Comment by jshc - Hacker Neue

jshc May 20, 2019 parent

Any idea why college education is so expensive? here's just my cynic view from personal experience but I don't have enough data to back it. 1. some professors in some public state schools can get paid a ridiculous amount of salary 2. The administration is inefficient and bureaucratic.

lotsofpulp May 20, 2019

Price is where supply curve meets demand curve. Demand curve is extremely far to the right due to everyone believing college will land them better, whiter collar prospects than otherwise available to them.

Also, it’s a very conspicuous social status marker and greatly contributes to the network of people that you have for the rest of your life. Not that it’s worth it for most colleges, but people believe, and no one likes to make less than rosy assumptions about themselves or their child.

Couple this extreme demand with an unlimited source of money, e.g. taxpayer funded student loans. Now a college can state whatever price they want, and the buy will be able to pay it! All they have to do is apply for a loan they are guaranteed to be approved for, and many times the parents are on the hook as well due to co-signing in the case of private student loans.

Not a single person does any cash flow modeling during this business of borrowing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars on an unproven adolescent. Imagine a lender’s requirements for any other scenario where this much money is borrowed. All because it’s all taxpayer guaranteed.

mrep May 20, 2019

It also allows them to price discriminate against rich parents to get them to pay more, and then they can subsidize kids from less wealthy backgrounds with scholarships. This works pretty well as a progressive system most of the time but there are plenty of stories of kids who have a rich parent or two who won't help their kid out at all and then the kid gets screwed with high tuition costs even though they have to pay for it all.

BurningFrog May 20, 2019

One theory is that it's mainly the strongly subsidized student loans:

https://reason.com/2015/12/21/new-study-the-main-thing-makin...

lotsofpulp May 20, 2019

It’s the only correct and obvious answer. Things don’t get expensive unless the purchasers have the money to pay for it. Considering the net worth of most US families, who struggle to get a loan for a house worth a few hundred thousand dollars, the only way they’re getting tens and hundreds of thousands for college is due to taxpayer funded loans.

cheerlessbog May 20, 2019

Absurd level of non curricular services. Stadia, prestige buildings, lazy rivers... When I went to college in the 90's we organized our own sports and the college handled the educating.

alecst May 20, 2019

Speaking just about the UCs, I remember seeing in a powerpoint that the price of tuition remained roughly the same over the last few decades, but since the tax dollars per student were going down, students were left picking up the difference. I didn't know why tax money was on the decline.

This powerpoint was on one of the public UCLA websites, but I don't remember which one.

This item has no comments currently.

Preferences

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

Navigation

Miscellaneous