Cheaper College Makes More Sense Than Free College

Hahaha. Their premise is that price controls might

>Forcing top public schools like the University of Texas or the University of Michigan to cut their budgets might weaken their ability to hire top professors and provide supportive living environments for students, thus reducing education quality.

Are they kidding? Luxury living environments don't make an education. And professors' salaries are the last thing universities spend money on these days.

Just to put it in context, a tenure track math professor could be getting $60K. They'd be the privileged elite, since most of the instructors are adjuncts who work for food.

(Source: ask people in academia, but really, public schools publish salary data, at least in TX)

Price controls are exactly what we need. There's no way the universities will be paying their professors less than they already do. But perhaps some of those admin expenses would stop growing exponentially.

EDIT: some numbers for y'all:

https://salaries.texastribune.org/university-of-texas-at-aus...

Top guys make over $100K (still way less than a tech salary), but look at new hires and smallet schools. And TX is a relatively rich state.

I’ve been surprised at the lack of good quantitative reporting on college costs over time. For state schools, yes, state funding has been cut, but I get the feeling that expenses have been skyrocketing. When I went to college in the late 90’s, my dorm was from 1930. The building boom in dorms was only surpassed by the expansion of residence life administrators. These new buildings were quite opulent for college kids, attempting to lure out of state students paying higher tuition. While these out of state student bodies grew, the cost for in-state students exceeded inflation, even while being subsidized by out of state students. A simple analysis of dorm costs over time, broken down by administrator overhead would shed a substantial light on the problem. Unlike tuition, dorms likely weren’t subsidized by tax payers and were designed to be cost neutral. I wouldn’t even be surprised if now, dorm costs exceed what they’re charging students, and constrained to raise prices by the external housing market, the excess administrators are funded by the general fund.

All the data exists and at public schools, is likely accessible by a reporter to validate these assumptions.

What I hear in the media is just simple politics - the left wants more funding for gender studies programs, and the right has cut the state funding of schools.

As the community college prices haven’t increased anything like the university prices, while the teaching staff is paid similarly... I have to wonder what’s going on with University expenses.

Community college (at least in Texas) is already pretty damn cheap [0]. Even better, those credits transfer pretty easily to the large universities in the state.

I have no idea what other states look like, but going to community college for the first two years and then finishing at a University is hard to beat from a cost perspective. If you live at home and make $10/hour working at McDonald's this is affordable. More so if you spread the time out over more years.

[0] HCC, which is a huge community college with several campuses serving Houston, has a cost of $ 1075.50 for 15 hours, according to it's calculator : https://www.hccs.edu/applying-and-paying/tuition-calculator/