This is just the straw that is popping the college bubble.
My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million.
Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off.
The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are not getting what they paid for, so of course they are suing.
It's the same story as every other industry in the US.. the administrators/executives trying to rob everyone blind while they can.
Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.
It was obvious while I was a student that the ratio of administrators to faculty was ridiculous. And the growth rate ratio between them was 3:1. At no point was it clear to me what real value they were adding. I was the captain of a more capital and real-estate intensive than average student group, and it was absolutely infuriating to try to figure out how to get anything done. There was always some new bureaucrat condensing out of the ether who needed to be appeased. No meant no, but a yes was never enough.
To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action.
It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.
> Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.
This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US.
Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.
I work in administration at a regional public university. What you said does definitely happen, but it's not the case everywhere.
The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.
Less than half of the students from my alma mater graduate within four years. When I learned this I was dumbfounded. The incentives are just not correctly aligned. The university is able to profit off of students taking fewer credit hours and staying more semesters, and academic advisors actively encourage this!
If anything the pandemic seems to have made people less patient with self-justifying administrators.
I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.
Same at a neighboring city. They want to lay off workers due to COVID while they have doubled administrative staff over the last few years. And none of the administrators is going to get laid off.
The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.
From personal experience in the industry right now, this is not the case at all institutions. I certainly haven't done a survey, but I know of a few that have been very equitable in their refund policy.
The reason there is such a large premium for on-campus education versus online universities is because on-campus education is an experience as much as it is a service.
If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the content; they don't need (or have time for) the on-campus experience aspect of college.
The on-campus college experience encompasses so much more than just acquiring knowledge based on what's taught in class. It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. It's being in a place where there are so many interesting people to meet. It's being in a relatively forgiving environment where practically everyone is figuring out how to live on their own (or with roommates) for the first time. Being physically present in that environment is a key draw.
For me, the VAST majority of the value I got out of my on-campus education was the stuff that happened outside of class time. And I'm not even talking about the friendships or the networking or the fun. I'm talking about my actual education. For instance, I learned a lot more about journalism by working for the campus newspaper than from classroom instruction. And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually.
I say that, by the way, as a remote worker who has had to spend a lot of time convincing managers and higher-ups that yes, remote workers can be as productive and energized as in-office workers. Remote workers are generally happier when they're not looking to their job to supply all of their social needs. But an on-campus experience is much more all-encompassing in terms of what needs and desires it fulfills for post-adolescents.
The problem is, if you're going to fall back on that perspective, Real Life (TM) has all those things too, and it will continue to do so, for essentially free. There will be clusters of that sort of thing somewhere, just as there are "retirement communities" and "bedroom communities" and such. Universities certainly aren't bringing anywhere near enough value for their marginal improvement on those matters vs. what would exist without them to be worth decades of crushing debt.
If you surrender on what the Universities have to offer intellectually, then you're putting them in a position where they're going to be competing with generalized social forces that can create similar clusters of demographically-concentrated appeal without having to pay administrators and deans and speech police and all that stuff, and the universities will never be able to win carrying around such baggage.
"And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually."
It can't be recreated virtually. But it can be recreated without a "University" attached to it.
If what the unis were offering was, you know, proportional to the gain, maybe 1/5th to 1/10th the cost they are now, then maybe it would still be worth it. But paying gold-plated prices for "social experiences marginally better than what you could put together yourself if they weren't there" is not a sustainable plan, or an adequate defense for their practices.
I think a lot of what you're describing ties in with the general lack of "third places" in the US. College is basically one giant third place, and that community experience is hard to find elsewhere.
> It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time.
that's a community. You shouldn't have to need to pay to be part of a community. By gating this behind an expensive college tuition fee, it causes separation in society and is a cause for the inequalities of opportunities in the world. IMHO, tertiary education should be "free" (that is, a loan which is almost zero interest, and only needs to be paid back when earning above some "high" tax rate).
I used to say stuff like this, but now I think it's mostly a lie I would tell myself. For most people, the "experience" of college/university is basically the a four-year party (or five- or six-...). For those who attend elite schools, they get a networking benefit. Most people aren't learning anything in classes, nor are they learning much outside of class beyond their ethanol tolerance.
I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).
Unfortunately, online education isn't popular because folks don't want the experience, especially if you are returning to school later in life. The reality is that many colleges are geared towards a non-working, single, young adult student. This is reflected in classroom times and coursework. (I had a class require volunteer work and short-term participation in college groups). You simply cannot work a 9-5 job and attend most regular colleges.
I agree with your overall point, but one of the issues with online learning is the credential received isn't the same value as an in-person one. There are an increasing number of exceptions like the Georgia Tech online masters, but I'm not aware of a high-end online bachelors degree.
