- If reducing “college costs” just means reducing the price students pay, that is really an argument about who should pay. It is not about cutting “college costs”, it is about having people other than students bear those costs. It is about shifting costs. There is nothing particularly wrong with that, but if you are arguing for shifting costs, you really should spend time explaining who you want to shift those costs on to. Saying “cut college costs” conveniently leaves out the explanation of who is going to bear the costs going forward.
Where I live, in MI, the state spends more on prison than on college. I would certainly love to shift the costs away from the penitentiary and toward the academy. That way, only the accounting is different. No new taxes. Lower fees for undergrads. More educated population. Fewer people incarcerated (poignant, given the administration's new position on drugs). It seems like everyone can win.
Wouldn't it be nice if things worked that simply? Referendum on the ballot reading: Should Michigan release prisoners with non-violent drug convictions and allocate the money that would have been spent incarcerating them towards tuition support for underprivileged students?: Yes___ or No___ Things should be that simple.
Will there really be lower fees though, or will that money simply go towards new projects/buildings and more faculty at a college? That's the issue at hand. Where I am, it's considered a success that fees are being raised only 3.4% this year (a reduction from the 4% average over the past few years). I don't think lower fees will happen, but possibly a reduction in the increase of fees.
There's also the possibility that "cutting college costs" could mean both trimming waste and reducing the price for students. When it comes to waste, I would look to those reducing those expenses that don't directly deliver the educational experience first. Professors would be the last in line to be targeted. But they are being targeted and costs are rising, which leads to another issue. IMO there is also a conflation here about what a "college education" is. The college experience itself has transformed in the last two decades, and I think there are strong arguments that what students are paying for now isn't what they were paying for 20 years ago. What are the costs that lead to near double-digit increases in tuition year on year? Surely they aren't due to increases in professor salaries, and the number of adjunct faculty has only increased. I'm not sure there's much evidence that current students are better educated as a result of these increased costs. And as for bearing the costs, it is more complicated than only shifting the costs. Financial aid might help an individual student, but the availability of financial aid enables tuition rates overall to increase, just as these ease in getting a large mortgage lead to the housing bubble. What worries me, is that student debt written now will lead to economic stagnation for a long time to come. Thus, even if costs aren't shifted from students to tax-payers, we all might pay for it indirectly anyway. Personally, I would like to see actual costs come down more than I would like to see the burden shifted, or new financial aid mechanisms. I'm typically liberal in my politics, and I guess I am saying: "Cut the cost of college, not the amount that the student bears." IMO one problem underpinning this conflated "liberal stance" on college costs that is presented, is that liberals don't want faculty to be targeted. However, it's pretty clear that faculty aren't part of this increase in costs. Faculty are being targeted, and yet costs continue to rise.
Excellent point. Some one has to pay. The students can bear the full brunt of the cost of education, or taxpayers can bear a distributed brunt of the cost. And as b_b points out, more kids in college might just have something to do with incarceration rates.... the sociologist in me wants to find some studies that could back up that hypothesis... but I don't think it's too much of a stretch to see some correlation.Conflating these various things makes arguments totally incomprehensible.
Yeah, I get that we are talking about who bears the burden of the costs, but isn't there another factor to the "costs?" He writes: Recently, we have seen the emergence of online education and distance learning creeping in to the mainstream academia. But it's only creeping. I would think that the market is ripe for a serious institution to fully embrace an extremely low cost version of their education model. A sort of Armani Exchange degree. Get a world class education for $5k a year. It's coming, perhaps it's already here, I have no idea. But my guess is it would already be here in full if the textbook manufacturers/publishers didn't have strong lobbies. If the professors weren't clinging to tenure and a justification for why in person lectures are valuable. Like the medical market, there is a lot of "waste" in thick margins, with little to no competition.If by “college costs,” you mean institutional costs, then that is calling for lower overall educational spending per student. That makes sense of course to the extent that there is institutional waste, i.e. spending that is not actually achieving some important educational goal.
The word "waste" in there is a very subjective one. People may think having tenured professors at $150k a year is "wasteful" at times, others may think having an educational infrastructure geared around "text+books+" that cost in excess of $200 a piece as wasteful. Some may think that having a professor give the same lecture every semester in person is wasteful. There will be others that find justifications for all of those things too.
I do think that this distance degree is fast coming, but I don't think you can get a 'world class' education from it. Perhaps I was spoiled, but most of my lectures were from professors that knew my name, and we had extensive dialogs during those lectures. My class sizes after my second year probably averaged 15 students. I have had 'lecture hall' classes, and I think those are pretty similar to distance learning. It's educational, but I wouldn't call it 'world class', no matter what campus it takes place at. That said, I agree that many versions of the college education could be replaced by distance learning. In fact they should be, because students are paying far too much for what they get.
There's not doubt that one of the greatest aspects of the classroom setting is the interaction between students and between students and teacher. How can distance learning recreate this? Would you have needed to be in the room with the prof to have experienced what you did to the fullest extent? Could that prof have "known your name" even in a distance learning environment via "chat" or "hangout" sessions?
I completely agree with all of this. (Although, anyone who still pays money for their textbooks is frankly stupid. If you're living under a rock and don't understand how the internet works, ask someone for help.) The evidence that we're turning the corner is there. Certain few industries hire based on skill rather than degree. That's the future. The future is learning what you need to as you need it, from free or very cheap online resources (some of which already exist). Obviously, many people, starting with the millionaires who sit on the board of directors of basically every major university in America, do not like this one bit -- but until they cut costs they will lose this battle inevitably.