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.
I agree, but quantifying value add is very hard. If we were just comparing small companies against each other then it would be straightforward to just look at each companies profit. But when you look at a team within a company, how can we say what that teams value add is?
Say we considered a simplified case and focused on a single engineering team that is solely responsible for a single product. Just looking at the revenue generated by that product is insufficient since it excludes the contributions of sales, marketing, business development, etc. in driving that revenue. And practice most engineering teams are dependent on other engineering teams for providing shared services and infrastructure.
Its also insufficient to just consider current revenue of a product. We also need to consider the potential future gains from a product, which is unknown.
And quantifying value add gets even harder when we start looking at individual people. Considering individual contributor engineers, there are numerous ways that one can contribute, ranging from developing new features, diagnosing and fixing bugs, writing and updating documentation, mentoring, interviewing candidates, etc.
> Good engineers are pushed into becoming managers, because that's the only way they can get rewarded.
And there's a second-order casualty of that: the people who are assigned to report to such an engineer-become-manager.
This happened to me on my previous job. The most brilliant programmer I've ever worked with got promoted to a manager, for the dumb reason that the company's programmer salary bands didn't go high enough for what he was (way more than) worth. As a manager he had to have headcount reporting to him, and I got assigned to be one of that headcount. He had no interest in people-managing. I didn't begrudge him for that at all - but it was clear my own career would go nowhere reporting to someone with no interest in managing, so I left that job shortly after.
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.
Regular market forces don't hold for college tuition for a number of reasons. Chief among these being that many students are paying with loans. Secondly, some students and their families view education as a veblen good, whereby higher price implies even higher value.
I know that. I wasn't addressing college. The OP was talking about in his profession, which I think was safe to assume was a different industry/profession.
> 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.)
As a non-American I've never really understood this "oh, in state is still cheap" argument. Does every state have a top university? What if your state doesn't have a good university for what you want to study? UNC sounds nice for people lucky enough to have been born in NC but why should out of state people pay more? Or do people move to a state specifically for the universities?
Education is considered a state responsibility, not federal. Every state generally has a "flagship" university. And they usually have the important stuff covered, such as professional schools, so that their state's population has these needed skills.
If you are a smart enough student that you would gain admission to one of the highly-ranked flagship universities of another state, you are going to win scholarships to private schools too. The lower the rankings you are willing to go, the better scholarships you can get.
You can relocate to get in-state benefits but it may take awhile as states put conditions (e.g. living there for a year first, having a a job, etc) specifically to prevent people doing this.
That's how the UK fees started under Blair. Then Cameron came in, the principle of free education had already been abandoned, so all he had to do was tweak the price.
Remember that many US states are the size of European countries. This is the same deal that many countries in Europe have: subsidized tuition for residents.
Also, a lot of state systems have good schools: UC Berkeley, UMass Amherst, UIUC, UT Austin, and UW Madison come to mind.
In-state tuition for public schools has been rising to unjustifiable levels, too, just not at the rate of private schools.
I have relatives that were able to pay for their tuition with part-time jobs in college. Today, I'd have to take out a small mortgage just for a liberal arts degree.
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.
You seem to be looking at private schools which are going to pay higher, I’m talking about public.
Also that dataset is not at all representative. In fact, it seems to skew high. Of the 9 big schools in my state, only 2 are listed and they are the 2 biggest. The biggest, wealthiest schools have higher paid executives. Of all the public schools in the country mine is probably a little below the median.
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.
When I was in college, there was one (only 1) student who took 6 years to graduate. Students passing by him would often mumble "7 years of college, down the drain!"
(I won't spoil the joke, google it!)
As I recall, only a small handful took 5 years. This drifting along failing to graduate seems to be a modern phenomenon.
I was class of 1986, graduated 1988 (though TBF I had a full time job in another part of the country for my last two years so taking classes was...complicated).
This is undergrads, I know of a grad student who took 13 years (and three theses he refused to submit) until they handed him a PhD and showed him the door. Obviously in his case he didn't lack brains, just had a longstanding psychological issue.
Even for those who get doctorates, outside a small number of fields (e.g. CS) there's a long, soul-killing gantlet of post docs and RAs before either a position is obtained or you give up.
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.
To a large extent, anyone can already get access to the top university lectures in the world for a range of subjects already. Since top universities, chiefly MIT, have been recording and publicly sharing full-course classroom lectures for years. I think this shows that students care about more than just the lectures.
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.
This alienation is what will cause more and more problems for society. It used to be nobility that had no idea of the lives of regular people. Now it’s the managerial and investor class who are losing touch with the rest of society by contracting out things, offshoring and reducing everything to simple numbers.
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.
Exactly. University presidents easily pay for their salary many times over just through their fundraising activities. Presidents aren't chosen for their administrative prowess, but instead for their professional network and informal connections. Further, most people that could serve as president could easily draw a much larger salary in the private sector and many were formally C-level executives at larger companies where were paid such a salary. For them, becoming a university president is more about prestigious and service to an institute they value than it is about maximizing compensation.
I think the problem to focus on is the large and ever growing number of administrators and staffers throughout universities. One stat that always makes my eyes bulge is that while student enrollment and professors have both grown by about 50% between 1970 and 2010, yet the number of administrators have grown by 85% and administrative staffers grew by 240%! [0] If anything, administrators and staff should've decreased due to productivity improvements from technology.
There is so much fat to be cut from administrative ranks.
No one works in a vaccuum. If students and alumni are paying for prestige, then you need staff to ensure the prestige is maintained and grown. However if students and alumni are paying/investing in education you may need significantly less staff and more professors/teachers.
