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)?
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)?