> STEM students were charges several thousand dollars a year more than humanities students.

That actually seems more equitable to me than what happens at some other schools, where everyone pays the same credit-hour rate no matter what course they take.

Teaching STEM courses, intuitively, seems like it should cost more. The pool of professors and TAs is smaller, a lot of courses call for lab equipment and the maintaining of labs and so on. And students have higher earning potential upon graduation and should, in theory, be willing to pay more.

Many humanities courses in contrast (literature, philosophy, sociology, political science, languages) can be taught quite cheaply, with labor being the only major expense. It seems unfair that humanities degrees (which are also worth less than STEM degrees on the job market) should be anywhere near as expensive as STEM degrees.

The higher cost of delivering classes with a lab component is generally solved via lab fees. This seems a much better solution than raising the cost per credit hour.

Also, some STEM-type departments get grants (public and private) at a rate that's much greater than liberal arts departments, and grant recipients have to tithe back a large portion to their parent institution in a way that defrays facilities costs, etc. So there are other sources of income besides student tuition.

If you started treating departments as P&L centers, I don't know that I'd want to be in Anthropology vs. MechE.

Ironically, I have been in several research heavy departments that have been looking enviously at the teaching-heavy, undergraduate centric departments with steady and predictable funding streams.

Two things to keep in mind:

1. Grants are difficult to get. The pay lines at both the NIH and NSF have been decreasing for quite some time, and even successful departments don't have the feeling of swimming in cash.

2. Overhead rates (the "tithes" you mention) do not necessarily cover the full administrative cost of a research-heavy department (especially things like capital construction).

There are certainly institutions that have built a great deal of monetary success on their research programs, but not as many as one might think. This is why, for example, in my field we're seeing a proliferation of MPH programs - student tuition is a more reliable income stream.

> The higher cost of delivering classes with a lab component is generally solved via lab fees.

That's fair. Just that (again, my experience) you were charged a fixed amount in lab fees every semester regardless of courses. It's probably varies between unis.

> If you started treating departments as P&L centers, I don't know that I'd want to be in Anthropology vs. MechE.

I don't know if you need to treat each department as a P&L center. There are bound to be departments that are important but perennially loss-making and knowledge shouldn't be reduced to just dollars and cents. But there does need to be more fairness in the money charged to students. The alternative is that humanities students (with lower earning potential) are subsidizing STEM students (higher earning potential). I know which one I prefer from a fairness point-of-view (speaking as a former STEM student).

Why are we considering universities in terms of the earning potential of their graduates? University is not job training. If anthropology students are being encouraged to continue in academia, it's because that's the purpose of that institution. From a "fair" point of view, the industries trying to hire engineers should fund education. Since that is unrealistic, the ultimate solution would seem to be making higher education free, like the rest of the civilized world. What you probably shouldn't do is admit that it doesn't make sense to try to compare the economic value of knowing Milton vs Maxwell, and then suggest doing so anyway.

> From a "fair" point of view, the industries trying to hire engineers should fund education.

At least at some points in the past, this was a significant funding source for universities. (In the US, not sure about outside of it.) The number of engineering schools founded by American industrialists is probably not coincidental, either.

That companies no longer feel the need to invest in universities in order to ensure a steady supply of workers suggests one of two things: (1) either the planning horizon of private companies has contracted to such an extent that they are no longer willing to make such a long-term investment, or (2) they believe they can just hire sufficiently skilled graduates without investing in the "supply chain" that produces them.

Argument 1 is largely a financial question, because it hinges on the long term discount rate; Argument 2 is essentially political, in that it assumes the ability to hire graduates from a large, slack labor pool outside of its immediate community in which it might otherwise invest. My guess is that both of these have played a role in declining private-sector funding of educational institutions vs. the early 20th century and prior.

> From a "fair" point of view, the industries trying to hire engineers should fund education.

They do, in a way, by paying higher salaries for the graduates they really want. Some companies also pay tuition for employees going to school.

> Since that is unrealistic, the ultimate solution would seem to be making higher education free, like the rest of the civilized world.

Great Britain doesn't have free higher education.

"Make higher education free" is certainly a worthy goal. But there needs to be some debate for how to get there. "The government pays your tuition" is unlikely to find much support outside of a certain age bracket.

