Brochures are rife with amenities and activities like you're picking out a resort or extended summer camp where you can safely figure out who you are, make friends, and be protected until you're set free, job-pass in hand.

These advertisements are also primarily aimed at the parents.

My SO got a second degree several years ago, and all of her official and financial paperwork was addressed to "the parents of $SO". It was a bit shocking that there's so little expectation by universities for a legal adult to take agency in the process.

I only wonder how much of this process was a result of student demands for more parental oversight and involvement, and if the end result is better outcomes or merely justification of more money spent.

This was already really noticeable when I enrolled in undergrad 12 years ago at a large public university.

I think part of it has been driven by student demand for more parental oversight, but I also think the marketing is what got so many students to take out debt in the first place. So many of my undergrad classmates (perhaps even a slim majority) believed that undergrad was going to be the best 4 years of their lives and they had to make the most of them, which I personally found completely insane.

I also think that the financial system around universities warped in such a way that it became easier to establish direct relationships with parents as university became less affordable to those trying to work while studying. Not to mention the absurd amount of money and effort that universities put into alumni communications to drive giving back to the school.

For people who don't neccessarily like working (i.e. for most people), school and college are usually the best times of lifes. It's just that it's hard to appreciate that when you have no point of reference. My parents and aunt had this wisdom and, while I was a child, told me "enjoy yourself now, because it will be all downhill from here".

Or doing a PhD.

After that, any non-academic job is super easy.

I don't know where/when those people you mention went to undergrad. When I went, it was brutal and endless. In order to graduate in 4 years, I had to take 18-20 credits per semester. When I wasn't in the classroom, I was in lab, and when I wasn't in lab, I was working on hours and hours of assignments. The professors never coordinated workload, so it all came at once in waves. All the exams were done in the same week, too, so you'd have to frantically cram. EDIT: Then, there was the job hunt during junior and senior years. Resume after resume, application after application, interview after interview. If I actually did any partying, I certainly don't remember it. Those four years were a blur of coursework that I still have nightmares about and am glad are firmly in the past. No job I've ever had in the decades since has come close to the amount of workload I had in university.

School was better. You don't become homeless if you get a D

Being told that as a child really fucked me up, actually. It's a really bad, pernicious idea.

It's analogous to money in politics or insider trading as far as conflicts of interest go. I guess it would help if education was enshrined in our constitutions as a human right, which institutions had fiduciary duties to uphold.

What do you think made the CSU/UC system the most affordable and attractive option in the Country?

The thing you need to accept is that the unfettered administrative bloat was by design, and will always lead to this; the CSU/UC system was essentially tuition-free if you were local and extremely low cost for most of its History because it didn't offer what the others did and we Californians funded that with extremely high local/state/property taxes and our family and by extension our economies were rewarded for it, so we put up with.

It wasn't until the bureaucrats made Industry impose a mandatory University degree for most entry-level jobs well into the 90s that many of those same people migrated to academia and start to shift it to the sordid mess you see today.

Honestly, I say keep in place: let it fall into disrepute crippled by its own malaise once and for all but have legislation in place that it cannot be bailed out when it does. Its the only way I think this has any chance of reform.

Personally, one of the silver linings of the Shutdown in California is showing just how much unnecessary bloat their is in Universities (and in Industry) to deliver on its MVP: accredited completion of courses to issue degrees. If this doesn't disrupt academia and make it shift to a having mainly an online-learning direction for most of its programs then it should rightfully walk into its own demise.

I just registered for a bunch of Coresera and Udemy courses on ML, Sustainability and Supply Chain analytics with accreditation from Industry and University alike for what amounts to what cost less than what I paid for 1 or maybe 2 textbooks while I was in University--that I can complete at my own pace on my terms.

If the goal was to foster an environment for those with the drive to acquire useful skills, then I'd say we already have evolved past the archaic University system and are only forced to be burdened by it solely because of convention.

Apprenticeships are pretty much the backbone of the Germanic countries' Economic and Industrial might, and University is pretty much just an affectation or continued learning component; we need to learn that lesson considering just how much of the US 'education system' is based on Prussian Pedagogy and Ideology.

They don't have "college funds," they have "education funds" because they will always need education, regardless of how it's delivered.

I'm looking forward to a time when that can be used for Coursera, Lynda (LinkedIn Learning), and any other continuing education program. That will be a powerful shift.

And before techies get up in arms about how much of a meritocracy their field is -- survey your FAANG/elite startup coworkers. See what school they went to.

