To that end, a quick google search yields an article that gives a good set of reasons a think-tank that studied the problem found as a set of causes. This is the first result of googling "what caused the student debt crisis":
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-is-the-student-debt-cris...
Now those four items ARE things that have changed between now and then. Generally, the decline state funding of schools means unis now fund themselves by relying on tuition that students do not feel as a cost (at least immediately) because the federal government can give out loans like candy.
Again people, please please please don't just conjure up ideas in your head and think you understand the causes in the world that explain how everything works. You would not apply this line of thinking to your own job you are paid for, people have studied these things and generally it is understood why the debt crisis exists, it isn't a mystery!
Colleges were captured by professional administrators. That’s what’s changed, and the results are entirely predictable.
See, also, hospitals.
As another example, we have a bunch of internal grants. It's basically free money that you can apply for to do whatever you want with it, to the tune of 10s of thousands. We need to pay administrators to handle that whole process. It's a lot of money to handle and it's not a cheap process to administer these grants. We could cut them and it would shrink the budget, but it would also stop the flow of early-stage ideas from forming that later turn into huge grants. If I have an idea that might cost like $10k, I can whip up a proposal and get funding for that lickity split, without having to go to the NSF or some other external agency. Then when the idea is more mature I can go and get external funding. If you cut the administrators just looking at a budget, you're really cutting research without realizing it.
I mean, running a University is basically like running a city. You have all the same concerns: infrastructure, food, security, a citizenry, political struggles, etc. You need a government (administrators) to do that kind of work that keeps this huge system running. Yes bureaucracies are expensive and inefficient, and sure there are of course things that could be cut, but by and large the University I work at gets the job done. Day in and day out for 10s of thousands of students. That machine doesn't just happen, it's administrators keeping it running.
The students get their piece of paper that employers use as a free-to-them proxy for intelligence and diligence. I won’t cry at all when this exploitative business model is disrupted and lots of administrators have to find honest work.
This is, as I understand it, correct. Administrators as a percentage of university staff has ballooned. The explanation I've seen for this is that they are needed to handle ever increasing amounts of regulations. This is the same problem faced by hospitals.
I’m cynical about this. “These damn regulations! It would be so much better for us… I mean for the public… if we could get rid of them.”
Too simplistic and too much incentive to blame regulations. No doubt it’s a burden, and some regulations are overzealous and misguided, but there’s probably more to it.
It’s a significant burden to the chemical factory when you make it illegal for them to dump their waste in the river (greed bad!). It’s also a burden to society because now we have to police their douchebaggery. Then there’s the (inevitable) chance that this policing is corrupted or becomes inefficient (regulations bad!). Probably a flawed analogy, but it’s what I think of whenever there’s an argument for or against regulation.
As an exercise, I sat down one day and listed the administrators that if I was suddenly president of my university should begin considering updating their resumes. Each one was a problem as a person, but the position was one I would want refilled - indeed, at least one of them was currently running a badly understaffed office.
Meanwhile, states have pulled back or failed to increase university funding, and the universities fill the gap with greater tuition. Here's the story+graph for the University of California system: https://accountability.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/chapt... This is the GP's point, and completely spot on.
It is also true that there are more MBA's in the admin buildings and that they suck, and are likely paid more than they should be. But while I think it /is/ a factor, it's likely not the biggest bottleneck.
If this is the primary factor we should expect student debt load for private school graduates to have grown much more slowly than for public school graduates, right?
It may be that the increasing admin staff has taken advantage of this situation more ruthlessly than good communist professor admins would have,
Why are we giving non profit tax benefits to profit maximizers?
Even into the 1980s buildings were simple brutalist concrete dungeons and A/C was not an expectation; there was no campus IT; no plethora of career placement systems; counseling office; Title IX compliance office; free medical clinics; fancy rec centers, and numerous other amenities.
And that's the problem! Go for a haircut and you can see the effect on a micro scale. Hair salons and barbershops have remained almost entirely unchanged for decades, yet the price of a haircut has skyrocketed. Why is that? Because you wouldn't be able to hire any hairdressers at $2/hour. Haircuts are more expensive because hairdressers need more money to live. Rent has gotten more expensive for hairdressers, just as it has for everyone else.
Increases in productivity due to automation have generated vast amounts of new wealth. It's the overall increase in wealth which has driven up real estate prices and the cost of rent. Replace the hairdresser in the above example with a doctor or a lecturer and the situation remains the same. The services of these jobs/professions have become dramatically more expensive because:
a) They cannot be automated to achieve the productivity gains seen in other sectors.
b) If wages in these sectors were to remain flat then they would see an exodus of workers to other sectors.
c) Some costs in life, such as shelter, are fixed by the availability of land. Land is finite but the demand for land continues to grow. This issue has been discussed extensively here on HN but all of the solutions I've seen are temporary. Ultimately, we could turn the entire planet into Coruscant and we would still see rent prices going up!
1) the staff to student ratio is going up
2) average pay for instructional staff is falling on an inflation adjusted basis
Also, unlike a haircut or knee surgery there’s no reason to believe that education should be difficult to automate if it were actually education that was being sold.
State school tuition cost have crushed the general level of inflation increases because it is easy money for the state and there is no state that does not love extra money to spend.
In 2008, state funding dried up, and has not returned, even in places with booming economies.
Federal funding via research grants has been, at best, flat over the same time period.
That leaves only one dial left to universities.
Agreed. See the recent UCLA TA position opening. The unpaid position.
Politicians answer to this crisis of rapaciousness is to suggest that the public should pay the ever escalating costs while suggesting nothing to rein in their growth. This suggests that the politicians have been captured in some way.