We have to ask ourselves why college is so expensive.
It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure).
There are probably a few factors.
- increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students
- increasingly top-heavy administration (hey, let's add another $300K Assistant Deputy VP of Student Diversity, etc) providing a path for faculty to 'advance' in their careers
- federally subsidized student loans make it less painful for colleges to increase tuition than if students had to borrow independently or pay out of pocket (this is especially egregious in for-profit education, where getting that federal money is key ... gotta get those marks, er, students enrolled so you get paid!)
Essentially, it's a racket where everyone has an incentive for the price to keep rising - except for the students and their families, and perhaps the government, who's underwriting this entire disastrous bubble.
- increasingly top-heavy administration (hey, let's add another $300K Assistant Deputy VP of Student Diversity, etc) providing a path for faculty to 'advance' in their careers
I'd like to point out that much of the administrative bloat has occurred because of new (bipartisan) laws forcing colleges to provide more services. There are services for veterans, services for the disabled, services for victims of crimes, oversight services for grants and such, etc. My girlfriend works for a university, and much of the administrative hiring they do is directly correlated to new requirements, laws, and administrative rules passed down from the federal or state governments.
So I think you're right, but don't place all the blame on the schools, just as much belongs to the political parties that like to use universities as a battlefield for whatever agenda they've got at the moment.
Edit: It is especially wrong to think that the faculty are driving administrative bloat when, in fact, the faculty are the biggest opponents (and literally stage rallies against it at some schools) because every dollar the university spends on an administrator is a dollar they don't spend paying a faculty member).
The vast majority of people have no aspiration towards being an academic administrator, and academic administrators aren't exactly a powerful voting block.
But disabled veterans are a voting block and they vote themselves extra services on campus and those services come with administrator. Repeat this process with every disadvantaged group and you have tremendous bloat.
You could make the argument that disabled veterans are the MOST important voting block and with good reason.
Please refrain from reducing veterans to a political action committee. They deserve much more than they currently get under our system. Try and get through the red tape at the VA and then tell me how you feel about the outsize effect that the veterans are having on the benefits debate.
Is it so unreasonable to believe that non-conscripted veterans deserve exactly the same financial status as their equivalent non-veteran counterparts? (Disabled or otherwise). This argument comes from anti-nationalist, pro-equality-of-opportunity values.
Veterans who go to war come back bearing terrible scars. They are routinely subjected to horrific conditions that would make you cringe. They are asked to do terrible things to terrible people and still maintain a standard of professional conduct that civilians cannot maintain.
SO I do believe it's unreasonable to treat war veterans, who volunteered to sacrifice themselves and their lives to defend our way of life, just like any other citizen who needs some governmental support.
Veterans who have no obligation to serve but do so anyway deserve our utmost respect and admiration. And on the list of people who contribute to the safety, security, and greatness of this country, they are at the very top.
True, but then you're talking about legislative votes, so more important than voting is action by pressure groups. Maybe it's accurate to say that they are "lobbying" themselves money.
Good point. My comment snarked at the faculty a bit, but I'm sure the rank-and-file don't love the top-heavy bloat either.
It's great for the mid to late career faculty member who wants to take the next step and become an administrator. It's less so for those whose areas of interest are lower priority and must tighten belts.
> It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure).
UGH! These kind of comments make me so angry. Sure, lots of graduate students are sub par due to inexperience or distraction or pure, simple busy-ness, but lots and lots of professors don't give a damn either. I TA'd on and off for about five years, sometimes spending 20-30 hours a week meeting with students and doing 1:1 sessions with them to help them learn whatever topics the course required. Did I sometimes get stumped by a slightly off-the-beaten-path question in a recitation section? Sure. But I'd still take a motivated grad student over many of the professors I suffered through.
(And to be fair, tons of--perhaps even most--graduate students don't give a damn either. But the problem isn't "More and more classes taught by graduate students and adjuncts", it's a combination of "Lack of interest in being a good teacher" and "Lack of interest in incentivising good teaching".)
Fair point. The mere fact of having earned a PhD does not automatically make a person a great teacher, and lacking one does not make a person a bad teacher. I certainly had a few full professors who were phoning it in every class, droning over their 20 year old lecture notes.
However, in my undergraduate experience, the most interesting and memorable classes were taught by active professors with many years of teaching experience, who also had a good research program. It helped a lot when they would teach class material, and also connect it to what was current in their field of research.
FWIW my best undergrad classes were taught by endowed lecture chairs, e.g. professors who were paid extra by the university to stop caring about and doing research and instead focus solely on teaching.
No one is saying that it is bad to have TAs than professors. But the default assumption is that if a college increases tuition fees, then they are probably hiring better professors. But if you increase fees and hire lowly paid TAs, then that is certainly not fair is it? (or atleast increase TA's salary!)
PS: I actually hated most of my TAs and loved the courses where the professor didn't use a TA and was involved in teaching, himself.
>increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students
This gets cited a lot, and sometimes people actually go to the trouble of citing the cost of a new facility at $x million. Is there evidence that these facilities actually raise the cost substantially per student per year? Often when I hear people getting offended about, say, a $15 million building, I run a back-of-the-napkin calculation and it's not even a drop in the bucket on a tuition bill when you consider that it's going to serve something like 40,000 people per year for more than 30 years.
It's a commonly-expressed complaint at my private, engineering-focused school that, of all the egregious capital investment is in things that have high donor selling potential but little use to the student body: a beautiful new athletic facility (we're D1 in only one sport) and a "performing arts center" where artists are subsidized residency and no student programs (not even through our tiny arts department) are accommodated.
If a new building replaces an old building, those costs should be the same as or lower than the older building, per square foot. If the new building does not replace an older building, it should allow the college to enroll more students or provide other services that bring in more revenue to pay for those ongoing costs.
A lot of courses taught these days also are sold as a package from the textbook companies. Often, a textbook comes with premade slide presentations (aka, lectures), projects, and tests based on their material. So even when you have professors teaching, a good number of them are really not doing much work themselves.
Teachers/administrators are told that they need these packages from corporations to make sure students best learn the material and to make sure that teachers best teach material, too, but what really ends up happening is that teachers become worse at teaching and students become worse at learning because more organic methods of education (teacher-student interaction, certain forms of abstract thinking, etc) can be forgotten, and we can see the lines between offline/online schools blurring as education becomes a corporate process like so many other things in our age. It is a bad racket all around.
As someone who's worked for a college before, there are things I could say about accreditation, but won't because it's generally a valid practice.
It's certainly not due to inflation in quality of education. More and more classes are taught by graduate students and adjuncts rather than actual professors (who are mostly focused on their research programs in order to earn tenure).
There are probably a few factors.
- increased student expectations of 'fun', leading to new facilities (dorms, student centers, etc), as colleges compete with each other for students
- increasingly top-heavy administration (hey, let's add another $300K Assistant Deputy VP of Student Diversity, etc) providing a path for faculty to 'advance' in their careers
- federally subsidized student loans make it less painful for colleges to increase tuition than if students had to borrow independently or pay out of pocket (this is especially egregious in for-profit education, where getting that federal money is key ... gotta get those marks, er, students enrolled so you get paid!)
Essentially, it's a racket where everyone has an incentive for the price to keep rising - except for the students and their families, and perhaps the government, who's underwriting this entire disastrous bubble.