This cannot be true as most Americans do not go to college. Of those that do, most do not do it the "traditional" timeframe of 4 contiguous years after high school.

For example, only 36% of 25-30 year olds have a college degree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

It appears that claim is wrong:

"In October 2018, 69% of 16- to 24-year-olds who graduated high school in 2018 were enrolled, with 9 out of 10 reporting they were full-time students – a marginal increase over 2017 high school graduates, 67% of whom were enrolled in college or university. Over the last decade, that figure has fluctuated between 66% and 70%."

https://www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2019-04-...

It is probably worth recognizing that for students who go to college for the experience there is little incentive to graduate.

I think that is the most disheartening thing of all that its become such an accepted and prevalent narrative; from Junior year of High School to to my Junior year of undergrad I had my own business(es), and was involved in professional motorsports (University was always my 'Plan B' if it all went wrong) in some capacity.

My Life was way more fun (albeit stressful and exhausting) outside of University, and almost never within it; I was there to do one thing and one thing only: graduate, and network with professors for lab positions and training to expedite my career as a Clinical Laboratory Scientist. Nothing else mattered to me that took place at school, it was a drain on what I deemed my 'real life,' so I knew I was an anomaly going into this system as Freshman enrollment and orientation had made it clear to me what I had gotten into.

I went to one of the more 'renown' party schools in the US for my upper divisions so I often had embarrassing encounters when turning down persistent invitations to events and parties at school, some possibly even being useful networking events--I mean if you have ever been to an official Red Bull party at an Industry event with an open bar, catering and entertainment and insiders to network and make deals was always going to make some kegger on campus seem monotonous.

Especially if you're there while under 21, as it leaves an impression to say the least.

But, I did notice how prevalent the Health Sciences, which were often really impacted majors at that school, were geared toward admitting non-Californian students, and would bend backwards for International students.

During the good times of the bubble era, I saw it for what it was and didn't mind really it: I was quite open to the cosmopolitan student body.

But it became crystallized how gravely insidious it had become as we started to head into the recession and especially within it as catering to International students was a priority; limited class and lab sections were a common occurrence as the CSU/UC system got hit hard with budget cuts and furloughs, strikes etc...

This all meant that placating to the International students was an even higher priority as so much funding depended on doing so, as keeping them content and within the system was far more profitable than having local students (Californian students) graduate on time who pay 1/7 of the tuition and probably don't participate as much on 'campus life' as they have family and friends outside of it.

I saw time and again as departments were pulling class/lab seats but were filled with predominately International Chinese students in the upper divisions as we had to petition to enter them, and exclusive elective courses: this isn't racist profiling just an observation, my great-grandmother is from Guangzhou, just so its clear.

I still remember my Organic Chemistry lecture that had 100+ seats available, and we were all sitting on the floor, isles, and their were students out the doors trying to petition for a seat. It's embarrassing to recall what it felt like I remember someone from administration coming irate at the fire hazard that it created and her solution being: encouraging those that had 'flexibility in their schedule' to go off campus to the CU 30 miles away and would be admitted (at an undisclosed a higher fee) as the first bailout in 2007 was being proposed that fall semester.

All of this left such a horribly bitter taste in my mouth, I saw the same thing happen with the Korean students at the University where I started where my family still lived and it was a crazy transition. Every time I went to visit there were more Mercedes, BMW, Audi and as the Korean luxury brands got more prevalent Genesis and big Hyundai cars all over that campus as I rode my bike around.

CU Boulder looks like that from the outside, and I'm told from a friend that recently graduated with a BS in Genetics it was the same; he's a local but his freshman year dorm roommate was some Saudi prince's son. I tuned out to the stories he'd say, but the it was practically the same.

So, with that in mind its not surprise to me to see articles like this being common place and finally confirming it, its a big part of what made me lose all value in academia, despite knowing several amazing professors and post docs within. Its realized it was such a rigged system that I had to put scruples and often times dignity off the table to accomplish my goals in a reasonable time frame; this led to a very interesting conversations with an International student in Lichtenstein that led to a collaborative study network I created among my peers.

This article with the USC admissions is also worth a read, as the Admission's officer was profiting from Chinese student admission fraud:

https://laist.com/2020/04/02/usc-cheating-ex-admissions-offi...

I have a hard time seeing how this (college being a great time in your life) is disheartening. For many, it's a time that a combination of

- learning

- meeting new people

- experiencing new things

And for many of them, there's much less stress about how they're going to pay their bills, feed their kids, etc. Those are great things for a LOT of people. If you can, you should enjoy them to the best of your ability.

