This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble.
My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million.
Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off.
The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are not getting what they paid for, so of course they are suing.
It's the same story as every other industry in the US.. the administrators/executives trying to rob everyone blind while they can.
Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.
It was obvious while I was a student that the ratio of administrators to faculty was ridiculous. And the growth rate ratio between them was 3:1. At no point was it clear to me what real value they were adding. I was the captain of a more capital and real-estate intensive than average student group, and it was absolutely infuriating to try to figure out how to get anything done. There was always some new bureaucrat condensing out of the ether who needed to be appeased. No meant no, but a yes was never enough.
To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action.
It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.
> Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.
Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value.
When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount.
All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people.
It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.
Padding certainly happens. The 'tech innovation incubator' at my college has a professional administrator. I worked in the same building. He had an office at the end of the hall, door open all the time. He came in (late) every morning with a pile of newspapers. Sat at his desk all day, reading all of them. Went home (early) having done precisely nothing. Got paid many times what faculty got paid.
> To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount.
If this were the only reason, the invisible hand of the market would address this problem most of the time. Add too many administrators that add no value and you end up with a higher cost structure than your competitors and are not able to provide the same value.
Most of the time people demand more headcount because (1) they actually need more headcount to get the work done or (2) regulatory burdens force you to hire more headcount to deal with the regulations.
We're increasingly moving to a world where (2) happens more and more.
A good example on college campuses are things like campus police and kangaroo courts that deal with issues that should have been referred directly to city/state/federal law enforcement and the justice system.
> Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.
This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US.
Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.
I agree with the thrust of your argument but my flagship state university is still affordable for anyone. It's not cheap, but in state tuition even if you pay sticker isn't so high you can't pay it off in a reasonable amount of time (in state tuition is ~$9k). It's a great university too (UNC) so part of the way they keep tuition for in state cheap is out of state students pay almost as much as private school tuition and there's a ton of OOS willing to pay it.
Schools bear a lot of responsibility but then we can't ignore the role state governments have played by drastically slashing funding over the past 10+ years. Probably only going to get cut further in the COVID environment.
Purdue University hasn't raised tuition in something like 5+ years and is also still affordable. It's not Ivy league by any means but it's a great school. You need government and administrators/boards willing to support this though, 99% won't
Something external needs to happen to stop rapid rise in tuition. Maybe it will be COVID. Maybe state governments will reign in the profligate spending of their universities. They aren't going to do it themselves (at least top Universities, schools at the bottom of the food chain could definitely go bankrupt.)
I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere.
The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.
Less than half of the students from my alma mater graduate within four years. When I learned this I was dumbfounded. The incentives are just not correctly aligned. The university is able to profit off of students taking fewer credit hours and staying more semesters, and academic advisors actively encourage this!
I learned (when MIT shut down my former dorm) that they track the six year graduation rate (doubt anyone is attending all of the six years). That seems more sensible.
If anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators.
I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.
The switch to online learning IMHO would lead to a 'winner-takes-all' market for professors/teachers.
To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.
In the telecom industry we had an adage, “Always cut staff before line.” Staff were overhead but line produced revenue. The same applies to teaching but it is not in the self-interest of administrators to cut staff.
Same at a neighboring city. They want to lay off workers due to COVID while they have doubled administrative staff over the last few years. And none of the administrators is going to get laid off.
The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.
There was a post a day or two ago about how remote work makes it harder for people to value employees except as utilities, whereas if they work closely they value them more.
Top administrators are in charge of who gets cut, and they probably interact with other admins the most or rely on them personally for some task, so they are most sensitive to laying them off versus park staff (or faculty) who they don't interact with often, if at all. They aren't visible.
Yea we really need to buck this trend, if anything we should be using city resources to prop up people affected by COVID so the cities economics don't collapse.
I attended RPI and recently had to recommend to a friend that they not send their child there. It made me sad. But the way the administration, and Shirley in particular, have been treating the students and the school has been so horrible.
College presidents/chancellors don't do as much administrating as they do fundraising from alumni and donors. This is more true the higher up in university prestige you go. The amount of value they bring in from donor contributions far outweighs their salaried cost.
Let's say you can increase your own salary, and no one is going to stop you from doing so. While some may not want to because it's a non-profit, others will happily nudge their pay upwards.
Eventually the universities that hesitated to raise their pay will be well below the pay of the others, and feel forced to raise their pay to something comparable to attract decent talent.
