<p>More</a> on the End of Public Higher Ed zunguzungu</p>
<p>It's pretty self-evident, since everyone's paying the same tuition costs. But it's obvious that each course has far different cost requirements (even the lab fee understates how much lab courses would really cost compared to humanities ones)</p>
<p>Well good, now people can stop *****ing about how useless my degree is.</p>
<p>All other factors aside you can make the argument that fluff degrees subsidize hard degrees. But I don’t think it’s so simple, in fact I think the proliferation of fluff degrees has made college far more expensive than the hard degrees by encouraging people to go to college who would otherwise get on with their lives.</p>
<p>Imagine if most of the people who went to college to study sociology or English or French literature instead pursued these topics the cheap way by studying them on their own in their leisure time, joining discussion groups, online forums, etc. (I whole-heartedly recommend these avenues of learning, I’ve become a bona fide economics, film, and video game history nerd largely on my own, without ever attending a class in any of these topics). The rest, the people who merely went to college and chose a fluff major, simply because going to college is “what you’re supposed to do,” actually got jobs and became more productive the old-fashioned way, by acquiring human capital and becoming valuable to employers.</p>
<p>Let’s also imagine that the government didn’t require a stupid piece of paper (i.e. a BS or MS) to be allowed to teach, or be a translator, or anything like that. (that’s a whole other thread topic, but what I’m saying is that imagine the people who wanted to teach second grade merely had to show that they were good at teaching second-graders, not that they wasted four years of time and money on a piece of paper that means nothing other than “I jumped through the stupid hoop”).</p>
<p>What would college look like? I think it would be around ten-to-thirty percent or so people studying “fluff” majors but taking it seriously (i.e. people who study English or sociology and are actual scholars), and I think the rest would be economics, engineering, science, medicine, etc. I think that over-all, far fewer people would attend college (college is <em>so</em> unnecessary for most people), and I also think that colleges would be smaller, more focused on academics, and I believe that credit hour cost would be based a lot on what one is studying (though I can still see schools charging a “flat rate” for credit hours but schools themselves becoming more specialized).</p>
<p>I also think average tuition costs would come way down. Why? A huge, huge chunk of current tuition costs and fees are due to paying for expensive bloated bureaucracies in the Office of This and the Department of That. Schools are able to get away with this because they have two types of customers they like the most: people paying with government-backed financial aid and the wealthy. Both of these types are more careless with the money they’re spending. Both of them think “so what if my textbook costs a hundred bucks, mommy/financial aid is paying for it.”</p>
<p>Case in point: community colleges. A class at one is much like a class at the other, but most community colleges run much leaner and meaner than that.</p>
<p>So while its true that fluff majors are subsidizing (to a point) hard majors, the sheer mass of fluff majors stimulating the build-up of school bureaucracy and price gouging are also affecting what <em>everybody</em> has to pay.</p>
<p>^Interesting ideas (and analysis). I totally agree with you on the self-studying. And it would be cheaper for everyone. Degrees are just mechanisms to signal a combination of intelligence+conscientiousness.</p>
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<p>What I <em>do</em> worry about, however, is that if the higher education model implodes (and it very well may implode in 10-20 years), then there will be far fewer science professors than before. And less research will be done as a result (there will be fewer graduate students since graduate student tuition is paid by undergrad tuition, and professor tuition is also paid by undergrad tuition). In a sense, people are funding the advancement of science by deceiving themselves about the fiat value of a college degree. And since so much depends on the advancement of science (aka every single improvement in living standards that humans have enjoyed over the past - humans could easily regress were it not for better technology), I’m not even sure if that’s a bad thing.</p>
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<p>Where’d you hear this? Graduate students are supported either on fellowship or by their advisor. That doesn’t just include stipend, it includes tuition as well (ever wonder why some professors want their less productive students to get out before six years?). The only part of graduate student tuition I can see being funded by undergrad is grad students that are TAs, but then they’re providing a major service for the class, so it only makes sense they’d be compensated for it.</p>
<p>I used to think it’s the other way around, expensive programs subsidize the rest of the school. Most MBA and MS Business programs are expensive cash cows.</p>
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<p>Actually, the private sector is the one that looks forward to hiring college graduates. It seems that a Harvard sociology major has a better chance of getting into Goldman Sachs than a UT finance major. If the private sector doesn’t care, then why should we be bothered?</p>