If you add the staff that a university president brings in to the payroll is the 5 million dollar/year president actually worth more than the 500k/year president?
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.
A 2015 Time Magazine article cited Jackson as the highest-paid college president ... for a stunning $7.1 million in total. That works out to more than $1,000 per student at her school".
That's actually very valid. I know somebody who works at a crime lab with >100k salary, lives in a cheap area of CA and can retire at 50 with full pension. Pretty sweet gig and if they want more money after retirement they can do some government contracting and consulting which is very well paid.
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...
Also everyone quotes Ivy League MSRP prices as if every student is paying them. In reality, Ivy League financial aid is the most generous, and the actual tuition paid over the past couple decades has been decreasing, unlike public schools where it's been increasing significantly.
No they give tons of scholarships and grants which amounts to a lot more than the loans these days. At least when it comes to tuition. This is true for private schools at all rankings.
Jacking up tuition then offsetting it with scholarships is both a bigger phychological drawn for students who end up paying the same, plus gets more money from the small set of students for whom money is no object.
Thank god (i.e. the French taxpayer) that allowed me (poor, 2nd-gen immigrant, blue-collar background) to have an Sw Eng diploma for free.
I would've been OK being forced working in France or for French companies for 10 years for this privilege. Tuition was 1000eur/year, and I always found this very low. Scholarships were needs-based and gave me 400eur/month. Tuition was waived.
Lodging was a really crummy 9m2 room all to myself (toilets, showers and kitchen common for 20 people) for 130eur/months.
It was hard life but perfect. I'd never rail against taxes...
What is breaking the system right now is they replaced the crummy 130-140eur/mo rooms with 'at norms' student apartments.
Application of building code and 'humane living' norms at its stupidest. Far less apartments, far more expansive... Met lots of kids recently struggling so hard during their school nights to make ends meet.
But 9k/year of tuition only? Only rich or middle-class kids could do that, and then not even sure how many.
Bit late response here, but wanted to clear this up. Ironically people tend to think the US has a system only "for the rich" when in some ways it may be the most progressive. Wealthy families pay through the nose while the poor pay zero tuition. Meanwhile everyone reaps the benefits of such rich world-renowned schools.
If you can't pay tuition in the US you would probably receive grants to cover 100 percent of it. And as I noted elsewhere, scholarships for good students are everywhere. Schools compete ferociously for rankings and one way to raise the stats of the incoming class is to "buy" lots of smart students with scholarships.
IIUC what you say, most of those scholarships and grants are for 'good' students, right? You need some kind of high GPA or over-average SAT results, right ?
Since I don't know much about the US system, I'm ready to believe my view is distorted :-) but then I'm not sure I understand the problem of student-debt ("next bubble to pop", etc.) in the US. I was debt-free at the start of my career thanks to the French taxpayer.
I hope what I brought since to the French society balances that, but I thought it very generous to trust me with a free education, 4000eur/year and a very-low-rent place on my own to try to get an engineering degree, especially as I was still a teenager when I started, and when so many go abroad... There's no downside of failing, I don't have to give the money back. The French taxpayer really wanted me to try and do this, with as little worry as possible about money and finding a night job, and as much focus they could afford for me. My room was clean and livable, common toilet/shower & kitchen were cleaned at least once a week. Internet was free (with huge bandwidth...). I'm sorry but some people found the whole thing shitty and cheap and 'not enough'... This was the last days of a great system.
"Scholarship" is used to mean merit-based kinds of grants essentially, so for good students. Whereas the word "Grant" used generally implies only the need-based versions. It's a bit confusing. There is a national system called "financial aid" where a family applies to the govt with their tax forms and their ability to pay is assessed. Then the govt offers grants and subsidized loans to cover costs. States will also supplement the grants with their own grants, and the school itself does too. Scholarships are just offered directly by the school based on some kind of competitive selection.
Looks like total cost of attendance is much higher than $9k/year: https://admissions.unc.edu/afford/cost-of-attendance/
Even if you only paid tuition, you'd still have housing expenses, since most students don't live at home for a school like UNC. So overall I think it's disingenuous to say it's only $9k/year.
Accommodation, transport, food etc. all need to be paid whether you’re attending school or not. If you’re trying to include all real costs foregone earnings are by far the biggest.
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.
Who says it hasn't? To some extent, it has. Interest groups and clubs of all sorts already exist, and non-university-affiliated sports are already pervasive.
But the rest of the answer is why I was talking about "what would exist if the universities didn't". Right now, the unis are sucking up a lot of the oxygen in that space. But it's a mistake to think that if they stop doing it, it will all disappear. It may partially disappear, but it will most assuredly not all disappear. There will be places where young people congregate. There will be roommates. There will be interests that emerge and get organized. Existing sports leagues can expand.
If the demand exists, supply will appear. It doesn't even have to start from scratch, there's plenty of non-University resources that could simply expand to meet the demand.
And the resulting system probably won't put you into decades of crippling debt.
For that matter, have a chat with some of your school acquaintances that didn't go to university. You may find their lives aren't as horribly impoverished as you thought. There's also a bit of a false mental image that the choice is either the shining lawn and conspicuously happy people in the university or the darkness where lightning flashes and a grim factory job from which there is no respite, and in reality the choices are not even remotely that stark. In both cases, a lot of it is what you make of it. And, you know, you'd best hope universities aren't some sort of unique fount of such activities and joys, because you will be joining the rest of us in the non-university world after graduation, you know. It isn't actually that horrid or bereft of opportunities.
It's illegal to create living communities for young people. You are allowed to discriminate against people younger than 55, but not against any other age criteria.
