Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M?
The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board.
This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people.
Efforts to reduce the cost of tuition, rather than shift the cost burden to different people, are the real humanitarian work here.
Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it. Lowering tuition lowers it for everyone. If your parents make $300k+/year, then you'll still be paying full tuition. But as their income is lower, currently you'll get some need-based financial aid. The problem is that this aid is a combination of "scholarship" and "loans". The goal here is to remove the loan component.
The problem still is that middle-class families get stuck in a gray zone. I went to Brown, and my parents made enough (~$110k) that I didn't get financial aid but they also couldn't pay $40k/year.
While the process sounds good in theory there is an ever increasing gap that people fall into between parents making too much money and parents not making enough. I'm bias because I fell right into the middle of the gap - my parents inherited an illiquid share of real estate that on paper is worth about a million dollars, in reality after taxes it yields maybe 40k/yr that my parents live off of (60+, no college). Because of this I was denied any form of financial aid and had to fend for myself.
Yup, and it leads to this perverse economic effect of middle class families that scrape together enough wealth to make a very positive situation, then get it all pulled back pretty hard because of outrageous tuition fees. Not that low-income students have it easy either. Sometimes it just feels like the rules of our society are lined up to keep the middle and lower classes in their place instead of supporting general prosperity.
Education is one of the biggest scams and it’s run 99% by the upper middle class. At elite universities, it’s upper middle class people fleecing upper middle class peoplle. At less elite universities, it’s upper middle class people fleecing middle and lower class people.
Did you explain this to the financial aid office? Generally, elite schools are in the business of finding elite students first and then dealing with FA second. But you have to make your situation clear to them. They offered you admission or you wouldn't be dealing with FA. So they wanted you. But FA is a negotiation even especially if you're in the gap and then you have to negotiate hard because otherwise you pay sticker.
None is necessary since they are both Federally guaranteed and they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy (which is the epitome of stupidity). Indeed, that ‘bargain’ is why Brown is doing this thing.
No collateral is necessary for student debt since they can come after anything you or your cosigners have.
Someone will have to explain to me what is special about this debt that it gets this special treatment.
> None is necessary since they are both Federally guaranteed and they can’t be discharged by bankruptcy (which is the epitome of stupidity). Indeed, that ‘bargain’ is why Brown is doing this thing.
Just because they can't be discharged in bankruptcy doesn't they're actually repaid. Student loans can and do default - an average rate of 15% a few years ago, though some schools have students that default at more than twice that rate.
External guarantees on loans (in this case federal guarantees) doesn't address the same issue that collateral is typical used for: namely, it doesn't solve the moral hazard problem.
(It's not that Brown has solved the moral hazard problem itself; it's that Brown's able to take on that risk themselves, because it's an incredibly selective, incredibly competitive, and fairly small[0] school).
[0] We're talking specifically about undergraduates
> Just because they can't be discharged in bankruptcy doesn't they're actually repaid.
Exactly. So instead that’s an albatross to be hung around a young person’s neck for all of eternity. Bankruptcy would share the burden between lender and borrower.
What we have now is a system where loans are Federally guaranteed and then not dischargeable through bankruptcy. That leads to $100k cooking schools that promise to turn you into a pro-chef, just sign here, here and here and you can even get a Federally guaranteed loan, sign here.
The gap is real, but parents with a million dollar house who aren't making enough while on retirement? That's most parents except for that huge asset. You're not in the gap in my view.
The difference is that some assets (in retirement accounts) are protected from financial aid inspection and inherited real estate is not. If that seems unfair, it is because it is.
Yep. My wife would like to be stay-at-home-mom, but she works so we can save $2k/month for two kids college expenses, currently in elementary school. Goal is to have $160k over next 10 years. So by saving, I'm screwing myself. It's equivalent to another mortgage.
You're not screwing yourself, you're taking responsibility. Financial aid comes with strings as well as a highly invasive personal finance anal exam called FAFSA (which database I'm sure will get hacked and disclosed at some point, if it's hasn't already, as most other big government databases have).
That’s mighty puritanical thinking. When a family works their ass off to be denied financial aid and pay full freight for highly inflated university tuition, that’s not what I would call “taking responsibility” that’s just being taken.
College financial aid is just another policy in the pile of progressive taxation and needs-based benefit programs which conspire to enact a near 100% effective marginal tax rate on the middle class.
>> Because they still want people that can afford to pay $50k/year to pay it.
That's not quite what I was getting at. My question is: Why are they making alumni find the $120M in grants, when they could just forgive the loan directly?
