It also subsidizes largess such as unnecessary buildings and retreats. University department managers treat budgets as signs of status, and try to build as large of org chart pyramids as possible.

Source: I worked at a top 5 US university as an employee, on both the business and academic sides, for 7 years.

Gee, this is what subsidized looks like? Must be a lot cheaper than the tuition in other countries that don't have nearly as many international students :)

In Germany all students including non-EU foreigners don't have to pay any tuition generally (with the exceptions being Saxony and Baden-Württemberg, per https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studiengeb%C3%BChren_in_Deutsc...).

The key difference is: our universities do not run expensive world-class sports teams (while there are amateur things such as racing, these do have an educational focus as they tend to be a side gig of the mechanics courses) and at the same time are properly financed by the state.

That sounds like a great system. From purely selfish motives, the state will reap more taxes from college educated citizens than they would otherwise, so literally investing in public colleges makes financial sense. America chose to invest in education debt (and modern day indentured servitude) instead.

> From purely selfish motives, the state will reap more taxes from college educated citizens than they would otherwise, so literally investing in public colleges makes financial sense.

On the other hand, college educated citizens are less likely to enter the army out of desperation (so no more cheap replaceable cannon fodder for the endless wars) or to agree to usurious 20%+ APR payday loans or end up in private prisons or work as replaceable cogs in Amazon warehouses, "gig economy", farming, meatpacking or whatever else exploitative labor market. This costs the rich elite donating to politicians actual money in profits.

Incentives for politicians are not aligned with the targets for a better society, that is the core issue.

Modern soldiers are not "cannon fodder", they are for the most part highly trained professionals that you cannot draft and quickly ship off to war.

They’re not cheap either.

Not many countries fight endless wars these days.

"it takes all kinds."

Most German universities also don’t have dorms, on campus amenities, erm, or often even campuses. German courses don’t have TAs, and many only have grades based on one final. It isn’t a bad system, but you get what you pay for.

> Most German universities also don’t have dorms, on campus amenities, erm, or often even campuses.

Most universities have some form of dorms, however they're usually wildly inadequate in numbers - but as most students come from the town or nearer region of the university and don't move across half the country they can live at their parents' houses.

As for amenities: who needs special "college amenities" here? Sports is provided by the town (public sports training grounds), its clubs (for team sports) and for really niche stuff sometimes by the universities themselves, drinking is allowed both in public and in a number of bars, discos and other venues... so what is missing? (Honest question, my knowledge about US campus culture is based upon more or less shitty comedy movies)

As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.

I'm not arguing that the German system is bad, just that it is a very different product from what American universities sell. It might actually be a better model for America to provide higher education to more people at a better cost.

> As for TAs: yes we absolutely have higher-grade students doing teaching or scientific assistance at university, source: many friends have done this.

Neither of those are called TAs. The first kind is a graduate student lecturer, the second is called an RA (research assistant). One or more TAs for a large course typically helps the professor in running sections and grading homework, those two things being missing from most German courses (from my understand being told by my friend about his college experience in Germany; they might have homework, but it wasn't graded).

Is complete ignorance of the economics of US collegiate sports a European thing? Those big sports teams are money-makers, not cost centers. Everyone bitches and whines about a college football coach being paid more than anyone else at the university, but that same coach's team actually provides funding to the rest of the university. The sports teams are not expenses, they are revenue.

They may be revenue generators indeed, but anyway I see this as yet another symptom of a failed setup in the core: research and education should be fully funded by the taxpayer directly instead of indirectly via saddling youth with decades of debt or by sports activities that have nothing to do with academia.

Academia should be academia and only dedicated to further scientific knowledge and teaching, not to spend boatloads of time and resources to hunt for half year grant money or sports revenue. Just imagine all the management time of what is consumed by sports go to helping the professors deal with grants/funding issues - that would be a major boost for science if scientists could actually do science things instead of management things!

Profit-generating programs are a minority, according to the governing body.

https://www.ncaa.org/about/resources/media-center/news/athle...

Afaik, they dont. There are few money maker teams and the rest of them is financial loss.

> Those big sports teams are money-makers, not cost centers.

Are they actually, when all's said and done? (Genuinely asking, I've no idea). In particular, after the facilities are paid for? Non-education-related sports facilities (stadiums and such) are notoriously nearly always net costs to the government who subsidise them.

As a simple example, a school with a division 1 football team like Ohio State will spend approximately $100 million per year on athletics but that will be less than the athletics programs bring in. The mens football and basketball teams will bring in almost all of the revenue, and will support all other athletic programs (and athletic scholarships) at the university. The Ohio State football stadium seats more than 100K, and the minimum ticket price is $22 so you are looking at more than $2M in gate revenue for games, plus TV contract revenue, plus merchandise it sells all over the state, plus donors and alums who will pay far more than $22/seat for corporate boxes or to attach their name to some aspect of the program for commercial purposes.

Stadiums can sometimes look for public subsidy when being replaced or re-built, but they can equally make a claim that their presence brings in millions of dollars of revenue to the local area over the course of a season and that the cost of the stadium can easily be amortized over decades (something that is actually easier for a collegiate program in a mid-sized city to claim than a pro team in a major urban center.) The ancillary facilities like practice space, offices for coaching staff and other infrastructure are almost always paid for by the athletic programs to the best of my knowledge.

My alma mater built a second stadium for their tier 3 football team that just got kicked out of their league for poor performance. I must be very ignorant of where this magical revenue comes from.

You mean the tuition that has increased in order to keep pace with administrator salaries?

No, the point was that administrator salaries are not the primary reason for tuition increases.

Running a college is expensive. Everything costs more, including the blue-collar work force, so tuition correspondingly costs more. Public schools must also deal with drastic cuts in state support--the UC system, for example, only receives 10% of its budget from the state of CA (but used to receive more than 90% of its budget from the state).

I teach part-time in a private for-profit college in Germany (in which German-citizen students get up to half their tuition paid by the government) & tuition is comparable to the least expensive public state universities in the US.

I don't know how the numbers work out but I suspect you could run a private college in the US for less than the mid to high 5-figure $ per student per year they seem to charge.

But then the school would be ranked as a low cost institution, and carry a stigma that many parents and students would want to avoid. There's a reason USC is raising tuition right now. Signaling that it's worth it...

My daughter is going to school in the fall, and I ran into this pricing strategy immediately. Her choice of college started tuition at over $50k/year, but offers "scholarships." These aren't Pell Grant etc, but scholarships that apply only to this institution. You get a scholarship for touring the campus. You get another scholarship for being a state resident. Eventually, you're effective tuition rate is cut in half.

This strategy is brilliant because it works on 3 axis; first, the parents feel like they're getting a good deal (since the effect of anchoring the tuition at $50k is hard to resist). Second, the school can appear elite since it charges a high tuition. Third, the student (and parents) feel good because their kid "earned" scholarships.

Then why does tuition increase so much every year even though numbers of international students increases every year?