The problem still is that middle-class families get stuck in a gray zone. I went to Brown, and my parents made enough (~$110k) that I didn't get financial aid but they also couldn't pay $40k/year.

No collateral is necessary for student debt since they can come after anything you or your cosigners have.

Someone will have to explain to me what is special about this debt that it gets this special treatment.

Just because they can't be discharged in bankruptcy doesn't they're actually repaid. Student loans can and do default - an average rate of 15% a few years ago, though some schools have students that default at more than twice that rate.

External guarantees on loans (in this case federal guarantees) doesn't address the same issue that collateral is typical used for: namely, it doesn't solve the moral hazard problem.

(It's not that Brown has solved the moral hazard problem itself; it's that Brown's able to take on that risk themselves, because it's an incredibly selective, incredibly competitive, and fairly small[0] school).

[0] We're talking specifically about undergraduates

Exactly. So instead that’s an albatross to be hung around a young person’s neck for all of eternity. Bankruptcy would share the burden between lender and borrower.

What we have now is a system where loans are Federally guaranteed and then not dischargeable through bankruptcy. That leads to $100k cooking schools that promise to turn you into a pro-chef, just sign here, here and here and you can even get a Federally guaranteed loan, sign here.

If you can pay your own way you avoid all that.

College financial aid is just another policy in the pile of progressive taxation and needs-based benefit programs which conspire to enact a near 100% effective marginal tax rate on the middle class.

That's not quite what I was getting at. My question is: Why are they making alumni find the $120M in grants, when they could just forgive the loan directly?

There's nothing that says a lender has to collect on its debt. It can choose to forgive the debt.

So it's possible for Brown to charge $50K/year generally, collect it from the rich kids, and then forgive the debt incurred by the poor kids.

But that's not what they're doing. They're keeping the money, and asking alumni and other charitable institutions to pay them.

They still want/need the money.

Because the Third Associate Dean of Humanities can't fund their $600k salary with the goodwill from a more reasonable tuition.

Snark aside, it's because the administrators are attacking a symptom - high tuition prices - and not the illness - administrative bloat and universities that are not run by academics, but by Professional Educators who in many cases have never taught a class in their lives, or haven't taught in the past n decades.

I worry that there's no solution to these problems that won't displace very many workers. One man's cost is another man's salary.

That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that those "markets" are fundamentally distorted by the in-elasticity of demand. People generally need education and healthcare.

Coincidentally, that's the way almost all of the non-US world chooses to look at it.

The Humanities Dean isn't a revenue center for the college, and nobody is (knowingly) donating so s/he can get a new office.

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Cal-footba...

The law school deans make $333,847. At the same time, Cal Athletics faces largest debt among all college programs.

https://www1.salary.com/CA/Berkeley/Dean-of-Law-salary.html

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-01-04/college-f...

So your humanities deans vs revenue digression is just whataboutism.

If Cal Athletics is in debt, they are doing it wrong.

Athletics salaries and facilities are very visible and often breathtaking, but in general they are not the cause of tuition inflation.

Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable.

Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher salaries ... add benefits, offices, etc, and you're at about twice that, so 26K just for faculty; add some for facilities and management, and their cost is probably about 40K/year per student, so a 20-25% markup, doesn't sound unreasonable (and then almost no student pays the sticker price).

High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty).

BTW, other universities will do it cheaper by either paying their faculty much less (which usually leads to quality problems), or having much larger classes, or crummy facilities, or government subsidies (or all of the above). Community colleges do an amazing job for the price they charge, but it's not the same education :)

Interesting. Wonder why it's more labor intensive compared to engineering or other degrees. 7:1 teacher-student ratio seems very good. Why can't it be 14:1, would that result in a dramatically worse outcome? (Not even sure what I mean by outcome, maybe inability to find a position after graduation...)

Having a 7:1 teacher/student ratio means that students will have tons of contact with the faculty outside the classroom; they can walk to their offices and chat (and a lot of learning happens that way). It means 'large' classes are 15-20 students, which means there's no 'lecturing' per se, and a lot more discussions.

