First and foremost, the lecture part of education is extremely inefficient. I know "watch the video" just doesn't work for some people, but charging for a live rendition of a repeated script, and then not valuing the person who watched the same recording equally, is absurd.
Education needs to acknowledge a couple things. 1) Theres probably a "best" lecture or lecturer out there for each topic. That's an overstatement, and a more documentary style edit of the best lectures is more realistic. The point is, there should be a collaborative way for lecturers around the country to contribute to a shared curriculum, and a group of people editing out redundancy. The amount of people in the country delivering roughly the same speeches is astounding. An open and shared processes for editing would allow for competing edits to exist simultaneously, a la forks and branches. 2) School needs to flip a bit and focus on the parts that need more individual attention. Discussions, Labs etc. Using physical space limitations in lecturers to create scarcity benefits only the schools. Anybody who has been in a 300 person lecture knows how little question and answer interaction there is with most professors, during the lecture. 3) a large portion of the value of school is networking. who you meet, who your environment is and who you absorb. is that the actual thing being sold, elitism? how do you fix that, when the product being sold is club membership under the guise of education? it's a way to manufacture class/caste divides there otherwise wouldnt be, or that would be even more nepotistic. its very much a "i had to do it to get in the club, so the next generation should too."
tldr: "school" is an artificially scarce elite caste membership. just because you pay the membership fee, doesnt mean you actually make the club, but getting in the lobby is a prereq to full membership. make school about education.
I think we are slowly getting here though. The number of credible online degree programs has exploded in recent years. Online education used to be like online dating: only something losers would do. But now it seems to moving towards the default way of doing business.
When I went to the next class in person, our professor was finishing up the exact same example problem from the lecture video. It could have just been coincidence that that exact lecture lined up the way it did, but it kind of opened my eyes to how silly it was to have professors repeating the same thing year after year.
The peer group in the ivy leagues have been strongly pre-selected to value achievement in academic related pursuits.
Could you supply some examples? I know of Western Governors University, but it only has limited majors.
In particular, do you know of any online degree programs in materials science?
A lot of materials science is highly experimental, so it's not super easy to teach advanced skills. I went to a top 10 materials science school for my PhD, and the absolute vast majority of what I learnt was self-taught. However there is a caveat - I self-learnt by doing, and failing multiple times. The advantage of a high ranked school is that the research facilities are top notch and professors bring in external grants, so the research facilities are always maintained at a high standard through overhead costs.
As a self-taught developer and proud of it, I like this quote. A lot. It's easy to let yourself fall into a toxic mindset where you (and many employers) unjustifiably feel inferior because you didn't take the traditional 4-year college route.
But in less than a decade, hearing of couples who met on Tinder has gone from a novelty to the norm, reminding us of how quickly societal paradigm shifts can happen (for the better, imo).
I went to a small college where most lectures had fewer than ~20 students (if that), so I realize this doesn't scale as well to 100-person lecture halls.
But, I got a lot out of the interaction in my college lectures. I almost always sat in the front† where it was easy to ask and answer questions, which I did a lot. Less obviously, professors could and did react to my facial expressions of confusion/understanding/curiosity as they went. Well, I don't know that it was specifically my facial expressions, but there was definitely an interaction going on between us even when only the professor was speaking.
I can't say if that's worth the inefficiency of small-ish, in-person classes, but it certainly helped me.
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† College: the one place where the best seats are also the easiest to get. Fine by me—I took advantage.
That's where the value in live classes lies - the interaction with peers and professors. Not the listening to pre-scripted lectures.
If we wanted to make it better to support interactive questions, one could imagine an online system with videos plus "Push now for live help". Or facetime your peers.
To #2 This is already a technique in education research its called flipped classrooms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipped_classroom).
To #3, I'm sure there are organizational structures you could implement that would augment every students network - there's a lot of stuff from management science you could try out.
Overall though I found it extremely frustrating trying to innovate in education because you really need to be able to implement radical changes but there are so many regulations at every level that you have to creep forward, hoping for minor incremental improvements when what you need is complete system overhauls. This was extremely frustrating for me.