It's another example in the unending list of losses in this generational war.
Genuine question, is it illegal if the people are older than 18? Possibly with resident adults acting in some supervisory role. I'm imagining dorm like satellite communities for collective remote online learning.
I would doubt requiring the individuals be able to agree to contracts would be illegal, this effectively would be 18+.
But you won't get young women joining if you also have to allow 55-yr-old male leches live next door. In University this is rare, but SROs can't discriminate in the same way.
I'll cede we don't want 55-yr-old leches next door to young adults. But I'm not sure it's necessary it has to be an SRO, if from what I understand is a term for low income/homeless focused housing. There should be a way for the lower priced remote college tuition to pay for the housing and requirements for only remote attendees to live there. But maybe I'm not seeing something.
Dorms are SROs -- it means a place where you rent a room but share other amenities, like bathrooms and kitchens. It is usually low-income, but most people are low income when young.
It's illegal to create the "college experience" (nearly only 18-22 year-olds living together) without University because filtering directly by age is illegal, while doing so indirectly is legal. I think 12 years of education should be enough for most people and we shouldn't require unnecessary schooling to let people have the college experience.
Thanks for your insights on age discrimination issues and housing experiences. That said, there can be communities of all ages that are vibrant spaces to be in -- and which also have places within that are gathering spots (e.g. libraries, cafes, bars, workplaces, churches, non-profit organizations, sports leagues, etc.) for people with something in common (whether age or interests or work or whatever). And I'm not just saying that because I am mid-fifties. :-)
Also, while young people obviously do like to hang out with similar-aged people for all sorts of reasons (including to find romantic partners), there also is value in encountering a diversity of experiences. When I was in college, informal interactions with older people, whether RAs, grad students, older returning students, staff, and faculty (outside classes) provided many formative experiences. And likewise, interactions with younger people (like tutoring a faculty member's kid) provide opportunities for personal growth through teaching, coaching, and mentoring.
Even at college, how many people can the typical person get to know or have as friends or romantic partners? How many friends and romantic partners does a typical person need to be relatively happy? What does it take to provide those opportunities?
Many people 100 years ago used to find that in cities perhaps (especially walkable low-rise ones like Philadelphia) -- but cities have changed for many reasons (including ones Jane Jacobs wrote about). Still, even now, many people flock to some cities for social connection opportunities. (Even as they may later in life flock elsewhere to raise families for various reasons...)
I am not saying most of the cities we have now in the USA are ideal for making social connections -- especially compared to many older European cities that are more walkable and were built with people in mind and not cars. Places favored by some religious communities (e.g. Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh where Mr. Fred Rogers really lived in a real neighborhood) may sometime be more community-promoting given, say, for observant Jews a cultural need to walk to a social hub one day a week which affects the urban layout generally in a positive way. In that sense, perhaps the Protestant Mr. Rogers benefited from neighborhood architecture shaped in part by Jewish traditions? Searching on "walkshed" can turn up some interesting results, for example: https://www.walkscore.com/cities-and-neighborhoods/
Potentially a good aspect of social media is it may (paradoxically) help people find local people with similar interests to arrange physical gatherings. But arranged gatherings are not the same as spontaneous repeated meetings in common areas -- which has been the basis of the formation of most friendships. Still, one can ask how all that could be made better.
Consider, for the bigger picture, the intersection of architecture, culture, and friendships:
"How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult" by David Roberts
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friends...
"Our ability to form and maintain friendships is shaped in crucial ways by the physical spaces in which we live. "Land use," as it's rather aridly known, shapes behavior and sociality. And in America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. ...
For the vast majority of Homo sapiens' history, we lived in small, nomadic bands. The tribe, not the nuclear family, was the primary unit. We lived among others of various ages, to which we were tied by generations of kinship and alliance, throughout our lives. Those are the circumstances in which our biological and neural equipment evolved. It's only been comparatively recently (about 10,000 years ago) that we developed agriculture and started living in semi-permanent communities, more recently still that were thrown into cities, crammed up against people we barely know, and more recently still that we bounced out of cities and into suburbs. So everything about how we live now is "unnatural," at least in terms of the scope of human history. Unnatural doesn't necessarily mean bad — our long lifespans are unnatural too — but it should remind us that the particular socially constructed living patterns common today have shallow roots. There's nothing fated or inevitable about each of us living in our own separate nuclear-family castles, with our own little faux-estate lawns, getting in a car to go anywhere, never seeing friends unless we make an effort to schedule it. ...
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added. ...
This kind of spontaneous social mixing doesn't disappear in post-collegiate life. We bond with co-workers, especially in those scrappy early jobs, and the people who share our rented homes and apartments. But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. ...
Say you're a family with children and you don't regularly attend church (as is increasingly common). There are basically two ways to have regular, spontaneous encounters with people. Both are rare in America. One is living in a real place, a walkable area with lots of shared public spaces, around which one can move relatively safely and effectively without a car. It seems like a simple thing, but such places are rare even in the cities where they exist. ... Walkable communities are very difficult to find in the US, and because there is such paucity of supply relative to demand, they are expensive, accessible only to the high-income. Places where they exist tend to have absurd zoning restrictions that prevent growing them. ...
The second, even more rare, is some form of co-housing. ... The idea behind baugruppen, and co-housing generally, is that it's nice to live in an extended community, to have people to rely on beyond family. It's nice to have bustling shared spaces where you can run into people you know without planning it beforehand. It's nice to have nearby friends for your kids, places where they can play safely, and other adults who can share kid-tending duties....