There's nothing that says a lender has to collect on its debt. It can choose to forgive the debt.
So it's possible for Brown to charge $50K/year generally, collect it from the rich kids, and then forgive the debt incurred by the poor kids.
But that's not what they're doing. They're keeping the money, and asking alumni and other charitable institutions to pay them.
The loans don't actually come from the school- they are often government-sponsored, though those typically cap out at $12k a year or something. The rest you have to get through private loans, and the school has no way to forgive them- unless they want to write a check to my loan provider.
The truth is that they should evaluate need not based on your parents income, but on their net worth - the price of their home. If you struggled to make ends meet for 15 years at the beginning of your child life but then suddenly started making 200k a year, you likely don't have the savings you need to pay 200k over 4 years to send your kid to college.
> Not that loan-free educations are bad, but why is Brown raising $120M from alumni and the like, rather than lowering their tuition by $120M?
Because the Third Associate Dean of Humanities can't fund their $600k salary with the goodwill from a more reasonable tuition.
Snark aside, it's because the administrators are attacking a symptom - high tuition prices - and not the illness - administrative bloat and universities that are not run by academics, but by Professional Educators who in many cases have never taught a class in their lives, or haven't taught in the past n decades.
According to Bain between 1995 and 2010 universities are proportionately spending significantly less on instruction and more on admin and support, and many of the universities spending is unsustainable.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11337193
This parallels the healthcare sector, where administrative costs have outpaced the cost of actual care. Both are markets heavily distorted by the federal government.
I worry that there's no solution to these problems that won't displace very many workers. One man's cost is another man's salary.
Both are markets heavily distorted by the federal government.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that those "markets" are fundamentally distorted by the in-elasticity of demand. People generally need education and healthcare.
Coincidentally, that's the way almost all of the non-US world chooses to look at it.
I'm no fan of coaches being the most highly paid public employees in most states by any stretch (especially with the athletes earning at most a free ride and a rubber-stamped business degree), but at least the sports teams are bringing in revenue, and people willingly donate to build a new stadium, etc.
The Humanities Dean isn't a revenue center for the college, and nobody is (knowingly) donating so s/he can get a new office.
Revenue is easy. Anyone can bring in revenue. Uber brings in revenue. The more important question is is the athletic department as a whole even profitable? At Berkeley, the football coaches make $16.3M.
Most athletic departments fund not only the football coach's salary but the salaries of the coaches and staff for all the other "non-revenue" sports as well as all the scholarships. The big thing that has developed in the past decade are the conference TV deals such as the Big Ten Network. Schools make a LOT of money from that, as well as from other licensed merchandise, ticket sales, and donations.
If Cal Athletics is in debt, they are doing it wrong.
Athletics salaries and facilities are very visible and often breathtaking, but in general they are not the cause of tuition inflation.
Yes, my alma mater is doing it wrong but the vast majority of athletic departments are also doing it wrong. Although I was a ‘tree’ guy when they spent the seed corn on the stadium upgrade, I do see the point of an elite sports program and ours overall is quite elite. And still Cal is doing it wrong.
Actually ... they are probably NOT charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room and board, when you look at their costs; good education is expensive.
Room and board is about $13K, or slightly more than 1K/month, which seems pretty reasonable.
Rate-card Tuition is 52K, but they have a 7:1 teacher-student ratio ; If you assume each teacher makes 100K/year (not unreasonable for PhDs), that's about 13K just in teacher salaries ... add benefits, offices, etc, and you're at about twice that, so 26K just for faculty; add some for facilities and management, and their cost is probably about 40K/year per student, so a 20-25% markup, doesn't sound unreasonable (and then almost no student pays the sticker price).
High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty).
BTW, other universities will do it cheaper by either paying their faculty much less (which usually leads to quality problems), or having much larger classes, or crummy facilities, or government subsidies (or all of the above). Community colleges do an amazing job for the price they charge, but it's not the same education :)
> High-quality liberal-arts education is really expensive, but it is because it is very labor intensive (both in students and faculty).
Interesting. Wonder why it's more labor intensive compared to engineering or other degrees. 7:1 teacher-student ratio seems very good. Why can't it be 14:1, would that result in a dramatically worse outcome? (Not even sure what I mean by outcome, maybe inability to find a position after graduation...)