A few months ago I saw a Lambda School tweet with a giant stack of regulatory filings and I’ve been wondering ever since why I don’t hear much about higher ed compliance. It isn’t one of the areas that immediately comes to mind when I think of “highly regulated industries” (banking, insurance, healthcare, etc) but perhaps it should be.
with regard to 3, i think the larger question is, is that what is best for society? to create elite clubs based on who you know vs merit, capability, output volume etc.
I don't know if finding ways to expand someone's network and connections necessarily means we have to create elite clubs - having networks is vital to success in any way, especially in a system based on merit.
So maybe I was one step ahead of what you were saying. I read it as more along the lines of given the entire set of X people in our education systems, how do we ensure a system that is fair and allows for the maximal human flourishing of each individual member while taking into account our psychology and the negative externalities / side-effects of emergent system dynamics. (Of course this last point, is something we sorely need in many fields - not just education).
Let’s say your average class size is 20 people at a good school and a professor costs the school 200k including benefits per year. Assuming a student takes 18 credit hours and a teacher teaches 12 credit hours that balances out to ~15k per year. But, more than 2/3 of what a teacher spends their time on is outside the lecture such as grading assignments etc. So, removing lectures only saves ~5k per year.
Sure the physical room adds a little, but the average teacher is also far less expensive at most schools.
Then you take a software job that's available but not interesting, and you get pidgeonholed into that field. It's not retail but it doesn't seem great for EEs who didn't go to a top-10 school. I'd be very interested to hear any other EE grad's perspective though.
College is selling you the promise of an opportunity to join the club. You pay an application fee, and then you may or may not get into the club. If you don't get in, they keep your application fee, and you have student loans and a degree but no viable networking.
This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Let's assume that there is one "best" lecture for a given topic. I think then effort could be spent with smaller study groups where students can have direct access to people who can help them understand the concepts. There is little reason to have so many other different takes unless they add to the universal body of knowledge.
This is where the education industry can learn from the law schools. They are certainly ivory towers, but part of that tradition is that law school deans still ussually teach. My first year contracts prof was also the school dean. Law school deans remain largely 'first among many' rather than a separate profession, the 'professional administrators'.
They also are some of the best too. My wife went to a top-tier school and I remember the controversy when it was discovered that almost 50% of the tuition was actually given to the medical school. The justification was that they were a top school, they would charge what the other top schools charged, and they had a moral imperative to make the medical school as cheap as they could make it. They also guaranteed (in writing) that if any graduate had difficulty paying off student loans, the alumni network would step in and make the payments.
At my Uni, the administrators taught bullshit courses on personal development et cetera.
Law schools have a unique culture. Teaching requirements are a product of their "first among equals" attitude, not a cause. Porting the mechanism without the culture is unlikely to solve the problem.
Note that I'm aware of in-state tuition. The main campus of my state university charges 30k/year instate, and 40k/year out of state. Neither number is appropriate in a state with a median household income of 75k, and a median home price of 450k.
There’s a strong culture war aspect to defund colleges, because you’re essentially funding the opposition if you’re a conservative and you’re paying the salaries of the extremely liberal college professors. Then people say obnoxious, arrogant things like “well reality has a liberal bent” and other platitudes to explain away why conservatives voices have been systematically excluded from college campuses over decades.
[0] Specifically, please. Two semesters of English, which is pretty standard, doesn't count unless few other options.
I have cried myself hoarse on HN trying to make this simple point - but except for Cornell, every Ivy League is ordinary in engineering and the hard sciences.
Harvard is a biomedical behemoth, especially once you include the affiliated hospitals (MGH, Brigham and Women's, Dana Farber, Beth Israel Deaconess, etc) and research institutes (Broad, Roland). Harvard proper and MGH each receive about a half billion dollars a year in NIH funding. These are usually listed separately in those "league tables", but the whole system must bring in nearly $2B/year (out of a total NIH extramural budget of ~$28B).
The other Ivies aren't as big (though not much else is), but all of them have well-regarded medical schools (except for Princeton) and biomedical research programs. Yale, Havard, and Princeton have pretty credible chemistry programs too. Princeton also has the Institute for Advanced Study, which has hosted a crazy number of Nobel/Fields/Wolf/Cole prize winners; it's formally independent but...right there.
