CNBC: "This is How College Got So Expensive in America"

[ucbalumnus]

@ordinarylives

Common? Where? Lake Wobegone, where all the children are above average?

Major school districts in California, including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, and Oakland, now require for high school graduation math (and other) courses conforming to California State University minimum entrance requirements. These include geometry and algebra 2, or integrated math 3 (or higher level math).

These requirements are higher than they were decades ago, contrary to claims about how high school students decades ago could be expected to know trigonometry.

[OHMomof2]

@ucbalumnus people often get a “back in my day” warped view of this stuff.

I went to HS in NYC in the 80s and the state didn’t require any HS math AT ALL. None. The state reqs back then were very few, at least for independent schools. 4 years English, 1 year US History. I think that was it.

Current NYS state students have a pretty rigorous set of requirements.

[donnaleighg]

and a “Regents Diploma” in NY used be be “for the smart kids.” Now essentially all kids need to get that sort of diploma.

[ucbalumnus]

Also, in the “good old days”, fewer people were even high school graduates.

According to https://trends.collegeboard.org/education-pays/figures-tables/educational-attainment-over-time-1940-2009 , the percentages of not HS graduate, HS graduate, some college, BA/BS+ for age 25-34 were:

1940 64% 22% 07% 06%
1950 51% 34% 10% 06%
1960 42% 36% 11% 11%
1970 26% 44% 14% 16%
1980 15% 40% 22% 24%
1990 14% 41% 22% 24%
2000 12% 31% 28% 29%
2009 12% 28% 28% 32%

[Mastadon]

There are no climbing walls, lazy rivers, or posh dorms at the likes of Yale and Swarthmore (the two schools I’m very familiar with in recent years). That trope is way overused.

The trope isn’t overused- it’s just describing a portion of the food chain which does not include Swat or Yale.

@donnaleighg , @blossom

Just to clear up a misconception, at more than $1000 a square foot Yale’s new dorms set a new standard for the trope. One doesn’t need a calculator to figure out that they didn’t buy the flooring at Home Depot. The 200 foot tall ornamental Gothic tower makes for a great (but rather expensive) climbing wall. Unfortunately, only elite members of mountaineering club are qualified to use it…

It’s not news that Yale has hundreds of workers building in New Haven, but it might surprise some to that the construction is the most expensive project in the university’s history — two new residential colleges, at a cost of half a billion dollars.

When the two residence halls open almost a year from now to the newly expanded incoming Yale Class of 2021, they will have cost more than $1,000 per square foot. That’s more than three times the average cost per foot of typical college dorms in the northeast and quite possibly the most ever spent, anywhere, to house students.

“The new Yale plan? Stay on brand. Make the college more marketable. Revive its glorious past of fake-old buildings with yet more fake-old buildings,” Yale alum C.C. Sullivan, the former editor of Architecture Magazine, quipped in 2014 on ZDNet.com, via Smartplanet.com. “This strategy may be good for the big business that is higher education, but it signals surrender in architectural terms.”

The design of the residential colleges is “the tissue” that Stern intended, while the appointments could effectively blunt any possible complaints that the two new colleges are not near enough to their predecessors on the old campus. Their plush and fully luxe aspects suggest they might come to be seen as the upper deck on the Good Ship Yale or, for those raised on Harry Potter, the colleges might echo Hogwarts.

The only doubles in the new colleges are for freshmen, representing 25 percent of the accommodations; the remaining 75 percent of the rooms are singles, all organized in suites. Each suite has a study and a separate entry space, and there are seldom more than two suites off each stairwell. The common areas’ interiors are flush with millwork and vaulted ceilings, expressive window-scaping and many nooks and crannies for study and conversation. As with all the residential colleges, there will be accommodations for resident faculty as well as facilities for dining, recreation and study.

The exteriors are equally sumptuous. The carefully scaled and shaped facades have hundreds of carved appointments and the kind of crafted stone and brick detailing that is unprecedented on this scale in any other facility built in this era. The landscaping lives up to the intricately burnished exteriors with generous plantings and trees.

While not easily observed at this stage of the project, the realities of constructing these colleges are extreme.

To start, the nature of Collegiate Gothic architecture is inherently idiosyncratic. Carved ornamentation, hand-hewn wood and stone detailing combine with intersections of geometry, material and technology to create a complicated, high-art set of buildings that include more than 200 sculpted art pieces. The commitment to imitated antiquity also means the project includes ornamental “chimneys” craned into place.

https://www.courant.com/hartford-magazine/hc-nh-new-colleges-new-haven-20160625-story.html