Why are such things in the US so complicated? Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.
Because the US government will loan people very large sums to attend, which allows the universities to raise prices at will. The buyers are price-inelastic, which means that they want to go regardless of price, because they are surrounded by people that tell them that going to college is the right thing to do - and the more prestigious the better.
College in the US would be a lot cheaper if the government didn't inflate it. If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
It isn't solely the government's fault. Most American universities are corporatized and exist primarily as money printers for the admin staff. The purpose of an adjunct professor is to cost the institution as little as possible while passing as many marginal students as possible so they can maximize profits with sheep that keep coming back to the trough.
This only works if students have the money though - which the government helpfully provides. The Universities are just milking the system - which isn't their fault - it's ours as the voters.
This is a common myth. This might explain why Harvard or MIT tuition is high but not the average college. Tuition mostly reflects staff costs and those have been going up due to Baumol's cost disease. Dentists, along with many other industries with its main cost being highly educated staff that haven't managed to scale production like online brokerages, have had a similar price increase since 1970.
You’re going to have to qualify where you are talking about. Where I am, California, that only describes community colleges. Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation. Very little of your tuition at these schools goes towards teaching salaries.
> Even state and especially UC have “invested” significantly in infrastructure improvements paid for with loans backed by expectations of tuition income, which has had an absurd effect on growing tuition far outside of inflation.
What timeframe are you looking at?
Back in 2011, registration fees at UC Berkeley were $7,230 per semester, with $813 allotted to health insurance (which could be waived if you provided proof of existing insurance from your family), so $6,417 ignoring health insurance. Meanwhile, last year, registration fees were an eye-popping $9,847 for new students, but cost of health insurance grew much faster to $1,929 ($7,918 ignoring health insurance). This is about a 23% increase, compared to CPI-measured inflation of about 35% between Sep 2011 and Sep 2023.
(The next biggest driver of the overall increase was the campus fee, which went from $253 to $820.)
Or, if you look at just tuition alone, that went from $5610 to $6261, or just barely above 10%.
I don't disagree, but they support my point that tuition has not changed meaningfully in the past decade (and then some), which is why I asked what timeframe you were looking at.
Inflation is perhaps not a good point of reference anyways, since in 2009, inflation per CPI was actually slightly negative. Cost of borrowing is not the same as cost of goods and services or cost of labor, for reasons such as the ones you point out (changes to banking regulations, increased risk aversion, etc).
Although, I'm a little surprised that cost of borrowing would have been much higher, seeing as that was the start of the zero interest-rate policy in the US. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was hovering around 6-7% pre-crisis and 4-5% in the years immediately following it.
European colleges are incredibly thrifty, though. German universities for example can lack dorms, student unions, and professors lack TAs to grade homework (so homework isn't graded) and your entire grade depends on one final.
We could do this in the USA also, or perhaps even bother with online universities, except those are generally considered not very useful as degrees.
I can't agree with your experience regarding German universities. Usually dorms are offered by the university but students usually just rent a room in the city.
I've had to submit weekly sheets that were graded in almost all courses and these qualify for the final exam (in STEM). There were two exercise groups with competent ta to ask questions..
What's missing is some kind of Disneyland experience, student unions also exist to some degree but it's more low key.
Not saying that German university is better or worse - I'm convinced it has it's own problems that only will get worse if nothing is changing but it's not like it's subpar and you are alone with your book.
the real issue in american universities is that the tuition largely goes to paying for administrators. they do no teaching and largly dont' add much value to the experience. if we capped administratiors to 1 per 5 professors, that would go a ong way towards paying for tutors and services that actually do help students.
That varies a lot between countries in EU. I live in Finland and my country has student unions, and professors are quite free to choose how they do the grading, so it's not always just one final exam per course. There are no dorms, but there is cheaper only-for-student housing. There are also really cheap state-subsidized meals in student restaurants on campus.
> If you go back in time just a few decades, this is how it was: you paid for it, either in cash or with a PRIVATE loan, and people didn't see college as an automatic requirement. Then it was 1/10th as expensive.
...if you go back in time a few decades basically everything was about 1/10th as expensive.
Still, I do not get it. Why would this competition / exclusivity rule be so much less prevalent in large parts of Europe?
I don't want to say Europe is without problems, but I think this kind of legislation, together with social security in general, is a clear example of how it can be handled more efficient and fair for most people.
Good question. I wonder if labor competition in Europe is less reliant on University names and reputation? IT could also have to do with cultural difference is what students look for in a university.
My understanding is that most universities in Europe look more like US bare bones commuter schools, opposed to an all inclusive recreational experience.
