Where the hell is all this gov’t loan money going? Clearly not to the people actually teaching the classes. I can sort of understand why my engineering degree was expensive - most of my last couple years I spent a lot of time in labs that clearly cost millions. But for an MFA, you need a room, some desks, and a professor. What’s the just…
Where the hell is all this gov’t loan money going? Clearly not to the people actually teaching the classes. I can sort of understand why my engineering degree was expensive - most of my last couple years I spent a lot of time in labs that clearly cost millions. But for an MFA, you need a room, some desks, and a professor. What’s the justification for that costing more than maybe $10k a year at the most?
I’m immensely frustrated that seemingly all the mainstream discussion is “why won’t the government pay for college?” instead of “why the hell does college cost so much, whoever is paying it?”. That a place with billions in the bank can be charging $60k for 15 or so hours a week in a classroom for 8 months, led by someone making $35k, is insane.
Take this with a grain of salt because I am not a higher ed finance person (because I value my sanity) but there are four things going on: the discount rate, cross-subsidy, administration costs, and capitol costs.
1) First: The Discount Rate. This refers to how much of the published tuition cost actually gets charged to the student, on average. Its no where near 100% and on an individual level can vary by academic achievement and family financial status. (This system has many flaws.) This is the most true at prestigious universities but it pervades the whole system.
On the whole, real undergraduate tuition has been stable to declining recently, and most undergraduate students leave with less than a third of the debt this woman has.
2) Cross subsidy: your tuition rate was likely very similar to that of your humanities major classmates but they used less of the expensive labs. Cross-subsidy is endemic across the university but figuring out what is actually net negative vs positive is a huge nightmare (it depends on how many majors the program brings in, how much they pay, etc). These predatory graduate programs absolutely do subsidize other programs--for one thing, they don’t do the tuition discounting (see above) that the undergraduate programs do.
3) Administration. Some of this is bloat, some of this is necessary for compliance (every time someone says they want “accountability”, someone has to start tracking that), some of its runs programs that either students or faculty genuinely appreciate (like the athletic center).
4) Capitol costs. All colleges are constantly building--there is always the oldest building on campus or a newer one that didn’t age well (like the athletic center). Besides construction, there’s maintenance, keeping current on technical equipment (very important for STEM and workforce programs), and utilities.
When I have seen comparative budgets, these elite universities do pour a lot of money into their students’ experience, and if you don’t find that valuable your local community college/public regional would love to have you.
Where the hell is all this gov’t loan money going? Clearly not to the people actually teaching the classes. I can sort of understand why my engineering degree was expensive - most of my last couple years I spent a lot of time in labs that clearly cost millions. But for an MFA, you need a room, some desks, and a professor. What’s the justification for that costing more than maybe $10k a year at the most?
I’m immensely frustrated that seemingly all the mainstream discussion is “why won’t the government pay for college?” instead of “why the hell does college cost so much, whoever is paying it?”. That a place with billions in the bank can be charging $60k for 15 or so hours a week in a classroom for 8 months, led by someone making $35k, is insane.
Take this with a grain of salt because I am not a higher ed finance person (because I value my sanity) but there are four things going on: the discount rate, cross-subsidy, administration costs, and capitol costs.
1) First: The Discount Rate. This refers to how much of the published tuition cost actually gets charged to the student, on average. Its no where near 100% and on an individual level can vary by academic achievement and family financial status. (This system has many flaws.) This is the most true at prestigious universities but it pervades the whole system.
On the whole, real undergraduate tuition has been stable to declining recently, and most undergraduate students leave with less than a third of the debt this woman has.
2) Cross subsidy: your tuition rate was likely very similar to that of your humanities major classmates but they used less of the expensive labs. Cross-subsidy is endemic across the university but figuring out what is actually net negative vs positive is a huge nightmare (it depends on how many majors the program brings in, how much they pay, etc). These predatory graduate programs absolutely do subsidize other programs--for one thing, they don’t do the tuition discounting (see above) that the undergraduate programs do.
3) Administration. Some of this is bloat, some of this is necessary for compliance (every time someone says they want “accountability”, someone has to start tracking that), some of its runs programs that either students or faculty genuinely appreciate (like the athletic center).
4) Capitol costs. All colleges are constantly building--there is always the oldest building on campus or a newer one that didn’t age well (like the athletic center). Besides construction, there’s maintenance, keeping current on technical equipment (very important for STEM and workforce programs), and utilities.
When I have seen comparative budgets, these elite universities do pour a lot of money into their students’ experience, and if you don’t find that valuable your local community college/public regional would love to have you.