I don't know about the legal question, but I think universities are setting themselves up for pain by arguing that the online experience they've been offering isn't substantially different from the in-person experience they had been offering. It's easy to imagine people calling their bluff on this, choosing to do remote learning even after COVID-19 goes away if it will save $100k+ over 4 years, and a subsequent contraction in the number of universities we need to educate people.
If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits.
The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees and simply delay education until after Coronavirus.
Instead, they made the best of the situation and tried to do right by the students as best they could within the financial, legal, and ethical constraints of Coronavirus. In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). We’re all making compromises under the circumstances.
I’d be more sympathetic if these students were requesting to defer their education until after Coronavirus and were willing to forgo all education and credits in the mean time. Demanding both the education and a refund isn’t exactly fair.
I was taking a class that transitioned online. (University extension school, biostatistics). So the networking and campus related activities don't relate to me. At the extension school, some classes were taught online already (this one was in person only).
I felt the teaching staff made a pretty huge effort to get things online and running well. I'm sure they weren't getting paid more to make the transition.
There was a general feeling of, this sucks but lets through it. It was a lot more work for faculty and students (It takes longer to learn material remotely, at least for me..). I don't think diplomas will have asterix next to them, saying "finished online", like the article indicates.
Going forward, what tuition is going to be if classes are online in the fall is another issue. I'm guessing universities will charge what they can.
Reddit's "AskReddit" subreddit had a question recently hosted with a title something along the lines of "How did your college financially screw you over in this crisis?" The answers were varied and often ... "shocking" is the wrong word, because I have come to expect a kind of compulsive money-grubbing from many universities ... perhaps "flinch-inducing." Certainly the local subreddit for my city discussed similar money-grabs, nickel-and-diming, and general high-handed behavior interspersed with a general lack of competency.
Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.
Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.
Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.
> "In my personal opinion, I can deliver the same quality of education online as I could in person."
Although this statement is debatable to begin with, it also misses a huge point. Even if the quality of an online education is the same, many students cannot learn as anywhere near as well in that environment. They paid tens of thousands of dollars for in-person learning, so for that to be replaced with something entirely different in form really sucks.
Anecdata from my little corner. My 'non-profit' university's president is at 800k, his VP is 500k and multiple other admin officials in similar range. It is hard not to have a bitter taste as they just offered the students $500 grant application for their COVID19 trouble.
If there is one good thing about this pandemic, it is shining a light on all this.
And from the other end of the spectrum, at my University of California campus, the top salaries are all in the 300k range, and all go to world-class engineering and sciences faculty who bring in millions in research grants each year. The chancellor, deans and one coach also break 300k, but that's it.
So, different schools, different governance models, different outcomes.
I think the offshoot of this will be that student/university contracts are about to become massive one sided EULA's with all liability on the student side.
Refunds are a pretty hard thing for universities to do though, in a lot of cases the money has already been spent. If the question is how much they charge for next semester (assuming closure or mostly online learning) then I think there's a stronger argument to not charge students as much.
The student perspective is basically that you're already paying so much, that the least the university can do is do good on what's being paid for or in the event where that is not possible, simply don't charge for what's not going to happen in the fall.
It's interesting that the short term solution of not giving refunds will likely cause long-term pain for universities because they are then admitting that remote is "the same as" in person. Most of the university value is in the experience. I'd predict that if colleges don't admit in person > online and don't offer refunds, then many students will decide to save the $150K over four years and just take online courses, then live in an interesting city to get that life/social experience.
Since there's unlikely a formal contract involved, they'll have to make a case with the public marketing and value prop which includes peers, access to professors, dorm life, state of the art labs, extracurriculars, a beautiful campus, alumni network, job fairs, etc.
Most of these colleges have spent years devaluing the content itself by putting it online for free and now that's one of the few things they're still offering.. for the small price of $X0,000/year.
While I agree tuition is too high, people have gone a little crazy with using the most expensive outliers as examples. Average tuition for state schools in 2018 was around $9,000 and I don't think that includes financial aid and scholarships.
And to complain about the coat of private schools is a bit like browsing around in a BMW dealership and complaining about how everything is too expensive.
Not to mention that if you are low income, there are lots of very nearly free options.
In general, declared states of emergency are a valid reason to get out of the "Did the college deliver it?" question as long as they attempted mitigations that are reasonable given the restrictions.
Few people I know with children in private schools(k-12) are planning on paying full tuition regardless of weather the next academic year is virtual or physical...
