
Fancy Dorms Aren’t the Main Reason Tuition Is Skyrocketing - curtis
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-main-reason-tuition-is-skyrocketing/?
======
mwsherman
This has been studied in other places. It appears to have a lot more to do
with the subsidy of student loans:
[http://www.nber.org/papers/w21967](http://www.nber.org/papers/w21967)

I.e., more dollars chasing the same amount of education. A bit more
explanation here: [https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-
almost...](https://fee.org/articles/student-loan-subsidies-cause-almost-all-
of-the-increase-in-tuition/)

~~~
yequalsx
I have a hard time believing this. I teach at a community college in
Minnesota. Our state funding per student has been halved in the last 20 years.
Salaries are not exorbitant. We went almost 5 years without a pay raise. We
aren't frivolously spending money. We raise tuition because the bills have to
be paid. The money isn't coming from the state. There's really only one way to
raise the needed money and that is tuition increases.

I wonder how it can be determined that tuition wouldn't have increased as much
as it has in the absence of eussidized loans. Would salaries be even lower
than what they are? Would administration not have increased as much?

~~~
dsp1234
Have you considered that state funding has been lowered due to the fact that
federal loans to students have increased?

 _We aren 't frivolously spending money. We raise tuition because the bills
have to be paid._

The ballooning of the 'administration' staff at my wife's university over the
last 20 or so years is the same type of staff explosion seen at larger public
companies. Except that those companies are responsible to share holders, and
thus constrict when profits cannot be maintained. Whereas the University can
forgo layoffs by increasing tuition, and know that the federal (and private)
loan system will fill the gap. I cannot remember there ever being even a 2%
layoff of staff at the university, let alone something you'd see from
MS/IBM/etc.

~~~
yequalsx
I think you have cause/effect backwards. Funding per student decreases because
it's easy for politicians to say we increased funding by x% without mentioning
that the number of credit hours has increased by (x+y)%. The politicians can
then claim that universities are being wasteful and bloated because despite
increases in funding tuition is going up.

~~~
metaphorm
it's not just one thing. here's like 5 different factors that all result in
tuition increases

1\. state budgets for universities are cut for political reasons not having
much of anything to do with the university itself. budget shortfalls must be
made up from other sources, primarily from tuition increases.

2\. increased student enrollment due to increasing economic and social
pressure for people to get a college degree. more students requires more
facilities and more staff, which requires more funding.

3\. natural aging of physical plant of university facilities, combined with
other long-term maintenance costs (pensions, for example) that have
historically been underfunded and now need more funding.

4\. a price spiral relationship between availability of student lending and
tuition costs. tuition costs increase so student lending amounts increase so
tuition costs increase etc.

5\. real actual greed. this isn't universally true but it can't be dismissed.
some universities will just raise tuition simply because they can.

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starnixgod
A pet peeve of mine is when an article displays data to bolster an argument
but then cites the source to something extraordinarily large and generic (e.g.
"SOURCE: DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION") which makes actually finding the primary
data nearly impossible.

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roywiggins
Missing from the title: ...at public schools. Which, if you've been following
the amount of funding cut from state schools at all, hopefully isn't too
surprising.

~~~
drawkbox
Agreed, after the Great Recession state funding to universities (and K-12,
colleges) dropped dramatically. Arizona leads the way with almost a -50% drop
in funding, of course tuition goes up by almost 90% [1]. The article has this
data from 2000-2014 but most of the damage was 2008-present.

[1] [http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/pf/college/public-
university...](http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/13/pf/college/public-university-
tuition-increase/)

------
spike021
Tuition is rising at San Jose State to: get us "great partnership deals" on
new equipment like expensive teleconference TVs or smartboards that are rarely
used.

I have had CS professors who struggle to get their computers on the projector
because of old worn-out bulbs while math professors get rooms with smartboards
they don't even use, and similar.

Tuition rises because of bogus costs and needs that aren't needs at all or
because of overspending on poorly used/misused equipment that is sorely
mismanaged.

I could ramble on and on about problems I've seen first-hand, but rising
tuition is a serious issue not only because of costs being higher but also
because schools are just plain casually misusing/abusing the money in the
first place, some even carelessly.

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hackuser
For any endeavor, including education, if we shift the source of funding from
democratic government to private individuals, then those needing funding will
shift their focus from pleasing the public to pleasing wealthy parties.

For example, there was a new park being designed in NY. Lacking traditional
public funding, they sought private funding. As a result, instead of a design
that serves the public, the park is designed according to the desires of a
wealthy donor.[0] In higher education, instead of making progress and giving
more and more people a better education, as prior generations did, we are
going the wrong way (AFAIK). I believe it's fundamentally undemocratic, which
is an American ideal much more than small government, which is a partisan
ideology.

To me, the adherence to ideology (in this case, smaller government) over
practical good results (educating people and opportunity), always is a
terrible idea and can lead to dangerous results.

The free market allocates goods to those willing and able to pay most for
them. That's efficient for many things such as soda and cars, but undesirable
for basic human needs and societal goods such as education and healthcare,
which we don't want to deny to people because they are poor. Funding by the
public (via taxes) is a good solution for some things.

[0] That was the story as I read it maybe 1-2 years ago; it's possible the
situation changed since then.

EDIT: added sentence, reworded another

