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Tuition at the University of California (1970) (thebackbench.blogspot.com)
47 points by eaguyhn on Dec 10, 2019 | hide | past | favorite | 90 comments



In-state tuition at the UC schools is now moderately above the median tuition rates at comparable flagship state universities. However, it's worth pointing out that the California State University system has done an amazing job keeping tuition and fees low[1]. You can get a nationally ranked education from San Diego State, Fresno State, Cal Poly Pomona, etc. for less than $7,600/year in tuition and fees.

This is obviously still a lot of money, but it's far cheaper than comparable options in most other states. Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, Montana, and Wyoming are the only other states that have similar options at that price.

[1] https://www2.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for-college/Document...


The increasing tuition of most college is the result of intentional fraud. When the US Government computes your 'financial need', the two primary inputs are your parents' income and the cost of tuition. If your parents' income is low enough, then the government will give you a grant based on the cost of tuition. Schools that have low tuition get a smaller check from the government for the same student than schools that have high tuition. As a result, schools push tuition higher and higher, then give grants to students to cover the high costs that remain after the government grant.

For example, say school A charges $5000 per year. A low-income student is accepted and maxes out their government grants, the school can get a check for up to $5000.

School B charges $50,000 per year. For that same student, they can get $23k per year (or something like that), plus the student now qualifies for subsidized loans to pay for room and board. The school can then give that student a scholarship for the remaining $27k.

For this student, the higher tuition school is much cheaper.

This isn't a theoretical exercise, this is exactly what Universities have been doing for over 20 years.


There has to be some upper bound to the cost of education, right? Or will I have to put aside a few million to send my kids to college twenty years from now?


A few years ago, shortly after the birth of our first child, our financial advisor recommended $350k in case we wanted a private college. We're nowhere near making that goal, nor do we have any particular preference for a private school, but it's an interesting number nonetheless.

But I think the trend to keep an eye on isn't the price of an undergraduate degree, but a graduate degree, as an undergraduate degree won't be nearly as useful as today, which already isn't as useful as 20 years ago in many fields. Indeed, both my wife and I have graduate degrees.

My wife came from a middle-class family that was college oriented. I came from a working-class/poor environment. My mom sent me off to college with $200 and a suitcase, and I subsequently paid for everything else, including housing and tuition, myself. But I barely made it through; I just wasn't culturally or academically equipped to do college. For example, my first week of school I was preoccupied with finding a job, I always prioritized working over school even when, financially, I didn't need to, and I didn't appreciate the value in developing relationships with professors (that felt more like cheating, reflecting not enough time spent studying). So what concerns me more than college right now is primary and secondary school--preparing my kids so the transition to college is seamless and natural. Fortunately, San Francisco has many excellent public and private schools. The public school district has language immersion programs in several different languages in addition to non-immersion early language programs, as well as other enrichment programs; and the parochial private schools in particular are relatively affordable--cheaper than daycare, even. (Though daycare can be crushingly expensive--whether run out of a garage or attached to a fancy private school, rates are similar--so I guess that doesn't say much.)

So the price of college? Meh. That's poor people thinking. My goal is to put my kids on a college trajectory and let that carry them through--hopefully to graduate school. Of course we'll save as much as we can, but that's not something I'm concerned about. In my hometown middle school and high school counselors often discouraged kids from college because the costs were presumed insurmountable for most families. In truth 1) they were ridiculously misinformed and misleading about the options and alternatives, and 2) setting kids up for failure whether or not they ended up going to college. Nope... worrying about cost right now is counterproductive.


> Fortunately, San Francisco has many excellent public and private schools.

San Francisco public schools are awful.

https://californiapolicycenter.org/san-francisco-unified-dri...

>No issue has been more contentious in recent years than how the SFUSD has handled the new Common Core mathematics curriculum. Algebra has been taught in middle school for ages, but because so many San Francisco middle schoolers have done so poorly at it, it is not even taught until high school anymore. Parents whose children didn’t do well with Algebra are OK with postponing it until the 9th grade, but for families eyeing college and looking ahead, this is a complete disaster.

> One parent who toured a government school for her 4-year old who could already read was told that she could tutor other students still learning to read; she ended up in a private school because her mother felt there would be very little challenge for her with so few children at her level.

> when she toured another government school and asked about challenging her daughter with math, the teacher looked down her nose superiorly and informed her that it was wrong to give any child any opportunity all children didn’t receive and she would never let any kid do more advanced work than the others.

https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-sf-educational...