<p>If you consider a large financial company to be the private sector (I don’t, I consider them partners with the government and I don’t like it)…</p>
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<p>That’s the OP’s point - those are programs that aren’t expensive to run but can demand large tuition checks. He’s not saying that programs that have low student fees subsidize programs that schools charge a lot for.</p>
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<p>I’m not sure why you would think people on financial aid would be careless with their spending. Sure, the money comes from financial aid, but if you waste that money you can’t spend it on other things. So there’s plenty of incentive there to be frugal. </p>
<p>The people who really can be careless are the ones whose parents are paying, wealthy or not. Then it often really is a situation where the money is only for the specific cost, and if you don’t see any of the money you save there’s no reason to try to save it.</p>
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<p>You completely misunderstand my point. Yes, people who receive financial aid must make decisions about how to spend it, but the very existence of financial aid to ANYBODY regardless of their future earning power and ability to pay it back leads to a much higher number of students going to college who otherwise wouldn’t (because they wouldn’t be majoring in something that would provide them with a big enough paycheck to make it worthwhile).</p>
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<p>I guess I was misled by the fact that you referenced textbooks when they really have little to do with tuition levels and school expenses.</p>
<p>But yeah, increasing demand by making college accessible to everyone regardless of wealth probably doesn’t keep prices down.</p>
<p>Well, the textbook price phenomenon is part of the tuition phenomenon, ya know. There’s no conceivable reason to keep printing new editions of an algebra book and making people buy it.</p>
<p>So are textbook prices driven up by large bureaucracies? I doubt it. Are there a bunch of people in fluff majors taking algebra? I doubt it. Are the most popular algebra books re-released in new editions every few years? No, at least none of the popular ones I’ve heard about. Do students on financial aid lack incentive to save money? Certainly not.</p>
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<p>Okay good point - you’ve corrected me on that point then. I should have noted this earlier since I posted a thread in Physics Forums about it ([If</a> the education bubble collapses, will it be the end of “blue skies research”?](<a href=“If the education bubble collapses, will it be the end of blue skies research ?”>If the education bubble collapses, will it be the end of blue skies research ?)).</p>
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<p>Agreed. If you put education to the whims of the free market, then textbook prices would go down (and there would be many high-quality university webpages that catered to the material from each major textbook). This could happen if people accepted test results in lieu of academic degrees.</p>
<p>Many people talk about the “intangibles” of a university education that can’t be replicated through self-study - but all their arguments seem to be hand-waving arguments without basis. It is possible to get a superior education through self-study, and many Caltech students do that (Caltech’s undergrad classes have very high class skipping rates).</p>
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<p>I think that is a very good point. There is virtually no price elasticity in demand among many parents who pay for college. College tuition costs are rising - and despite this - demand still only goes higher and higher. Because of the lack of the price elasticity in demand, textbooks can charge for higher prices without decreasing demand. I literally don’t care how much a textbook costs to me - it’s my parents who pay for it, it’s still a small fraction of tuition, and it’s also a very small fraction of parental income.</p>
<p>I’d rather go to college for 4+ years and get my name on a paper.</p>
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<p>They’re generally referring to discussions, which are obviously more important in the humanities. There aren’t many Caltech humanities majors.</p>
<p>I’ll make it clear one more time and be done with it: by making easy money available to people to go to college it artificially stimulates demand above market levels, which means that rent-seekers like textbook publishing companies can raise prices above what they would otherwise be.</p>
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<p>I don’t disagree with that.</p>
<p>See how much easier it is when you don’t throw in your politically motivated BS about careless spending by people on FA and fluff majors?</p>
<p>What politically motivated BS? I was presenting what I believed to be a good cause-and-effect analysis of the situation, not a condemnation of financial aid or fluff majors. <em>I’m</em> on financial aid!</p>
<p>And if you don’t disagree, then what were you arguing about to begin with?</p>
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<p>Caltech classes also have a high hassle-the-TA-until-they-teach-you-because-you-didn’t-go-to-lecture rate, as well.</p>