~~~
ende
I don't see how your comment is relevant to the topic. This isn't a public vs
private debate. If anything it's a debate between federal loans and state
appropriations, or an issue of administrative mismanagement.

There is another kind of ideology, however, which may be at play here: an
automatic reaction to pour public money on problems. Public institutions can
be irrational actors that cator to narrow interests just as private ones can.
The public sector needs to be regulated as well, and it largely is not.

~~~
hackuser
> This isn't a public vs private debate

We might be referring to different forms of "private". The article says that
as public funding was pulled back, tuition was increased to fill the gap.
Tuition is private funding, though by many (mostly) wealthy people rather than
a few uber-wealthy. With funding coming from that private source, wealthy
customers, educational institutions need to focus on pleasing them and invest
in fancy amenities rather than educational resources.

> The public sector needs to be regulated as well, and it largely is not.

It is regulated by voters and their representatives - very imperfectly, and we
should improve it and not be satisfied, but I've yet to find a large human
endeavor for which that wasn't the case.

> There is another kind of ideology, however, which may be at play here: an
> automatic reaction to pour public money on problems

Given the radical cuts in government budgets on the federal and local level, I
don't see that approach having much influence currently so I'm not worried
about it. Also, spending public money is a strategy, not an ideology.
Democratic socialism is an ideology, and I do dread dogmatic ideologues of all
stripes, but that one also isn't a threat right now.

------
Fomite
You can also see this in aspects of the university that are supported by
research funds instead of tuition. States slashed their support under the
assumption that the Federal government would pick up the tab with faculty
writing more grants.

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Animats
That site managed a breakthough in bad behavior with tracking blocked. The
page turns black every five seconds, then reloads.

------
amyjess
In 2004 or so, right after I started college, the state of Texas repealed
their laws that capped tuition at public universities at a very low amount.
After that, tuition at my university, UT Dallas, utterly _skyrocketed_. It
rose far more than the other public universities: we very quickly became one
of the most expensive public universities in the state, possibly _the_ most
expensive, and on par with private universities.

I was insulated from that because I had a scholarship, but if I didn't, I
might have had to drop out.

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smsm42
So, if the article is to be believed, the tuition costs were already high, but
hidden by financing them through taxes, and now they are coming out for all to
see by explicitly stating them as tuition costs and putting them on those who
consumes the service instead of distributing them between all taxpayers.

If so, then despite the obvious negative impact on students, I think by itself
such restructuring is a good thing - if the costs are hidden, they'd never be
discussed and evaluated and subjected to both public and market scrutiny. If
nobody knows how much tuition really costs, it's virtually impossible to have
meaningful discussion about it. If the public thinks tuition should be
subsidized, these subsidies should be out there in the open, so the public
knows how much it costs per student, and experiences it openly, not has to dig
it up from the piles of budget allocations.

One question, though, is if it was state financing drop that causes tuition to
raise in public schools, wouldn't that effect be much less in private schools?
So far I don't think the data confirms this.

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squozzer
It's worth asking what drove the states to cut aid. Some states have certainly
had lower tax revenues than expected. But some states (probably) felt safe
moving the funding problem onto loans and/or sources such as lottery proceeds.

