Excellent gears-level account of what’s going on, thank you.
This seems to suggest several alternative models for college education I’ve never considered before:
Have colleges with very specific, limited curricula as independent institutions and a set professor/student ratio, with several credits per semester assigned to some sort of self-directed learning, where the student takes an online course or pursues some other educational activity, and perhaps meets up with a mentor/student group/professor once a week to discuss it.
Break up the four-year college paradigm into two separate institutions, much like community colleges currently function. We can imagine an explore/exploit dichotomy here, where there are two-year institutions dedicated to providing an incredibly broad array of classes that students attend first, after which they matriculate to a second two-year school for a specific major. The first institution is basically a broader community college, which can already keep costs low. The second avoids the pitfall of breadth you outline above.
Legislation requiring better price disclosure? That gap between nominal and actual tuition seems particularly insidious to me, as I suspect something similar is going on with medicine.
Oddly enough, better housing/zoning policy, because (especially for undergraduates) housing costs are usually a large part of the bill. Do the tuition price increases account for the entirety of college price increases? How have college housing/food costs changed over time?
These are good points! I have been thinking the same thing. However, I don’t imagine the upper institute requiring prerequisites, just an entrance exam. But a four year college offers basically the same thing except they lower transaction costs to basically zero or making that decision to commit to something you like. Hence declaring or changing majors is usually easy if you do it sophomore year.
The price disclosure issue isn’t a problem. You can Google average cost of any private college and it will give a good ballpark estimate which matches the OPs 20k+ chart. Colleges engage in near perfect price discrimination. It’s not really considered nefarious, because it’s both redistributive and expands supply. The richer pay more, thus subsidizing the poorer. This allow more students than otherwise would be able to to afford the college.
This price discrimination expands supply by increasing the absolute quantity of students who can afford the schooling there. Charging 20k for everyone would allow fewer students to attend than charging 30k for some and 10k for others.
I agree about using an entrance exam over prerequisites. Depending on the specifics, I’d favor an entrance project over/alongside an entrance exam—basically a portfolio-like construct of work in the field (anything from solved sets of physics problems to github pages to artwork could count).
The thing with price disclosure is that, in order to facilitate charging wealthier students more, colleges are acting to obscure how much they cost. I understand it as a part of trading off a sacred value (education) versus a mundane one (money), and thus suboptimal.
Perhaps it makes more sense to have a cutoff, with students who can afford it paying, and those who can’t being entirely supported by the institution’s endowment (at least in cases where the institution has a large endowment)?
I’d suggest another model. Separate the research part of academia from the teaching part of academia. I currently am attending an institution that is nearly completely a teaching institution (mainly focused on engineering, health sciences, computing, and trades). The instructors are focused on teaching rather than research.
As for the research side of things, I’d suggest a department of research development as part of every government.
Something like this exists in the French classe préparatoire system. Basically imagine highschool, but for the first two years of college education, and super hard, competitive and elitist (and without tuition fees). The point is the teachers are full time teachers and in my experience both as a student and a teacher it is way better than what universities can offer.
It is however quite expensive due to a huge teacher/student ratio, and can be hard for the mental health of students due to the tremenduous work charge. I really don’t know how the overall cost/benefits analysis work out, but all else being equal it is evidence for the “full time teachers better than half teacher/half researcher” idea.
One reason for having researchers teach is that in specialized subjects, it’s hard to find people who know the field well enough to teach it that are willing to be full-time teachers instead of actually doing work in the field (and keeping up with new developments, etc.). This probably matters more at the Master’s degree level than the bachelor’s degree level, though; there are a lot of people who aren’t Richard Feynman who can teach undergraduate students how to solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom, but the number of people who can teach string theory to physics graduate students is a lot smaller.
Excellent gears-level account of what’s going on, thank you.
This seems to suggest several alternative models for college education I’ve never considered before:
Have colleges with very specific, limited curricula as independent institutions and a set professor/student ratio, with several credits per semester assigned to some sort of self-directed learning, where the student takes an online course or pursues some other educational activity, and perhaps meets up with a mentor/student group/professor once a week to discuss it.
Break up the four-year college paradigm into two separate institutions, much like community colleges currently function. We can imagine an explore/exploit dichotomy here, where there are two-year institutions dedicated to providing an incredibly broad array of classes that students attend first, after which they matriculate to a second two-year school for a specific major. The first institution is basically a broader community college, which can already keep costs low. The second avoids the pitfall of breadth you outline above.
Legislation requiring better price disclosure? That gap between nominal and actual tuition seems particularly insidious to me, as I suspect something similar is going on with medicine.
Oddly enough, better housing/zoning policy, because (especially for undergraduates) housing costs are usually a large part of the bill. Do the tuition price increases account for the entirety of college price increases? How have college housing/food costs changed over time?
Once again, great work.
These are good points! I have been thinking the same thing. However, I don’t imagine the upper institute requiring prerequisites, just an entrance exam. But a four year college offers basically the same thing except they lower transaction costs to basically zero or making that decision to commit to something you like. Hence declaring or changing majors is usually easy if you do it sophomore year.
The price disclosure issue isn’t a problem. You can Google average cost of any private college and it will give a good ballpark estimate which matches the OPs 20k+ chart. Colleges engage in near perfect price discrimination. It’s not really considered nefarious, because it’s both redistributive and expands supply. The richer pay more, thus subsidizing the poorer. This allow more students than otherwise would be able to to afford the college.
This price discrimination expands supply by increasing the absolute quantity of students who can afford the schooling there. Charging 20k for everyone would allow fewer students to attend than charging 30k for some and 10k for others.
I agree about using an entrance exam over prerequisites. Depending on the specifics, I’d favor an entrance project over/alongside an entrance exam—basically a portfolio-like construct of work in the field (anything from solved sets of physics problems to github pages to artwork could count).
The thing with price disclosure is that, in order to facilitate charging wealthier students more, colleges are acting to obscure how much they cost. I understand it as a part of trading off a sacred value (education) versus a mundane one (money), and thus suboptimal.
Perhaps it makes more sense to have a cutoff, with students who can afford it paying, and those who can’t being entirely supported by the institution’s endowment (at least in cases where the institution has a large endowment)?
I’d suggest another model. Separate the research part of academia from the teaching part of academia. I currently am attending an institution that is nearly completely a teaching institution (mainly focused on engineering, health sciences, computing, and trades). The instructors are focused on teaching rather than research.
As for the research side of things, I’d suggest a department of research development as part of every government.
Something like this exists in the French classe préparatoire system. Basically imagine highschool, but for the first two years of college education, and super hard, competitive and elitist (and without tuition fees). The point is the teachers are full time teachers and in my experience both as a student and a teacher it is way better than what universities can offer.
It is however quite expensive due to a huge teacher/student ratio, and can be hard for the mental health of students due to the tremenduous work charge. I really don’t know how the overall cost/benefits analysis work out, but all else being equal it is evidence for the “full time teachers better than half teacher/half researcher” idea.
One reason for having researchers teach is that in specialized subjects, it’s hard to find people who know the field well enough to teach it that are willing to be full-time teachers instead of actually doing work in the field (and keeping up with new developments, etc.). This probably matters more at the Master’s degree level than the bachelor’s degree level, though; there are a lot of people who aren’t Richard Feynman who can teach undergraduate students how to solve the Schrodinger equation for the hydrogen atom, but the number of people who can teach string theory to physics graduate students is a lot smaller.