I wonder how many US colleges will go under if many students dont return after the covid vaccine appears. Many were already hurting from a small GenZ cohort, competition from well-paying non-degree opportunities (now dubious), and current administration strangulation of immigrant scholars.
Investors should step in and pay the kids off (since these lawsuits are either guaranteed losers or will take years to settle). Then in exchange take a % of their future earnings. Vary the % and timeline based on the degree they're seeking.
I actually kind of like this idea - following the mold of coding bootcamps.
The only concern I have with this is tying monetary incentives to education. As a society, I think we benefit greatly from the diversity in learning paths that people choose to follow.
Once you attach a price tag - higher percentage of future earnings for majors like literature, philosophy - you are getting closer to turning the university system into a STEM robot factory.
A large part of the reason that some young people choose to go into esoteric fields of study is that their monetary outcome is not real to them at the point that they enter college.
To be fair, I bet there is a significant difference in the proportion of students from wealthy economic backgrounds who enter these esoteric fields compared to that of poorer students. And if it is the wealthy who are studying these kinds of subjects, then the approach you suggest will not seriously affect the diversity of subjects being explored.
Colleges should just open up. Young students are low risk that they're unlikely to be very sick if/when they contract disease. There will be some old or unhealthy staff members that can be protected.
California and NY have stronger lock down rules, but people should just transfer to Texas, Florida places that are more open.
Faculty member at a top-tier CS school. For most of the faculty where I am, an hourly consulting fee in the range of $500-1000 is reasonable. If you take the low-end of that range ($500) x 3 hours of class time per week ($1500) x 12 weeks of class you get $18,000 worth of expert time. Multiply that by three classes and you get $54k of value each semester, so even with non-trivial tuition it is still a pretty good deal. Likewise, FAANG et al recruit very heavily from our school so there is additional value-add.
I personally came from modest means and have a ton of outstanding student debt and was hesitant to go the faculty route precisely because I think the higher education in the US can be financially exploitative, but there are places where the high tuition is in fact a bargain based on market rates for the expertise. Likewise, nearly all faculty at top-tier CS schools can make way more in the private sector - we do this job because we really enjoy mentoring and work hard to make sure our students get the best education possible.
That kind of consulting fees for 1:20 shared time with so many other students on topics they don't control flow of ??? (i.e. I don't get to choose the specifics on topic you are "consulting" on or dictate what and how you teach me).
I wouldn't be able charge $ 10,000 - $20,000 for a 1:1 consulting session ! There are very very few people in the world who can command that kind of premium
[+] [-] ben7799|5 years ago|reply
My Alma mater has 15 administrators who make 2-3x more than the President did when I graduated. The President makes $5 million+. The VP/Dean of HR makes > $1 million.
Administrators took a 5% pay cut. Lots of professors are furloughed or laid off.
The school did all kinds of shenanigans to hang onto as much tuition/board/food money as they could. Students are not getting what they paid for, so of course they are suing.
It's the same story as every other industry in the US.. the administrators/executives trying to rob everyone blind while they can.
Alumni have been furious for years now, this isn't helping.
[+] [-] zbrozek|5 years ago|reply
To be quite honest, I see the same thing in my professional work. Everyone feels that their problems deserve more headcount. And heads make work, justifying more heads. Further, those heads want to get promoted, so they make-work to justify that too. And to compound the problem, people try to magnify their power and impact by becoming gatekeepers. More people to say no and more overhead and drag to every action.
It's unfortunately difficult to ask and to honestly answer why we do things and whether those things are worthwhile. It's even harder to take corrective action even if you admit that what you're doing is not worthwhile. I think it's one of the pillars of cost disease that is nibbling away the on-the-ground productivity of Western societies.
[+] [-] mnm1|5 years ago|reply
This is why I stopped all the donations to my alma mater. Why should I donate to an institution whose tuition has risen 300% over the last 15 years? If they wanted donations, they shouldn't have taught us about inflation then because now we can see them for the predatory scumbags they really are. And this increase in cost doesn't even pay for professors. They are getting shafted to the point where that is no longer a viable career option for any but a lucky few. Hell, for the quarter million plus it would take to get my bachelor's degree today, I'm pretty sure I can hire my own dedicated professors, get better instruction, finish earlier, and learn more. Or spend a tiny fraction of that living in Europe and then attend university there for free or a few hundred dollars a semester, which probably includes a bus pass and is less than I would spend on books in the US.
Only in a society of extreme anti-intellectualism would public K-12 education be such complete and utter shit and university cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and be unaffordable by basically anyone not in the upper class or lucky enough to get a scholarship. The children are our future and extreme stupidity is already here and has been here for a long time, so there is little to no hope of reversing this trend of anti-intellectualism and stupidity that most of the nation is beholden to.