It may be debatable how much this matters for undergrad teaching--is it better to have a world-renowned expert or someone invested in teaching?--but for anything involving research (including undergrads), they are definitely way up there.
(No argument that JHU, Stanford, and other places (CMU, UMich, NYU, etc, depending on field) also have intensive research too).
NIH funding data from here: https://report.nih.gov/award/index.cfm
As just one, powerful example: Go visit the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis sometime, at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. They have life-changing exhibits about the Jim Crow system; about the civil rights era — which I remember from childhood; and especially about slavery. I was fighting back not just tears but sobs. Twenty years ago I scoffed at the idea of reparations for African Americans; now I'm very much open to the idea because of the corrosive compound-interest effect of what was done to their ancestors. To be sure, neither I nor my forebears kept people enslaved, AFAIK — in fact, one of my ancestors was crippled in the Union Army, according to family lore — but all we whites are still benefiting from what was done to the A-As. (Yeah, yeah, I know, other minorities were treated badly too, including some of my recent ancestors; none, none, were treated as badly as enslaved Africans and their descendants.)
That's just one example. I could go on ....
(Personally, I had no use for the ideologues either but managed to avoid them by simply not taking any of their classes; foreign language courses are a great way of filling humanities requirements with something actually useful.)
Typically property taxes go towards education at the local level, and as property taxes were reduced there would be a shortfall in the budget somewhere. This typically fell on education, which then forced colleges to start raising tuition as there is still a non-zero cost to education.
There was a "print" article about this in the 70's or 80's in a local newspaper in California urging residents to vote NO on lowering property taxes citing the increase in future college education as the main reason. But the vote went through, property taxes were slashed, and then of course ten years later and so forth, tuition had sky rocketed.
Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back. Hard to imagine any real states or large communities raising property taxes significantly to actually reinvest in the local community.
> Decreasing taxes is like debt. Once you are hooked on it it's hard to go back.
Well some voters see the taxes as an investment in their city and community. My city passed a referendum to back a bond to pay for climate change projects and education programs. The state passed a constitutional change that has made it virtually impossible to raise taxes.
When I look at the midwest and the hollowing out of their cities I have to imagine the tax cuts partially contributed. But at the time they passed the politicians believed they would be a net positive.
It's a delicate balance. Taxes too high will drive businesses away. Taxes too low will reduce communal investment and drive people away.
The price of an education (regardless of cost structures, public funding, or whatever) is going to dominated by demand, since supply is relatively fixed. It takes years or decades to increase the supply of qualified instruction following typical university models.
In this case Federal dollars guarantee a massive surplus of demand, while Federal accreditation limits supply (rightly or wrongly).
"Public" schools are paid by students, just like private, as a fee-for-service product. For most educations at most universities, this service is largely indistinguishable. Some of the University income comes from tax offsets, but the product they provide is the same service and on the same market as private universities - fee-based educational services.
The price is therefor entirely determined by the amount of supply (relatively fixed) and the amount of demand for fee-based education. Demand has risen dramatically since WW2 due to a bevvy of Federal programs designed to underwrite and promote post-secondary education.
No amount of legal wrangling or tax-offsetting will defeat that. In fact, by increasing tax-offsets for public universities, the apparent price of the service supplied by public universities drops (relative to the market price), which is a signal to buyers that they should buy MORE of that service. This signal would naturally increase demand until the price of a public education on the market matches the price of the same education at private institutions.
The actual oddity is not that public education pricing keeps rising to private institutional pricing, but that it is not already at the same price.
Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
For extra credit, this is largely the same process that drives healthcare pricing in the US. A relatively fixed supply of a specialized service and a price-insensitive buyer pool largely underwritten by massive Federal programs.
This is an interesting claim, because tax-offsets of tuition have been going down over the last 30 years, not up. Look at the percentage of educational costs covered by state general funds in the late 60s compared to today. It's night and day different.