Same sort of trend occurring with CEO pay, just with a lot less hesitation because no one feels like they're robbing a charity.
This sounds strikingly similar to what's going on at my school, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. President has a 5mm+ salary and took only a 5% pay cut while laying off (not furloughing!) 60 faculty members.
From personal experience in the industry right now, this is not the case at all institutions. I certainly haven't done a survey, but I know of a few that have been very equitable in their refund policy.
The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service.
If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the content; they don't need (or have time for) the on-campus experience aspect of college.
The on-campus college experience encompasses so much more than just acquiring knowledge based on what's taught in class. It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. It's being in a place where there are so many interesting people to meet. It's being in a relatively forgiving environment where practically everyone is figuring out how to live on their own (or with roommates) for the first time. Being physically present in that environment is a key draw.
For me, the VAST majority of the value I got out of my on-campus education was the stuff that happened outside of class time. And I'm not even talking about the friendships or the networking or the fun. I'm talking about my actual education. For instance, I learned a lot more about journalism by working for the campus newspaper than from classroom instruction. And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually.
I say that, by the way, as a remote worker who has had to spend a lot of time convincing managers and higher-ups that yes, remote workers can be as productive and energized as in-office workers. Remote workers are generally happier when they're not looking to their job to supply all of their social needs. But an on-campus experience is much more all-encompassing in terms of what needs and desires it fulfills for post-adolescents.
The problem is, if you're going to fall back on that perspective, Real Life (TM) has all those things too, and it will continue to do so, for essentially free. There will be clusters of that sort of thing somewhere, just as there are "retirement communities" and "bedroom communities" and such. Universities certainly aren't bringing anywhere near enough value for their marginal improvement on those matters vs. what would exist without them to be worth decades of crushing debt.
If you surrender on what the Universities have to offer intellectually, then you're putting them in a position where they're going to be competing with generalized social forces that can create similar clusters of demographically-concentrated appeal without having to pay administrators and deans and speech police and all that stuff, and the universities will never be able to win carrying around such baggage.
"And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually."
It can't be recreated virtually. But it can be recreated without a "University" attached to it.
If what the unis were offering was, you know, proportional to the gain, maybe 1/5th to 1/10th the cost they are now, then maybe it would still be worth it. But paying gold-plated prices for "social experiences marginally better than what you could put together yourself if they weren't there" is not a sustainable plan, or an adequate defense for their practices.
Why is everyone acting like every school charges Ivy League prices?
Most state schools are affordable. Mine is a top school and charges $9k a year in tuition for in state.
You can get all of the social, in person experience at almost any state school. You might not get a job at Google or Mckinsey but you also won't take on 6 figure debt.
The problem is everyone wants to go to the private/out of state schools with sky high tuition and only marginally better academics. Then there's majoring in unemployable fields but that's another story entirely...
The counterpoint to your argument is that if it is so easy to create those types of communities for much less money than what universities are charging, why hasn't it happened?
I would guess that it's a combination of 1. not being as easy as it seems and 2. network effects. Because of the latter, you would basically have to persuade a large number of students to make the switch at the same time for them to feel as if they still have the social/professional networking they get from the on-campus experience.
I think a lot of what you're describing ties in with the general lack of "third places" in the US. College is basically one giant third place, and that community experience is hard to find elsewhere.
> It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time.
that's a community. You shouldn't have to need to pay to be part of a community. By gating this behind an expensive college tuition fee, it causes separation in society and is a cause for the inequalities of opportunities in the world. IMHO, tertiary education should be "free" (that is, a loan which is almost zero interest, and only needs to be paid back when earning above some "high" tax rate).
So your degree is free unless other people are willing to pay you to have it? In which case it costs you money? You already did society a favor by studying something other people care about instead of studying something only you care for. Why not just raise income taxes? Serves the same purpose without making people salty about college major choice. You already pay an effective 50% tax rate between income, sales, gas, registration, property taxes, etc. when you’re in that “sweet” spot of earning a great wage but not being wealthy. No one ever gets rich off paychecks.
I used to say stuff like this, but now I think it's mostly a lie I would tell myself. For most people, the "experience" of college/university is basically the a four-year party (or five- or six-...). For those who attend elite schools, they get a networking benefit. Most people aren't learning anything in classes, nor are they learning much outside of class beyond their ethanol tolerance.