> On the most recent round of tests, 87% of San Francisco Unified’s black students performed below standards in math, as did 79% of Latino students and 78% of Pacific Islanders. Ninety-six percent of districts in California that serve black students had better reading scores for low-income black students than San Francisco did, Innovate found.


That says more about the impoverished situations of many of the people in those communities than it does about the schools. And bickering about Common Core and similar issues is a pastime across the whole country. Indeed, the intensity of the debate is a testament to the engagement of many, usually well-to-do, families in the city. Poor families have neither the time nor interest in having those debates. In poor rural communities the schools can also suck, but you'll never hear a peep of controversy because there's often only a single school and nobody capable or interested in critiquing the system.

Our oldest is currently attending TK (transitional-kindergarten, for those who turn 5 between September and December) at a public school, we've toured several public and private schools for kindergarten already, and we've spoken extensively with other families in our neck of the city (north and west). There are dozens of schools in the system, but at least for primary school your kid will be just fine. The middle schools and high schools can have more problems, but again that's a reflection of larger social and economic problems that older students unfortunately bring into the classroom; you can't fix that stuff through school. The staffing and academic programs at the public schools are as good as anywhere, and in some areas unmatched.

I recently attended an informational session for kindergarten enrollment at my son's school. I arrived and followed the signs to the room and sat down. When it began the principal asked, "who here only speaks English"? I raised my hand. She said, "the english language session is in the portable building", and I ended up in a room about the size of a walk-in closet. For the first half of the session, until some stragglers arrived, I was the only person there, so basically just had a one-on-one with the school official. The 15 or so parents in the main session all spoke Chinese, even though enrollment at the school is maybe half Chinese and this was the only night such a session was offered. (Which is to say, no other white, black, or latino families showed up.) All of which goes back to family life. Many in the Chinese community in the city are poor or working-class (only very recently have rich mainland Chinese began immigrating to SF), often immigrants or first or second generation, but they're extremely engaged academically and very demanding. It matters, both for their kids and the schools more generally.


> A few years ago, shortly after the birth of our first child, our financial advisor recommended $350k.

Amazing. Land of the free seems to be quite keen to come up with innovative ways to enslave its citizens...


> in case we wanted a private college

This was the entire point of even including that anecdote. You can pay insane prices for very good education in any developed nation, regardless of their political system.


Many graduate programs are funded either completely or partially by research fellowships and/or TAships. Med school loans iirc are pretty low interest and aren't as much of a burden given you can do things like moonlight to generate a lot of instant income as a doctor (most docs pay for a month of childcare by taking a night shift or two).

The real stick is law school. If you don't end up in a top program, you better end up at the top of your class unless you like starting salaries of 45k after a >200k education.


> our financial advisor recommended $350k in case we wanted a private college

That's too much cash for an undergrad education, and the payback is often not there. Here are some other options:

* Canadian universities -- similar quality of education to most U.S. state universities at a significantly lower cost. Close to home (cheap airfares, or within driving distance for most U.S. states), culture is similar, education system is very similar to U.S.

* Continental European universities -- free or close to free in many countries, plus your kid gets to have a study abroad experience in Europe at no extra cost. Many colleges in Germany for instance have instruction in English nowadays so there's not even a need to learn a foreign language (well, one should but one doesn't have to). The downside is the style of education in Europe tends to be very hands-off and less pedagogical (sink-or-swim), so if your kid isn't that independent they're not likely to survive.

The only things to take care of:

* Make sure your kid does summer internships in the U.S. if they want to get hired in the U.S. Studying abroad means losing the U.S. network, but that is remedied by summer internships.

* FAFSA -- most Canadian schools as well as schools abroad are FAFSA eligible.

For me, a U.S. education is only worth it if you're going to a top U.S. school. Otherwise education abroad can be as good as (and in many cases, superior to) the average U.S. college.


The lower cost of education at major Canadian universities is available to residents only. International students pay dramatically more tuition.

At my university, as a Canadian citizen I pay about $7000 a year for my program (mathematics). An international student is looking at $38000 a year.

Want to do a more popular program like software engineering? As an international student, you’re looking at $55k per year, not including books, residence, or meals. Maybe not as expensive as some Ivy League schools, but those schools often have extremely generous funding available for low income families.