That you're mentally setting yourself up for be stunted for the rest of your Life is inevitable if you reach your apex by 22 and is incredibly sad; personally speaking, despite that phase of my Life I really didn't know how much more joy I would get out of Life until I turned 26 and saw how my skill set enabled way more opportunities as I got to travel, work and collaborate with People outside my discipline.

Learning the 'Game of Life' via the University lens is what makes the 'academic' trope so astonishingly laughable: making 'safe spaces' a norm has to be the most infantile notion I've ever heard of. What part of Life, outside the perversions of a FAANG like corp where you're pretty much vetted for social regression/immaturity, accommodates that?

And as we saw with all the cancel culture and mob violence mentality that has been created (mainly on University campuses): it is cancerous. If you cannot see a problem with this, then I think you are the Problem.

I'm so glad I got out as that phase of campus life was starting to became the norm.

I got to do all those things during college (exception travel, but I'm not a big fan of travel). I've enjoyed my life since college, in some ways more. But college was a unique, wonderful experience that I remember fondly. Going back to school isn't in the cards for me, but it's certainly the source of the occasional idle thought.

The rest of your discussion seems to veer off on a tangent ranting about current social constructs at colleges. It certainly isn't part of the discussion I was having about how college can be a truly wonderful time in one's life. That has been true for decades, at the least, certainly predating the things you're talking about.

Your POV reflects that, which is very unfortunate, as does your adamant dismissal about my 'tangent' not being relevant to my conclusion of how the priorities of the system have been completely lost; I used it to try and convey a very observable example as it proves that the well can been poisoned by administrative decree, which is in turn aided by those very same who sought to create University into a walled garden experience.

If people are uncomfortable with having their convictions and ideals questioned and placed into scrutiny than something like 'higher education' should be the antithesis of what they are seek and they should be discouraged into such a system--instead they seem to be encouraged to do so all while accruing obscene amounts of un-payable student debt, backed by the State. Further creating an explotable under-class which ultimately amounts to indentured servitude.

But hey, don't let me interfere with the pursuits of all of those luminary Gender Studies majors being awarded PhDs for their exemplary work on the correct use of Gender pronouns of fluid-furries Influencers on Social Media.

Are there no legal issues that could come up with this? Working with financial documents addressed to someone other than yourself?

I briefly touched on this elsewhere in this thread, but as a working professional who happens to still be very young and wanting to get my degree, universities are pissing me off. They create their own definitions of residency and independence that differ from the legal versions that seem to have no purpose but to extract more money from a potential student.

Schools maybe didn't say it as blatantly, but I think that's been a/the selling point since ... you had schools you went away to.

I'm not convinced a huge % of students value outcomes until ... it is time to face them.

If they did I think I'd see a lot different choices by students. That's not recrimination as much as a recognition about how folks make these kinds of decisions / choices.

Rather, parental demands like "we're paying for this, we want to know what's going on"...

And to be fair that position makes sense when parents put up hundreds of thousands of dollars.

By changing the institutions incentives, we've managed to destroy the educational value of the institutions themselves - because we no longer incentivise it.

[1]:https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2019/08/grea...

All of this disappears in a moment if those two are separate.

But universities would resist that kicking and screaming to high heaven. Because it would not only undermine their 'great institution' claims, but educational routes that aren't universities would trump them (in terms of cost for attainment) in very short order.

Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline. At UK universities, grades are routinely reviewed by an "external examiner" from a separate institution. In my experience, the result of this additional scrutiny has usually be to put grades up rather than lower them.

> Easier said than done. In more niche disciplines, the only people qualified to evaluate student attainment are other academics in the same discipline.

It is actually done in quite a few places. And even when there is no non-academic alternative, at the very least the examiners could entirely come from a different university than the lecturers.

In Germany there is the concept of "Staatsexamen" where a government-run examination agency recruits examiners from representatives of the profession and academia.

I work in large-scale assessment, and can attest that we should hold a fairly skeptical/conservative position in the power of tests to get to the "real" skill level of prospective practitioners. All of the measures currently available are fairly weak at predicting outcomes.

I didn't know I would be solving problems.

Good that they teach math, but there's a giant disconnect between academia and industry.

How does this work in Canada in regards to professional licensing? In the US, it my understanding that getting an engineering license requires an accredited program and that majority of a reddit programs are 4 year bachelors degrees. Even most master degrees dont have the right accreditation.

