it might be 100+) then you are frivolously spending money.
[1] Gerald Epstein elaborates on this argument, though he of course applies it to finance rather than education. https://promarket.org/rents-high-cost-high-finance-qa-gerald...
Certain cocoa farms in Africa have decided to do away with frivolous salaries by using slave labor. I am certainly not a slave but the point ought to be clear nonetheless. That we can find someone willing to do a job for x% less is not evidence that the current wage us frivolous. Woe would be the lives of most of humanity if your view were widely accepted. We don't need a race to the bottom in this area.
I understand that you want to keep collecting your paycheck while the next guy on the totem pole makes $12,000/year as a PTL. Similarly, the Donald wants to build a giant wall of ice guarded by rapers, bastards, criminals and political exhiles to prevent unskilled white men from losing their rents (while keeping the Mexicans in poverty).
I guess that in my morality, rent seekers are evil and Trump is a bad person for appealing to them. You seem to disagree.
I'm sure there are qualified people who would do my job for less. And there will likely be qualified people who would do the job less than my replacement. Eventually we can find a local minimum. Great. We saved a buck or two. There are costs (non-financial) to society for creating a system in which the race to the bottom is the norm. I do not wish to live in a such a society. If conditions are bad enough you'll find someone willing to work for less. But this incentivizes creating a situation in which times are tough for most people. I do not wish to live in such a society.
Considering my salary to be frivolous because a local min on my wage has not been achieved is not in line with how most people use the term as it relates to wages.
I didn't bring up Hitler because it wasn't relevant. Slavery is given your apparent view that anything greater than the local min for wages is a frivolous expenditure. It does not require much thought to see that the pursuit of the local min for wages can, and does, lead to slavery in some cases.
I'm sure there are qualified people who would do my job for less...Eventually we can find a local minimum. Great. We saved a buck or two.
More students can now attend college (since costs are lower) and those that do have less debt. But I guess that's less important than keeping the rents flowing to yourself.
Trump 2016! Yeaaah! Don't want no Mexicans to take our jorbs!
But this incentivizes creating a situation in which times are tough for most people.
This is exactly the situation we have in the software industry. What does "times are tough" mean to you? People with six figure salaries and indoor jobs forced to endure the indignities of a 20 minute standup?
...the pursuit of the local min for wages can, and does, lead to slavery in some cases.
By "slavery", do you refer to the normal definition (namely people involuntarily working under threat of violence)? Or do you have some less common definition?
His professors weren't rent seekers and they got paid better than me. See it's possible to live in a system in which people make a reasonable wage without being rent seekers or others getting screwed. I'm using rent seeker in the pejorative sense that term denotes in colloquial speech. It's not a zero sum game. Society was better for the GI Bill. Even those who didn't directly use it. My uncles, while not being as well off as my dad, were better off overall. They got out of poverty as the economy got better.
We had a system in which college didn't put people in penury, didn't keep rents flowing to teachers, and was an overall benefit to dociety.
I grew up in Panama. During Noriega times were tough. People did things for far less than they normally would have. After all, the value of a glass of water to someone dying of thirst is far greater than it is to me in my present condition. There's a point where the race to the bottom becomes dehumanizing. There's more than maximizing/minimizing dollars. I feel sorry for people who can't see that. I've never met you personally but from posts I've seen of yours you appear to be a libertarian with a reverence to market forces. In a world of 7 billion people I think most libertarian ideas don't scale well.
I used slavery in the normal sense of the word. Think hard enough and you'll see that man in desperation can volunteer to be indentured but when the situation isn't so bleak he will try to leave. Of course his desire to increase his wages may lead to a violent response from the employer. Especially if the practice has become normative.
Perhaps you think that rent is good, but that's a different statement. I'm sure that most Trump supporters also feel they deserve rents at the expense of Mexicans/those who might otherwise employ Mexicans.
I'm not sure what "colloquial speech" you refer to or what you mean by "pejorative sense". As far as I know "rent seeker" is a technical term used primarily by economists to refer to people who take actions to seek/preserve their rent. If you feel it's pejorative, that's only because on some level you recognize that harming others for personal gain is not a good thing.
How would an American wall keep Mexicans in poverty?
Mexicans are free to create wealth themselves or by trading with the entire remaining world. They could even still sell to the US or work for US companies, just without moving there.
If Trump was going to cordon Mexico off, there would be something to that argument. But they have access to two oceans.
