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> The cost of copyrighted textbook can be substantial, but they are usually dwarfed by the cost of the larger educational undertaking. Open access textbooks is a good goal, but I'm not sure I it as critical to improving education.

I absolutely agree. We have to bring down the cost in higher education. I'd go as far as to say that for public institutions, we should considerably bring down the administrative cost which is not possible without removing a lot of the reporting requirement. We require our schools and colleges to do far more than just teach. There is no reason why public schools should compete against private, land grant schools by outspending on athletics and fancy dorms (no, please don't tell me these programs make more money than we put into it because it is NOT TRUE for all colleges as a whole). For public schools, it should be easy to calculate the median annual income of all teaching staff (tenured professors, non-tenured professors, associate professors, adjuncts, lecturers, graduate assistants, yada yada) and enforce that nobody not even the football coach makes more than twice that median. There are a lot of things we need to do to lower the cost, including some things that will make the unions mad at us and some things that will make the administration mad at us (basically we will make enemies all around if we want to do the right thing which is mostly why we can't do the right thing).

Above, I was just talking about books. Once we remove the "intellectual property" part out of the textbooks out of the equation, we can have very cheap books that anyone can print and we can more fairly assess the cost of print vs screen.




Something I believe is that college tuition isn't high because maintaining a college is expensive due to the unnecessary expenditure you state. I think it is high so that the money can be used fund other, more important parts of the university.

One of the primary ways a college gets 'ranked', and thereby attracts better students is by research efforts of the university. Now research needs money, from equipment to paying post docs to retaining good professors. State universities get federal grants, but is that sufficient to compete against private universities that charge $40k+ each semester?

I think lack of research funding is the reason college tuition being so high. I also think driving down costs will only drive down the quality of education, since lower salaries mean less resources for research & sub-par profs (because they'll be at $TECH_COMPANY) -> lower ranking -> less 'good' students -> less research. And at some point you'd be stuck in the same situation as the public middle and secondary schools, where administration has to pinch pennies and reduce programs that benefit students.

Sounds messed up, but the only way out is more funding from the state if you want a cheap college education. Or just avoid the costs and get yourself an Internet Education.


Sorry, I'm very bad at explaining myself. I do want more money to go into education. My thought was of we pegged administrator pay to professor pay, we could offer a living wage* (or better?) to our (non tenure track) adjuncts and postgrads.

By the way, I sincerely doubt we can afford to match private sector pay. (Look at the military and see how much they stretch every dollar when it comes to salary). We don't have to match private sector pay. We just have to pay our teaching staff enough and not make their job too miserable. I mean where are you going to go off you want to do basic research?

As much as we hate to admit it, there is a lot of what I'd call waste. We have too many people in management making six figure salaries who act in their own self interest first. I sincerely believe there should be a pay cut for management (from the college president down to all management).

I love the idea of an Internet education too but I feel like there might be value to being there in person sometimes? I'm not sure what I'm talking about.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777899


Definitely agree we should bring down the cost while keeping or improving academic standards, but your quick fixes are pretty naive. If all we needed to do was dock coach's salary to make a school affordable, or require open access text books, it would have been done long ago. Most professors aren't wealthy. Public schools are huge institutions, limiting their administrations power to set salaries or assign books can cause far more harm, hurt recruitment and quality. I don't have a quick fix, other than making much larger investments in education with public dollars.




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