Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

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Because paying customers demand better services. In the UK, I went to university in the first year that students were charged direct tuition fees.

My dorm was modelled on a Swedish prison, had a single plug socket per room, and two toilets between 20 of us. The kitchen was barely big enough for 6 people, and couldn't support more than 4 people cooking at once.

That wretched hall was demolished and replaced by something a lot nicer - because when students are paying thousands of pounds per year, they expect something a little more salubrious for their cash.

The same was true of teaching. I remember a bunch of us complaining about the poor quality of lectures from one particular professor. The head of our department was genuinely shocked when I said "I don't think I'm receiving value for money". Students were now expecting a guarantee of quality for the debt they accumulated.

Better facilities cost money - but capitalism demands that students (as rational consumers) should seek value for money. If you have a choice between UCLA and NYU - it makes sense for your to spend your money on something that is attractive to you.

A truly rational student might forgo comfort in exchange for excellent teaching. But I suspect the majority will spend their money on something which looks nice, rather than is actually effective.

This is an excellent point. When you go deep into debt to go to college, you want the experience to be as nice as possible. Not to mention that as states push their public colleges and universities to be more businesslike and rely more on tuition, they are doing so, by making themselves more appealing to a broader range of customers.

The flip side of this is that student loans are guaranteed by the federal government, and when tuition goes up, so does loan availability. If financing is guaranteed no matter the cost, then no one should be shocked when customers lose their price sensitivity.

It's also important to keep in mind that the graduates coming out of college in the time period mentioned have entered the most challenging job market for new job seekers in 70 years. It's hardly fair to expect them to be able to live up to promises they made in the mid 2000s when everyone running the economy promised it was in great shape, while those same people were building the house of cards that collapsed on the millenial generation. There's lots of blame to go around, but very little of it should land on the students who took out these loans.

> When you go deep into debt to go to college, you want the experience to be as nice as possible.

What you want and what you can afford can be two very different things. Just because you can get a big loan does not mean you can afford it. For myself, the purpose of going to college was to get a piece of paper to get my first software development job. I didn't care if the college looked nice, offered all sorts of amenities, etc. I went to a local state university and commuted.

Too many people have been brainwashed into going college for the non-education part of the 'college experience' without understanding the long-term implications of coming out of school with an enormous debt load. Continuing to allow 17-21 year old kids to sign up for these loans is just a scam.

> The flip side of this is that student loans are guaranteed by the federal government, and when tuition goes up, so does loan availability. If financing is guaranteed no matter the cost, then no one should be shocked when customers lose their price sensitivity.

This is not true. Federal student loans have an annual cap and overall cap, anything above that has to be financed with private student loans, which are not guaranteed by the government and have much higher interest rates. They are generally co-signed for by a parent, who is on the hook if the student cant pay.

edit: this is further broken down into subsidized and unsubsidized loans (the former the government pays the interest on while you are in school, the latter they dont): https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsid...

Let's not fall into the extremes. We can have nice, cheap dorm. Either prison-like dorm, or all inclusive Spanish coast dorm should be not a standard.

That doesn't explain how the cost of tuition has risen a lot faster than the cost of most other goods and services that people also pay for and demand (and receive) good quality of. Also, it assumes a previous state of not paying for the services which did not exist in the US in the same way it did in the UK.

In the US most students at public universities have never paid for most of the services they receive, the state has paid for the bulk of their university education. For the past decade or two the states have been slashing university funding left and right. This is why tuition costs have been rising.

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