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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

As a parent, I'm not-so-secretly hoping we will see some correction. Especially with the proliferation of online options. If I sent my kid to Oregon State to get an online CS degree, they'd pay the same tuition as if they were on-campus. If they went to somewhere like ASU for the online CS masters, it is similarly overpriced. Meanwhile, I'm just about to finish my Georgia Tech masters in CS for under 10K for the entire program. If other institutions follow their lead, it'll put a lot of downward price pressure on the rest.

Especially for online classes that can scale pretty inexpensively, the current tuition rate is absurd.

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We need more than a price correction, we need a reckoning.

And as taxpayers who fund this education via loans we should have a lot of leverage, yet the only thing anyone talks about is loan forgiveness, as if we won’t end up in the same exact situation again in 10 years.

Though the online classes can be scaled fairly easily, administrators seem to follow a different rate. The growth rate of college students is slower than of administrators. Their pay is also up there so the total payout is also growing fast.

This is essentially Parkinson's Law. The common one you hear about Parkinson's law is about work filling up time but really if you read the original from 1955 it talks about "the increase in the number of employees at the Colonial Office while the British Empire declined". And causes for this being: "An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals," and "Officials make work for each other."

If you've ever worked at a large corporation you've seen this in action. Universities and government are no different. Bureaucracy keeps expanding, corporations address this problem by random acts of cancelling entire divisions/products and layoffs.

ASU had a lock step 1yr MS in DIS and then Information Systems for a very reasonable price. Finish in late 90s basically to get in front of quality recruiters. For the opportunity it provided me and other fellow graduates it was an excellent deal. Our counterparts who were doing MS in Accounting were being paid half the money at graduation for a very similar degree.

And Tech's program is awesome. ;)

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