I guess it depends on what you mean by outcomes ... if the outcome is finding a job after graduation, probably not; if the outcome is becoming a 'better' human being, probably yes :)
Having a 7:1 teacher/student ratio means that students will have tons of contact with the faculty outside the classroom; they can walk to their offices and chat (and a lot of learning happens that way). It means 'large' classes are 15-20 students, which means there's no 'lecturing' per se, and a lot more discussions.
Doubling that rate means larger classes (40 students means teacher cannot answer all questions, assignments are made to be graded quickly etc), less interaction with faculty inside and outside classroom
Is it worth it ? I think so, and, if needed (and able), would willingly pay it for my kids. If you don't think it's worth it, or can't afford it, good state universities cost 1/2 or 1/3 as much (tuition is probably around 10K for in-state, room and board is still probably 1K/mo). Community/technical colleges are cheap for a reason, but teachers want to teach, and good students will learn from them, and get a degree; and of course, there's tons of free learning resources
Maybe I’m understanding incorrectly: 13k in teacher salaries would be per course taught by a teacher right? Which really means cost should be 1/4th.
52k per student for a 5,000 student college is 260m per year of claimed expenditure. That is quite a lot money for a faculty of 700, even after subtracting boarding and scholarships, no? I do not know where money is going, although the Bain research does seem to support the evidence for concluding that admin is a benefactor of it.
You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant.
You can't just decide to reduce your income and expect nothing else to change. They're changing where their getting the income from, probably with the idea that former students of Brown who are now doing very well, will be willing to pay it forward to a new student who is in a similar position as they used to be.
The exploding cost of education over the last generation doesn't boil down to an increase in teaching or even research staff costs. These costs are stable, largely thanks to the very low cost of junior academics.
In the US, "administration staff" (everyone else) has blown up by 500% or more, proportionally. There have also been increases in non staff related costs. University' are fancier, more expensive and more income focused.
What the OP is saying is that education has become unaffordable because it has become expensive, not because of how it is financed. Fixing Brown students problem with donor financing is great for Brown students, but does not scale even if is sustainable at brown.
Whether through donors, loans, public financing or parental savings, we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.
I continue to be very curious where all that "administration staff" spending is going. I grew up in the higher education sphere (both parents professors), and I work as a staff member at a university now. What I see here, at least, is a near-crippling lack of care for the staff, such that morale is constantly low and turnover is high.
So where, exactly, is all that extra spending really going? Is it going to six or seven extra deans and associate deans? (We have a bunch of people with "associate dean" or similar in their titles, but some of them are actually fairly junior staff members, and my understanding, incomplete as it is, is that their pay reflects that, rather than being what you'd expect for someone with that title.) Is it going to people who are managing the ever-growing presence of technology in the classroom and throughout the institution? That would actually make some sense, as it's a thing that's been growing at around the same time as the apparent increase in spending on staff/admin.
But in general, based on the limited breakdowns I've seen, I'm still puzzled as to where all this extra money is going, as it seems like most of it is not, in fact, going to inflated salaries for the top administrators (though some of it is), and most of what I've actually seen doesn't support the idea that there are massively more people in administration than are actually needed to support the students. The only way that could be true, based on my experience, is if a huge percentage of them (many more than in previous generations) are utterly incompetent, and pulling their weight so poorly that it takes half the time from the competent people just to keep everything moving. While that's not impossible, it seems implausible that such a significant shift could have occurred so quickly.
> ...we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education. Any solution that builds on the premise that we can is an elitist (or at least elite) model.
I think that calling it elitist is jumping on a bandwagon of derision for that term, when what it should really be called is "unrealistic," "impractical," or just "stupid." In fact, if anything, it's as anti-elitist as anything can be—it's trying to spread the education to everyone, rather than reserving it to the elite purely based on the inconvenient fact that we don't have enough money in our economy to spend that much on everyone.
I was also in higher education; I think it is a problem of lumping different categories of schools, changing roles, and of people having a political axe to grind :) I'd be very surprised if admin costs at Ivy League universities, or even state schools have changed much ...
You work at a university. Can you think of even one time that someone has been let go for incompetence? I've never seen it happen, and I've seen incompetence so blatant that it's undeniable.
In business, if two companies merge, the redundant positions are eliminated. In a university, if two schools or departments merge, everyone stays and a bunch of new titles are created.
>we cannot afford to give everyone a $150k education.
We most certainly can, easily, we just choose not to.
We could bomb a few less hospitals a year and pay for every single American to go to college for free. We could make our corporations pay more than zero taxes and do the same.
But you are right about the skyrocketing costs, colleges have bloated massively and for really no reason other than that they have begun to be run as businesses rather than as public-focused academic enterprises.