~~~
brianwawok
Illinois it's been a pension time bomb building for 30 years. "Luxuries" like
higher education are way down the line from legally mandated payments to
retires teachers and policemen

~~~
douche
Is Illinois one of the states that's made a habit of raiding their pension
programs over the decades, promising to pay back in later[1], and now later
has come?

[1] (although they never mention the interest that would have accrued if the
principal hadn't been stolen...)

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
It's more like Illinois pensions are second to the Ten Commandments in terms
of universal truths that must not be questioned under any circumstances.

It's one thing to make a promise and intend to keep it. It's another thing to
stick to the promise until it's beyond the realm of possibility to fix it, and
a lot of people end up getting hurt.

------
rm_-rf_slash
As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most people,
I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher education is the
degree with which we have allowed it to become the universal gatekeeper of
professional careers.

I think college is a great experience, and I do hope for a day where everyone
can experience higher education in their life, but the basic mechanisms of
college are NOT necessary to work in a professional field. It is only our
culture that prevents it from happening.

The nucleus of this problem is our obsession with pedigree. We want everything
to be awesome and perfect and follow a neat little narrative where we all end
up rich and famous and successful because we attended the right schools and
worked with other people who attended the right schools. But life is never
that clear cut, and this narrative ignores the reality that most of your
ability to do a job is learned on that job. I didn't know a lick of ColdFusion
or even more than a few lines of JavaScript when I graduated college, and
within just a few months I could handle anything my employer threw at me.

A good amount of that success was because of my education, but most of it was
because they were willing to take on the risk of someone that had to learn and
grow, instead of insisting on a ColdFusion expert that could have done
everything from day one.

College is great, but it's not for everyone. My GI Bill-aided grandfather
didn't need the college he dropped out of to teach him how to run a successful
restaurant and support a family. And most of us understand that a lot of what
we get tested on from the age of 5 is bullshit.

The way forward is not fixing education, it's fixing employment. We need
employers willing to take risks with people who aren't perfect by default. To
do this we need to encourage and maybe even subsidize paid apprenticeships.
Real, paid work experience is better than any welfare or job retraining or
$80k degree. It shows what you are worth and what you are capable of doing.

As Ronald Reagan said, on one of the few occasions that he actually managed to
make a damn good point:

"The best social program is a job."

~~~
zeveb
> As someone whose family is more steeped in higher education than most
> people, I have come to believe that the biggest problem with higher
> education is the degree with which we have allowed it to become the
> universal gatekeeper of professional careers.

Blame Griggs vs. Duke Power Company[1], which is the reason employers are
afraid to use proficiency tests in hiring (and hence are forced to rely on
proxies like an applicant possessing a four-year degree).

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co).

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Interesting, didn't know about this case. Not sure how a degree would be any
less discriminatory given the makeup of college graduates, and if I can cite
this case the next time I'm asked to whiteboard FizzBuzz, but either way, I
still believe it would be better than a purely educational focus to instead
subsidize apprenticeships so that employers see if someone is simply
incompetent for lacking the right skills or if they have a lot of potential
and are worth investing in.

------
Spooky23
The analysis here is pretty insipid. If primary sources of funding get cut,
and your reaction is to go out on a capital projects spree, what do you expect
to happen?

I went to a big state school where most classrooms weren't painted since 1969.
Now there's a 50" tv ok every flat surface and, the dorms are very fancy, and
the mystery meat and hamburger vending machine has been replaced with better
food and 24x7 cafeterias.

Guess what? This shit costs more.

------
forrestthewoods
This article fails to mention the exploding student population size.

Over time the per-student funding from states has gone down significantly. But
that doesn't mean the state slashed funding for higher education! For
University of Washington the budget from the state is almost entirely flat. Up
about 3%.

Student Size: +100% State Tax Revenue: +40% State Higher Education Funding:
+15%

What would you consider the "dominant factor" here? It's several factors. But
I would not consider, and I quote, "a steady decrease in support for higher
education on the part of state legislatures" to be the dominant factor. In
fact, that statement is flat out wrong. The state legislature hasn't decreased
support at all. They're providing more support than they were! The state, and
the state's coffers, have no way to keep up with the growing number of
students.

[http://f2.washington.edu/fm/financial-report-
archive](http://f2.washington.edu/fm/financial-report-archive)

(I did a little digging last night specific to the University of Washington.
Numbers from memory and a little fuzzy. But within the ballpark.)

~~~
chrisbennet
It depends on how you look at it. There _has_ been a decrease in funding _per
student_.

~~~
smsm42
But it is presented as a state government action to cut funds, when the actual
events were that action was to increase funds but not enough to catch up with
increasing student numbers. Given that student numbers are not under control
of the state government, describing it as a state action to cut funds in
misleading.