Both these alternatives — walkable communities and co-housing — sound exotic to American ears. Thanks to shifting baselines, most Americans only know single-family dwellings and auto-dependent land use. They cannot even articulate what they are missing and often misidentify the solution as more or different private consumption.
But I do not think we should just accept that when we marry and start families, we atomize, and our friendships, like our taste in music, freeze where they were when we were young and single. We shouldn't just accept a way of living that makes interactions with neighbors and friends a burden that requires special planning. We should recognize that by shrinking our network of strong social ties to our immediate families, we lose something important to our health and social identities, with the predictable result that we are ridden with anxiety and loneliness. We are meant to have tribes, to be among people who know us and care about us. ..."
At first glance, sure, it may seem to make sense to ask how can we recreate the college social experience for people 18-22 without the high price of "University". But a deeper question is perhaps: how can we have a culture and architecture that promotes friendships? While also still having access to natural settings that are also improve mental health?
Here is a quote about an even deeper aspect of all that related to depression (which can strike people even in the "best" college where social needs are perhaps met -- but others might be neglected like getting enough sleep, omega3-s, sunshine & vitamin D, exercise, downtime & creativity-provoking-boredom, purpose, and so on): https://tlc.ku.edu/
"We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life. (Stephen Ilardi, PhD)"
So, an even deeper and more general question is: how can we have a culture and architecture and economy that promotes life-long wellness and happiness?
SROs are hotels cum boarding houses, cheap places to stay. They’re associated with the homeless in the US because the only places they haven’t been zoned out of existence are cities with many homeless activists.
The answer to “Why isn’t there cheap housing?” is always zoning and the motivation for the zoning is to keep poor people away to protect property prices.
Young women will live there if it’s cheap enough and safe, same as young men will. People live in apartments with cockroaches, rats and mold if they’re cheap enough, and not just young men.
I spent €100 a week to share a room with five others close to the center of Dublin city ten years ago. There weren’t any women in that room but there were women living in the apartment.
I left young people open on purpose. I could not create a housing community and only rent to people under 23 (which is mostly what undergraduate University is), but I could if I only allowed people over 55.
You are allowed to rent or buy things as a group, but the transactional costs make it rare.
Social acceptability is a big reason. Historically there were many socially acceptable ways to spend your late teenage years and early 20s including
- The Frontier
- Artistic Cities such as Paris/Venice
- Apprenticeships in factories and major industrial centers.
- University
The rise of the middle class also coincided with a consolidation into the University as being the only socially acceptable path. In practice one could probably lose money slower, have new social experiences, and learn more about art/culture spending a year in Brooklyn rather than spending 50k at a liberal arts college. Even in the realm of software development jumping straight to incubators, bootcamps and similar entry-level opportunities may provide better out of class learning opportunities than some university programs for the money and time.
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.
> So your degree is free unless other people are willing to pay you to have it? In which case it costs you money?
yes. If your degree is in an area where you are unlikely to recuperate the initial investment of the education, then it effectively becomes free (i.e., paid for by society). I like this because some degrees that aren't productive, but has a genuine societal benefit (like studying history or something), can be funded this way. The person doing said degree has to really like it, and give up a high salary to do so.
Degrees which _are_ economically productive will very easily reach the threshold for repayment of the loan, and thus the cost is borne by the employer/employee, who then ultimately benefit the most out of the degree (and therefore, justifies the relief to taxpayers for the cost of the loan).
And because i believe most people are not willing to sacrifice their future economic gains just to have a free degree, i believe most will look to doing one which will become economically productive. But there are a few passionate individuals who look beyond their own economic gains, and this method allows those people to exist and contribute their passion to society.
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.
Sure, some folks enjoy them. I'm not arguing this at all: It is just that it is hard to say that folks actually prefer them if they cannot comply with a standard university's requirements - class times, for example. Which really is the reason the colleges would go after older learners.
I'm going to guess that there are a few schools that do specialize in this segment - I know Ivy Tech in Indiana use to make an attempt. Not every campus offered non-traditional class times, not all degrees were offered at those times, and I'm not sure you can get more than an associate's from there.
There are other weird quirks as well. So many people cannot drive to the school locations (and keep their jobs) and many jobs simply won't work around a college schedule, especially not one that changes from semester to semester. (To be fair, 'traditional' college students have this problem all the time, but it is easier to switch jobs when young than when one has a family and insurance to consider).
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.
Still, there really isn't a viable online bachelors for the average 18 year old college applicant who is looking for a credential to use in the job market.
FWIW, HES doesn't require admissions - a prospective student simple registers for the first few required classes in the program. If successful in those, they continue on in the full program. I believe one of the courses is a research & writing survey that is reportedly quite difficult to pass.
So, still not an option for an average 18 year old. But, potentially a fantastic option for a smart 18 year old who wouldn't otherwise be able to attend Harvard (or other elite institution).
From my limited research (considering the Masters of Liberal Arts program), the difference is the mix of required courses and capstone/thesis work. The number of credits and core subject courses are similar.
A liberal arts degree still gives you the skills to pursue a specific industry for jobs. It is just that your education is much broader than a typical university. So 12-15 CS courses, instead of 20-25 CS
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
Eh, qualify fantastic. It's great in that the courses are difficult, and if you complete them it will signal you are smart computer scientist; it's backed by GaTech's name brand and the diploma is the same as the on-campus diploma.
It's not fantastic in that the courses vary wildly in quality, are mostly taught by teaching assistants, can require 20 or more hours of (busy-ish depending on course) work per week, and just like undergrad, you will struggle and be forced to teach yourself the material instead of being taught a significant portion of the time. Usually the textbook is much more informative than the lecture; your life is better if you own many textbooks on the subject since often the lecture information density and coherence is poor.