In my state, a four year BS degree in an engineering discipline is an automatic accept, although a non-engineering but engineering-related degree is accepted with four years of experience working essentially as a PE's apprentice. And regardless of degree situation, six years of PE apprentice type work qualifies. The criteria are not set by the state gov but by a professional cert board.

So a BS in EE from an ABET approved school is an automatic accept to start stamping civil engineering sewer projects, which seems a little weird as if obtaining a neuroscience degree qualifies one to perform open heart surgery, but whatever. My BS in computer science is "engineering like" enough that a four year apprenticeship under a PE would qualify me, although I didn't pursue that path. My SiL's primary K12 educator degree would qualify her after six years of apprenticeship under a PE, hilariously implying her liberal arts degree counts negative two years toward learning to be a PE, LOL.

I know some PEs and the required written test is reportedly very easy if you recently graduated, virtually impossible the longer you've been focused tightly in one industry. Stealth ageism much like how CS jobs "require" algorithm whiteboarding.

My state is extremely interested in prior felony convictions as a criteria. Not sure why that's relevant in any fashion to PE stamp a civil engineering project. I don't know how common that weird fixation is, this might be doc dropping what state I live in?

Anyway, in summary, there are 49 other states with differing opinions.

If an industry wants its employees to receive a specific kind of training, it should pay for it.

I mostly agree with your cynicism, but this doesn't actually strike me as completely implausible. Phased differently, is it really so astonishing that with 30 years of research and development we can massively improve performance? Once Upon a Time, calculus was a super advanced thing that only the very most advanced students at University could do. Now we have high school students doing it on the regular. Other fields don't usually have the rate of improvement the Computing has, but everybody is making progress.

Same with grades and everything. Once student having it has advantage outside, the school that is more strict will have more students loosing those advantages.

And as for quality of education and knowledge, I honestly don't have a sense that careful knowledgeable thinkers would be favored by typical management.

The total value of any given degree might well go down, but where else are the employers who have always done graduate schemes going to hire people from? Captive market.

Gaming league tables drives almost all management decisions in UK universities, because it so directly affects the bottom line.

That the whole system has become so dependent on foreign funding that this sort of incentive became a financially prudent decision for the unis is terrifying from the point of view of independence [2] and ongoing security of the system.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/26/australian-uni...

[2]: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/universities-rewrite...

Honestly I think airbnb and student housing are scapegoats to an extent, where the bigger problem is a council that tends to oppose new housing they don't control (aka stuff that isn't council flats, which most people don't qualify for), and the political imperative to keep housing expensive means keeping it scarce. Height restrictions in the absolute middle of the city are bizarre, and it's kind of shocking that we still have low-ish density suburban semi-d's next to Grafton Street.

https://goo.gl/maps/MzB5DfXpqCZp9V5V6

Edit: If I may risk a small plug - I was displeased with the UI of Irish housing sites and made www.gaffologist.com to address this.

Good. May they collapse swiftly.

Thats a bit disingenous and hyperbolic. It is true that more apartments are available (00's) due to Corona but the housing crisis is far from over.

It's far more nuanced and complex -- involving tax laws, property dev incentives and planning laws and policy. None of which he mentions.

property dev incentives - airbnb & student housing

planning laws - airbnb & student housing

policy - airbn and student housing

All of these except possibly the first item could directly address airbnb & student housing. I'm not seeing where you 2 disagree.

The thing that pisses me off the most is that the student services usually provide very little guidance to international students about their legal rights in Australia, leading to massive wage exploitation (this is a global problem -- I have friends in the EU -- namely Finland -- and the US that have suffered from this too). Fears over their visas being revoked mean that they are also very unlikely to report abuses by the university or their employers to anyone. I've had to plead with friends to report their employer to Fair Work for outright wage theft, and I know many people who were lied to by their employer into thinking they can work more hours than they can (which was then effectively used as implicit blackmail -- "if you report my abuses, I can get you kicked out of the country"). They didn't know better, because they weren't told by anyone.

And then there's work experience. Many degrees (especially in engineering fields) require practical work experience in order to complete your degree, but employers are incredibly reluctant to give international students unpaid internships (let's not get into the fact that unpaid internships are actually illegal in Australia, except for the specific case of university degrees it seems). My partner has dealt with employers who have explicitly said that they don't accept international students (which is not legal as it is discriminatory), and others have done it more slyly (international students can only work 20 hours a week during semester, so they put on the job description that you must work 21 hours a week). And universities don't help here either, in fact I'm going to name and shame UTS here. At a UTS Career Fair a few years ago, they specified which employers accepted international students and which didn't on the maps (only about a quarter did) and then they gave all of the international students different coloured name badges to local students. The net result was that international students were ignored when they came to any of the "local-only" booths. I don't know if they continued this behaviour, but I sent a complaint about this when I heard about it. Absolutely disgraceful.