I just checked the fee schedule for a few universities -- you're right. Fees seem extremely high these days compared to when I went to school. When I was in undergrad, we had a ton of U.S. international students because it was a bargain for them but I guess that's no longer the case.


You're assuming that graduate education is going to be highly valuable in the future...that may be, but it may also be that white-collar occupations get heavily automated, as a few analyses recently have shown.


All the more reason to get into a field that hires you for your head, not your hands. Usually that means grad school.


You can save for college, but then this gets deducted from your "need", causing financial aid to be reduced. There isn't much incentive to save when that just drives up the costs.


True, but above a certain income threshold, one which many of the visitors to this site exceed, you won't be getting any aid anyway. It sucks to be "punished" for doing the "right" thing and planning your your kid's future but what's the alternative, assuming a college education is the end goal?


They look at your income too. If you are a high earner with zero in the bank you aren't getting any aid.


As long as the government continues to give people loans (ie demand side) rather than directly provide a competitor to schools (ie supply side), the price will continue to grow.


I haven't been able to find much online historical tuition data, but the little I have found (about 100 years of Stanford tuition) shows that it was increasing before there were government loans at about the same rate it increased after government loans.

This makes me doubt the theory that government loans are behind high tuition.


To add to that: many other countries subsidize or offer student loan and grant programs (including Canada) and domestic costs have not risen to the same extent. A loose example: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/13/heres-how-much-it-costs-to-g...

I think there are just too many counterpoints for the student loan thing to be accurate outside of a vacuum.


Stanford is not a good proxy bc the students were well funded before the loans poured fuel on the fire.

Loans help increase the cost of schools with lower social economic status (middle class) schools like state schools.

Loans allowed many schools to charge private costs for public education. Professor salaried have risen, cost structures are too high to support unloaned demand.


"Professor salaried[SIC] have risen,...."

This is untrue. If anything, the rapidly growing pool of poorly paid adjuncts has lowered the median salary. Perhaps you could take a look at this book for a deeper understanding of the issue.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/16/herb-childres...


This is one story. If you pull the financials of major public colleges, prof salaries per credit hour taught are increasing.

No other metric matters.

The cost has to come down, and that includes the cost of instruction etc.


No other metric matters

That’s simply not true. The vast majority of the increase in cost is due to the explosive growth of non-teaching administrative staff.

When wealthy donors earmark their gift for a new library or sports complex, it’s the students who end up paying for all of the staff to maintain the building and run the programs.


I've looked at a bunch of school financials, and I am not really seeing the admin bloat that everyone quotes.

That said, its not really the only metric that matters, but it does matter a lot. And it matters a lot more than all other metrics around cost because you can easily reduce those other metrics if they are truly bloat.

Professor salaries cannot easily come down, and you cannot easily add more kids per class.


Schools don't need to bring professor salaries down. They just hire cheap adjuncts to teach a lot of classes. That greatly reduces their average cost per credit hour.

Good professors pay for themselves by bringing in grant money.


Ding, +1. Schools spend their vast income on administrators, marketing, and marketing gimmicks, such as sports and very expensive new buildings. They are in competition with other schools to bring in more students and manage more students (thus bringing in more cash), so they optimize for that goal.


Also as long as US education remains a strongly positional good — that the value of your education continues to be mostly dependent on where your university sits in the pecking order, rather than on some absolute value (e.g. of the knowledge you actually learn).

With a positional good, demand can never be really satisfied, because everyone always wants something further up the chain, so prices expand to whatever people can possibly pay.


Government loans for college could very well cause the next recession. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/09/785527874/student-loans-a-lot...

The economic effects will be more indirect than the last one. Folks will delay homebuying, they will have fewer children later in life. Schools and Colleges will be competing for fewer people. Many small liberal arts colleges will close.



I don't understand this sentiment. In-state tuition for state school in still only around $15,000 a year. Assuming your children get no financial aid and take out zero loans, you still only need to have $60k saved for four years. That's not much more than it was when I went to college fourteen years ago.


Tuition is only about half the cost of attendance at most state schools. Room and board, books, living expenses. I would expect the total price tag to be at least $25,000/yr at a school like your example.


Add $800-1000/semester in must-buy-brand-new-because DRM books, a mandatory meal plan, enrollment fees (That all active students pay, regardless of their course load), mandatory dorm housing, and you'll be hitting $35,000/year.