I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).
Unfortunately, online education isn't popular because folks don't want the experience, especially if you are returning to school later in life. The reality is that many colleges are geared towards a non-working, single, young adult student. This is reflected in classroom times and coursework. (I had a class require volunteer work and short-term participation in college groups). You simply cannot work a 9-5 job and attend most regular colleges.
I was under the impression remote / online leering was most popular with older learners?
Aren’t there schools that specialise in this segment.
This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353796 mentions University of Phoenix for one, and I’ve know more than a few people here in Australia who claim to have enjoyed their remote / online courses as older learners.
I agree with your overall point, but one of the issues with online learning is the credential received isn't the same value as an in-person one. There are an increasing number of exceptions like the Georgia Tech online masters, but I'm not aware of a high-end online bachelors degree.
In UK the Open University is highly valued, and only (?) offers remote learning (and has for decades).
Indeed it's recommended to put BA(Open), or whatever, by the uni as it's considered by some more valuable than an attendance based degree. This mirrors the writing of Oxon., for example, for an Oxford degree.
Harvard Extension Campus offers quite a few. While not viewed as favorably as an on-campus degree from Harvard, still valued higher than an on-campus degree from many other institutions.
Do you think your experience generalises to the whole university population? Was the entire journalism school working for the campus newspaper and did they derive real benefits from it with regard to post-university outcomes?
Or does it stand to reason that, on average, half of people who go to university on-campus have a below average experience of it?
For every post saying something like yours, there’s another post about how a person didn’t go to university, or dropped out early, and claim to have benefitted from not wasting their time at university.
Sweeping generalisations are never going to capture the whole of possible experience, and I believe there’s room for on-campus, off-campus, and way more on the job / apprenticeship style training, and other types of learning I probably don’t even know about.
Online colleges like the University of Phoenix have been around since the public internet (and by mail before). They went after working people and veterans who didnt care for the 'dorm experience'.
I don't know about the legal question, but I think universities are setting themselves up for pain by arguing that the online experience they've been offering isn't substantially different from the in-person experience they had been offering. It's easy to imagine people calling their bluff on this, choosing to do remote learning even after COVID-19 goes away if it will save $100k+ over 4 years, and a subsequent contraction in the number of universities we need to educate people.
If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits.
The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees and simply delay education until after Coronavirus.
Instead, they made the best of the situation and tried to do right by the students as best they could within the financial, legal, and ethical constraints of Coronavirus. In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). We’re all making compromises under the circumstances.
I’d be more sympathetic if these students were requesting to defer their education until after Coronavirus and were willing to forgo all education and credits in the mean time. Demanding both the education and a refund isn’t exactly fair.
Your opinion is reasonable from a contractual standpoint, but, contracts aren’t all that matters.
Universities have a variety of tools they use to lock-in students. If the universities gave students the ability to take the semester off and get a refund before it started your argument would be strengthened. Most universities did not offer that option (if any).
When you build an org with a massive cost structure, you cannot survive big risks. We are seeing it playout in a number of markets, but education is about to be changed forever
>it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate
I feel its not reasonable to ask students to pay more than fair market value for what they receive regardless of operational costs. They should refund up to what similar online schools charge today.
If it costs the auto dealer as much as a new BMW to deliver a used Toyota, that isn't my problem I'm only paying used Toyota pricing or I'm taking the matter to court.
> In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases).
I think it depends on the endowment. If the University in fact has a lot of money, then I think they _should_ be operating at a loss while taking advantage of their cushion. But yeah for the majority of universities not in that situation I do agree with you.
> "When universities across the U.S. shut their doors because of the coronavirus pandemic and sent students home, many did offer partial refunds of dorm and activities fees."
It comes down to the amount of the refund. Students are still receiving something online, but less than they'd receive in person, both in quality of education (e.g. no chemistry labs) and everything else that physical attendance comes with. Arguing for a higher discount factor seems fine to me, and probably depends on the amount the college has already agreed to.
Ah yes, why won't anyone think of the poor administrators who get paid obnoxious salaries for doing effectively none of the labor that goes into providing an education for the students.
I was taking a class that transitioned online. (University extension school, biostatistics). So the networking and campus related activities don't relate to me. At the extension school, some classes were taught online already (this one was in person only).
