Posted on 04/06/2015 12:39:57 AM PDT by iowamark
ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after...
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher...
By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
For example, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1980, my parents were paying more than double the resident tuition that undergraduates had been charged in 1960, again in inflation-adjusted terms. And of course tuition has kept rising far faster than inflation in the years since: Resident tuition at Michigan this year is, in today’s dollars, nearly four times higher than it was in 1980.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Club Ed is now a resort business in disguise. That’s a large part of why the prices have gotten so high. The slutty women everywhere that a scholar would never marry are a feature, not a bug.
But getting back on topic, I think state education budgets should get back to funding our colleges like it was until the middle 1970's. That way, we don't needed so ridiculous tuition costs even for in-state students (I've seen the cost of my niece going to UC Santa Cruz--ouch).
And this is where the illegals from Mexico become a huge problem: many of them aren't even literate enough in Spanish to get proper training in the building trades. This is especially true from the southern parts of Mexico, where indigenous tribal people are only fluent in their native language and barely able to even speak Spanish.
“Curtail the availability of government funny money and tuition rates will drop.”
Not initially. For tuition to drop, universities have to spend less, including what they spend on administrators. Since the administrators are the ones setting tuition, they won’t do this until there is a public backlash about tuition.
1. Schools where you go to get a job. Ga Tech, Purdue, Cal Poly ect (and all of the other top tech schools).
2. Schools where you go to meet your future business partners Yale, Vanderbilt, Duke ect. These are the people who will employ those from #1.
3. Schools where you go to extend adolescence. These are all the schools who would be unknown if it weren't the “Top Party School” lists. The only way for these students to get jobs is to go to Grad School. Unfortunately too many go to Law School and having failed there become Politicians.
Some of these endowments have reached critical mass to the point of being able to cover tuition. But places like Harvard and Yale seem to be in a competition for who has the bigger endowment fund (both are at critical mass)
the constant expansion of university administration
Should be in the title.
I’m glad to see this getting some attention. Something’s wrong.
I believe it has gone up to fund the gibmedats. Full retail tuition is for the middle class, but it covers tuition for more than 1 student. Why should I have to pay for other students?eespecially at a public university.
I’m glad you did well there.
While I do have a problem with airbags as my mom and a co-worker got their faces re-arranged in what otherwise were very minor accidents - not to mention the hundreds of decapitated kids that the media refused to report on until relatively recently (they didn’t want to “set off a panic” and possibly remove the mandate). Later model cars now have much better air bags, but the earlier ones were literally bombs waiting to go off.
I have no issue with seat belts, though, and if they were not mandated by government, I would want them mandated. To libertarians, sorry, the attitude of the car manufacturers was simply criminal in resisting seat belts. I’m also on board with most other safety features - go into an old car with a sharp steel dashboard and a steering column that won’t collapse in an accident. No thanks!
But I still never saw the numbers on air bags to convince me they are/were worth the thousands of dollars per car that they cost. In my case, I held on to non-airbag cars for 15 years after air bags came out, as I knew what they were doing to people (relative worked at GM then). During that time, I could have bought modern, clean, and otherwise much-safer cars, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
Regarding college funding by the state - you may want to look at the levels of funding in the 1970s before wanting to go back to those levels (even in current-year dollars). I’ll give you a hint - we could double our highway spending if we went back to those levels, and still balance the budget.
Executive Branch spending is certainly out of control, but this is not an example. The author points out that state level spending has increased, but the costs of tuition have continued to rise at a rate above the funding that higher learning receives from state governments.
When there’s no money to spend, spending will drop.
Rather quickly, too.
It depends. How much research (grant) $$ does he bring into the University. If you take this into account, some (some) professors literally pay for themselves. Many pay for a good part of their salary. And then there is the professor’s reputation as a draw recruiting. It is also true that for every hour you are in the classroom, you are spending at least 2 for prep, grading and student correspondence (answering questions, typically via email). Most senior faculty are on multiple committees too.
But, yes, a professor with a 2 course teaching load should also be doing research and other duties.
The way the DC Metro system has jacked up their fares in synch with increases on the Federal employee transit subsidy is another good example of how institutions see pots of easy/free money and try to empty them.
Of course when the subsidy gets cut, and ridership declines (predictably) Metro doesn’t cut fares. It just goes sobbing to the governments (federal, state, local) about how it needs direct subsidies because it’s mean and selfish customers are resorting to things like telework to avoid doing their fair share by paying to use the system.
Here in Wisconsin they started one. They found something over a billion in slush funds (I heard upwards of 1.7 billion). Totally off the books bank accounts.
Of course, they went ape when Walker suggested a 300 million funding cut.
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 1984
Tuition: $800/semester
Room and Board: $800/semester
In 2015
Tuition: ~$6,900/semester
Room and Board: ~$5,800/semester
All to be taught that the United States is the worst thing that ever happened to the world, that all wealthy people got that way by stealing from everyone else, that men are all rapists, and that all white men are racists to boot...
Good article and good comment.
I would add that one of the major reasons people think college is required for so many jobs that shouldn’t really require it is because a high school diploma has become so worthless. Too many kids get high school diplomas because of “social promotion” and they graduate without the ability to read, write, or do basic math. Many employers think that a college diploma is a check box for those basic skills. Sadly, many college graduates are lacking in these basics as well.
It’s not that honest, is why. It talks about administrative costs increasing but blames high salaries for high-placed staff members whereas the recent reports have been of increased costs for low-level college employees. It never mentions health care or pensions, which have both skyrocketed. Health care cost increases were the main reason a Harvard guy gave for their need to increase their endowment even more.
He says it’s not decreased government funding.
When colleges became political activist tools, they necessarily became wasteful and ever more hungry for dollars to devote to brain-washing and social engineering.
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