What I'm saying is, the course lectures are pretty mediocre for ~40% of offered courses. OMSCS is valuable because it's cheap and prestigious, not because the instruction is high-quality. It's great for self-starters, auto-didacts, and hard-workers with background in the subjects (admittedly, most students from decent engineering schools will qualify).
This could be explained by the difference between fixed costs and marginal costs, and the fact that in person students paying higher fees subsidize part of the fixed costs.
>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.
I can more easily change grocery stores than I am able to change colleges. Credits aren't often 100% transferable, also a degree from another school may be less valuable but also less costly, therefore the money I already spent on the more expensive degree may be lost.
> 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.
I guess you're right that many large gifts are, but what about the (combination of) small gifts? And all returns on interest on such gifts? I mean if I donate money I don't know what contract would exist preventing it to be used for this sort of a purpose. Who would the contract even be with if I personally don't agree to it and I'm the one donating?
> "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.
While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the College? Or administrators that manage grants? Or administrators of admissions, or athletics, title IX, or school of medicine?
Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.
Same as when people say "government should stop spending on useless things, government should be smaller and trim the fat / pork barrel spending". Yeah of course when you put it that way, who wouldn't agree with that. But when you get specific, "government should reduce veteran's benefits, national parks, border security, obesity research, food stamps, etc." well that's when it's not so easy.
While in general I agree that there are too many administrators at many universities, this type of argument is ineffective without pointing out exactly which administrators. And I find that once you try to do that, no one agrees which administrators should be cut. Do you want to cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion? Or the administrators responsible for tech transfer? Or the Dean of the College? Or administrators that manage grants? Or administrators of admissions, or athletics, title IX, or school of medicine?
For a start, let's cut any administrator that was not considered needed for the proper running of a university 30 years ago. So we can start with the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion and tech transfer. You can probably also get rid of most of the administrators administering grants, athletics, and title IX.
Give us some specifics to discuss. Because while almost everyone agrees administration needs to be trimmed, if everyone just wants to keep the ones they think are important and there's not much overlap, then there's clearly no way to do this.
The argument, "We can't cut anyone if we can't all agree on who to cut" is a recipe for, "We will cut everyone after we go bankrupt." Those bankruptcies are already starting. And before COVID-19 is over, plenty of universities that can't figure out how to do layoffs of administrators are going to have to do just that.
Education has been on an unsustainable path for decades. It is widely recognized that it is unsustainable. As Stein's law says, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." But before we get there we get to see the truth of Stanisford's corollaries, "It will go on a lot longer than we think" and "It will end badly when it does stop."
It has gone on a lot longer than I thought it could 20 years ago. However COVID-19 has changed the equation enough to end business as usual, and now we get to see how bad the ending is. The more that administrators cling to keeping business as usual, the worse that they will make things for themselves.
I was in university 30 years ago. It was sufficient to educate me.
Going from that point to this, the cost of university has more than tripled in real dollars. A significant portion of that change is increases in money spent to administrators. It seems absurd that anyone would think that the education received today is worth over triple the education received 30 years ago.
I know, as a parent, given the choice I would cheerfully prefer to pay for my kids to get the university experience that I received and have no debt than I would have them get stifling loans for the modern university experience and start their lives in debt. I know very few parents that disagree with me on that.
Nobody is suggesting that universities were perfect 30-40-50 years ago. But... the parents of millenials seemed to thoroughly enjoy college back then, so they couldn't have been run that badly.
On top of that, when I compare my undergrad experience, 20 years ago, to that of my nieces and nephews attending today (or cousins who attended 10 years before me), I fail to find substantive differences.
Sure, there is a general trend that cafeteria food has improved (or, at least, schools brag about it more), and dorms are a little fancier, but how does that justify the administrative bloat?
Well, maybe the programs just weren't aimed at you or your family? Maybe diversity programs had a large impact on other people and it would be useful to learn their views before discarding diversity administrators because we don't see the point.
I don't think this needs to be settled ahead of time. If we shut off the tap of infinite student debt funding I guarantee the universities will magically discover what administrators and departments are dispensable quicker than you can imagine.
I don't see what assurances you have of this guarantee you give. As so far it seems like when funding is cut, faculty (teaching and research) and academic departments are cut and financial aid is reduced, rather than major cuts in administration. So it's worth discussing what administrative units are cuttable, or come to the realization there is no free cuts to make to administration without sacrifices to some existing principles.
If we can't trust these organizations to make the right (and obviously needed) cuts in order to still realize their value to society in the face of reduced funding, then they don't deserve to be the ones teaching our children in the first place.
I think we just keep going back to the same issue -- people agree that administration is too big. But if you break it down to actual positions or administrative units, it's not clear there is any agreement. There is no such thing as "right cuts" because that implies it's clear which parts of administration should be cut.
Same with government. Government waste is bad? Of course! Trim unnecessary government spending and pork barrel? Yes!! And which branches and positions should we cut? The Right Ones!! [cue nothing actually happens]
What I'm getting at though is that it's a distributed problem and that I frankly don't care if everyone gets it right.
Shut off the money first. Some of the universities will make their cuts in academic and research departments. That's fine. I don't expect we'll hear too much from them after a while. Good riddance.
This frames the question wrong and deceptively so. When you say "cut the administrators responsible for diversity and inclusion", you frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion. But you can go without an administrator whose sole purpose is diversity and inclusion and still have diversity and inclusion be handled. That sounds like the kind of thing the administrators in admissions ought to be handling. Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college? Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant?