I felt the teaching staff made a pretty huge effort to get things online and running well. I'm sure they weren't getting paid more to make the transition.
There was a general feeling of, this sucks but lets through it. It was a lot more work for faculty and students (It takes longer to learn material remotely, at least for me..). I don't think diplomas will have asterix next to them, saying "finished online", like the article indicates.
Going forward, what tuition is going to be if classes are online in the fall is another issue. I'm guessing universities will charge what they can.
My guess the tuition will be similar in price. However, if it were me going to college at this time I would seriously consider skipping a year/semester if they did that. Get a small time job somewhere and help get ahead of the loans I already racked up. But that is just me. It became crystal clear to me a few years ago that these schools had gone off the rails price wise. My wife was taking 1 class. The book was more than the class and the previous semester you could not buy used. Ironically the class was micro economics.
I would love the option to be able to skip a semester or two of college, but unfortunately if I made that choice I'd lose all of my scholarships and it would end up costing me more than whatever I'd make in the meantime :(
Reddit's "AskReddit" subreddit had a question recently hosted with a title something along the lines of "How did your college financially screw you over in this crisis?" The answers were varied and often ... "shocking" is the wrong word, because I have come to expect a kind of compulsive money-grubbing from many universities ... perhaps "flinch-inducing." Certainly the local subreddit for my city discussed similar money-grabs, nickel-and-diming, and general high-handed behavior interspersed with a general lack of competency.
Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.
Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.
Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.
> "In my personal opinion, I can deliver the same quality of education online as I could in person."
Although this statement is debatable to begin with, it also misses a huge point. Even if the quality of an online education is the same, many students cannot learn as anywhere near as well in that environment. They paid tens of thousands of dollars for in-person learning, so for that to be replaced with something entirely different in form really sucks.
As the article stated, many of these universities did give partial refunds. The students are demanding even more refunds while still collecting the education.
I’m curious: Would you consider the same argument valid for workers forced to work remotely? Would you be upset if a company decided to cut workers’ pay in half during COVID19 remote work under the assumption that some workers can’t be as efficient remotely? After all, the company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for in-person work, but now they’re getting potentially worse remote work.
> As the article stated, many of these universities did give partial refunds. The students are demanding even more refunds while still collecting the education.
To be clear, the article doesn't state that partial refunds of tuition have been offered, but that "many did offer partial refunds of dorm and activities fees."
Anecdata from my little corner. My 'non-profit' university's president is at 800k, his VP is 500k and multiple other admin officials in similar range. It is hard not to have a bitter taste as they just offered the students $500 grant application for their COVID19 trouble.
If there is one good thing about this pandemic, it is shining a light on all this.
And from the other end of the spectrum, at my University of California campus, the top salaries are all in the 300k range, and all go to world-class engineering and sciences faculty who bring in millions in research grants each year. The chancellor, deans and one coach also break 300k, but that's it.
So, different schools, different governance models, different outcomes.
Looking at UC system, I see that UCSB chancellor received $415k compensation, 9th highest at UCSB, but only 750th highest across UC campuses! Top two salaries went to athletic coaches at UCLA.
I think the offshoot of this will be that student/university contracts are about to become massive one sided EULA's with all liability on the student side.
Readit News
My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million.
Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off.
The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are not getting what they paid for, so of course they are suing.
It's the same story as every other industry in the US.. the administrators/executives trying to rob everyone blind while they can.
Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.
To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action.
It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.
Take two teams, one with 6 people that produce a lot of value, and one with 50 people that produce... Let's say the same amount of value.
When the manager of the team with 6 people, in the same org, starts getting paid three times more than the manager of the team of 50, you'll stop seeing managers fight for headcount.
All of the economic incentives in the workplace lead to bloat, because people aren't paid for value added - they are paid market rate. The market rate for a manager of 50 people is higher than the market rate of a manager of 6 people.
It's like the gripe that engineers have in firms that don't have an engineering career track for vertical advancement. Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded. Likewise, managers are pushed into becoming managers of larger teams, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.
If this were the only reason, the invisible hand of the market would address this problem most of the time. Add too many administrators that add no value and you end up with a higher cost structure than your competitors and are not able to provide the same value.
Most of the time people demand more headcount because (1) they actually need more headcount to get the work done or (2) regulatory burdens force you to hire more headcount to deal with the regulations.
We're increasingly moving to a world where (2) happens more and more.
