0. Collective magical thinking.That, and fencepost errors just about cover it.
1. Feature creep.
3. Poor governance and milestone management (e.g., execution failure, particularly that discovered late in the project).
Fight the Free Sh☭t Nation 
Posted on 04/06/2014 5:26:49 AM PDT by Kaslin
The solution to this is at the state level, since universities receive the majority of their money from the state.
First, recognize the axiom that the *reason* that states subsidize higher education is so that their citizens can get better paying jobs than with just a high school education.
Then compile a list of majors offered by the university, compared to how many of their graduates in those majors get employment in that area of study within six months of graduation.
At the top of the list of majors, you will see Nursing, Education, and Criminal Justice, as getting the most jobs for the most graduates. At the bottom you will see ethnic and gender studies and many other joke majors that get no one hired, ever.
After this, only two questions remain:
1) Should the state discontinue funding for these worthless majors?
2) Should the state prohibit students from impoverishing themselves by using students loans to take these majors?
Loan slaves do not improve society, which is why in most states loan sharking is outlawed. So why not outlaw loans that impoverish students yet do not provide them with fair “consideration” (a business law term)? States have “lemon laws”, so why not “lemon degree” laws?
Take the government money out of "education" and the cost will fall.
Part of the expense problem is the number of highly paid, tenured professors who do no, or very little, classroom teaching.
Another factor is the expense of providing all of the different liberal "feel good" courses - Wymens studies, The Black Influence On the 17th Century Fur Trade, Homosexualism In the Literature Of 18th-century France, etc....
Two examples:
1) Many homeschoolers are entering college as young teens.
My own children stated college at the ages of 13, 12, and 13. The the younger completed B.S. degrees in mathematics by the age of 18. The oldest of these two earned a Masters in mathematics by age 20. The oldest of the three was a nationally and internationally ranked athlete. He now has a masters in accounting.
2) Our Founding Fathers went to college as young teens. It was considered normal to do this.
Starting a career 4 or more years early can add up to a quarter of a million dollars or **more** over a lifetime. That alone, if used wisely, would buy a nice house and/or provide for a secure retirement.
0. Collective magical thinking.That, and fencepost errors just about cover it.
1. Feature creep.
3. Poor governance and milestone management (e.g., execution failure, particularly that discovered late in the project).
Fight the Free Sh☭t Nation
There! Fixed that! We don't have an education system in the U.S. We instead have crony-education for members of the education-industrial-complex.
“Far Side Entomology” - Now THAT looks like a fun course.
Anyone can learn marketable skills if they want to, or are incentivized to.
The most important function of formal schooling is to teach people how to communicate and think. Grammar and logic. With those two skills, children have the ability to learn and seek truth.
With regard to your post 20, do you think that your friend had the intellectual competency to handle a curriculum in engineering, mathematics, computer science, or accounting?
So many Freepers assume that anyone can do whatever they want to do. It’s rather like the old joke, “If I had the mind to, I could write like Shakespeare.”
“College Isn’t For Everyone”
What college isn’t is a substitute for competence and an old fashioned work ethic. Intelligence can be a handicap if a person views their IQ as a substitute for hard work and loyalty. I have been blessed/cursed with bright children and teaching this lesson is a full time job.
“College has become so expensive because of all the money Obama and the Left have been throwing at it.”
While a lot of this started before Obama came into the picture, in 2010 the he signed a law removing commercial banks as lenders and substituted federal government as the originator of federally guaranteed student loans. Interestingly, at the time of the law passage, total outstanding college loan debt exceeded consumer credit card debt.
Most colleges would not be able to maintain the high tuition rates of tuition and room/board pricing without all the financial aid given to students - Pell grants, student loans, etc etc. You are right, by making money so easy to come by to fund higher education, it has helped drive up the cost of education.
The current higher education model has started to be impacted negatively. I wonder aloud how universities, with their collective intelligence, don’t openly show (if there is any recognition of the problem) any concern on how the level of federal funding threatens their future viability and sustainability, their independence and academic freedom. Then again, being run mostly by leftists, I am not surprised.
I would add that you subscribe to this belief; you said as such in your post. It's just not true, sir. Hell, I would have loved to have been a major league baseball player. But that requires a talent. Academic ability is no different.
Community College is affordable, and not as infiltrated by Marxist professors. Plus those in lower income levels do get Pell Grants, etc; and more conservatives send their families there....a better education for less money.
Were you attempting to become a chemical or mechanical engineer then?
You must have taken at least one course in Physical Chemistry (”P-Chem”) too? Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, Quantum Chemistry, etc etc. Not sure there ever was a big demand for P-Chemists in the private sector. One of my favorite bumper stickers of all time was “Honk if you passed P-Chem!”
“Community College is affordable, and not as infiltrated by Marxist professors.”
That has been my experience too; I have seen some very dedicated, teaching focused faculty at the community college level who aren’t pushing Marxism, etc. Affordable too - even for middle class families - without having to humiliate themselves in the FASFA process, get loans or go into debt.
But one must consider what the community colleges offer as well. At least one other commenter above noted that they are changing as well - to paraphrase - moving away from the “trades” and becoming 4-yr college prep school.
One thing that would immediately bring down higher education costs would be to make student load debt dischargeable in bankruptcy, just like credit card debt.
As it stands there is a strong incentive to lend money to any prospective student, regardless of how useless their course of study is because there is no way to get out from under that debt. If student loans were as risky as other forms of credit there would be an incentive to only lend to those who were likely to repay, and a lot of the money that’s sloshing around the system would vanish.
Of course the Left doesn’t care about incentives any more than they care about results. The solution to distortions caused by government intervention is always more government intervention.
bflr
Bfl
Totally agree. And that is why experience and what I would call “street smarts” is more important than the MBA and all the methodologies.
Back in the 90’s, I was managing a large systems integration project. Every morning, my core team and I would sit down over coffee, discuss what needed to happen that week, what the priorities were and off we went. On Friday, we would show our sponsor and major stakeholders what we accomplished.
They now call that Scrum and have a certification for it. We called it common sense.
My first instinct is not to see dischargeable in bankruptcy as bringing down costs, significantly, if at all. As the burden of the loan is the student’s, the bankruptcy burden remains with the student as well.
I recently heard a proposal that if bankruptcy would be dischargeable, then it should include the college for being responsible for some of the repayment. I don’t see this as a way to reduce cost either as the college will have to build in the cost to cover their risk.
One fundamental problem is getting money for college is too easy - especially if one wants to humiliate himself in the FASFA process. Anyone who wants to go to college can get all the money needed without impediment, including no real barrier on borrower creditworthiness. The government protects itself by making bankruptcy as non-dischargeable, and dragging parents in as cosigners of guaranteed loans. The problem is further exacerbated by those colleges who accept academically unprepared students as a way to bring more $ into their coffers. Then require unprepared students take remedial courses, which can lengthen time (cost) at the university - a testament to the failure of elementary and secondary education. Who is worse off -students who leave college with no degrees and student loan debt; or graduates with useless degrees and even larger debt? The former at least cut their losses.
Colleges aren’t taking any responsibility - they are enablers - hurting the very people they supposedly are trying to “educate”. There seems to be some people catching on and questioning whether they will impoverish themselves or their families by going into debt. Eventually this boil should burst.
I agree completely
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