Doubling that rate means larger classes (40 students means teacher cannot answer all questions, assignments are made to be graded quickly etc), less interaction with faculty inside and outside classroom

Is it worth it ? I think so, and, if needed (and able), would willingly pay it for my kids. If you don't think it's worth it, or can't afford it, good state universities cost 1/2 or 1/3 as much (tuition is probably around 10K for in-state, room and board is still probably 1K/mo). Community/technical colleges are cheap for a reason, but teachers want to teach, and good students will learn from them, and get a degree; and of course, there's tons of free learning resources

52k per student for a 5,000 student college is 260m per year of claimed expenditure. That is quite a lot money for a faculty of 700, even after subtracting boarding and scholarships, no? I do not know where money is going, although the Bain research does seem to support the evidence for concluding that admin is a benefactor of it.

You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to be.

In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more income focused.

What the OP is saying is that education has become unaffordable because it has become expensive, not because of how it is financed. Fixing Brown students problem with donor financing is great for Brown students, but does not scale even if is sustainable at brown.

Whether through donors, loans, public financing or parental savings, we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.

So where, exactly, is all that extra spending really going? Is it going to six or seven extra deans and associate deans? (We have a bunch of people with "associate dean" or similar in their titles, but some of them are actually fairly junior staff members, and my understanding, incomplete as it is, is that their pay reflects that, rather than being what you'd expect for someone with that title.) Is it going to people who are managing the ever-growing presence of technology in the classroom and throughout the institution? That would actually make some sense, as it's a thing that's been growing at around the same time as the apparent increase in spending on staff/admin.

But in general, based on the limited breakdowns I've seen, I'm still puzzled as to where all this extra money is going, as it seems like most of it is not, in fact, going to inflated salaries for the top administrators (though some of it is), and most of what I've actually seen doesn't support the idea that there are massively more people in administration than are actually needed to support the students. The only way that could be true, based on my experience, is if a huge percentage of them (many more than in previous generations) are utterly incompetent, and pulling their weight so poorly that it takes half the time from the competent people just to keep everything moving. While that's not impossible, it seems implausible that such a significant shift could have occurred so quickly.

> ...we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.

I think that calling it elitist is jumping on a bandwagon of derision for that term, when what it should really be called is "unrealistic," "impractical," or just "stupid." In fact, if anything, it's as anti-elitist as anything can be—it's trying to spread the education to everyone, rather than reserving it to the elite purely based on the inconvenient fact that we don't have enough money in our economy to spend that much on everyone.

In business, if two companies merge, the redundant positions are eliminated. In a university, if two schools or departments merge, everyone stays and a bunch of new titles are created.

We most certainly can, easily, we just choose not to.

We could bomb a few less hospitals a year and pay for every single American to go to college for free. We could make our corporations pay more than zero taxes and do the same.

But you are right about the skyrocketing costs, colleges have bloated massively and for really no reason other than that they have begun to be run as businesses rather than as public-focused academic enterprises.

Anyway, I think that these days the left and right may have changed seats in this regard. The left wants more price/cost control and the centre (centre-right and left, but more right) is talking about resource allocation, in practice defending the market driven system. The right hasn't resolved to a consistent position recently.

I'll venture that it's the executives who are pulling in the big bucks. Looking at the glassdoor numbers, profs are peaking at under $200k, the vast majority well under $100k. Contrast that with Comms directors making $250k.

Comms directors provide more immediate returns, namely fundraising and spinning. However, top professors can write their ticket just to say they're there and earn a fortune on the side.

If Princeton for instance decided to lower tuition fees by cutting down on 'luxuries' like smaller class sizes/ unrestricted enrollments in classes, then they'd lose out on the best students to Harvard or Yale.

So the only way to reduce tuition fees would be to do it across the board at once, but the richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.

Brown is trying to get the best of all worlds: let the rich pay full price to maximize income, invest heavily in students to optimize chances of later success, and subsidize education for less wealthy students to keep the applicant pool as large as possible.

> Richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.

From personal experience, this statement is wrong. A lot of my classmates at Princeton were not paying the full sticker price. Princeton also has a need-blind admission process so admissions and financial aid are kept (on paper at least) separate.

Alongside the increase in tuitions has been a massive increase in financial aid. Princeton really kicked this off around 2000 when they started drastically reducing loans and increasing grants, essentially competing for the top talent among lower income students.

I think administrative costs have gone up too much and have space to cut back. But when articles come out saying administrative costs have ballooned 500%, I don't want people to imagine that it's all wasted - most of the new positions represent new services provided to students.

And in anticipation of the argument that "I don't need those services so they shouldn't exist": see arguments for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes on healthy people. The whole university functions better and achieves its mission better if there is more diversity and if students have more access to services they need. Lowering tuition would be a trade-off, not just trimming fat.