The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
Oxford doesn't pay staff well unless you are in the top of the pyramid, i.e. a professor. Paradoxically those tend to contribute less to education. Senior postdocs and fellows do a significant amount of teaching but their salaries are incredibly low. You need to make lots of life compromises to be able to sustain yourself at one of those. For example, fellows teaching at different colleges often get stipends and salaries in the range of £30-35,000 per year. Keep in mind that those fellowships require a PhD and a stellar CV.
Most other British and EU universities suffer from the same issues. For more information, see this article at The Guardian, which generated lots of debate: https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2015/no.... In a nutshell the article states that "[...] I no longer believe that early-career positions at Oxbridge universities are viable for individuals without independent financial means." Also "[...] the median non-professorial academic salary at Oxbridge is £45,000."
>The top ranked university in Europe is Oxford, which educates more than twice as many students as MIT with half the budget. I doubt this is because Oxford is cutting corners on educational curriculum.
Maybe, maybe not. It could just be from cost-of-living differences: salaries for many jobs (particularly highly-educated ones) pay a fraction outside the US what they do inside the US. How much are Oxford professors and staff getting paid compared to the ones at MIT (which is Boston, which is a very high cost-of-living city for the US)?
According to the sister comment to mine, Oxford pays only professors well, and everyone else quite poorly. There's a lot more to a university's staff than just the professors.
"Professors" at a UK university are the most senior academic staff - mind you there does seem to be a move in some universities to move to US style job title where all academics are a professor of some kind.
When I worked in UK academia the hierarchy for permanent academic posts was something like: lecturer, senior lecturer, reader, professor.
Im not sure what you mean by maybe not. If oxford is cutting corners, it still has the top rank in Europe, so I suppose they are the correct corners to cut.
Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
>Perhaps high professor and admin salaries in the US are a problem with US education.
This is exactly my point. And not just professor and admin salaries, the salaries and costs for everything.
It's not about "cutting corners", it's that if you compare the cost of something in the US to something in another country, the US usually is much more expensive; this doesn't mean the other country is cutting corners, it means the US is just too damn expensive.
MIT is a huge outlier in terms of R&D and the population it selects students from, it would be more fair to compare Oxford to Harvard. Oxford...really is about as far from commuter schools than you can get, for example having to wear robes to the dining hall...that is straight out of Harry Potter (and indeed, where they filmed the dining scene at one of the colleges).
actually ETHZ and EPFL are very good and highly ranked, and have cheap tuition and open enrollment. i don’t know how they do it. I guess things just work better in Switzerland.
They’re also significant funded by the state particularly as they’re the two federal universities. The figure I heard while there, although I can’t find actual numbers online, was in the low tens of thousands in subsidies that may otherwise mostly be collected through tuition.
Also, it’s not exactly what I would call open enrolment as it’s only open to Swiss students who are accepted into and pass a Matura program or similar in grade school while other students typically require applications or minimum exam scores depending on the program.
Education quality, especially adjusting for tuition, doesn't correlate to prestige. Which, after WWII, almost required "Anglophone" as the language of instruction.
I was speaking to the US situation, and agree most European schools are quite cheap in comparison. Not only in tuition, but in terms of their budgets; US schools spend 4-5X as much per student- so it isnt just about state funding.
>Where I live, studying is much much cheaper for most professions,for everyone!
I'll go out on a limb and bet people in your country earn much less than the average American, too. Why? Why don't companies just pay these people more? IT all comes back in income and value added taxes.
I don't know where the OP lives. But in Switzerland, where world-class univeristies like the ETH cost something like $ 1.5k a year in tuition, I'm pretty certain that people earn more on average than in the USA.
I live in Belgium, we earn quite a lot less on average indeed. However why would we need so much money? We can go to hospital, or even 20 times visit a dentist for that matter, without expensive insurance and without the fear of bankruptcy. We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kintergarten.
> We can have kids without fear of not being able to pay kindergarten.
FYI: Public kindergarten is 100% paid for by gov't across the US. I don't think any public schools in the US have tuition. (That said, there is no magical money. It is paid for by local taxes.) Where did you hear about this myth?
Also: In Belgium, can you really go to the dentist 20 times? Is there any good reason to allow this in a public healthcare system? If the barrier to entry for healthcare services is very low, then there must be (1) a lot of abuse... or (2) long waiting times... or (3) very high taxes. My guess in Belgium: A combination of (2) and (3).
Kindergarten means different things in different countries, and that's probably the source of confusion. In Europe, it usually means a program that gradually transitions from daycare to a proper pre-school as the kids get older. Starting ages vary, but it seems to be 2.5 years in Belgium.
Kindergarten is free in the US. Also the vast majority of people pay a relatively small amount of their income for health insurance (and of course it’s free for 65+ who are the primary consumers).
Kindergarten is preschool which means at least daycare, it's not free in the US , I think there's a confusion with elementary school, to which there's a public option.