Meanwhile, my entire education (5 years, 144 credit hours, compared to the usual 4/120) cost me ~$32,000... In Canada. I didn't live in a dorm, didn't buy a meal plan, and paid for pretty much all of it over two summer internships, and one fall one.


You can send them to study for free in Germany, in English[0]. That's my plan.

0: https://www.daad.de/en/study-and-research-in-germany/plan-yo...


Pretty sure that's for EU citizens only. Some EU countries used to offer free tuition even to non-EU nationals but most are now charging fees meaning that they are roughly as expensive as American universities.


I might be wrong, but I am currently studying at a German university with about 30% foreign students and I believe it's still essentially free (cost is under 500 dollar / semester).

Though people who wish to study here from outside the EU have to prove that they are financially solvent and able to support themselves before they come here. This is done by depositing about 10k euros into a German blocked bank account.

This site is a great resource for foreign students, detailing pretty much everything involved: https://www.studying-in-germany.org/how-to-study-in-germany/


I think Germany is in the process of reinstating tuition fees for most degrees. See https://www.studying-in-germany.org/germany-will-reintroduce... I might be wrong though.


This bachelor degree in applied math appears to be free. Is there some place it explicitly says it's for EU citizens only? https://www2.daad.de/deutschland/studienangebote/internation...


Last time I looked, most undergraduate universities in Germany required proficiency in German as the courses are not taught in English. Graduate study courses frequently are however.


> Or will I have to put aside a few million to send my kids to college twenty years from now?

No, because that wouldn't make sense as an investment. Already it often doesn't make sense. Hence the student debt crisis.

Colleges will have to adapt and bring costs down as people increasingly opt for alternatives.


You’d think but with Siemens requiring a college degrees because people can’t read at a 9th grade level, probably will have to take out a million Dollar loan.


Send them to study in Canada.

Even paying international student rates, their education will be much cheaper.


I think tuition can keep going up as long as its offset with grants and aid (insured by the federal government). A few weeks ago there was an article about how University of Chicago was on track to have 100K per year tuition. That would put you at almost half a million to send you kids to school.


It's amusing to read this now when tuitions for the UCs have grown by a factor of a hundred.


I have to wonder...where does this money go? Unless all my professor friends are lying to me, it's not going to the professors' salaries. When I went to school (Florida State University about ten years ago), the dorm was absolutely dreadful, but that wasn't even part of the regular tuition, so it wasn't going to increasing student living conditions.


Useless administrators. There has somehow been an increase in administrators over a time period when the introduction of computers should have cut the number drastically.

> At public research institutions specifically, there has been a particularly marked rise in the number administrators. In 1990, there were approximately twice as many full-time faculty at public research institutions as administrators. In 2012, the two groups were nearly equal.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...


The data given does not support their premise.

“Three decades later... administrative spending made up 24% of schools’ total expenditures”

Even if admin costs where zero in the 1980’s they went up far more than 24% over the next 30 years. What happened is fewer classes are taught by full time professors which was a minor cost savings.

One of these costs was a massive influx of new students required a huge increase in facilities. Another was the need for websites, computers, and networking infrastructure to keep up with the competition. Collages did not benefit from the computer revolution because few things could be automated and they suddenly needed websites, and networking in the student dorms etc.


This article contains more data to support:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/05/opinion/sunday/the-real-r...

> an analysis by a professor at California Polytechnic University, Pomona, found that, while the total number of full-time faculty members in the C.S.U. system grew from 11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008, the total number of administrators grew from 3,800 to 12,183 — a 221 percent increase.

> According to the Department of Education data, administrative positions at colleges and universities grew by 60 percent between 1993 and 2009, which Bloomberg reported was 10 times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions.


full-time faculty is a talking point, part time instructors make up a larger share of total instruction. Anyway, faculty want to defend their salaries which is why it’s coached in those terms.

Reusing numbers from another post. 12.1 million US students in 1980 vs 21.2 million in 2010 and their instructors increased “11,614 to 12,019 between 1975 and 2008” sure that’s the full story.

PS: I can’t find C.S.U numbers but I expect your going to find similar or larger growth in student populations due to California’s higher than average population growth.


There's no way that computers (which have only gotten cheaper over time) and networking is why it costs nearly 50k/year to go to a private university. Facilities also get paid off and aren't being rebuilt every single year. They also often are funded through alumni contributions (which is why buildings are named).