I didn't frame it as getting rid of diversity and inclusion, that's just usually how the roles are defined. But you're missing my point completely (maybe intentionally?). I'm just saying that we should talk about specific administrators or administrative units, not "administration is too big". So let's talk about that, not whether your framing of my framing of the university's framing is accurate.
And you'll see that this is effective, because now when you ask those more specific questions, there are potentially good discussions.
Like "Why is there a Dean of the College of Athletics that isn't also handling athletics and the parts of title IX that are relevant" and someone might wonder if it makes sense (based on your proposed structure) for the Dean of Athletics to be handling rape cases, and whether they have the expertise to deal with the federal regulations that come with Title IX.
Or "Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?" and someone might wonder why it makes sense for someone responsible for undergraduate education (which might not involve research in some universities) to handle grants, which is usually related to graduate education and research (and in many fields, don't involve students at all).
Or "administrators in admissions ought to be handling [diversity and inclusion]" and someone might wonder if there should not be someone also responsible for diversity and inclusion in faculty/staff/administrator hiring, or in campus policies around inclusion (like accessibility services), which are post-admissions.
No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.
Administrators in admissions handle diversity and inclusion for students. Whoever is already in charge of hiring faculty/staff should also be handling diversity and inclusion there as well.
I get that specialists are needed at times, and having one person (or group of persons) can help in getting a singular focus and consistent strategy. But there's nothing wrong with people wearing multiple hats in a job and communicating with peers as they do so.
There also can't be a discussion of which adminstrators to let go until we are talking about specifics. Each University will have different circumstances, priorities, problems and budgets, and each individual adminstrator will have their own skills, expertises, and abilities to handle certain workloads. What changes Harvard would make are going to be different than the changes Notre Dame would make. That's why you can't have those specific "which administrators" conversations. It's not because we can't decide whether to cut administrators in charge of diversity or administrators in charge of athletics. Any given administrator can have multiple roles. They don't need to specialize in one. Which grouping of roles occurs will be determined by a very specific set of circumstances for a given University and its people, which is going to depend on knowledge that neither you nor I have.
>
No, it does not make sense for the Dean of Athletics to handle rape cases other than for them to kick out the athlete that has been convicted of rape by a court of law after an investigation by the police. An argument can be made as to whether those are University police or non-University police, but the investigation shouldn't be done by the Dean or any other administrator. If the Dean of Athletics has questions about federal regulations, that's what lawyers are for, which don't need to be in house administrators either.
A student's behaviour can generally get them kicked out of a university, despite not being convicted by a court of law. Just like you can be fired from your job, without a jury-of-twelve-peers conviction, if you've broken your employer's code of conduct.
So, no, the dean's job in this case is to not to simply grep through the list of state felons, and match them against the student roster. There's broader discretion in the kind of censure that private individuals need to apply, that does not begin and end at the courts.
If, as other commenters have said about their schools, there are double-digit numbers of administrators making over $1m, why not just cut their compensation to near that of lecturers?
> Why can't the Dean of the College also handle grants for their college?
Among other reasons: It takes an entire team to manage the lifecycle of grants, it's too much work for a single person to accomplish. In addition to the work needed to apply for a grant, there is also mandatory reporting and compliance to that needs to be completed. Additionally, a dean doesn't have the capacity to bind the entire university to the terms of a grant (nor the awareness to safely do so), so you run into problems with interdisciplinary research, which is increasingly encouraged.
Keep in mind that if you're not a professor, you're an administrator. Most university administrators are grossly underpaid relative to industry. Also keep in mind that the mission of public universities is more expansive than education for students.
Whether administrators are considered underpaid or overpaid relative to industry depends on what industry jobs you consider comparable. Readily available comparisons tend to be prepared by administrators themselves. There is an obvious bias here.
If the comparisons were fair, then I would expect to see university administrators switching back and forth to industry, with salaries going up and down, and for them to offer reasons both ways as to why they did so. That expectation is based on what we actually DO see happen with professors in employable subjects like computer science and engineering. However we DON'T see it happen administrators.
I therefore conclude that administrators are worth less to industry than they think they should be. Which fits with my opinion that they are worth less to education than their pay suggests. And fits with my further opinion that the current growth in number and salary of university administrators is unsustainable and is a luxury that our society cannot afford. Particularly the part of our society that is university graduates with crushing loan debt - which are the people who paid for those administrators and did not receive sufficient benefit from it for the debts that they bear.
I totally agree with you there. But note that there are people who are 50% professors, 50% administrator, For example, we have a VP of Campus Planning, a rotational position, who is 50% professor and 50% administrator while they are in that role. Then they revert back to being a professor after 3 years.
I wonder if we’ll see that shared governance model expand in response to COVID budget pressures? I’d consider that a positive outcome. I haven’t heard any opinions on it in APLU or COGR calls.
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.
Refunds are a pretty hard thing for universities to do though, in a lot of cases the money has already been spent. If the question is how much they charge for next semester (assuming closure or mostly online learning) then I think there's a stronger argument to not charge students as much.
The student perspective is basically that you're already paying so much, that the least the university can do is do good on what's being paid for or in the event where that is not possible, simply don't charge for what's not going to happen in the fall.
> in a lot of cases the money has already been spent
Then they can take out loans or go bankrupt.
I mean, if you paid for a Ferrari and the car dealer can only give you a Corolla, they owe you a refund - irrespective of how big their rent and salary bills may be.
If they were forced to choose between going bankrupt and having traditional in-person classes, they would be offering in-person classes right now and allowing people to “opt-out” to the remote version.
These companies aren’t arbitrarily choosing to educate people remotely. They’re adapting to the situation.
