<p>The answer [to soaring college costs] is surprisingly simple: ban the bundling of campus services just as they are prohibited in the consumer telecommunications industry. [...] Because many of these extras are either unwanted, unnecessary, or can be bought off campus much cheaper, the cost of college will fall, much of todays administrative bloat will vanish and, perhaps most importantly, student debt will shrivel.</p>
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<p>Online courses may drive the unbundling. If you can access the course materials at low cost, the ancillary services may not be worth $50,000 a year.</p>
<p>I think that wealth redistribution is a bigger factor than services which you can’t take out and the wealth redistribution thing is intentional. As long as colleges have students clamoring to get in, they can charge what and how they want.</p>
<p>So, say a student declines the “activity fee” for use of the rec center for example. How do you police that? Does their key card just not open the door to the building? What if there is some kind of assembly in that building, say graduation, since that student didn’t help pay for that building or use of that building, do they not get to attend graduation? In reality, those “fees” are minor compared to the overall cost of the school and unbundling them would cause more problems then it would solve.</p>
<p>This article does not seem well researched at all. Textbooks are not subsidized by student fees, and can be purchased online now. Most colleges do not provide oncampus housing or require students to live in dorms, so many already use Craigslist to find housing. Regarding the football example, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Longhorns are self-sustaining.</p>
<p>^while I think most colleges do provide on-campus housing, at least for the first couple years, that is already an unbundled cost. If you don’t live on campus, you don’t pay for it. :D. Major football teams are not only self-sustaining, they typically fund most of the rest of the athletic department as well-along with the other revenue sports anyway.</p>
<p>Actually, no. “most” colleges are judos, and few have anything approaching student housing. But even many public four-years have limited housing; the 20+ CalStates for example, are primarily commuter schools, with few beds for the Frosh class.</p>
<p>wrt article: could students then get a discount if they took classes in old, decrepit buildings vs. the new (and massively expensive), green-approved LEED buildings? (Of course not, bcos that kind of unbundling would be politically incorrect.)</p>
<p>bluebayou–I’m sure I will get blasted for this but Community Colleges are not real colleges. Most 4 year schools do offer housing on campus. Even if that housing is limited, it is there and it is unbundled from the tuition costs already. The author of the article obviously has not participated in the college search process.</p>
<p>As for all the new buildings, etc. Those are generally paid for through specific donations to the college or through the interest from endowments earmarked for capital improvements.</p>
<p>It’s an interesting premise, but right now the author of the article is just taking a wild guess that “unbundling” services would cut tuition significantly. Not exactly well thought out or researched.</p>
<p>Scratching my head about how he throws the library into the category of services of which “[n]one, in [his] estimation, is vital to learning”. :eek: And this is a guy with a PhD who teaches at NYU. What would he regard as “vital to learning” if not the campus library?</p>
<p>The answer to soaring college costs is much simpler: Just return to the 2005 bankruptcy laws which allowed student loans to be dischargeable in bankruptcy. This will prompt lenders to tighten the money supply based on creditworthiness which should cause tuitions to drop. (Same as happened with the recent housing boom & bust.)</p>
<p>Some schools do charge more for lab courses, or majors with lots of lab courses (although they do not charge that large a differential).</p>
<p>However, not all STEM majors are necessarily “expensive”. Math is probably as cheap as English in equipment and support costs, although it may require more expensive faculty (since math PhDs have better competing non-academic job prospects than English PhDs). Biology has higher equipment and support costs, but probably has cheap faculty.</p>
<p>It means that community “colleges” are technical colleges with a more politically correct name. They are not in the same league as a 4 year school and when the discussion is about housing on campus it is assumed by most reasonable people that you are not talking about vo-tech schools.</p>
<p>I call it voc-tech vs academic. NH CCs are more voch-tech and only recently moved towards providing more academic options. MA’s CCs are more balanced between voc-tech and academic.</p>
<p>"So, say a student declines the “activity fee” for use of the rec center for example. How do you police that? Does their key card just not open the door to the building? "</p>
<p>Yes, that is how the technology already works. There are fields in the ldap record for what access the account has. It is SOP in companies for id cards to have differentiated access. For instance only a small subset of people can get on the data center floor and its not the marketing guys and gals. </p>
<p>If someone needs short term access (like a graduation exercise) then you follow the company model and post and escort. Student labor is cheap and plentiful. </p>
<p>I think the general idea of unbundling is a good one- most of the cost drivers of education rate increases are not classroom labor or fancier food. They are initiates driven for the benefit of the administration and faculty. There is no particular reason why a student should be paying for ego monuments. </p>
<p>Differentiated pricing by class would be nice too see too. How much does it cost to have a guy in a scruffy blazer teach calculus at a whiteboard?</p>