Individual computers got cheaper but the numbers increased dramatically. Few collages had high speed networking to every dorm in 1980. WiFi is a similar new expense that they suddenly ‘needed’ to pay for and staff people to maintain. My point was not that computers where the only issue just that they where a specific example that grew much faster than inflation. IT was really expensive.

Many schools lack donors and actually needed to pay for new facilities. 12.1m students in 1980 vs 21.2m in 2010 means quite a few new buildings across the full range of collages.


This particular example is an added expense but doesn't strike me as an extraordinary one, and brings with it many administrative savings to do with applications, enrollments, grading, payments, educational resources, and so on.

These are things that would have required more physical space and more personnel in the past. Schools have transitioned a lot to a more self-service model but it has not translated into savings for students or their families as far as I can tell.


I think your overestimating the effort those tasks required. Grading for example seems like a significant administrative burden ideal for automation. However, collage administrators don’t calculate grades per student, at most their doing a quick GPA calculation based on final letter grades.

Teachers actually calculate grades, but that’s again vastly less effort than grading assignments. to the point where many just use pen and paper to record results. Many attempts at automation have increased teacher workload and require support staff.

Schools are seeing benefits from these computer systems, but they rarely reduce costs.

PS: Another consideration is collages are seasonal. Reducing the effort for some task may aid the workers. However, 100 administrators twiddling their thumbs costs just as much and schools need to staff for various crunch times not average workloads.


Instead of free public tuition which would be untenable given our governments inability to manage the money they do have (or don't have depending on your perspective), I'd rather see them introduce a law to cap administrative expenses for public universities to some small number...maybe 10% of the total budget.


Administrators. Not to one super administrator that's soaking up all the money, but to an array of administrators in various, emerging roles.

Anecdotal: When I went to undergrad, all of the student advisors were tenured faculty members doing it as part of their job responsibilities. When I went to grad school a few years later, the advisors were all full-time advisors, and all the departments had instructional designers to consult when creating courses.


If I were a student, I would prefer to be advised by an actual faculty member, than by a "full-time adviser" divorced from everyday instruction responsibilities.


Not that I disagree, but I had the opportunity to have both cases, each at separate schools. Having a (capable) full-time adviser meant that they were well-versed in the requirements of the program, as well as how to navigate administrative side of things, such as adding classes even if you don't fill the prereqs, etc.

With a faculty member, I found that they were more focused on their actual faculty/teaching duties, and had trouble with the more administrative side of things.

This is also probably dependent on the quality of the school


I'm a math professor, asked to serve as an advisor frequently. I typically advise math majors -- and I do a fairly good job of it. Although I tend to have difficulty with the administrative side of things, especially since our degree requirements are a moving target.

That said, our faculty used to advise incoming students as well. From what I understand, our undergraduate director (tenured faculty) would do all the advisement personally, during the summer, himself. One summer he was out of town a lot and asked me to fill in for him for a day.

I was not very happy to be asked to show up during the summer. For one thing, typically faculty are paid only during the academic year, unless it's from grants (although I happened to be getting summer salary that year).

But also, the advisees were mostly freshman who weren't ready to take math-major courses yet. They wanted general advice on how to navigate the system, which gen-ed requirements to get out of the way, whether to take "University 101", and the like. Although I did my best, I felt quite out of my element.


Funny part is that all these extra administrators don’t actually help out the faculty much.

Thirty years ago, most senior professors had secretaries, but now secretaries are almost unheard of. Individual professors wind up spending most of their time on ridiculous administrivia required to keep their grants.

If an administrator sticks his or her head into a profrssor’s life, it’s to make it harder, not easier.


> Funny part is that all these extra administrators don’t actually help out the faculty much.

For the most part, it's not part of their job descriptions.

Some things which have grown: student services; "Student Success" centers and the like; advising; IT; compliance with various grant agency and accreditation requirements (which seem to be growing); institutional efforts to further diversity and inclusion.

As an example, my understanding is that universities are doing much more to identify, and try to help, at-risk students than they were before. The new administrators hired into these roles will cheerfully work with faculty as appropriate, but it's a much more student-facing than faculty-facing role.


> Anecdotal: When I went to undergrad, all of the student advisors were tenured faculty members doing it as part of their job responsibilities. When I went to grad school a few years later, the advisors were all full-time advisors, and all the departments had instructional designers to consult when creating courses.

Can't tell if you think this is a good thing or not?


Seemed pretty silly to me. Universities seem to have become a jobs program for middle class functionaries who don't actually have academic credentials.


But before the academics were doing non-academic jobs like student advising? Seems better now?


Academics should be doing advising.


Maybe I don't know what you mean - do you mean a career advisor? What do academics know about careers outside academia?


I was in a similar situation as this other commenter. Undergrad for biology and grad school for biology. Guess who gave me better career advice, the guy in the field for 3 decades, or the 26 year old with a online degree in human resources from directional state?


But you're varying two things at the same time there. Age and role.

You could equally say who gives better career advice - a 26 year old academic who knows nothing but their PhD, or someone who has been guiding people into careers successfully for 3 decades.

Might be best to control for the age I think.


I am curious -- were the departments, in fact, consulting the instructional designers? And, if yes, was it by choice?


As a TA, I was only privy to certain discussions. There was talk of the instructional designer, mostly in the sense of "Maybe we should get the instructional designer involved!", but I never encountered the instructional designer in the wild.


Mortgages and more administration. I watched my school build new building after new building (New Residence Hall, New Chemistry Hall, New Engineering Building, etc.) and then wait for a benefactor to donate enough to name the building after them. These donations never approached the costs of maintaining and furnishing the new building. Just like lots of other things in America larger rooms were in demand as well. An old dorm with 200sqft dorm rooms housing 2 students was knocked down for dorms with 1000sqft suites housing 4 students.


And then, to pay for rebuilding the dorms, undergrads are forced[1] to live in them, even if they could find cheaper housing somewhere else.

[1] The people justifying these requirements, of course, spend much time hand-wringing about how important it is for students to live in their expensive dorms.


I'm betting people will say administration, but I don't think even the swarms of useless educrats can account for the entire difference.

Other possibilities:

Direct funding from states to public universities has decreased. Some portion of tuition increase has gone to replace the revenue lost from reduction in subsidies.

Capital costs from new campus buildings have gone up, as universities add expensive features that are not strictly required for education, such as apartment-style dormitories, or luxurious fitness centers for faculty and students. The university's money is usually fungible, so housing and recreation fees may be higher for students using those buildings than for the palmetto-bug dorms and century-old fieldhouse, yet still subsidized out of tuition revenue.

The aforementioned swarms of useless educrats may be corrupt, diverting university revenues to their own pockets via schemes that require their academic credentials or administrative authority.

Universities may be underwriting student loan debt, trading cash now for future income streams from future repayment. In that case, the money isn't even there yet, and the students first have to graduate and start earning before there is any of that money to spend.

I know that Indiana University dumped a lot of money into its "18/20" retirement plan, to attract better quality professors. It sounds very expensive. At some point, they realized it would bankrupt the university, and stopped offering it, but current students will still be paying for it until all those old professors that got it die off. So, maybe tuition increases are going to retired employees.

Last, we have accounting fictions. Universities charge $X on paper, to receive or maximize some third-party benefit, then rebate $Y to the student in the form of grants or scholarships. The money was never there, except on paper.


They (the universities) are constantly begging for more money, too, in the form of grants. According to my professors in grad school, tuition revenue is a “drop in the bucket”.


Oh yes, certainly no University would dream of actually paying for the research that goes on within their walls.

Even better, if a professor actually gets a grant, the university will “tax” the grant at around 50% to pay for the overhead of providing office space for your post docs.


> According to my professors in grad school

I'd suggest talking to your professors in undergrad school :)


The UC budget 2019–20 suggests:

68% staff + faculty salaries and benefits 15% financial aid 17% equipment

From page 7, https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2019-20...

If someone knows a more detailed breakdown of the budget, I’d be curious! :)


https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2019-20...

I think UC is first and foremost a research institution. A lot of these professors are barely involved in undergraduate teaching, and the massive staff employee count I think is a lot of people related to research and assisting these researchers. That's why the undergraduate student experience is going down at UCs, with worse class sizes, and less engagement.


Research is funded by research grants from government organizations or private companies. Administrators (those involved in enabling research) are funded by "overheads" i.e. a percentage of money taken off the top of grants before any of it is allowed to be used for actual research. No tuition money goes into this.

So I'd expect the tuition increase to be associated with teaching staff or teaching administrators (either dedicated to this full time or else as a percentage of their time), not with research (which is basically self-sustaining anyway). In fact, probably one of the motivations for increasing research activities is that it naturally brings in money and that you don't need to increase tuition to do it.