This is true of many things, but seems to be politically unpopular to notice. The right will claim that prices are what prices are and cannot be changed, and the left will claim it's all in resource allocation.
Well... It's not that financing and cost are unrelated. Economics exists. I (I wrote the comment) do think that prices and costs rose in response to more available money.
Anyway, I think that these days the left and right may have changed seats in this regard. The left wants more price/cost control and the centre (centre-right and left, but more right) is talking about resource allocation, in practice defending the market driven system. The right hasn't resolved to a consistent position recently.
The administrative costs have been the most sizable portion of cost increases for universities over the last few decades. The costs for teaching faculty have decreased, probably due to the use of adjunct professors (who don't get tenure nor benefits).
> You still have to pay market rate for professors, executives, maintenance, etc, if you want to stay relevant.
I'll venture that it's the executives who are pulling in the big bucks. Looking at the glassdoor numbers, profs are peaking at under $200k, the vast majority well under $100k. Contrast that with Comms directors making $250k.
>>Profs are peaking at under $200k, the vast majority well under $100k. Contrast that with Comms directors making $250k.
Comms directors provide more immediate returns, namely fundraising and spinning. However, top professors can write their ticket just to say they're there and earn a fortune on the side.
Keep in mind that these are Ivy League universities hoping to attract the best students they can in order to boost their prestige.
If Princeton for instance decided to lower tuition fees by cutting down on 'luxuries' like smaller class sizes/ unrestricted enrollments in classes, then they'd lose out on the best students to Harvard or Yale.
So the only way to reduce tuition fees would be to do it across the board at once, but the richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.
That seems... backwards. If the standard of admission remains the same (which is unrelated to cost of attending), lowering prices doesn't decrease the quality of the admitted student body, but _increases_ it. Lowering the cost means that additionally to the students who would be admitted and are capable of affording the school, students who are more qualified but would otherwise _not_ be able to afford attending would then be able to apply and attend. Admissions can only benefit from giving opportunities to a larger body of prospective students. The wealth of a student isn't what gives a school prestige--it's their academic prowess and likelihood of becoming successful later that gives the school a good name.
I don't think you're really disagreeing with the parent comment. In order to remain at a constant level of profitability with a price reduction for all students, universities would have to reduce the benefits given to students (e.g., larger class sizes, fewer building upgrades). This would negatively impact the student's likelihood of becoming successful (like you mentioned), and would potentially cause some high-potential students to switch to other schools.
Brown is trying to get the best of all worlds: let the rich pay full price to maximize income, invest heavily in students to optimize chances of later success, and subsidize education for less wealthy students to keep the applicant pool as large as possible.
Wealth of the students family probably has some influence on "likelihood of becoming successful later". Especially if one measures success in how much money people donate to their alma mater.
Princeton went about it the way Brown is striving to do now: meet 100% of a student's financial need with grants and no loans. You don't need to lower tuition (and hurt "prestige") if you can do this.
> Richer universities have no incentive to do so because they can attract enough full-paying students and have a large enough endowment to pay for everyone else.
From personal experience, this statement is wrong. A lot of my classmates at Princeton were not paying the full sticker price. Princeton also has a need-blind admission process so admissions and financial aid are kept (on paper at least) separate.
This is a complete misunderstanding of what is happening in higher education. The increase in tuitions for need-blind schools like Brown is essentially forced donations for the families that can afford to pay. Everyone is already given financial aid to meet whatever their need is. Now, however, some of that is in the form of loans.
Alongside the increase in tuitions has been a massive increase in financial aid. Princeton really kicked this off around 2000 when they started drastically reducing loans and increasing grants, essentially competing for the top talent among lower income students.
Today's elite schools offer myriad resources to students that they didn't before. And today's elite schools are therefore able to serve a much more diverse group of students.
I think administrative costs have gone up too much and have space to cut back. But when articles come out saying administrative costs have ballooned 500%, I don't want people to imagine that it's all wasted - most of the new positions represent new services provided to students.
And in anticipation of the argument that "I don't need those services so they shouldn't exist": see arguments for universal healthcare even if it means raising taxes on healthy people. The whole university functions better and achieves its mission better if there is more diversity and if students have more access to services they need. Lowering tuition would be a trade-off, not just trimming fat.
I don't think anyone's saying it's all wasted, and I agree that a university in 2015 is going to offer a lot more to its students in terms of non-academic services than a university of 1985. But it's hard to argue that even half of that 500% is good spending.