- The year I started my undergrad, there a mini-scandal where tuition was raised by over 10% with little warning and it leaked that the school President, having written a heart felt letter about how hard it was cutting costs in these difficult economic times, made over $400k/yr and the college was paying his mortgage. Nearly $600k adjusted for inflation.

- At that same undergrad institution, the career services officer, responsible for finding people jobs (or at least helping), had never held a job outside of that college, and would do little more than putting your resume on Monster for you.

Just two examples from my limited academic experience (undergrad only) at one small liberal arts school nobody's ever heard of. I'm sure the graduate folks here could throw dozens of examples at you of much more egregious things.

This happens a lot at universities. They are great places to work if you're OK with an "adequate" salary (with generally very good benefits and time off) and not being held accountable for very much. So you have staff people who have worked there for decades, if not their entire careers. Often entire families (parents and eventually their children) will be working there. Those sorts of people have no understanding of what the "real world" or private sector is like, so the problem of low productivity and low accountability perpetuates itself. It's normal and they don't know anything else.

I really don't get how these universities manage their cashflow. With such an exorbitant amount of cash you can basically put people on Mars for all I know.

[1]http://time.com/money/4777909/private-college-scholarships-2...

However, lectures allow you to use TA's to more cheaply expand class sizes and might make it possible at the undergrad level.

I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators.

Check out how Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a real CS Master's Degree for a fraction of the cost using similar stuff: https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/

This x1000. With all the improvement in educational technology, it's weird that the gold standard of elite education apparently remains the lecture.

I am reminded of the quote: College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

Part of the issue is that college-as-elite-networking-venue needs to remain scarce, by definition, if it is to retain its value. If everyone can "go to Harvard" (through online delivery, enhanced ed-tech, automation, etc) then the scarcity is lessened. When you go to an elite college, you don't just get an education, you get association with a brand that, you hope, retains and increases in value.

What makes one a good prof/teacher/lecturer for a given department, subject matter or set of students may not make one a good prof/teacher/lecturer for a different department, subject matter or set of students.

The quality of an instructor as a prof/teacher/lecturer for a given department, subject matter or set of students implies nothing about the their quality in any of those attributes for the same setting or the same attribute if the department, subject matter or set of students changes.

I recall having a discussion with another student who had very similar abilities and interests. We agreed about the quality of the profs we had in common except for one where one of us thought he was a great teacher and lecturer but terrible at the rest of being a prof and the other thought he did a great job as a prof but was a terrible teacher/lecturer.

I'd like to point out that there's also plenty of utterly crappy educational technology that only exists to nickel and dime students for licenses. See MyMathLab.

Really face time with a professor is not directly the huge cost you might think. Class participation and helping students during office hours don't scale very well. On top of that it's much simpler to cheat in an online only environment.

Honestly, I think High school is probably a better place for this kind of automation. Setting up a rotation where you have say both a small and double sized classroom seems very possible.

In the UK a professor might take 3-6 lectures and 1-3 classes a week, and they're often staffed by masters students.

It might be possible to nominally get that number but only if your hiding other costs.

Does that mean they could be paying those professors $300,000?

Further, just having a teacher without a classroom is not going to get you very far. Still, assuming the average student pays 1/2 that much per year they can probably cut the costs significantly.

They aren't similar. The Ivy League has ultra-wealthy donors and parents paying the tuition of students of modest means.

Most students don't pay the sticker price

PS: It’s led, not its metallic homonym lead.

It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. Like, sure, it's easy to make fun of literature students who end up $200k in the whole with no marketable skills and no job prospects. But they are just a small fraction of the whole picture. A higher ed degree is by far the highest-chance-of-success way for a lot of people to make it financially (whether or not it should be is a separate discussion), and a lot of positions require degrees for good reasons.

That's not my position.

> "Reasonable" is a weasel word.

You can have a reasonable definition of what is reasonable ;-) It just has to do with the ammount of risk you're willing to take, yes, it involves personal risk.

But you can see, for example, in such and such people that get a degree are >70% unemployed or working in a different area that has nothing to do with it. Then well perhaps it's not a good choice if I don't have the liberty to do it just for the sake of it, without expecting money in return.

Some other career choices probably have better expected outcomes for the average Joe. So maybe if you need the money, chose that.

The bottom line is: it's just silly to live as if you were rich and but then after complain you don't have the money for it.

Voluntarily giving some cash to a school endowment is not getting "bilked".