> Prices drive expense-side efficiency. An operation (such as a University) will not be mechanically driven to keep costs significantly lower than income - most are non-profit. There is no reason to "increase margin". Most Universities are already teaching at capacity. Since the price is set by the market, there is no reason to keep prices significantly below the market rate. Instead, the costs associated with an education simply rise to meet whatever revenue can be generated from a fixed pool of buyers. These buyers have virtually no spending limit, since their purchasing is de facto underwritten by enormous Federal programs. The result year-over-year dramatic price increases.
This is a interesting point, but the data doesn't back it up. We have data from the Department of Education on expenditures by universities. It doesn't show dramatic expenditure increases. The prices went up because state legislatures cut higher ed funding, and universities had to raise tuition to balance the books. Here's that data: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
If you have data showing that universities are spending dramatically more in expenditures on a per-student constant-dollar basis, I'd love to see it.
In the case of a state university, it's odd that we don't see at least one example of this approach. Why isn't there an example of a state university with fixed admissions capacity, poor dorm/ student life quality, low cost, but with good academics?
We generally see the same set of tradeoffs across the entire industry with no student cost considerations in university planning to speak of.
Also, real estate
One is that increased demand for employers for "certification" of ability pushes demand for degrees among students. Every recession there's articles showing that those with a college degree fare better than those without. We can argue about why that is, but that's what the average 17 yo sees, along with their parents, and they don't want to be left behind, regardless of the details.
Another is that loans basically prop that up and facilitate it. So schools don't lose money on people who say "I can't afford it" because they find a way.
Another is the increasing administrative bloat at universities, which are now largely run like for-profit institutions even when they are not on paper. I think this is similar to a lot of fields, but my sense is that (based on personal experience) things are much more hierarchical now, with more of a focus on exploiting the university for personal gain than anything else. So administrative salary costs, and administrative costs in general, drive up the need for costs.
The public colleges have to compete for private colleges for faculty, administrators, etc. which then increases their costs, which then drives them to bigger need for more tuition.
At the same time, states have been cutting their funding. If they cut funding and unis have all these fixed costs, where else are they supposed to get money from?
A major dynamic between public universities in the US and political circles in the last couple of decades has been an increasing pressure for them to operate as revenue generating, profit-making institutions in every aspect. At the state level, the idea is that their role is to bring in money, at less cost (an alternative is to see them as providing a service to the state and country -- can you imagine wanting K-12 schools to be treated as profit-making ??? ). As a result, what we've ended up with are institutions with a lot of profit-seeking administrators, pyramid schemes, taking advantage of federal funding loopholes at every chance to bring in money, etc.
Public universities should be able to offer a good value to students, but they're being run as profit centers. If you think of it that way, it's no surprise tuition isn't competitive.
Just today there was a story I read about a Georgia Tech professor who is under federal investigation for misrepresentation on her continuing NSF grant. And the money involved was $40,000. And one of her defenses is that Georgia Tech provided very little secretarial services to her. Which may very well be true.
Everyone cribs about increased administrative bloat at universities, but given how massively paperwork requirements have ballooned, nobody is willing to point the figure also at that. Universities are hiring more admin because professors are often overwhelmed with paperwork nowadays.
And how much more help would she need?
Georgia Tech has really high admin costs with fees per semester above $1000. That’s just the explicit fees and doesn’t include the admin costs that are included in tuition.
Our entire math department was served by two advisors who likely also had non advising administrative duties.
My honors advisors were just the main faculty of my honors program.
I don't think I ever spoke to my official CS advisor.
So, just because you didn't get value out of it doesn't mean that's true for all students.
Did you instead mean loans that the parent takes on, perhaps as cosigner?
I'm seeing nothing beyond $5500 that can be obtained by a student.
No sympathy here for the college industry.
I believe people who support such things think as follows:
1. $15k a year tuition for 4 years is a great deal if it turns you into a banker or programmer with a $150,000 a year salary and a 40-year career. Indeed, it would be unjust for a garbage man's taxes to be paying for a stockbroker's education.
2. Majoring in poetry might not be such a clearly great decision, but if you're on the left politically, banning poetry is anti-intellectual; and if you're on the right market demand is its own justification.
On the poetry point specifically, I really think writing degrees in general would be more successful if they were granted by trade schools (i.e. a focus on doing the thing, not a focus on academic scholarship about the thing).
