Much of the physical plant owned by colleges counts as part of their endowments, and in many cases is income-producing.
As for dorm rooms, colleges underbuild dorms, if anything—you don’t want to overbuild them, because empty space that has to be maintained costs money.
The idea that colleges are spending on luxuries is overblown. Yes, some schools have climbing walls and lazy rivers and such, but they’re unusual—which is why they get the attention. If you were to pick a randomly chosen college, you’d have a very small chance of having chosen a place with a climbing wall or a lazy river or a [insert other such item here].
And I repeat: One person’s unnecessary luxuries are another’s vital services.
So according to your plan, a high income earner must pay taxes year after year needed to send a low income student to college, but is not allowed to receive the same benefit when it is time for his child to to attend college. How is that fair?
I’m sure they do produce income. The question is, where is that income coming from? The answer is quite obviously from students, often students who were either coerced into living in a dorm for stupid reasons or who have to but really don’t have the kind of money that dorms cost. In other countries, these services are provided for free.
Of course large capital expenses are income-producing once they’re already built. It’s the building process itself that ratchets up the cost of the schools.
Not to mention oversell. Because it’s profitable to do so.
These aren’t exactly a problem, except when a student is expected to indirectly pay for the expense of these out of their tuition/room and board fees. I find it hard to justify many of the more optional services that schools tend to provide (stadium improvements, new office buildings, general student services) when it makes college unaffordable for the poorer students. Not that all of these things wouldn’t be good to have - it’s better to have more than less, and it’s not a terrible use of money - but it is very much unessential. College does not have to be a luxury cruise with every fancy perk provided for.
One person’s “vital services” are another person’s “prohibitively expensive luxuries that are required to be purchased in order to pursue an education.”
@NeoDymium: No, you misunderstand. The physical plant I’m talking about isn’t just the stuff we think of as the college campus, but also things like off-campus buildings that are rented out, land with leased timber and mineral rights, and so on.
It’s curious why you would even bring that up. It seems pretty irrelevant to the matter at hand how the university chooses to invest its money in real estate once it already has said money. If that endowment was obtained from tuition payments, then that’s a different story.
@NeoDymium#85: Why? Because you brought up the issue of what you called “unnecessary real estate” in #75. I was pointing out that a good chunk of the stuff you would call unnecessary because it’s not directly tied to teaching and/or research is actually helping fund said teaching and/or research, and therefore a crucial part of the enterprise.
Also, the other stuff on your list of things you find unnecessary (e.g., stadiums) aren’t always funded by tuition dollars, as @lookingforward points out.
Basically, you seem to have an incomplete picture of the way funding structures work at modern US institutions of higher education, and as a result you are making policy proposals that would have a marginal effect at best, and a negative one at worst.
ETA: Also, a lot of property (both real and investment) owned by universities comes from things like bequests. Just pointing out yet another thing you seem to be overlooking—your #85 makes it seem like you’re assuming that tuition revenues (including federal and state financial aid) and (for public institutions) state appropriations are the only income streams colleges have. Even leaving aside grant overhead payments, which is a big one for many schools, there are a lot of other sources of revenue out there.
I don’t know how you decided that what was mentioned there sounds like “get rid of real estate investments that provide an income to the university.” Frankly you are arguing a strawman.
Student services and housing are often paid for out of tuition/room/board income. Not like schools don’t have other sources of income, but there are most certainly cuts that can be made to those that will be somewhat harmful, but can be offset by more selective enrollment to reduce overall costs, certain budget cuts on less essential expenditures, and additional sources of income.
Ah! I suppose I misunderstood your phrasing, then—I thought that (a) the reference to tuition money was the first part of a list, not something that covered everything in the list that followed, and (b) the reference to office buildings didn’t cover all commercial real estate owned by the school.
If that’s what you meant, though, then you’re focusing on a dreadfully small part of the finances of a modern college, and I don’t see what your prescription would actually do.
Ideally the hope is to be able to figure out a way to eliminate tuition/room/board costs without also cutting out the essential qualities that make a university what it is. Granted, there is only so much “fat” that can be cut before you will start to also cut into important features of the school, but I disagree with the idea that college is necessarily expensive as implied in #74, since a lot of those things mentioned in that post are luxuries.
I think that the biggest thing that would help would be to stop enrolling those that have no business being in university, until they prove that they can actually hack it. A lot of that effort would be better spent on revamping and improving the community college and vocational school system, which is a lot better in most countries than it is in the US.
My prediction is that when people are not able to take out soul-crushingly large debt to afford college, the colleges will somehow magically discover that they’re able to provide an education for less than $65k/year/kid.