Also forgetting the fact there's no universal parent leave in the US compared with the very generous many months elsewhere, which also makes a huge difference to new parents. There's no possible comparison...
Those numbers mean disposable household income divided by the square root of household size. American households are unusually large for a developed country, and measures like that overestimate individual incomes relative to countries with smaller households.
To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance through my job, this comes out of my pre-taxed income. While I won't get into specifics on the details of the terms, I am quite happy with it.
I work in Massachusetts, but I live in New Hampshire. I pay more than double this on both Social Security fees & Massachusetts income taxes, which are non-deductible since New Hampshire has no income tax and makes up for that with higher property taxes (housing is cheaper though). Filtered to just health related services I can easily identify, in total I pay for Social Security, Medicare, and indirectly Massachusett's state healthcare (which I can only gain access to under limited conditions). Of these, only the private insurance fee directly benefits me, and I have little faith social security will actually pay out when I reach the qualifying age.
In terms of investment my HSA, and 401k are a much better dollar for dollar investment for my future finances than any government service, so I find it extremely unlikely I would ever truly benefit from public healthcare.
Despite my tone here, I'm more annoyed than upset about this. Due to the overall societal benefit, I'm not entirely against public healthcare depending on the details, I'm just under no illusion that it would be to my benefit, and I'm not much of an outlier. I'm also mostly convinced the root issue here is the inflated cost of healthcare rather than just the insurance aspect, public healthcare naively implemented would likely turn into yet another government subsidy for hospitals to devour imo.
> To throw in a data point on this for reference, as an American I pay around ~$220 a month (~$2,640 per year) on health insurance
Having just filled my annual benefits selections tonight, here's my data point: health insurance is $3000/month on the company plan (36K/year).
Yes, the company "pays" for a percentage of that. But of course the entire $3K/month is part of my total compensation cost to the company. If healthcare wasn't so ludicrously expensive in the US, they could afford to pay me more, instead of funneling all this money to insurance company profits.
The short answer is greed, plain and simple. Higher Education has not been an institution for the people in the US for a long, long time. It may never have been, actually. It's a business, same as our Healthcare industry and businesses run on maximizing profit margins so that is their primary goal.
Some prominent universities in the US have ballooned with administration in the past 20 years. MIT in particular has a $1.2 billion administration cost out of a $4.5 billion annual budget.
Roger Freeman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan's education advisor, was afraid that educated voters would turn the United States towards communism.
One of Ronald Reagan's campaign promises was dismantling or breaking the department of education, similar to what he had done to California's state universities by limiting their budgets and moving the burden of tuition to students.
At the time this was quite popular as it lowered taxes.
Well hopefully Trump and his DoGE head Musk will eliminate the Department of Education soon, so that most public universities will have to shut their doors and Americans can stop wasting money on college education. Then all the college students can go to work at meatpacking plants and farms to replace all the illegal immigrants that are about to be deported. This will definitely help America re-assert itself as a world power and a great place to live.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible, but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work. so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
> the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
american universities get closer to this ideal than you might expect. the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away, at least for undergraduate degrees.
this is partly true. it is cheap / free for very low income -- if you qualify for a Pell grant you can usually get additional financial aid from your state university that can bring your cost down to zero.
But if you are above the low income line, but by no means wealthy -- so if you're a household making say $100K a year, then college is extremely expensive and unaffordable especially if you have several kids. You're not poor enough to qualify for substantial financial aid, and you're not wealthy enough to afford tuition. Yeah, your kid can get into Harvard or Stanford for free, but the chances of them being accepted are vanishingly small no matter how smart they are.
The saving grace is community college -- enroll at the local CC for 2 years and then transfer to the state school.
Because they can afford it. It's a redistribution tactic. You can also phrase it like this: college should be free for all to attend. Then, as long as you have a progressive tax scheme, the outcome is the same. Cheap for the poor, expensive for the rich.
If you are an education provider, yes. If you are receiving education, I'd say it's totally different due to expected value added over the student lifetime.
According to the old story, the New York Times asked a famous bank robber why he robbed banks. The answer: Because that's where the money is.
The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.
Granted, I think all of those institutions are due for reforms, which have little chance of happening right now, but still, I think the basic funding equation can't be eliminated.
> The money for funding public and quasi-private (universities and hospitals) institutions has to come from somewhere. Making it equally affordable for everybody doesn't raise enough money to maintain operations. Same for funding the government.
That's what taxes are for: you take proportionally more from people with more assets. I find the entire conversation about "not wanting my tax dollars to pay for some millionaire's kids' education", because those millionaires would end up paying the difference in taxes (under a fair system) than they do now.
That's without even considering the perverse incentives at play when a wealthy parent can use the payment or withholding of payment for education as a way to control their kids. Just because a parent is wealthy it doesn't necessarily mean that the kid would have access to those funds, or that explicit or implicit requirements that could be imposed to access those funds would be reasonable.