To be fair, we also have compulsory schooling for that period as well, and it makes complete sense to use tax revenue to pay for something the same government is making you do.
Note that I don't oppose the use of tax revenue to fund voluntary education, and I personally benefited heavily from it. Its just that using the example of the government paying for something it made mandatory is not much of an argument in itself for having it pay for something that is voluntary.
Education and improving society floats all boats, just as the garbage man is dependent on people generating trash. Stocks fund companies that employ people who generate trash. That was a very narrow, short-sighted analysis of tax policy.
With loans, the govt both makes a return on the interest AND a lifetime increase in net tax revenues.
Value of a college education goes beyond salary, and ideally creates a better informed citizenry.
My town currently spends about $12,635 per pupil for public schools. Other towns in the state spend over $20k. Compared to that, $15k tuition seems right in line.
I think university could be cheaper than it is today, but probably not much cheaper than K-12.
The idealized form of studying is education with mentoring, see Blooms 2 sigma results.
But that is too expensive, who wants to have that number of teachers ! It would cost a fortune!
So instead people try to cut costs, and or keep making it a discussion on price, since this is America, instead of just making colleges public and free.
These things and reputations take years and tons of willpower and planning, so the risk of falling behind is immense.
Good professors are rare. Good classmates are rare. Distributed education lets benefits from the former scale, albeit with degradation. There is no known way to scale access to the network of a good college experience.
Education quality varies with respect to both of the above. As a result, there is a scaling limit. As a result, there will be scarcity until the preconditions are solved or the scaling limits released.
There is more value in a Princeton diploma than a Princeton education.
There would be fine tuning in the numbers and parameters but that would kill price as a signal as a good thing as it forces either public rates or exorbitant private school which thinks they can actually make more without the massive prime consumer pool.
That's also ignoring that FBS is basically advertising. There's been a steady increase in applications (and subsequently an increase in average GPA and similar numbers) at University of Alabama under Nick Saban, and I know I would have been less likely to go to Virginia Tech if it wasn't for their football program drawing me in when I was in middle/high school.
Jim Calhoun and Geno Auriemma did more to take the University of Connecticut to national prominence than 100 deans. And Auriemma did it by excellence in a non-revenue sport.
While Mark Few at Gonzaga made the NCAA tournament 20 years in a row, this small Jesuit school in Spokane doubled the number of applicants, increased the proportion of students from outside Washington, increased incoming student test scores and dramatically grew the endowment.
Big brand name schools that are regularly competing at top level in sports are usually seeing huge financial surplus due to sports.
http://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athlet...
Are you forgetting the entirely free K-12 option here that most people grow up with?
>$15k/yr is not expensive
Ok....
My kids' school spends $21k/pupil/year.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/quality-counts-2019-st...
We distributed the cost, but 15k a year is absolutely unaffordable for most Americans.
currently, the incentives are such that greedy people can just milk all the unrestrained cash flow coming into what should be a non-profit-oriented institution.
it's best if schools have to compete on price vs. value, and for students to leave school with a little debt to know the value of what they bought. it's when both price and debt are unconstrained that you need such tricks in the first place.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_334.10.a...
(until you get to ~80/20)
Funding is created for college places. Enough to "educate" 30% of people. People start to go.
Employers for very basic jobs notice that 50% of applicants have degrees. They stipulate on their next job advertisement "degree required".
The bar has been raised. You now cannot get an interview without a degree in many jobs.
You have to get a degree. The financiers start to loan more and more for this now essential ticket.
Universities start charging more. Student's entire working lives are financialised, as the debt will take a lifetime to repay.
University is not set by the cost to deliver, it's set by the available credit.
Same for housing.
But hey keep on focusing on your "right to free speech" that every single other nation has but without a brutal police force that Europeans look upon with horror.
The job can be done better for much less. Indeed, it used to be much cheaper in the past when the dorms weren't so fancy and there were a bazillion deans waltzing around trying to look essential. The adjunct professors get paid next to nothing. Let's give them a slight raise, fire 90% of the deans and we'll get back to something sustainable and affordable.