Likewise, it would be unreasonable for employers to cut people’s compensation for working remotely under the assumption that remote work is less efficient and therefore the company deserves a refund.
And maybe a car dealer couldn't deliver your Ferrari due to difficult circumstances beyond their control, and giving you a Corolla is the best they can adapt to the situation.
But they're still only delivering a Corolla so you don't have to pay the price of the Ferrari they promised you
Brilliant minds may have once lead education, healthcare and financial industries, but its probably more like a kit car Ferrari experience in modern times (the DNA is not there).
I've come across more and more articles about adjunct professors in poverty over the years, so the brilliance (and the brilliants) is definitely missing from the experience.
But you’re not car shopping and this isn’t a Ferrari vs. Corolla scenario.
If you read the article, you’ll see that the Universities did give partial refunds. These students are demanding even more refunds, while still collecting the education.
The education is still delivered, just through a different medium. If we believe that engineers can work just as effectively remotely, why can’t we believe that educators and educate just as effectively remotely? It feels like HN is picking and choosing when remote is good vs. bad based on how it personally benefits the commenter.
People do not pay to get only the education. Yes, it is a prominent part of it but more important are the facilities, the community and the networking capabilities. With remote teaching, everything else except learning is lost.
There’s no reason to pay the sums the universities are charging considering you can get the same education from almost any university.
No I am not. Due the current circumstances, the universities are not able to provide the facilities and the networking capabilities to the students so they should not be required to pay the full amount.
Also, as the students are going to be home anyway, the differences between universities shrink. If the education is somewhat similar in a university A and university B, but university A is five times more expensive during the normal times, why should the students of university A pay five times as much as the students at the university B. They have lost the reason why they pay so much for it.
Remote work in engineering is completely different then remote learning. Engineers are self-directed, a particular type of thinker. Maybe the professors are just as effective at performing remote work, but that does not mean that all students can just flip a switch a perform at the same levels.
I never implied all remote engineers would be adept at remote work, but I'd easily argue that engineers, as a group, would be more adept at remote work than most other professions, including a group of college students.
1) In a normal situation, some people are equally productive or more productive working remotely, and they should be able to.
2) In the current situation, almost everyone is less productive working from home, because they weren’t prepared and they have to deal with other stresses (family at home, too small of a space, fear of infection, etc.)
3) In the current situation, educators are less able to teach online than they would in person in a normal situation, and similarly students aren’t able to learn as effectively.
It can both be true that working remotely in a normal situation should be an option while this situation makes it harder to get a good education.
In any case, completely different scenarios. Except in very rare cases, employers don’t make huge upfront payments before the work is done. College students do.
> These companies aren’t arbitrarily choosing to educate people remotely. They’re adapting to the situation.
That doesn't really matter though. Like, it sucks, but they're giving a much shittier product and charging full price. Your example about people being less productive is not relevant because there's no doubt that the quality of education is much worse.
Do you feel the same way about engineers working remotely? Is someone working remotely and communicating over Zoom delivering significantly lower quality work and therefore deserving of a lower compensation?
Your assumption that there’s “no doubt” about the quality of education being worse is not a good assumption. Educators are working overtime to make the most of the remote learning situation.
You keep implying that the schools are doing their best in a trying time and deserve sympathy. Sure, that's fine. They're not acting in bad faith. But they aren't acting fairly. If the reason you went to a school was it had a cool robot building program, and you don't get to build any robots, that's clearly not what was offered to you. An online college is not worth the price of an in person college and it is very, very unfair to these students who are paying fortunes to get them. Much more unfair to the massively indebted students than the bureaucratically overbudgeted schools.
Employed engineers working remotely is a really bad analogy because engineers are paid to be available on an ongoing basis. Contract workers are a much better fit. If they were a contract worker, contracted to complete a specific task, and they don't complete the task... they don't get paid. COVID or otherwise. There is a wealth of pretty reasonable legal literature of settling disputes over partial completion of work.
> "While closing campus and transitioning to online classes was the right thing for Defendants to do, this decision deprived Plaintiff and the other members of the Classes from recognizing the benefits of in-person instruction, access to campus facilities, student activities, and other benefits and services in exchange for which they had already paid fees and tuition."
Note things like "campus facilities". Obviously 0% of that thing that they paid for was provided. And it should be reimbursed.
Educators are working their best, but that doesn’t mean that it is equal, because the stresses that have been put on students and educators are significant and can’t easily be worked around.
Also some things are simply impossible to do remotely, like music lessons or chemistry labs.
What does have legal liability is an act of god clause. If any sort of language like that is in whatever's being signed this situation certainly qualifies.
A force majeure contract absolves them of delivering their service. It doesn't mean they get to change their service however they see fit and keep all the money.
People up front for an in person semester. If they really want to go the force majeure route, they should return the money up front and renegotiate the rest of the semester.
Sure, they can return some money but who knows how much was already allocated, especially with distance learning continuing. I got no refund from my kid's preschool for similar reasons.
It's interesting that the short term solution of not giving refunds will likely cause long-term pain for universities because they are then admitting that remote is "the same as" in person. Most of the university value is in the experience. I'd predict that if colleges don't admit in person > online and don't offer refunds, then many students will decide to save the $150K over four years and just take online courses, then live in an interesting city to get that life/social experience.
Since there's unlikely a formal contract involved, they'll have to make a case with the public marketing and value prop which includes peers, access to professors, dorm life, state of the art labs, extracurriculars, a beautiful campus, alumni network, job fairs, etc.
Most of these colleges have spent years devaluing the content itself by putting it online for free and now that's one of the few things they're still offering.. for the small price of $X0,000/year.
