Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

This glosses over the reality that all the money that should be going to the non-tenured teachers has been diverted into the burgeoning middle level administrative roles that have been created in the past 25 years as schools became run as businesses first and educational institutions second or third. Focusing on the top level deans and presidents will not fix this core problem. Returning to staffing levels that were sustainable 30+ years ago will.

View on HN

In order to achieve this we will need to dramatically re-evaluate our priorities for higher education. Although it is empirically true that college administrations and associated costs have grown in recent decades, we have much higher expectations of colleges today than we did 30+ years ago. Health centers, rec centers, dining halls, transportation agreements, student clubs, etc., all contribute to a need for...more administration. So long as colleges have to compete for the funding students supply, they're in an arms race to have at least some minimum of amenities that modern students have been conditioned to expect. Judging by enrollment trends, "rigorous academics" is not ranked favorably in the decision of where to attend.

This is one of the reasons that I favor increased public funding of public universities and junior colleges, because many students would forego elaborate benefits in exchange for lower costs -- especially after watching Millenials take on a lifetime of debt to finance an expensive "pre-adult" development phase. I think there is plenty of room in the market for private colleges (who can spend their money however they like), but public schools should have more modest expectations of what they provide.

Why would giving more money to colleges cause them to reduce elaborate benefits? Wouldn't they just spend the money on more elaborate benefits (and salaries for admins)?

Would raising tuitions also cause the quantity of elaborate benefits to go down?

First, I don't think that increased funding should be granted without conditions. It's not just a matter of dumping buckets of cash into the system and hoping for the best, but rather about targeting investment of public resources into higher education to achieve specific goals.

Secondly, I don't think raising tuition would have the same effect. As prices rise, fewer students will have access to the resources required to attend at all, in which case the existing schools would be competing for a smaller group of buyers at that price. The schools would be competing with each other to provide the optimal experience those students desire in order to attract as many as possible. And this speculation isn't entirely academic (pun intended, maybe?) -- schools have been raising their prices for a few decades, and we have seen an escalating "arms race" to provide more and more "experience" benefits from public and private schools alike. Because as I mentioned before, enrollment numbers suggest that "academic rigor" and "long-term value to society" don't seem to be the driving concerns for college students.

>> we have much higher expectations of colleges today than we did 30+ years ago

Who is 'we'? I see this argument sometimes, but I've never heard of anyone choosing to go to school A versus school B because school B didn't have a gym. It seems like the people who want rec centers, dining halls, new dorms, etc. are school presidents -- both so they'll have something to fund raise for and so they'll have additional staff to boss around.

"We" is "students", and they vote with their feet, bringing their dollars with them. The enrollment numbers are below, but the total funding (including public funding) for "party" schools is about 1.22x the total funding of the overall best schools. We can argue about rankings, public/private funding, personal debt, etc., but the overall point seems to be that people like party schools, and they love taxpayer-funded "party" schools.

Top10 Party Schools: Tulane - 13531; U. of Georgia - 35197; WVU - 29175; Miami - 18456; U. of Iowa - 31387; UofT - Austin - 51313; U. of Wisconsin - 43193; UCSB - 23051; Howard - 10265; Ohio University - 29217 Total: 284785

Top10 Schools (overall): Princeton - 8125; Harvard - 21000; Yale - 12336; Columbia - 29870; Stanford - 16136; U. of Chicago - 14467; MIT - 11319; Duke - 14850; U. of PA - 24806; Caltech - 2209 Total: 155118

This makes no sense as a comparison. All of the top 10 schools get many more applications than they have spaces, and that's true of many of the "party" schools as well.

Isn't the ease with which students can get sizable, non-dischargable, government-backed student loans the primary driver of these problems? Universities can practically charge whatever they want and they will always get paid, which leads to extravagant health centers, rec centers dining halls, etc. If anything, I think decreased incentives for schools to charge such high tuitions would lead to cutting lots of these high-salaried administrative deans and perhaps the universities thinking twice about building that new $5M rec center.

Guaranteed loans are part of the problem. That's why I think the funding should be provided to the school rather than the student. Same money, different mechanism. It would also force schools to justify their extravagant investments, and limit their ability to borrow against future tuition revenues.

Yes and no. In Germany, universities are essentially free, even for foreign students[1] (experiments to charge higher "tuition" that's still ridiculously low by U.S. standards have largely failed), and low-income students can get loans to cover some of their living expenses while attending.

As far as I can tell, costs for educating one student average around 1/4th of U.S. levels[2], despite also having a very high administrator/educator ratio. We generally don't have lush campuses or dorms, university sports exist but are something completely different etc. My sister went to Stanford, so yes, U.S. unis are really nice. But maybe not all of that is strictly necessary.

It seems to me that you can get away with government funding if both sides are government-controlled. It's the "Public Private Partnership" angle where you combine the profit motive with effectively unlimited government funding that you get in trouble. "Privatize profits, socialize losses(/costs)".

[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32821678

[2] http://www.marketplace.org/topics/education/learning-curve/h...

>because many students would forego elaborate benefits in exchange for lower costs

Isn't this pretty much disproven by your previous paragraph? The reason why the arms race happened is because students chose schools that offered these amenities regardless of how much that increased the price.

>students chose schools that offered these amenities regardless of how much that increased the price.

Not really. Consider the alternative: public universities are 100% free to students, who must in turn maintain their GPA and achieve minimum progress to remain enrolled. Some public funds are allocated to student services, even while we pare back subsidized loans and grants. Students who are price sensitive will go to a public uni, while others with different objectives and expectations are free to take on loans or self-fund attendance at their preferred private uni that better caters to their goals.

We don't do that because we don't want to create a two-tier college system where people without money all get shuffled into the same colleges. Under the current system it's already difficult for non-rich kids to get into a Harvard or a Yale, but at least it's possible.

Harvard and Yale both have need-blind admissions and generous tuition grants for median-and-lower-income families. Those policies are quite affordable for institutions with their endowments. Do you really think they'll stop admitting median-income students as soon as state schools return to low tuition?

Dining halls are actually a profit center at many collages and most of the others where around 30 years ago.

The main drivers of administration overhead is mismanaged IT, and external administration requirements such as the certification song and dances.

I'm not sure this is even possible. Many of those extra bureaucrats are there as a result of some Department of Education mandate.

Of course there's inefficiency in every large organization, but that doesn't mean you can get rid of it. Every large organization tends to follow Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html), which basically says that over time people who are looking out for the organization's interests (as opposed to the organization's purpose) will always end up in charge.

> Many of those extra bureaucrats are there as a result of some Department of Education mandate

do you have a source for that?

http://www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/Regulations_Task_Force_...

"The compliance problem is exacerbated by the sheer volume of mandates—approximately 2,000 pages of text—and the reality that the Department of Education issues official guidance to amend or clarify its rules at a rate of more than one document per work day. As a result, colleges and universities find themselves enmeshed in a jungle of red tape, facing rules that are often confusing and difficult to comply with."

You will never see a reduction in the number of college bureaucrats while the federal government micromanages higher education.

At my limited time working at a large state university, I saw unbelievable inefficiently. Like printing paper copies of things to be processed by hand. The software sucks, but ripping out parts to support 60 year old process sucked more. When they get by by throwing more and more work study at a problem, well it sounds my soul.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com