[+] [-] yoyohello13|5 years ago|reply
The highest-paid person we have is the president and they make a little over $200k a year. All admin just too a 20% pay cut and faculty haven't been furloughed at all yet.
[+] [-] austinl|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vmchale|5 years ago|reply
I don't think this can continue. Professors/teachers add value for students, you can't cut them indefinitely when they are now so much of the reason that the online college experience has value.
[+] [-] Ididntdothis|5 years ago|reply
The plan is to have parks being cleaned by unpaid volunteers instead of city staff.
[+] [-] xhkkffbf|5 years ago|reply
https://renewrensselaer.org/
It's really sad the plunder.
[+] [-] mac01021|5 years ago|reply
Are the people in these positions in possession of a skill that non of the people who would gladly hold the post for $150k have? What is it?
They're hired by a board of regents, right? What is the BOR looking for that they value so highly?
[+] [-] heavyset_go|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jawns|5 years ago|reply
If you're only interested in mastering the content, then online learning may be the place for you. That's why we see so many people pursuing online courses for their master's degrees and when they return to school later in life. They just want the content; they don't need (or have time for) the on-campus experience aspect of college.
The on-campus college experience encompasses so much more than just acquiring knowledge based on what's taught in class. It's dorm life, it's extracurriculars, it's meeting people and forming friendships and hanging out with them outside of class time. It's being in a place where there are so many interesting people to meet. It's being in a relatively forgiving environment where practically everyone is figuring out how to live on their own (or with roommates) for the first time. Being physically present in that environment is a key draw.
For me, the VAST majority of the value I got out of my on-campus education was the stuff that happened outside of class time. And I'm not even talking about the friendships or the networking or the fun. I'm talking about my actual education. For instance, I learned a lot more about journalism by working for the campus newspaper than from classroom instruction. And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually.
I say that, by the way, as a remote worker who has had to spend a lot of time convincing managers and higher-ups that yes, remote workers can be as productive and energized as in-office workers. Remote workers are generally happier when they're not looking to their job to supply all of their social needs. But an on-campus experience is much more all-encompassing in terms of what needs and desires it fulfills for post-adolescents.
[+] [-] jerf|5 years ago|reply
If you surrender on what the Universities have to offer intellectually, then you're putting them in a position where they're going to be competing with generalized social forces that can create similar clusters of demographically-concentrated appeal without having to pay administrators and deans and speech police and all that stuff, and the universities will never be able to win carrying around such baggage.
"And I don't think that atmosphere or energy can be easily recreated virtually."
It can't be recreated virtually. But it can be recreated without a "University" attached to it.
If what the unis were offering was, you know, proportional to the gain, maybe 1/5th to 1/10th the cost they are now, then maybe it would still be worth it. But paying gold-plated prices for "social experiences marginally better than what you could put together yourself if they weren't there" is not a sustainable plan, or an adequate defense for their practices.
Viva la disaggregation.
[+] [-] delecti|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
[+] [-] chii|5 years ago|reply
that's a community. You shouldn't have to need to pay to be part of a community. By gating this behind an expensive college tuition fee, it causes separation in society and is a cause for the inequalities of opportunities in the world. IMHO, tertiary education should be "free" (that is, a loan which is almost zero interest, and only needs to be paid back when earning above some "high" tax rate).
[+] [-] baryphonic|5 years ago|reply
I think you stumbled onto a big truth, though: college kids have by and large zero "real world" experience outside of contrived scenarios posed by their teachers/coaches, so college classes can often devolve into the Chinese Room thought experiment with students memorizing the lookup table without having any concrete idea of what they are talking about, based on lack of experience. (When I realized that this was also true for a significant number of the faculty and almost all of the administration–people whose only cultural experience is within academia,–I started treating my time in college more honestly.) I think a better system would be one in which people actually do gain some experience before attending college. It would be much more efficient (working for free as an intern or apprentice seems preferable to paying several tens to hundreds of kilobux to maximize learning during free time).
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 7thaccount|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] albntomat0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trixie_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkingsbery|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PragmaticPulp|5 years ago|reply
If you read the article, you’ll see that the universities in question have already, voluntarily, given partial refunds to students prior to these lawsuits.
The lawsuits are demanding even more refunds while the students still want to collect the remote education. If the Universities were faced with this decision up front, it would have been better for them to furlough all employees and simply delay education until after Coronavirus.
Instead, they made the best of the situation and tried to do right by the students as best they could within the financial, legal, and ethical constraints of Coronavirus. In my opinion, it’s not reasonable to demand universities operate at a loss to provide the remote education at a rate less than it costs them to operate (which I suspect may be happening already in some cases). We’re all making compromises under the circumstances.