I do agree that research professors don't necessarily make the best teaching professors, but that's an entirely separate issue from the financial one.


Oh. Thanks for clearing that up. I go to a UC, so I'm pretty interested in where all our money is going. It just seems like so much goes in, but the ROI isn't exactly there for a lot of students.


There are about twice as many teachers per student as there used to be:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...


The chart for teachers shows elementary and secondary schools. I wouldn't be surprised to see that the proportion of teachers in colleges has increased, but I'd need to know how much of the increase comes from adjuncts teaching a class or two per semester.

Let me add that there were some very large class sizes during the peak of the baby boom. I don't think that I ever had fewer the fifty kids in my classes until I transferred out of parochial school in sixth grade.

[edit: teach -> teaching]


For the UC system, here's a tool that gives a breakdown: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/revenue-an...


Go 'Noles! 80% of a college's costs are personnel. Not only are there a heckuva lot more services being offered, and the services offered are being offered more broadly, but colleges are also trying to be all things. A college that was a famous teacher's college in the 1960s now wants to have top tier science departments as well. I think when boomers like me came along the number of people going to college increased so dramatically (because a. there were so many of us and b. more people were seeing a college education as valuable) that colleges expanded.

It's interesting to consider how college costs have increased compared to other indexes:

US inflation : ~300% https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1980

US college costs: ~300% https://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-college-tui....

US GDP per capita: ~500% https://mgmresearch.com/us-gdp-data-and-charts-1980-2020/

Keep in mind that those college and gdp graphs have inflation removed.


Administrative bloat (think about all the jobs that have dedicated people that used to just be the side job of a particular professor) and all the BS you piss money away on when budgets are dependent on what you used last year (which many university department budgets are).


2.3MM on diversity employee salaries: https://www.campusreform.org/?ID=11852


I think University prices are like some weird mirror of airline ticket prices. Time was that airlines sold tickets at a premium but the service was great. Now you can get tickets at incredibly low prices but the service is at cattle car level. People complain but at a fundemental level - that's what they want.

The airlines say "If you want 60's service then fly first class and pay 60's level prices" And the response of virtually everyone is - No, thank you, I just want to get to wherever I'm going as cheaply as humanly possible.

It seems like the same thing in reverse happened with University. Have you seen or read about dorms in the 50's? Or all the ancillary things that went with going to a university? It was all crap. And it's like everyone went "I would like a very nice University experience. I want a nice dorm. I want a beautiful campus. I want a sports team that wins and gym to go to. I want administrators that will hold my hand." And the Universties resonse was "You go it. If you want the cheap version go to community college"

Now by bent I'm classically liberal. If you asked me why prices have gone up I'd tell you a tale of government action. Make student loans widly available. Making student debt non-dischargable in bankruptcy. You may not but I find the argument plausible.

What if that's not a root cause though? Because truelly none of that stuff happens by chance. It's everyone who votes putting people in government. It's everyone who votes saying- "These are my priorities" and then the people in government saying "this is how we're going to meet those priorities" and both walking away happy to some greater or lesser degree.

All of which indicates to me that free University for all isn't going to cut it. If it's publically financed it won't in the long run be able to afford what people seem to want to get out of University. If that's true then they'll all run to a non-free private system and get the politicians to help them to pay for it.


Another great cost saving idea of Ronald Reagan was the closing of all the mental hospitals, supposedly to be replaced by community clinics (which never happened). The unrolling disaster of homeless with severe mental illness continues, on and on and on. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. What a legacy.


a) off topic, and (b) representative of a global trend that was going on at the time, led by the psychiatric profession, rather than being any kind of personal whim of who your president happened to be at the time. We in Australia closed our mental asylums at the same time, with the same effect.

Blame Jack Nicholson if you want to blame someone; or rather the rash of 1970s “aren’t asylums terrible?” asylum fiction.


Asylums were terrible. It's a dynamic that's extremely prone to abuse. I do think some people should probably be institutionalized involuntarily, but I can see the argument where, even as a mentally ill homeless person, you at least still have the freedom to physically escape someone who is abusing you. That's not something to be deprived lightly.

And yes, it was very much a global phenomenon, largely predating the 1980s.


Reagan did not personally come up with the idea of deinstitutionalisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation




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