I'm not claiming that Mexico is a middle income country solely because of US immigration restrictions - far from it. Pointing out their trade opportunities would be a valid counterpoint to that claim. I think most of Mexico's economic problems are entirely self inflicted (same as for the US, Venezuela, or most other countries).
And if Mexico's economic problems are self-inflicted then it makes perfect sense not to invite people who inflict such problems.
Note that I never advocated allowing Mexicans to vote; on the contrary, I'd like to disenfranchise bad American voters rather than enfranchising bad Mexican ones.
There's simply no realistic path where people move into a large, modern European* country and remain second class residents with limited influence over the government. This state won't last a single generation.
* USA included by heritage if not by geography
Well yeah, of course their kids would get to vote.
When an 18-year old can take on tens of thousands in loans with mostly no strings attached (well, no bankruptcy) so that they can attend a big college which is little more than a summer camp with some classes thrown in, you've got a problem.
I'm a phd student at a state school. As a graduate student I am allowed to take on up to 240k(!). I love learning and I enjoy school, but anyone who has been in academia for any length of time at all and doesn't realize it's largely a scam with good intentions which is designed to pass money around baffles me.
Any education reform that doesn't cut back on loans and rethink how we do it is broken. The amount of money that gets poured into my school combined with the incompetence I've seen at so many levels is astounding.
The education system in America is largely broken. Many high schools are worthless because it's expected everyone's going to go to college and take remedial classes in order to get a piece of paper which they probably won't use for their job and they'll spend the rest of their 20s and 30s paying off.
Yeah, because it's worse than bankruptcy. You can't even get rid of the student loan debt if you go bankrupt. I'd say that's a bigger string attached than any other type of loan available. This is the ultimate string of death and why we're in this crisis right now!
I mean these are people who largely aren't qualified for the debt otherwise having either no job or a low paying job and little credit history and are given the money on the promise that their degree will get them a career when they graduate, even thought that's far from a guarantee.
It's the kind of outrageous overreach some fat cat banker would put in the contract to reduce his liabilities but then the person in the government who's job is protecting the general public was asleep at the wheel and failed to have it struck from the contract. Did the clause pass because the kids don't put up any collateral? The college loan business is so screwed up.
http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/ncaa/sports-at-any-cost
When Football coaches earn more than any of the other faculty there is a serious problem.
My sons high school and every other high school in my county has spent more on sports facilities than on any other aspect of education. Football stadiums, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, several football fields, a parking lot the size of a football field for band marching practice, At least 3 massive indoor gyms, wight rooms. Everything is watered and manicured all year around and I would say about 30 - 40 % of the schools students actually use these facilities.
I wonder why my property taxes are 14k a year.
This just carries on to post secondary education but instead of property taxes it's student tuition that is paying for it.
http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/the-highes...
(A slide show of uni coaches.)
When lots of money is loaned out with artificially low rates (because they are not able to be discharged and are backed by the gov.) this is exactly what happens.
See it everywhere from student loans to housing to health insurance. When people don't feel the cost of something, they have no reason to say no to a price increase.
Federal funding didn't decrease, the nature of the money being made available shifted into a very easy to get loan that the Feds now make money off of. Not only do they print huge profits on it, they also ensure the laws remain such that you can't discharge the debt, to their own benefit. This has helped replace the red ink that Social Security is now generating, as previously the Feds were stealing from SS funding instead of actually safe-guarding the inbound revenue flows. Now they can't steal from the positive SS flows, so they had to come up with a 'revenue replacement' - what better way than to hitch young workers to massive debt they can't get rid of, yielding a perpetual interest bonanza for Federal spending. It will generate over half a trillion dollars in interest for the Feds in the next ten years.
As state funding decreased, lottery scholarship funding increased almost in parallel.
As lottery scholarships increased, tuition increased.
Administrative costs skyrocketed.
Lastly and most importantly though, when people in high school take out student loans they have no concept of what debt repayment looks like or feels like. They have no idea what taxes coming out of your paycheck looks like in terms of cash flow. They have no concept of housing costs in that cash flow. Job loss or gaining employment is not factored in and what THAT does to cash flow and debt payments.
When students graduate all they know is that they got into school X and they need to pay for it.
The one true check on prices going up despite ALL other factors is the number of people who will say "not for that price" which thanks to student loans is virtually nonexistent because even if you say that somebody else will just slide into your spot.
Pure supply and demand. If cost is not a check on demand, cost will increase.
I.e., more dollars chasing the same amount of education. A bit more explanation here: https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost...