One of the unintended consequences of the Occupy Wall Street movement is the public discussion about the costs of a college education and the resultant huge student loan burden on young people.
Some pundits have blamed over paid college professors for the rising cost of schools. Let me just say that college professors are not over paid. Sure, there are few that break the six figure income bracket, but they are relatively rare and senior group of faculty. Weirdly enough, the professors at community colleges around here are paid better than the local state professors. But that weirdness aside, most college professors make far less than other professions that require eight years of education. For the most part, professors, especially junior faculty, work long hours and there's a lot of stress involved with getting tenure and publications. Putting on a show for distracted kids and grading mountains of papers is no cake walk.
Others have pointed to the diminishing revenue from state government. There's no question that state government is contributing less to state colleges, but that's the new reality. Money is not going to suddenly appear from the strapped states. So, cuts need to be made.
We've talked about how difficult it is to make changes in the current college structure with its decentralized decision making. (Links later.) But if purposiveful changes aren't made, then we're going to end up with a situation that makes nobody happy.
So, since I am lucky enough to have such a highly educated readership, I thought I would throw it out to the audience. Many of you are involved in higher ed as teachers, parents, or students, so you have some ideas on this topic.
Question of the Day: How should colleges reform themselves, so that young people are not stuck with huge student loan burdens?
Apt. 11d 
I like Instapundit’s idea of making colleges cosigners on student loans. Colleges are smart about money–they’ll figure out pretty darn fast what it is realistic to expect graduates to be able to pay back.
Alternately, colleges can hold the notes themselves. Even an 80/20 arrangement would probably work.
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Colleges need to pull back on their desire to focus on the university experience rather than academics. At the University where I’m employed, the majority of funding from the past ten years seems to have gone to experience rather than academic improvements.
I’m not naive though. There’s no way they’re going to shift the focus back to academics now. Universities have made the switch to thinking of students as customers and I can’t envision the path away from that model of service. It’s obviously a big money maker for them and fits with the push to act more like corporations rather than public institutions.
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The extra tuition money is for sure not going to my salary or to the salary of any my colleagues.
Once upon a time, when you went to college you lived in a shitty dorm room with inconsistent heat, sat in a dank library that nevertheless held a decent number of titles, and ran around the campus perimeter when you wanted to work out. Now: beautiful dorm rooms that look like condos I couldn’t have afforded even on an assistant professor salary, state of the art gym and pool and athletic facilities, a gorgeous library with lots of sitting space (not so many books), and gobs of student support services (some extremely important, some not so much). Plus, countless administrators who apparently do stuff of some kind.
If you offered prospective students a hard core academic experience and a bare bones environment in which to pursue it, would parents actually choose it?
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Would you like a rake and a lawn to stand on?
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Certainly curious monolith’s institution has a perfectly manicured, grassy lawn area for her to use.
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Finance/policy aren’t my areas, alas.
I come at it from the perspective of the classroom. What could happen to make students learn effectively? 1. Value learning (as opposed to just a credential) and 2. Have faculty who value student learning, not just their own.
Item 1 requires a cultural change. Item 2 may involve hiring the right people to teach vs. to do research.
I agree that there is too much focus on the university experience. The first year of college is almost a wash these days, at least here. It’s all about partying. Once I get these kids back as sophomores, they are much more grounded.
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I think that more colleges need an applied focus. What will these kids be doing when they’re done? They should be able to get college credit for apprenticeship work, especially close to graduation. This would be essentially free (students would only need to pay for minimal bureaucratic processing and room and board).
Or, students should be able to be sponsored by employers: “We’ll pay for your college if you work for us for dirt part-time now, and for 2 years after you graduate,” somewhat like the ROTC programs.
In essence, I think more changes need to happen on the employers end: they either need to stop requiring mostly useless college degrees (which would require better high school education), or else be willing to sponsor students through college.
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“Now: beautiful dorm rooms that look like condos I couldn’t have afforded even on an assistant professor salary, state of the art gym and pool and athletic facilities, a gorgeous library with lots of sitting space (not so many books), and gobs of student support services (some extremely important, some not so much).”
Also, every large building on campus needs a coffee shop, ideally a Starbucks. (Not that this costs the university money, of course, but it certainly inflates student spending.)
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“How should colleges reform themselves, so that young people are not stuck with huge student loan burdens?”
How do other industries with falling revenues restructure?
Grinding layoffs and budget cuts, price competition, reduced standards for facility upkeep, shedding of nonessential services (there appears to be a tremendous oversupply of academic research being produced, so that’s an easy cut) … and better performance in key areas, like teaching. Maybe that’s too general for the readership here but it helps to take a more general view sometimes.
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As mentioned above, much of the increase in cost has been facilities, to no good end.
I remember when I went to my small, selective liberal arts college and the first week was disappointed by classrooms and buildings that were shabbier than my high school. I quickly learned the valuable lesson that who was in the rooms (faculty, but also students, as nothing drags you down quicker than being surrounded by unmotivated students) was much more important than the rooms themselves.