Something to consider: German universities are free to everyone who passes an entrance exam [1]. But German universities also spend half the amount per student per year as US universities[2]. $10,164 vs $23,064. They also spend more on R&D proportionally, and in absolute terms per student-year.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Germany#Tertiary_...

2. https://www.oecd.org/edu/EAG2014-Indicator%20B1%20(eng).pdf (page 215)

> They do, in a way, by paying higher salaries for the graduates they really want.

Seriously?

> "The government pays your tuition" is unlikely to find much support outside of a certain age bracket.

"I've got mine, fuck you Jack" is a popular sentiment across all age brackets, but charity and compassion are also not age-restricted.

>For example, at my public university, STEM students were charges several thousand dollars a year more than humanities students. STEM programs also did their best to discourage enrollment. Meanwhile the anthropology department is literally begging students to stay and get a masters or phd with them.

BUT you need also to compare what the labour market (outside the University) offers to a professor level mathematician, engineer or technologist and what it offers to a brilliant anthropologist.

Also, try remembering last time you saw an ad where someone was looking to hire an anthropologist (or an archeologist, a literature major, etc.).

Why should this be the case? They offer a service with hundreds of competing options (other schools), so it's hard to argue they're not offering market rate.

I think the infinite access to loans is destroying any connection between market pricing and desirability. People at the age of 17 or 18 when they're going into college tend to have minimal to no knowledge of the workforce, and tend to be completely unrealistic about their own probable outcomes. More than 50% [1] of Americans under the age of 30 expect to become what they consider "rich." That was from 2003, but it was repeated in 2010 and yielded near identical results. [2] What does an extra $20k/year in debt matter if you're going to be a millionaire in a decade anyhow? When people's views of the value of something is completely out of touch with reality, they are rarely going to be incentivized to make logical decisions.

This feature also makes the entire for profit education industry quite predatory. I realize public institutions are ostensibly not for profit. At the same time, when you have higher executives taking salaries in the millions of dollars, and layer upon layer of redundant administrators with comparably bloated salaries, that they then regularly adjust upwards as "their revenue" increases, that belies the intuition of 'not for profit.' So forgive my colloquial nature.

[1] - http://news.gallup.com/poll/7981/Half-Young-People-Expect-St...

[2] - http://www.bankrate.com/banking/savings/do-you-think-you-wil...

The market is much smaller than you think especially for public universities because of the huge difference between in and out of state student rates. That means most students can only really consider in state schools where there's at most a handful and generally they've each got a few things they're known to be 'the good one' for that subject/field.

Do they though? Do public universities really have competition? Maryland has College Park and not much else. All the other public schools are much much smaller, and generally lower quality.

This isn't the 1850s, UMD essentially competes with at least the other east coast public schools. So you have Penn State and UVA, as well as UD, Va Tech, GA Tech, UNC, etc.

Add to that the negligible degree to which attending "the best school" effects your outcomes (spoiler: virtually not at all. Being in the top 25% at your school far outweighs how good your school is) and you'll realize that they compete heavily. This totally leaves out all the private schools with which they compete in the DC area.

Except not really because the cost for going to an out of state public school is much larger for a student so any given school has a large leg up on cost in competing for students in their state.

Except not really because most State schools on the East coast will give you in-state tuition after you live in said State for one year. Take a year off after highschool, make some money, then get in-state at whichever school you chose.

Source: many of my friends graduated college a year behind me after doing exactly what I'm suggesting.

Some vacation companies advertise that people should take loans to go on vacation. Should they be held accountable when it turns out that adding that you went on a cruise to your resume is just as useful as adding that you got a useless degree? In fact some colleges advertise their college as you would advertise a vacation. They use terms like "college experience".

No,but the government isn't also paying employees to tell people in schools and since they were children that they _need_ to go to on a cruise or be doomed to a life of mediocrity/poverty. Our college system in the US is having a similar problem as our healthcare. We've decided everyone needs it badly and it's better for all of society to have it, but we leave it up to corporations to serve that need when they will take advantage of the extremely inelastic demand.

It's like having an open wound next to a hungry tiger and being surprised when they try to eat you. The government should be setting price ceilings on schools that take Federal loans if we as a society have agreed that it's such a worthwhile goal as to ensure everyone can go and that we will pay for it