Sorry, I just felt the need to rant.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/82sxp9/pay_1000_...

And if anybody is reading this thinking, "whew, I'm sure glad I'm not an international student", this affects everybody. (I mean, you should be outraged anyway but just in case). By normalizing abusive behavior, it creeps up on everyone the same, even if it takes a little bit longer to spread.

One time we did a drone competition sponsored by NASA, in which it was me (Italian), two guys and a girl from Mexico, and one local whose only job was to talk to the corporate types because they wanted to talk to a citizen.

But I think it's fair summary to say that if you are neither a citizen or a permanent resident, you have a damn tough hill to climb [3].

[1] https://www.quora.com/How-can-non-U-S-citizens-work-for-NASA...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

[3] https://www.inverse.com/article/21487-elon-musk-spacex-forei...

Absolutely not. No company requires a clearance for employment in general, only for specific programs. Also, US Permanent Residents can access unclassified export-controlled information.

(A bit ironic that it took-off after they "hired" that German scientist after WWII - pun intended)

I would argue that this has occurred already; my associates in China assume that many students in Australia cheat their way through their degree, especially the ones who cheated their way into their degree (regarding the English requirements). eg https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-01/chinese-students-paid...

I can't see international travel restrictions to Australia being relaxed until a vaccine is developed, so universities and landlords are going to be in a world of hurt.

Honest question: Australia wants to seriously lock its borders for 18-24 months? And what if a vaccine is not successful (despite tens in development, just two are being currently tested on humans)?

Things change. The situation is extremely dynamic not static. And response will change too.

Germany is already thinking of scaling back its lockdown. So will Australia.

Holidaying sick people will quickly swamp the local small infrastructure as they can't easily be moved away!

As it always turns out, providing food and accomondation for tens of thousands of people is always easier said than done.

The government is not messing around because many previous arrivals who were told to self isolate at home turned out not be self isolating, and most of the infections to date have been traced to overseas arrivals vs local "community transmissions".

Most states have also shut their borders, the only exceptions being NSW and Victoria. E.g., anyone entering South Australia or Tasmania from interstate has to spend the first two weeks in self isolation.

I can see the domestic travel restrictions being eased in a few months, but think the Australian government will be very reluctant to relax international travel restrictions until there is a vaccine.

This blog may be relevant:

https://professorconfess.blogspot.com/

For others it's a way to build status back in the home country by having attended a US university, and then go back.

For others it's just a way to hang out in the country, while paying someone else to do all of the exam-taking for them. The wealthy Chinese-dense "626 area" in SoCal comes to mind as one of the big offenders in this underworld. They don't even show up to class, someone else does. There's no incentive for universities to police this, why bite the hand that feeds? The school gets a few hundred k in revenue, the wealthy student gets to live in the US for a few years, have fun. It's a win win, even though it corrupts the point of an F1 visa. Unlike H-1Bs, I don't think they're limited, so at least it's not a zero-sum game where some other "more deserving" students are screwed out of a place.

Just like decoupling health care from employment is a good idea, decoupling for-profit education from immigration seems like a good call as well. Unless we're on board with immigration being pay-to-play, vs using other markers besides family net worth in order to gate keep.

Those with the means can purchase US citizenship much more directly - for example look up the investor visa.

Many many fellow engineering students went down this road with me - all are US citizens now.

It's almost guaranteed that you'll get it if you get your application in early in the year.

Right, that makes complete sense.

Many years ago a friend’s family offered me $30k to marry her so she could get her green card. If students are spending upwards of $200k for a shot at a H1b than that marriage would have been a bargain in comparison. She’s happily married now with kids. And her spouse did not magically become $30k richer for it.

The not so good universities spend a ton of money on marketing.

And some very good universities do too.

The American education brand was strong a decade ago, so any American university would be considered good. Further, people outside the US are often surprised by how many scams are prevalent in the US. The general belief used to be that the US was a largely sensible country where people did things the right way.

Minor nitpick, you get two years of extension if you graduate with a STEM degree.