It is misleading in the same way as to say that the company substantially
raised the average salary of employees when in fact what happened is that CEO
salary was doubled. Technically yes, that means average salary has increased
too. But such statement omits important details that make it misleading.

~~~
chrisbennet
Oh, see what you're saying now. You're right. It _has_ been "slanted" as a
funding "cut".

That said, I think you'd agree that the government has failed to fund the
education of its citizens to the level it used to. I got my college education
when it was "cheap" so if I was selfish [OK, _more_ selfish than I am] I would
be inclined to go with the "I got mine, tough for you. I had to walk uphill
both ways to school, blah, blah. Thanks for paying for my retirement."

------
asbestas
Nate Silver totally fails to note the enormous financial transfer from
professors (all new professors are cheap adjuncts) to administrators. I know
adjunct professors that are on food stamps. Academia is a hellhole and college
administrators should be ashamed.

~~~
jdhopeunique
Often the administrators are former or current faculty themselves. I've seen a
professor hold a position as head of the university technology department(a
non-academic support role) and teach classes. VPs, Deans, department heads,
leaders of various "Centers of Excellence", leaders of various initiatives,
Provosts, and even Presidents can be former faculty.

The former professors just view their role as administrator as another step up
the academic ladder. There's even a website poking fun at university titles:

[http://universitytitlegenerator.com/](http://universitytitlegenerator.com/)

------
rileymat2
This article is largely on point, but I get the feeling they are playing games
with Tuition v. Total cost. At my state university Tuition is separate from
dorm costs, so fancy dorms effect loan amounts but not "tuition".

------
patmcguire
What's the enrollment change? Is this the same amount of money spread over
more students?

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jkot
One university decided to change signs on toilets. Single label costs $400, it
has to be in brail and match various regulations.

I think education is ripe for disruption. We will see rise of bootcamps and
online education. Also university in foreign country costs peanuts.

~~~
inputcoffee
Your comment makes an important point though: who will take care of people who
are visually impaired or who need other accommodations?

The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.

I am kind of glad they spent that money to accommodate those students. Aren't
you? That's not what is raising the cost of education.

EDIT: I did work on a mouse that provides haptic feedback including texture
years ago, so I am aware that it is possible to provide braille like feedback
over the web.

EDIT2: Many people have pointed out that MOOCs do add accessibility features.
This is true, and good. I think the MOOCs are largely run by well meaning
people.

~~~
jkaptur
> The online MOOCs aren't going to introduce braille.

In general, putting content online makes learning more accessible. As a
specific example, Khan Academy has done important work developing tools in
this area:
[http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/tota11y.htm](http://engineering.khanacademy.org/posts/tota11y.htm).

I see where you're coming from - many "dispuptive" services have (shamefully,
in my opinion) resisted making their services accessible, but I don't think
MOOCs really fall into that class.

~~~
GauntletWizard
Disclosure: I work for Uber, so I'm more than I little biased.

Tell me; How many blind or deaf people did you know who took a cab before
Uber? I went to RIT, which hosts a school for the deaf, and while there wasn't
really a call for cabs at the school, I knew a couple people who did co-ops in
big cities and were frustrated by how hard it was to get around. When asked
why they didn't take a cab, they explained how much of a pain it was to
communicate with their drivers, even with the fairly advanced assistive
devices (every student had a sidekick, at the time a very advanced phone, and
could usually pass around notes using such). It was still too hard; the
barrier of entry on the communication was too high, and taxi drivers were
easily frustrated trying to communicate fares and routes to deaf students. I
can't even imagine a blind person hailing a cab. How would they know where to
hail? How would they know when it stopped in front of them?

Now, I see posts on the RIT subreddit from time to time from deaf students
who've just taken an Uber. It's not a problem anymore. There's a distinct
group of blind users of the uber app; It works, the interface is consistent,
and I just tried it myself (it wasn't easy, but I called a cab, and I think
it'd work decently with practice).

~~~
jkaptur
That's fair. I mentioned Uber because I remembered the criticism from the
National Federation of the Blind [1]. However, it's tangential to my point, so
I've edited my post to remove it.

[1] [https://nfb.org/groundbreaking-settlement-end-
discrimination...](https://nfb.org/groundbreaking-settlement-end-
discrimination-against-blind-uber-riders-who-use-guide-dogs)

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coldtea
What fancy dorms? You'd pay like $200/month or less for such a place in most
cities...

~~~
analogwzrd
When I was applying to college in 2006, one of the big selling points at the
University of Alabama was that the honors dorms had a lazy river.

I wonder if the "fancy" dorms are only a thing in non-city universities. It
would make sense that building fancy, new dorms in a downtown area in a place
like Boston or New York just wouldn't be worth it.

~~~
g52oevr0in
Universities get a property tax exemption that allows them to do things with
land in downtown areas that wouldn't be economically rational for typical real
estate investors.