Indeed, and I think we're not far apart on this. I would support funding of things like education and healthcare through progressive taxation, and making them free, or some nominal cost.
But this strategy only applies to the wealthy universities, like Harvard, which are extremely difficult to get into -- and that is by design (Harvard could expand its student body), since what Harvard is selling these days, above all, is exclusivity.
the ideal is that college should be very expensive for rich people and cheap, free, or at least more affordable, for less wealthy people.
Dunno where you got this "ideal".
the days of outrageous student debt are thankfully fading away
..."fading away", to the tune of (at last glance ) one and three quarters of a trillion dollars in outstanding student loan debt.
it would make more sense to do this redistribution through taxes if possible
The ability of US higher ed to raise tuition prices will always overwhelm the ability of US taxpayers to meet those prices. The phrase "utility monster" comes to mind.
but many US institutions are private so that doesn’t really work.
Private, in the sense that nobody who answers to someone who must win an election is directly in charge of running them, but, who operate as charities for the purpose of donations, pay no taxes on either capital gains or real estate, and are permitted to act as government contractors skimming up to 85% of grant money they're tasked with administrating.
so the colleges basically have their own privately-run means testing programs, and like all such programs there are flaws and loopholes.
The flaw being that...the school is allowed to have total knowledge of a customer's ability to pay before it chooses to do business with them. Imagine if you had to give three years of your tax returns to the person you were trying to buy a house from.
I wonder if people like you just lack the imagination or system thinking or equate poor with useless or are just afraid of thinking people? From the perspective of the state and the society it’s beneficial to have an educated population, unless you think you won’t have enough stupid people to man the factories?
We have plenty of cheaper schools too, and they’re fine.
The expensive schools are for the richest people to say they went to school next to the best students who get in free.And for the best students to meet rich people.
Even the cheaper schools in the US (public universities) aren't all that cheap anymore. When was an undergrad in the late 1980s, I paid under $2000 a semester. Now it is close to $10000. Yes, there's been inflation since then, but not 5X (it's more like 2.5X).
The cheapest you're going to get is $10K a year (and that's hard to find), and that's just tuition. If it's not near your parents' home then you're looking at $25K/year bare minimum (as in living off ramen packs and peanut butter). So that's $100K that your parents have to have saved up (per child) or which you have to take on as debt.
Just looked up our main state schools and cost of attendance is $31K - $35K for in-state residents. So that's $120K - $140K for 4 years (not counting increases). And these aren't top-100 schools either.
I will say though, that pretending there isn't a difference in education is just untrue sadly. I've had to come to terms with this, going from a very small state college to a more prestigious private school for graduate studies. Nearly everyone around me is from a large, more expensive school, literally everyone else in my program is significantly better educated than me. Of course you can find good programs at small schools, they try very hard. But there's just a difference between a school that can afford to run classical mechanics 2 and one that cannot, a school that can afford to pick and choose a good professor for their classes and one that cannot. And that gap is vastly wider than i had imagined
Networking is a way to maximize your optionality. If you limit your network you limit your potential options. Rich kids have more options and there’s absolutely zero downside to being exposed to some of them. (Don’t confuse with actually exercising them when they appear, I’m just talking about having them.)
That depends who you are. You want to be surrounded by kids who have assets you don't. If you're there on an academic scholarship, you want rich contacts. If you're there on family prestige, you want capable contacts.
If you're there on a need-based scholarship, you need both kinds, but neither of them need you.
American universities sell their students a lot of amenities that aren't really necessary for study. Not to mention the bloated admin class. You want to feel "in" when it comes to social justice? Here are your administrators that do the rituals of social justice as a full-time job, but they demand salaries.
As for amenities, back in Europe, many universities don't even have a campus, just a scattering of buildings all around the city, acquired randomly as the school grew (that includes dorm buildings, often quite far from one another). You will spend some extra time commuting among them, but the university saves money - and, indirectly, you too.
Getting from dorm to lectures usually took me about 30 minutes each way - on foot, then subway, then on foot again.
Because America is a place where people have been indoctrinated to believe that misery is the cost of freedom. It's a place where half the population would rather read your obituary or donate to your fundraiser than simply have a healthcare system that people can use in a timely manner without worrying about cost.
I really think Freedom, the American way, is super overrated. If the cost is misery, fear of loss of health or job, what's left of Its benefits? "I'm the chosen one protected by God"? Or does social security still have this huge connotation with communism?
Sorry for my ranting, I just cannot believe what is still happening.
That's the only fair way. Also, a set of well educated people pays itself back later in the form of mostly income and added value taxes, which provides money to keep studying for cheap for the next generation.