- The year I started my undergrad, there a mini-scandal where tuition was raised by over 10% with little warning and it leaked that the school President, having written a heart felt letter about how hard it was cutting costs in these difficult economic times, made over $400k/yr and the college was paying his mortgage. Nearly $600k adjusted for inflation.
- At that same undergrad institution, the career services officer, responsible for finding people jobs (or at least helping), had never held a job outside of that college, and would do little more than putting your resume on Monster for you.
Just two examples from my limited academic experience (undergrad only) at one small liberal arts school nobody's ever heard of. I'm sure the graduate folks here could throw dozens of examples at you of much more egregious things.
This happens a lot at universities. They are great places to work if you're OK with an "adequate" salary (with generally very good benefits and time off) and not being held accountable for very much. So you have staff people who have worked there for decades, if not their entire careers. Often entire families (parents and eventually their children) will be working there. Those sorts of people have no understanding of what the "real world" or private sector is like, so the problem of low productivity and low accountability perpetuates itself. It's normal and they don't know anything else.
And it's horrible. At my alma mater this person was in charge of helping kids who were finishing their degrees find gainful employment. Some kids who came from poverty, were getting the first degree in their family, and finally they had a shot at an upper middle class lifestyle. And they're supposed to get advice from some schlub whose entire resume is "B.A., [Liberal Arts School You've Never Heard Of]" then "Career Services Officer, [Same School]"? I think of the ridiculous advice he gave me ("GPA is incredibly important for your resume even 20 years after you graduate" and "Put hobbies and interests on your resume that show you're a well rounded person!") and shudder to think of the nonsense he was telling people who didn't know any better.
I recently met an American here in Europe that mostly grew up here the last few years who wanted to go to NA (more specifically Toronto) for university when she could basically enrol here in a good university for a fraction of the cost. I pay less than a gran every year for my software engineering master's degree and can't fathom someone going to a different country knowing you're gonna be in debt for a large portion of your life. I'd rather study here and move to Canada after than study there and get a huge ass debt piled up.
I really don't get how these universities manage their cashflow. With such an exorbitant amount of cash you can basically put people on Mars for all I know.
Canadians university has far lower tuition than the US equivalent. It's also easier to immigrate when you have a Canadian degree so the story might be a bit different for Canada.
Tuition is far lower if you're a Canadian citizen or resident. If you're foreign, it costs $25,000+ per year which isn't that different from public US universities.
I went to UWaterloo CS co-op as an international student and it was less than CA$25000/year all-inclusive and before the money I made from co-op. I am pretty sure comparable education in US costs far more than that.
The trick is that most people don't pay full tuition[1]. It's like hospital prices: most people don't pay the sticker price and those who do are subsidizing those who don't.
I'm not sure the Ivy schools "lead" in price gouging. They've always been very expensive. I wonder what a comparison of tuition from 20 years ago would look like, compared to a typical public university? The tuition at public universities I know of has gone from something an in-state kid could probably manange by "working his way through school" to something you better hope your parents have been saving for since you were born. And during the same time there's been an explosion of administrative staff, new buildings, extravagant landscaping and green space, brick sidewalks, etc.
If your pulling in ~10,000$ per person in tuition, and the average person takes 5 classes with a class size of 30 that's. 60,000$ per professor per year if they teach 4 classes, 75,000$ per professor if they teach 5 and 90k & 6 classes before expenses per class. So, the only way for that to work out is some other subsidies.
However, lectures allow you to use TA's to more cheaply expand class sizes and might make it possible at the undergrad level.
Why even use TAs for lectures? There's YouTube. There's automated software for quizzes and testing. Textbooks should be open source documentation, printed-on-demand.
I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators.
Check out how Georgia Institute of Technology is offering a real CS Master's Degree for a fraction of the cost using similar stuff: https://www.omscs.gatech.edu/
I'm not saying remove the human element entirely, but there's a lot of low hanging fruit in education to consider where technological automation can help improve the productivity of educators.
This x1000. With all the improvement in educational technology, it's weird that the gold standard of elite education apparently remains the lecture.
I am reminded of the quote: College is a place where a professor’s lecture notes go straight to the students’ lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.
Part of the issue is that college-as-elite-networking-venue needs to remain scarce, by definition, if it is to retain its value. If everyone can "go to Harvard" (through online delivery, enhanced ed-tech, automation, etc) then the scarcity is lessened. When you go to an elite college, you don't just get an education, you get association with a brand that, you hope, retains and increases in value.
