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Comment by pascalxus | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone else see the contradiction: the amount students are spending on college keeps going up, but the budget for professors seems to keep going down. What accounts for the discrepancy?

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The belief that everyone should go to college. What the government spends on public schools has actually gone up over the decades, but a move to everyone going to college means that funding per student has dropped.

Edit: Link to source: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...

This is a more accurate response than most on this issue.

To take it further, the underlying issue is that it is now compulsory for people to have a college degree in america to keep up with their expectation of a normal middle class life style.

Decades ago, you didn't need to be college educated to live the American Dream.

The collapse of those jobs has left citizens to scramble for what's left. this leads to all sorts of secondary effects such as the reduction of extra curricular activities, teaching the test, rote memmorization to survive tests, and cram schools.

This pattern exsists already in many third world and developing world nations, and it is a shit show. Our worst scams when it comes to education are horrifying. (Search: vyapam for the most recent education related scam in india.)

The education problems in america are a jobs/employment problem.

Facilities and administrators. Schools get ranked based on their facilities and the types of programs and activities they offer so they keep outspending each other in this area to remain competitive. It's a tragedy.

That's part of it. The other part is for private universities, they are admitting more and more lower income students. Each low income student receives tuition waiver, and often a living stipend. So it's a double whammy on the budget.

Administration. More and more money going to committees for every little thing.

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