The second factor is administration bloat. It used to be that faculty governed themselves, with deans and even presidents recruited from the faculty ranks. Where there was once one administrator, now I would wager that there are a dozen or more.
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Stop paying healthcare and offering competitive salaries. Stop updating the technology hardware.
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It’s my husband’s dream to start a no frills, low cost, focused on teaching institution. Somewhere where smart kids will want to go to get a good education. I’m to tired to even think of something like that. Some of us on campus have talked about blowing up the whole 3 credit model. What does higher education look like if we move away from that? Maybe we can deliver some instruction via 1 credit online modules. I don’t know what the solution is, but I think we all need to start thinking way outside the box.
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Administration and sports cost far more than the luxury dorms. Cut all 3, problem solved. Research, salary, and academic buildings that are not falling apart are under prioritized at my uni and the uni of nearly all my faculty friends.
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Humanities, and a good deal of the Social Sciences, cannot be tied to after-college employment (I am assuming here, and maybe I’m wrong, greatly social utility in the Natural Sciences). Indeed, the Liberal Arts ideal is not about producing workers for businesses. I teach ancient Chinese philosophy, which is fairly useless in terms of employment. But I will certainly defend its apparent uselessness because learning for the sake of learning is what we do. It is not my job to get my students jobs after they graduate. It’s my job to get them to gain an initial understanding of Zhuangzi.
A second point: the top end LACs and research universities are not going to reform, because they are not under any dire pressure to reform. Demand has never been higher. Everyone complains (me too, my kid is going to college next year) about astronomical tuition and fees. But applications for the top end institutions are up, up, up. And that demand is only going higher with full pay applicants lining up in China, Korea, and India for places. Middle class Americans are squeezed, but that does not mean the top end colleges and universities are.
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I really like ajbc’s idea that students should be sponsored by employers.
I’m also intrigued by jult Laura fan’s comment that “there appears to be a tremendous oversupply of academic research being produced, so that’s an easy cut”. I see the point that some of this research is not necessary improve the world. On the other hand, not only is it the price of admission for professors, it’s key job training for the academic world as it used to be — a world in which we used research methodology not only to credential ourselves but to teach our students how to think, plan, communicate and achieve.
Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that very, very few of the enormous number of students now are actively engaged in getting an education; most of them are working their way through a credentialing process. I think that decoupling the two could vastly improve the situation for everyone — but I also think that that will be difficult not just logistically, but socially. How do you convince students and employers that the RIGHT training for the job is preferable to mediocre training for a general job?
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There’s a lot of talk about moving to a 3-year degree model, which will make a lot of sense if we can, first, move to a 4 (as opposed to 5 or 6) year degree model Generally, tightening things up would help. Selective colleges could coordinate to make senior high school final semester grades count for admission, so that students keep learning in the academic semester before they attend college; and could change the balance of large lecture/small class format courses so that freshman students, especially those at risk, end up having more small class format classes with professors (or senior academic staff). On financing: professors would, in fact, get paid less if there were less money around to pay for college. I think figuring out ways to make colleges more responsive to the interests of students in graduating on time, and to press students to study during that first year, are both money savers.
State revenues will continue to decline. And they should: imagine you ae governor of just about any state and someone hands you $1 billion. Look at the health care infrastructure, the provision of early childhood education and k-12, and your colleges. Where would you want to spend that money maximally to improve the lives of the worst off 30%, and maximally to benefit the state economy? Not on college.
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I think my university could save money by ignore bomb threats that come without any detail. Some ass is on his third one in less than ten days.
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Demand has never been higher. Everyone complains (me too, my kid is going to college next year) about astronomical tuition and fees. But applications for the top end institutions are up, up, up.
I think Sam’s point is absolutely right. “College tuition is too high!” is really just “You’re charging too much for Netflix!” with a very more zeroes. If too many people drop their Netflix subscriptions, they’ll change their pricing. If people stop applying to Farleigh Dickinson and St. Joseph’s, they’ll drop their prices. But they haven’t, so from their perspective there is no problem. (On the other hand, people taking the LSATs are down 25% over the last 2 years. Maybe to see the future of colleges, keep your eyes on law schools.)
I was having a long talk with my barista the other day (for Conservative readers, this is the liberal equivalent of a guy chatting with his bartender.) She’s in her second year at Camden County College — the local Community College — and actively looking at which college she will transfer to next year after she gets her Associates for the next 2 years to get a BA.
So, that’s one common path to avoid 4 years of private college tuition — cutting the years of high tuition in half. And it’s not a new development. It’s always been understood that what counts is where you end up graduating — not where you start.
If that happens enough that it effects the school’s bottom line/ ranking, then maybe we will see a change. As it now only happens on the margins, I don’t expect schools to identify a problem that needs to be “fixed.”
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I was having a long talk with my barista the other day…
Conversation while sober and, I assume given the fixtures at every coffee place I’ve seen, standing? Absurd.
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Make student loans dischargable in bankruptcy. This would make it very hard to get student loans, forcing more students to look more closely at tuition prices and balk at paying increases that outpace inflation.
Each non-elite institution would then have to figure out how to cut back while still attracting students.
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