A non-trivial portion goes to legal expenses and risk management. It started with the concept of in loco parentis (in the place of the parent). University students stopped being adults and became children.
Obama's interpretation of Title IX was also catastrophic for expenses. All of a sudden you had to set up your own internal pseudo-court system and have an entire mechanism for handling even the most dubious of accusations. These things are not free.
This has snowballed into other pseudo-legal aspects and the social justice movement is just monumentally expensive to deal with. It's not a question of if a #metoo incident happens on your campus, it's a matter when. What steps did you take to prevent it? What staff do you have in place to react?
And the worst is that once you've hired these staff they're there forever. There will never will a point of mission accomplished, perfect equity, or an environment sufficiently free of even the smallest of nano-harassments for a university to rid itself of this burden.
Don't get me wrong, there's a country club and sports team aspect to a lot of university expenses, but the primary purpose of most universities is not education, research, or anything along those lines - it's to avoid getting sued into oblivion.
I spent years as a student and working at a large research University and let’s be very, very generous and say that there were 30 people detailed to this “#metoo incident” mitigation and action squad. Of the thousands and thousands of other nonfaculty staff payroll; of the many millions the library system pays for journal access alone, let alone special collections and acquisition; of the cost of running the steam for heating the buildings, the computing infrastructure; etc., etc. how non-trivial do you expect this Title IV portion to be?
This is caused by external forces like Title IX compliance, but also by the expectation that, since students are now essentially the consumers of a luxury good, they expect impeccable and instantaneous “customer service”.
Also, how the hell is college so damn expensive when
the people teaching classes are paid 12 bucks an hour
Imagine I'm the boss of a university, and I push through across-the-board budget cuts of 10%, and cut tuition by 10%. I drop the out-of-state annual price from $25,000 to $22,500.
Am I going to be widely praised for my radical move? Probably not, the price remains extremely high. Are sales going to skyrocket, offsetting the price drop? Probably not, most good universities fill 100% of their places.
Are loads of the colleagues I see on a daily basis going to be mad at me? Quite possibly! Did I take this job because I love slashing budgets for libraries and arts education? Probably not. Is there a risk, due to different departments' abilities to raise funds externally, that some departments will be disproportionately impacted? Absolutely.
If I'm a university boss and I want an easy life, much easier to turn a blind eye to increasing costs.
Some jobs are truly thankless jobs.
- IT
- Any type of student welfare services.
- Title IX and any other regulatory offices.
- Diversity offices and other efforts.
- Disability services.
- Dedicated police departments.
- Advising, Counseling, and Academic support (because more and lower-qualified students than ever are going to college).
- In the case of state schools, typically significant budget cuts from the state.
I'm not saying these rationally explain the increase in cost, but it's a significant expansion in responsibility and functionality that brought with it administration and bureaucracy.
It's a positional good, and the buyers are bidding for it using borrowed money, and bidding from a position that is underinformed and cannot be anything but underinformed.
It's the epitome of a bubble.
Most people here went do university, and they still have no notion how the sausage is made. Why is that?
This varies wildly across colleges/universities, faculty position, and department. There's enough variation that it's much more nuanced than your statement indicates.
My music and archaeology friends are not. Unfortunately, the cult runs so deep that some were convinced the solution to being unemployed was a master's. True, they signed the papers, but a whole industry exists to deceive them.
So, you have 50+k in debt, are in your mid-late 20's, and you:
will not qualify for a mortgage (so you keep paying rent instead of at least buying something with SOME value for that money)
Cannot start any sort of enterprise because you can't save, because your disposable income goes to loans/rent (see above)
Cannot reasonably save for retirement
And god help you if you want a kid or want to save for their college education. We made sure ours is an EU citizen so she doesn't have to deal with quite so much of this bullshit (hopefully).
Music and Archaeology would be incredible majors if the students didn't have to go into debt.
Education, university, and all of the social connections, experiences and knowledge gained are wonderful for a kid in their early 20s and really makes for a well rounded person and betters society by making people good educated citizens.
However the affordability is an issue. But don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
This means that universities are incentivized to peddle b.s. degrees.
Also, how the hell is college so damn expensive when the people teaching classes are paid 12 bucks an hour because they're "adjuncts"?? where tf is the money going?? (see above)
Exception: my local junior college was great, and reasonably priced. If you want to do uni, go to jc and then to europe.
Oh. Also there's a whole university cargo cult. It made some baby boomers wealthy so obviously the solution is for EVERYONE to go to college.