Has anyone ever broken down the wholesale cost of educating a kid? I know these colleges say they’re non-profit, but really, how much does it cost per student? I have a hard time believing it’s $65k/year.
Where’s Marcus Lemonis? Break it down…
Also, WRT the Hope scholarship, the 3.0 student is not the “average” student. If an A is excellent, a B is good, and a C is average, the kid who never gets a C (or conversely balances it with an equal amount of A’s) isn’t what I’m seeing as an average student here. Those are the strong students. The 3.7 and above students are the super grinders here.
Neo- the number of students who would attend a university which did not have Wifi or modern communication/technology infrastructure is close to zero. So what you describe as lavish rebuilding/retrofitting/new construction is a university accepting that a 19th century building needs a significant capital investment in order to maintain any semblance of being usable in the digital age. You try making a building constructed before the Civil War up to code.
I mean, they might, but they might also drag their feet for a decade or two and leave the public worse off in the process or get the loan guarantees reinstated. Personally I think this all needs to be solved with free attendance (or more likely, a nominal and small tuition fee of $100 or so). College is a benefit for society and I don’t think people should have to pay for that positive externality for society.
I do indeed know a thing or two about real estate construction and renovation. The amount of money that universities just throw away, because students are going to be footing the bill anyways, is remarkable. Beyond some government required cheapness that ultimately leads to impressive cost overruns, sometimes they simply buy new buildings that they could easily go without if they were to repair some of the older buildings for a fraction of the cost. How do they pay for it? Often with tuition increases, coercing students to live on campus (and charging more money than it is worth), and annoying forms of nickel-and-diming. And I’m not even opposed to having nice things on campus - they just have to be paid for in a responsible manner that doesn’t make it more expensive for people to get an education.
If student tuition/room/fees income were not so readily available then the schools would be much more careful with their money.
I don’t profess to understand the economics discussed in this thread or to know anything about tuition outside Massachusetts schools and the schools my own D looked at in her decision process but…I believe that students who really want to go to college, make it happen, regardless of their family income, whether that be by dual enrollment, community college, or military duty for example. I don’t believe everyone belongs in college but if you want to go, it is available to you by various means. Our local community college is affordable for every student, but it might mean they have to bust their behinds in the summer working two or three jobs to avoid loans…not a bad thing. Dual enrollment is available in most high schools but it might mean they have to bust their behinds carrying that academic load. And then there’s the military which would need its own thread. But my S chose that path and in 8 years has nearly completed his bachelors degree while serving our country, making a good living, preparing himself for a private job in the cybersecurity field, saving for retirement and his future childrens’ educations, and a myriad of other benefits. I don’t believe anything in life is free.
In my state, the capital construction budget (funded by bonds) has nothing to do with student fees and tuition. Dormitory, library, labs, new athletic centers, new stadium, state of the art parking for said stadium- all financed via bonds.
What does this have to do with student loans?
I think it’s a horrific state of affairs that my state flagship has state of the art athletic facilities and a middling intellectual/academic experience. But people vote with their feet…
》》Help to lower prices, or help to exclude people based on what they can afford? 《《
I meant the former. But if you were implying the latter…
In other words, “free college” means a guaranteed full ride (tuition, fees, books, room and board, transportation costs, tech supplies, a car, snacks, laundry money, internships, study abroad, …) for any student for any college in the US, regardless of their family or personal finances. The government should provide everything for everyone, since everyone is owed everything they could ever desire.
Then you would be wrong. Military duty is not for everyone and I sure hope you don’t recommend that people potentially sign themselves up for the next war in hopes of having college paid for. Dual enrollment is so much so a high status/income aspect by availability, funding by school, parental encouragement, etc that it isn’t really useful as a means to minimize cost. Community college is helpful, but the US has a pretty terrible community college system and it still doesn’t make the tail-end of the education cheap.
Do people beat the odds and make it despite these issues? Certainly. But there are plenty who choose not to go to college because of this, when society would be better off if they did get a degree.
If students don’t have to pay, directly or indirectly, for these improvements, then that’s great. If the dorms are free to rent for the year and they are financed by govt money, I’m all for having them. That’s not my experience in general - real estate is often paid for with student money.
Education is not a commodity to be purchased (or maybe it is but shouldn’t be). It’s a public necessity and should be treated as such.
Who pays for “free” college (because as folks seem to understand, college ain’t free) and who decides what those “free” colleges should have in terms of academic offerings, housing, dining and other facilities/opportunities?