While I agree tuition is too high, people have gone a little crazy with using the most expensive outliers as examples. Average tuition for state schools in 2018 was around $9,000 and I don't think that includes financial aid and scholarships.
And to complain about the coat of private schools is a bit like browsing around in a BMW dealership and complaining about how everything is too expensive.
Not to mention that if you are low income, there are lots of very nearly free options.
In general, declared states of emergency are a valid reason to get out of the "Did the college deliver it?" question as long as they attempted mitigations that are reasonable given the restrictions.
Few people I know with children in private schools(k-12) are planning on paying full tuition regardless of weather the next academic year is virtual or physical...
Same with me. My kid is in an international school. The school offered an insultingly small refund that made a lot of parents angry. Not me personally, because I understand that their largest cost by far is teachers, and that cost does not go away unless they furlough the teachers, which is a big problem since they probably can't get them back when they reopen. Second thing is that most parents depend heavily on the daycare aspect of school which is not being delivered.
I wonder how many US colleges will go under if many students dont return after the covid vaccine appears. Many were already hurting from a small GenZ cohort, competition from well-paying non-degree opportunities (now dubious), and current administration strangulation of immigrant scholars.
Investors should step in and pay the kids off (since these lawsuits are either guaranteed losers or will take years to settle). Then in exchange take a % of their future earnings. Vary the % and timeline based on the degree they're seeking.
I actually kind of like this idea - following the mold of coding bootcamps.
The only concern I have with this is tying monetary incentives to education. As a society, I think we benefit greatly from the diversity in learning paths that people choose to follow.
Once you attach a price tag - higher percentage of future earnings for majors like literature, philosophy - you are getting closer to turning the university system into a STEM robot factory.
A large part of the reason that some young people choose to go into esoteric fields of study is that their monetary outcome is not real to them at the point that they enter college.
To be fair, I bet there is a significant difference in the proportion of students from wealthy economic backgrounds who enter these esoteric fields compared to that of poorer students. And if it is the wealthy who are studying these kinds of subjects, then the approach you suggest will not seriously affect the diversity of subjects being explored.
> An income share agreement (or ISA) is a financial structure in which an individual or organization provides something of value (often a fixed amount of money) to a recipient who, in exchange, agrees to pay back a percentage of their income for a fixed number of years.
...
> Common Concerns
Indentured Servitude
> However, advocates of ISAs contend that since students have no legal obligation to work in a particular industry, and since it is illegal for investors to pressure them into a certain career, students are no more “indentured” than those with a student loan. In fact, someone with a traditional student loan has less choice than someone with an ISA, because the student with a loan needs to be in a career where they make at least enough income to cover their monthly payment, whereas someone with an ISA can choose to never make any money, and would never owe the investor a dime.
Someone who does not make any money doesn't need to care about student loans either. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the debt collectors can only collect what exists. They can't force you into the debtors prison. As long as you don't have anything, you don't have to worry about anyone coming after you (in the USA).
If you have assets you need to care about debt but the same is not true of an income share agreement. You can have assets without income from sources other than selling those assets.
If it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy, it's indentured.
The relevant question is "what is it acceptable to own?", and if your answer includes "human capital" your answer includes "people" and that makes you pro-slavery.
What?? This is literally the definition of a student loan: the bank gives the student some money now, and the student agrees to give them a certain amount of money out of their paycheck for a number of years after graduation.
Indentured servitude involves work without pay for a period of time. Quit talking about things you don't understand.
That’s actually a good agreement if not done in a predatory way. Which it is almost to be guaranteed if the finance guys set the terms of such an agreement.
Colleges should just open up. Young students are low risk that they're unlikely to be very sick if/when they contract disease. There will be some old or unhealthy staff members that can be protected.
California and NY have stronger lock down rules, but people should just transfer to Texas, Florida places that are more open.
While true that younger people are less at risk than older people, that risk is non-zero and significant.
You also ignore that students don't isolate themselves within the walls of the college. They are a part of that community, using dining and retail facilities, traveling home, visiting nearby cities, etc. That puts their parents and families at risk, locals at risk, etc.
Not to mention the majority of professors would be considered at least moderate risk. Maybe I just had a particularly good experience but I got to interact with a number of profs quite a bit during undergrad. Paying for in-person with only a bunch of TAs just wouldn't be worth it IMO, plus things like campus events would also have to be limited. It would take most of the benefits of the college experience out of the picture. I think gap year is the way to go for anyone that can make it work, regardless of whether the schools try to do online only or make accomodations for in-person.
Faculty member at a top-tier CS school. For most of the faculty where I am, an hourly consulting fee in the range of $500-1000 is reasonable. If you take the low-end of that range ($500) x 3 hours of class time per week ($1500) x 12 weeks of class you get $18,000 worth of expert time. Multiply that by three classes and you get $54k of value each semester, so even with non-trivial tuition it is still a pretty good deal. Likewise, FAANG et al recruit very heavily from our school so there is additional value-add.
I personally came from modest means and have a ton of outstanding student debt and was hesitant to go the faculty route precisely because I think the higher education in the US can be financially exploitative, but there are places where the high tuition is in fact a bargain based on market rates for the expertise. Likewise, nearly all faculty at top-tier CS schools can make way more in the private sector - we do this job because we really enjoy mentoring and work hard to make sure our students get the best education possible.
That kind of consulting fees for 1:20 shared time with so many other students on topics they don't control flow of ??? (i.e. I don't get to choose the specifics on topic you are "consulting" on or dictate what and how you teach me).
I wouldn't be able charge $ 10,000 - $20,000 for a 1:1 consulting session ! There are very very few people in the world who can command that kind of premium
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.