A good example on college campuses are things like campus police and kangaroo courts that deal with issues that should have been referred directly to city/state/federal law enforcement and the justice system.
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This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US.
Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.
Schools bear a lot of responsibility but then we can't ignore the role state governments have played by drastically slashing funding over the past 10+ years. Probably only going to get cut further in the COVID environment.
Purdue University hasn't raised tuition in something like 5+ years and is also still affordable. It's not Ivy league by any means but it's a great school. You need government and administrators/boards willing to support this though, 99% won't
Something external needs to happen to stop rapid rise in tuition. Maybe it will be COVID. Maybe state governments will reign in the profligate spending of their universities. They aren't going to do it themselves (at least top Universities, schools at the bottom of the food chain could definitely go bankrupt.)
The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.
You have to go down 502 schools on this list before you run into a leader that makes less than 200k/year.
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/executive-compensatio...
I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.
To simplify, if you're attending class at a top university you get a top math professor, if you're attending a school ranked at #1000, then you have to settle with whomever they can get. However, in an online setting, why wouldn't all the students just use the top online material? And in that situation, the top professors become more valuable (since students of many universities not only want access to their lectures, but also can actually get them), but the majority of median-quality professors become expendable.
They will soon find out the truth.
The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.
Top administrators are in charge of who gets cut, and they probably interact with other admins the most or rely on them personally for some task, so they are most sensitive to laying them off versus park staff (or faculty) who they don't interact with often, if at all. They aren't visible.
https://renewrensselaer.org/
It's really sad the plunder.
Are the people in these positions in possession of a skill that non of the people who would gladly hold the post for $150k have? What is it?
They're hired by a board of regents, right? What is the BOR looking for that they value so highly?
Eventually the universities that hesitated to raise their pay will be well below the pay of the others, and feel forced to raise their pay to something comparable to attract decent talent.
Same sort of trend occurring with CEO pay, just with a lot less hesitation because no one feels like they're robbing a charity.
https://transparentcalifornia.com/agencies/salaries/#univers...
It is as an accurate depiction as you might wish for.
EDIT: the reality is worse.
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If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the content; they don't need (or have time for) the on-campus experience aspect of college.
The on-campus college experience encompasses so much more than just acquiring knowledge based on what's taught in class. It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. It's being in a place where there are so many interesting people to meet. It's being in a relatively forgiving environment where practically everyone is figuring out how to live on their own (or with roommates) for the first time. Being physically present in that environment is a key draw.
For me, the VAST majority of the value I got out of my on-campus education was the stuff that happened outside of class time. And I'm not even talking about the friendships or the networking or the fun. I'm talking about my actual education. For instance, I learned a lot more about journalism by working for the campus newspaper than from classroom instruction. And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually.
I say that, by the way, as a remote worker who has had to spend a lot of time convincing managers and higher-ups that yes, remote workers can be as productive and energized as in-office workers. Remote workers are generally happier when they're not looking to their job to supply all of their social needs. But an on-campus experience is much more all-encompassing in terms of what needs and desires it fulfills for post-adolescents.
If you surrender on what the Universities have to offer intellectually, then you're putting them in a position where they're going to be competing with generalized social forces that can create similar clusters of demographically-concentrated appeal without having to pay administrators and deans and speech police and all that stuff, and the universities will never be able to win carrying around such baggage.
"And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually."
It can't be recreated virtually. But it can be recreated without a "University" attached to it.
If what the unis were offering was, you know, proportional to the gain, maybe 1/5th to 1/10th the cost they are now, then maybe it would still be worth it. But paying gold-plated prices for "social experiences marginally better than what you could put together yourself if they weren't there" is not a sustainable plan, or an adequate defense for their practices.
Viva la disaggregation.
Most state schools are affordable. Mine is a top school and charges $9k a year in tuition for in state.
You can get all of the social, in person experience at almost any state school. You might not get a job at Google or Mckinsey but you also won't take on 6 figure debt.
The problem is everyone wants to go to the private/out of state schools with sky high tuition and only marginally better academics. Then there's majoring in unemployable fields but that's another story entirely...
