
Cheaper College Makes More Sense Than Free College - paulpauper
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-26/free-college-needs-to-help-poor-kids-and-avoid-tuition-inflation
======
romwell
Hahaha. Their premise is that price controls might

>Forcing top public schools like the University of Texas or the University of
Michigan to cut their budgets might weaken their ability to hire top
professors and provide supportive living environments for students, thus
reducing education quality.

Are they kidding? Luxury living environments don't make an education. And
professors' salaries are the last thing universities spend money on these
days.

Just to put it in context, a tenure track math professor could be getting
$60K. They'd be the privileged elite, since most of the instructors are
adjuncts who work for food.

(Source: ask people in academia, but really, public schools publish salary
data, at least in TX)

Price controls are _exactly_ what we need. There's no way the universities
will be paying their professors less than they already do. But perhaps some of
those admin expenses would stop growing exponentially.

EDIT: some numbers for y'all:

[https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-
aus...](https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-austin/)

Top guys make over $100K (still way less than a tech salary), but look at new
hires and smallet schools. And TX is a relatively rich state.

~~~
MR4D
"No state funds are used to pay for any salary in the UT athletic department,
which is completely self-sufficient"

Source: [https://www.chron.com/sports/longhorns/article/Texas-
regents...](https://www.chron.com/sports/longhorns/article/Texas-regents-
approve-Tom-Herman-s-five-year-10689744.php)

~~~
inuhj
Who pays for facilities and player scholarships? It's not difficult to move
numbers around.

~~~
MR4D
Think of the athletic department as a self contained division within the
enterprise known as UT. That division has its own P&L, and consistently makes
a profit. [0]

[0] [https://www.hookem.com/story/texas-athletics-generates-
recor...](https://www.hookem.com/story/texas-athletics-generates-record-
breaking-214-8-million-2016-17-athletic-year/)

------
jmpman
I’ve been surprised at the lack of good quantitative reporting on college
costs over time. For state schools, yes, state funding has been cut, but I get
the feeling that expenses have been skyrocketing. When I went to college in
the late 90’s, my dorm was from 1930. The building boom in dorms was only
surpassed by the expansion of residence life administrators. These new
buildings were quite opulent for college kids, attempting to lure out of state
students paying higher tuition. While these out of state student bodies grew,
the cost for in-state students exceeded inflation, even while being subsidized
by out of state students. A simple analysis of dorm costs over time, broken
down by administrator overhead would shed a substantial light on the problem.
Unlike tuition, dorms likely weren’t subsidized by tax payers and were
designed to be cost neutral. I wouldn’t even be surprised if now, dorm costs
exceed what they’re charging students, and constrained to raise prices by the
external housing market, the excess administrators are funded by the general
fund.

All the data exists and at public schools, is likely accessible by a reporter
to validate these assumptions.

What I hear in the media is just simple politics - the left wants more funding
for gender studies programs, and the right has cut the state funding of
schools.

As the community college prices haven’t increased anything like the university
prices, while the teaching staff is paid similarly... I have to wonder what’s
going on with University expenses.

------
MR4D
Community college (at least in Texas) is already pretty damn cheap [0]. Even
better, those credits transfer pretty easily to the large universities in the
state.

I have no idea what other states look like, but going to community college for
the first two years and then finishing at a University is hard to beat from a
cost perspective. If you live at home and make $10/hour working at McDonald's
this is affordable. More so if you spread the time out over more years.

[0] HCC, which is a huge community college with several campuses serving
Houston, has a cost of $ 1075.50 for 15 hours, according to it's calculator :
[https://www.hccs.edu/applying-and-paying/tuition-
calculator/](https://www.hccs.edu/applying-and-paying/tuition-calculator/)

------
sancho11
I think it is wrong to say that a cheaper college is better than a free one. I
will explain why. Even the cheapest colleges require very high prices for
education, which is very difficult for some families. Prices in the field of
paid tuition do not vary greatly. But when studying at a free college, a
student gets about the same knowledge but at the same time saves money. In my
case, it was exactly that and all the money I saved I spent on study needs,
such as writing control papers, term papers, essays
[https://gpalabs.com/essay-writing/buy-essay.html](https://gpalabs.com/essay-
writing/buy-essay.html) .. So think about how you should decide on admission
to a paid college ..