I’d be more sympathetic if these students were requesting to defer their education until after Coronavirus and were willing to forgo all education and credits in the mean time. Demanding both the education and a refund isn’t exactly fair.
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
I felt the teaching staff made a pretty huge effort to get things online and running well. I'm sure they weren't getting paid more to make the transition.
There was a general feeling of, this sucks but lets through it. It was a lot more work for faculty and students (It takes longer to learn material remotely, at least for me..). I don't think diplomas will have asterix next to them, saying "finished online", like the article indicates.
Going forward, what tuition is going to be if classes are online in the fall is another issue. I'm guessing universities will charge what they can.
[+] [-] at_a_remove|5 years ago|reply
Even universities with some staggeringly large endowments will cry poor and point to the endowments being tied up in various investments, which did take a turn down at the start, but looking at the Dow I see that the numbers are nearly back to what they were in May of 2019.
Many universities are staggeringly bloated, yet squeeze their faculty via adjuncts, then squeeze the adjuncts in turn. Why pay tenured faculty rates when you can throw in an adjunct? And then why pay the adjunct well? After all, we have these enormous administrative budgets. Having had access to some historical employer data and performing general tracking as part of a "make sure that the input is within historical limits" sanity check, I noted that staff, "important" staff, had grown massively over a decade.
Now the on-campus college experience, for which so much is subtracted from student accounts in funding various events and facilities, is largely remote, well, that "value-add" is now a "where's the beef?" moment.
[+] [-] irskep|5 years ago|reply
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/gqb30j/uni_stude...
[+] [-] cg505|5 years ago|reply
Although this statement is debatable to begin with, it also misses a huge point. Even if the quality of an online education is the same, many students cannot learn as anywhere near as well in that environment. They paid tens of thousands of dollars for in-person learning, so for that to be replaced with something entirely different in form really sucks.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|5 years ago|reply
If there is one good thing about this pandemic, it is shining a light on all this.
[+] [-] secabeen|5 years ago|reply
So, different schools, different governance models, different outcomes.
[+] [-] LanceH|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] easterncalculus|5 years ago|reply
The student perspective is basically that you're already paying so much, that the least the university can do is do good on what's being paid for or in the event where that is not possible, simply don't charge for what's not going to happen in the fall.
[+] [-] andygcook|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|5 years ago|reply
a) What did the college promise?
b) Did the college deliver it?
Since there's unlikely a formal contract involved, they'll have to make a case with the public marketing and value prop which includes peers, access to professors, dorm life, state of the art labs, extracurriculars, a beautiful campus, alumni network, job fairs, etc.
Most of these colleges have spent years devaluing the content itself by putting it online for free and now that's one of the few things they're still offering.. for the small price of $X0,000/year.
[+] [-] jjeaff|5 years ago|reply
And to complain about the coat of private schools is a bit like browsing around in a BMW dealership and complaining about how everything is too expensive.
Not to mention that if you are low income, there are lots of very nearly free options.
[+] [-] PeterisP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] naveen99|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter303|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paulcole|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zomglings|5 years ago|reply
The only concern I have with this is tying monetary incentives to education. As a society, I think we benefit greatly from the diversity in learning paths that people choose to follow.
Once you attach a price tag - higher percentage of future earnings for majors like literature, philosophy - you are getting closer to turning the university system into a STEM robot factory.
A large part of the reason that some young people choose to go into esoteric fields of study is that their monetary outcome is not real to them at the point that they enter college.
To be fair, I bet there is a significant difference in the proportion of students from wealthy economic backgrounds who enter these esoteric fields compared to that of poorer students. And if it is the wealthy who are studying these kinds of subjects, then the approach you suggest will not seriously affect the diversity of subjects being explored.
[+] [-] renlo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ouid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rb808|5 years ago|reply
California and NY have stronger lock down rules, but people should just transfer to Texas, Florida places that are more open.
[+] [-] tlibert|5 years ago|reply
I personally came from modest means and have a ton of outstanding student debt and was hesitant to go the faculty route precisely because I think the higher education in the US can be financially exploitative, but there are places where the high tuition is in fact a bargain based on market rates for the expertise. Likewise, nearly all faculty at top-tier CS schools can make way more in the private sector - we do this job because we really enjoy mentoring and work hard to make sure our students get the best education possible.
[+] [-] manquer|5 years ago|reply
I wouldn't be able charge $ 10,000 - $20,000 for a 1:1 consulting session ! There are very very few people in the world who can command that kind of premium