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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

Good. The market would quickly self-correct. It's pretty good at doing that. No more 6 figure loans for english degrees. No more automatic 80k loans for shitty technical colleges where most graduates can't even get a job. The whole thing would sort itself out overnight.

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And remember, who is getting the money for those 6 figure English degrees? It's not the students. They are liable for the funds, and they do get the degree, but if you follow the money it goes to the universities, and within the universities, it goes increasingly to high paid administrators, who pad their work with increasing capital expenditures on building construction and the necessitated salaries that goes with so many projects on the table, and not the faculty.

This is partly true. What I've seen personally is that with each increase in the tuition I experienced they were busy throwing that money at facilities and whatever else they could think up. Some of it was decent like actual improvements to aging buildings, but most of it was BS facilities like completely redoing the student center which had no real issues and been renovated barely two years earlier. It seems like the universities are following the same pattern that many hospitals have done: if they have money they must spend it even if it's not to the benefit of its consumers or its shareholders. It's like these institutions have replicated the Stalinist "make every thing big" mentality.

It's the easiest way to justify the accelerating administrators incomes. And they say they have to do it to maintain the competitive advantage, over other schools that are doing the exact same thing.

See UC Davis, where they are building a huge new Art Museum, to compete with the one being built right now in Berkeley. Here's the thing, UC Davis is NOT an art school. It's an ag school and should be focusing its resources on that. But no, building an art museum justifies the salaries of all the people that are involved.

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