Another take on the cost of college focusing on how very few tuition dollars go to instructing your kids. From USA Today, Where's all that college tuition money going?:
The chief reason why costs keep rising is that education has become a minor player in higher education. At public universities, only 28% of spending goes for instruction; private colleges do a bit better at 33%.
So at the big public schools most kids go to, only about a quarter of the money you pay in tuition goes to instruction. The rest goes for athletics, research and other things that create the vaunted “college experience”. Thanks to Title IX, many schools have scores of women’s athletic programs in the name of fairness that generate no revenue at all and those sports along with esoteric men’s sports are subsidized by football and basketball and tuition dollars.
For every school that is an academic and athletic powerhouse like Michigan where the athletic department brings in enormous sums of money, there are lots of schools that make a pittance on their sports programs but they still have to offer them to be “competitive” because it is part of the college experience.
Frankly you can spend four years getting the “college experience” and sitting in classrooms and come out little changed and marginally better educated. I learned some stuff in college but I have learned a lot more in the years since. When I lived in the dorms at Ohio State, the "college experience" was mostly skipping class to play video games and stumbling through the week to get to weekends filled with drunken debauchery. You can get that without going into six figures of debt.
The dirty secret is that, whether by design or fortuitous chance or a combination of both, the higher education establishment has created a monopoly for itself where they are perceived to hold the key to middle-class prosperity in America. It is generally understood that you cannot be successful in America without a college degree and only colleges and universities grant them. You have to go to them on their terms and their accomplices in the Federal government are subsidizing that process by making unsecured debt readily accessible to 19 year old kids, enabling colleges and universities to keep raising their tuition year after year. It is a perfect situation for higher education: you hold the keys to prosperity for every single American, you set your own prices with essentially no accountability, you can raise those prices in what amounts to collusion with other schools and the Federal government provides financing that is not subject to creditworthiness to fund it. Our current President wants to expand the number of people in college, further jacking up costs and watering down the value of a bachelor’s degree.
Isn’t it about time that we start asking some hard questions about colleges and universities in America and the Federal governments enabling of their addiction to student loan funding?
The chief reason why costs keep rising is that education has become a minor player in higher education. At public universities, only 28% of spending goes for instruction; private colleges do a bit better at 33%.
So at the big public schools most kids go to, only about a quarter of the money you pay in tuition goes to instruction. The rest goes for athletics, research and other things that create the vaunted “college experience”. Thanks to Title IX, many schools have scores of women’s athletic programs in the name of fairness that generate no revenue at all and those sports along with esoteric men’s sports are subsidized by football and basketball and tuition dollars.
For every school that is an academic and athletic powerhouse like Michigan where the athletic department brings in enormous sums of money, there are lots of schools that make a pittance on their sports programs but they still have to offer them to be “competitive” because it is part of the college experience.
Frankly you can spend four years getting the “college experience” and sitting in classrooms and come out little changed and marginally better educated. I learned some stuff in college but I have learned a lot more in the years since. When I lived in the dorms at Ohio State, the "college experience" was mostly skipping class to play video games and stumbling through the week to get to weekends filled with drunken debauchery. You can get that without going into six figures of debt.
The dirty secret is that, whether by design or fortuitous chance or a combination of both, the higher education establishment has created a monopoly for itself where they are perceived to hold the key to middle-class prosperity in America. It is generally understood that you cannot be successful in America without a college degree and only colleges and universities grant them. You have to go to them on their terms and their accomplices in the Federal government are subsidizing that process by making unsecured debt readily accessible to 19 year old kids, enabling colleges and universities to keep raising their tuition year after year. It is a perfect situation for higher education: you hold the keys to prosperity for every single American, you set your own prices with essentially no accountability, you can raise those prices in what amounts to collusion with other schools and the Federal government provides financing that is not subject to creditworthiness to fund it. Our current President wants to expand the number of people in college, further jacking up costs and watering down the value of a bachelor’s degree.
Isn’t it about time that we start asking some hard questions about colleges and universities in America and the Federal governments enabling of their addiction to student loan funding?
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