> it's weird that the gold standard of elite education apparently remains the lecture.
What makes one a good prof/teacher/lecturer for a given department, subject matter or set of students may not make one a good prof/teacher/lecturer for a different department, subject matter or set of students.
The quality of an instructor as a prof/teacher/lecturer for a given department, subject matter or set of students implies nothing about the their quality in any of those attributes for the same setting or the same attribute if the department, subject matter or set of students changes.
I recall having a discussion with another student who had very similar abilities and interests. We agreed about the quality of the profs we had in common except for one where one of us thought he was a great teacher and lecturer but terrible at the rest of being a prof and the other thought he did a great job as a prof but was a terrible teacher/lecturer.
I'd like to point out that there's also plenty of utterly crappy educational technology that only exists to nickel and dime students for licenses. See MyMathLab.
Their is some evidence this simply does not work as well. MOOC's demonstrate you can perhaps get ~80% of the benefit of an introductory lecture online, but they don't carry as well into more interactive styles.
Really face time with a professor is not directly the huge cost you might think. Class participation and helping students during office hours don't scale very well. On top of that it's much simpler to cheat in an online only environment.
Honestly, I think High school is probably a better place for this kind of automation. Setting up a rotation where you have say both a small and double sized classroom seems very possible.
Was editing 60k is teaching 4 classes with students paying 10k over 4 years. 90k for 6 classes but that's before expenses such as administration, the buildings etc.
It might be possible to nominally get that number but only if your hiding other costs.
That's nominally 50k/student they can then offer scholarships so it's possibly nobody actually pays that much.
Further, just having a teacher without a classroom is not going to get you very far. Still, assuming the average student pays 1/2 that much per year they can probably cut the costs significantly.
Regardless of the validity of your claim I think the answer to your question is why would Brown be incentive to lower tuition to eliminate student loans (lower profits) if they could just ask for it from alumni (same profits and free good PR)?
Most universities are run like a business. They are "non-profit" but essentially they are trying to generate "profits" that raise their endowment. Larger endowments mean more $ per year to spend on faculty, admin/staff, and student services/housing. Having more faculty and better student services/housing helps recruit more and stronger students...
Humphrey: Bernard, you know perfectly well there has to be some way to measure success in the Civil Service. British Leyland measure their success by the size of their profits. Or, to be more accurate, they measure the size of their failure by the size of their losses. But, we don’t have profits and losses. We have to measure our success by the size of our staff and our budget. By definition a big department is more successful than a small one.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this position, but that's an unnecessarily extreme way of stating it. "Reasonable" is a weasel word. If I study for 4 years for a job in a lucrative, degree-requiring field with very high jobs demand when I matriculate, and I go into debt to study, is that "reasonable"? What if that field encounters a sea change on the year I graduate, or the economy crashes, leaving me with bleak prospects and debt? Does that make what I did "wishful thinking"?
It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false. Like, sure, it's easy to make fun of literature students who end up $200k in the whole with no marketable skills and no job prospects. But they are just a small fraction of the whole picture. A higher ed degree is by far the highest-chance-of-success way for a lot of people to make it financially (whether or not it should be is a separate discussion), and a lot of positions require degrees for good reasons.
> It seems like that argument easily ends up in the "educations that require significant debt are always useless" position, which is false.
That's not my position.
> "Reasonable" is a weasel word.
You can have a reasonable definition of what is reasonable ;-) It just has to do with the ammount of risk you're willing to take, yes, it involves personal risk.
But you can see, for example, in such and such people that get a degree are >70% unemployed or working in a different area that has nothing to do with it. Then well perhaps it's not a good choice if I don't have the liberty to do it just for the sake of it, without expecting money in return.
Some other career choices probably have better expected outcomes for the average Joe. So maybe if you need the money, chose that.
The bottom line is: it's just silly to live as if you were rich and but then after complain you don't have the money for it.
Brown has traditionally been one of the most expensive colleges in America for decades. The "Boys Club" of Brown is through the roof. This is just a weird story to come from Brown.
The student loan crisis is only a crisis because Universities (lead by the Ivy League and similarly elite private colleges) are charging exorbitant prices for tuition, room, and board.
This isn't charity or benevolent. This is just bilking a different class of people.
Efforts to reduce the cost of tuition, rather than shift the cost burden to different people, are the real humanitarian work here.
Here's a story from 2013 on Texas's efforts to create $10,000 Bachelor's degrees. https://www.texastribune.org/2013/01/30/guide-getting-one-te...