I would guess that it's a combination of 1. not being as easy as it seems and 2. network effects. Because of the latter, you would basically have to persuade a large number of students to make the switch at the same time for them to feel as if they still have the social/professional networking they get from the on-campus experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
that's a community. You shouldn't have to need to pay to be part of a community. By gating this behind an expensive college tuition fee, it causes separation in society and is a cause for the inequalities of opportunities in the world. IMHO, tertiary education should be "free" (that is, a loan which is almost zero interest, and only needs to be paid back when earning above some "high" tax rate).
I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).
Aren’t there schools that specialise in this segment.
This post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23353796 mentions University of Phoenix for one, and I’ve know more than a few people here in Australia who claim to have enjoyed their remote / online courses as older learners.
Indeed it's recommended to put BA(Open), or whatever, by the uni as it's considered by some more valuable than an attendance based degree. This mirrors the writing of Oxon., for example, for an Oxford degree.
It's surely about perception of employers.
https://www.extension.harvard.edu/academics/bachelor-liberal...
Do you think your experience generalises to the whole university population? Was the entire journalism school working for the campus newspaper and did they derive real benefits from it with regard to post-university outcomes?
Or does it stand to reason that, on average, half of people who go to university on-campus have a below average experience of it?
For every post saying something like yours, there’s another post about how a person didn’t go to university, or dropped out early, and claim to have benefitted from not wasting their time at university.
Sweeping generalisations are never going to capture the whole of possible experience, and I believe there’s room for on-campus, off-campus, and way more on the job / apprenticeship style training, and other types of learning I probably don’t even know about.
If this is a true, then why is the online version much pricier?
If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits.
The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees and simply delay education until after Coronavirus.
Instead, they made the best of the situation and tried to do right by the students as best they could within the financial, legal, and ethical constraints of Coronavirus. In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). We’re all making compromises under the circumstances.
I’d be more sympathetic if these students were requesting to defer their education until after Coronavirus and were willing to forgo all education and credits in the mean time. Demanding both the education and a refund isn’t exactly fair.
it's not reasonable to expect students to pay for the costs of operating a university when all they receive is a glorified khan academy experience.
Universities have a variety of tools they use to lock-in students. If the universities gave students the ability to take the semester off and get a refund before it started your argument would be strengthened. Most universities did not offer that option (if any).
When you build an org with a massive cost structure, you cannot survive big risks. We are seeing it playout in a number of markets, but education is about to be changed forever
I highly doubt that these universities have offered even close to a 5/6th refund to their students.
I feel its not reasonable to ask students to pay more than fair market value for what they receive regardless of operational costs. They should refund up to what similar online schools charge today.
If it costs the auto dealer as much as a new BMW to deliver a used Toyota, that isn't my problem I'm only paying used Toyota pricing or I'm taking the matter to court.
I think it depends on the endowment. If the University in fact has a lot of money, then I think they _should_ be operating at a loss while taking advantage of their cushion. But yeah for the majority of universities not in that situation I do agree with you.
It comes down to the amount of the refund. Students are still receiving something online, but less than they'd receive in person, both in quality of education (e.g. no chemistry labs) and everything else that physical attendance comes with. Arguing for a higher discount factor seems fine to me, and probably depends on the amount the college has already agreed to.
I felt the teaching staff made a pretty huge effort to get things online and running well. I'm sure they weren't getting paid more to make the transition.
There was a general feeling of, this sucks but lets through it. It was a lot more work for faculty and students (It takes longer to learn material remotely, at least for me..). I don't think diplomas will have asterix next to them, saying "finished online", like the article indicates.
Going forward, what tuition is going to be if classes are online in the fall is another issue. I'm guessing universities will charge what they can.
Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.
Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.
Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gqb30j/uni_stude...
Although this statement is debatable to begin with, it also misses a huge point. Even if the quality of an online education is the same, many students cannot learn as anywhere near as well in that environment. They paid tens of thousands of dollars for in-person learning, so for that to be replaced with something entirely different in form really sucks.
I’m curious: Would you consider the same argument valid for workers forced to work remotely? Would you be upset if a company decided to cut workers’ pay in half during COVID19 remote work under the assumption that some workers can’t be as efficient remotely? After all, the company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for in-person work, but now they’re getting potentially worse remote work.
To be clear, the article doesn't state that partial refunds of tuition have been offered, but that "many did offer partial refunds of dorm and activities fees."
If there is one good thing about this pandemic, it is shining a light on all this.
So, different schools, different governance models, different outcomes.
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https://dailynexus.com/2018-09-06/ucsb-payroll-totaled-appro...