

One of the Worst Explanations You’ll Read of Why College Is So Expensive - gooserock
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2015/04/06/why_is_college_so_expensive_the_new_york_times_offers_an_awful_explanation.html

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sago
Wait, what?

So tuition has gone up by 350%, but subsidies have decreased by less than 20%
per TE student, at the same time that the number of academic staff has stayed
roughly the same.

The only linked study says that tuition increases were larger in years with
drops (in the tens of percent) in state funding, but the increases were not
reversed when the funding returned, nor, in fact, did tuition even stop
growing in those years.

Furthermore, the same linked study says that actual tuition revenue per
student grew faster than ticket price tuition per student as colleges found
other ways to maximise the revenue from students.

Yet the article still claims that declining state subsidies are a "key reason"
for tuition increases?

I agree the NYT article was weak, but this one seems willfully ignorant of the
implications of its own statistics.

NB: It's also interesting that the linked to study points out growth in
operations as one of the largest cost centers over the time (the claim of the
OP), but still not a vast increase. It doesn't include capital expenses, in an
obvious way. So we're still none the wiser why costs have increased at 200% of
the rate of the median family income over the period of the report (up until
2008).

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Spooky23
Institutions always play sleight of hand with numbers by ignoring or
misrepresenting capital costs. In my state, the debt ends up on the books of a
public authority that borrows for construction projects. They often structure
the loans with minimal early payments.

My local state university and alma mater has been on a construction binge for
that last decade. They've built a stadium, new administration building, new
dorms, gyms, etc. all while crying poverty on the business side and losing
enrollment.

Oh and tuition is 2.5x what I paid in 1999.