> Only if your employer has already applied for your H1B. Doesn't seem like so to me, the requirements for the extension are (from [1]): >> Have a degree in an eligible STEM field from a Student and Exchange Visitor Program-certified school that is accredited when the student submits their STEM OPT extension application to USCIS. >> Pursue their STEM OPT extension through an employer that is enrolled in USCIS's E-Verify employment eligibility verification program. >> Select a STEM OPT employer that provides the student with formal training and learning objectives. Work a minimum of 20 hours per week per employer.

[1]: https://studyinthestates.dhs.gov/stem-opt-extension-overview

In the UK at least, we used to have a model where universities were funded by the government (through tax, of course) but the government also set hard limits on how many students you could enrol, with penalties for going over. The current model which Tony Blair in effect started and David Cameron completed removed this cap, and so opened the way for the current growth race.

Whether a university can survive under the new model, or even be better off than before without increasing student numbers depends on many things including the amount and kind of reasearch income, the proportion of international students they have and whether they're city-centre or campus-based. I would say most UK universities were faced with a choice between masively increasing student numbers or massively cutting expenditure to survive - lots of them seem to be doing a combination of both, which is one reason we've seen so many staff strikes this year. At least in several decent (Russell Group) universities that I know a bit about personally, it was very much a case of we have to grow by x% a year just to carry on paying our staff and bills. At least in the UK, I make a case that it's not just greedy unis and fat cat vice-chancellors driving this problem.

To give some numbers - the fees for home undergraduates are capped at £9250 a year and in a science or engineering degree with high equipment costs, it's hard to break even on these fees. International students are where the money really comes from, a one-year MSc degree can set you back £25k-£30k in fees alone although that usually includes doing a supervised project over the summer as well as attending an academic year's worth of teaching. Or at least, it'll include whatever supervision you can get this summer.

We now live in a world where you don't need a secretary, because you can type up documents yourself, you can instantly send written communication via email. You can publish agendas, and other campus wide information instantly on a website. You can automate. You can distribute notes to your students for free instead of endless photocopies.

Why given these gifts bestowed upon us by the tech gods, are we so hopelessly inefficient in the West?

What is the actual point in doing more research, when we have all this step jump in technology, and we can't seem to do anything any more?

Part of what they do is really valuable: customer services helpdesk/helpline for students for example, every question they answer is one that doesn't end up taking academics' time.

But then there's also all the "quality control" where you really wonder how we ever managed to run a degree without every decision going through at least three different committees. And you need someone to sit on these committees, because academics will avoid them whenever they can :)

now, some of the ivy league colleges have endowments in the multiple billions in addition to other properties but UGA is a state college

[0]https://www.uga.edu/facts.php

Between the "REF" and grant applications it's very easy to spend more time getting the money for research and producing the required outputs than it is on doing the research.

There is also the much wider question of what it is that "we" want universities to "do".

Slate Star Codex [1] has a good overview, but doesn't provide a solution (instead only providing some good evidence that rejects some hypotheses).

As far as I can tell, the single biggest driver of Cost Disease is labor, but not salary: it takes more people to deliver the same services. This in turn is driven by market failure:

- The signaling component of higher education is zero-sum, and infinite loans and foreign capital mean not enough few consumers make college decisions based on cost

- US states have shown insufficient teeth in enforcing caps on construction budgets; overruns are expected meaning the bidding process cannot actually cause cost savings. And the days of private light rail companies competing against each other are long, long gone.

- Primary education's cost growth has been concentrated in areas that are not teaching - administration and bureaucracy. There is, of course, no meaningful cost competition at all in primary education.

All of these carry the caveat that we used to be able to get these things for cheaper, and e.g. primary education was never traded on a free market. So what happened? Was it inevitable, and merely took time?

If anyone has other ideas, please let me know. I would love to vote against cost disease and call any politician who will listen, but I don't fully understand the problem, let alone have a solution to offer.

[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Probably because some other kind of unnecessary positions have been created

Most of these, on their own, are actually good things in my opinion (though I'm skeptical of the coroporate messaging one, we're supposed to be a university).

EDIT: just to clarify, after seeing the lecture slides that some of my esteemed colleagues used to produce, the accessibility policy is a very good thing indeed.

College in the USA is expensive because of the credit available. That is how prices are set.

They only served the rich elite

That is because there has been a severe lack of competition until SpaceX arrived. Let's be honest there is no real alternative to Airbus and Boeing for airplanes, and it has been the same situation for space before SpaceX.

Or, to express it better: Why should ULA have tried to divert to agile processes or try out new ways of doing things when the status quo reliably keeps jobs in congressional districts and money in supplier companies?

The goal of these semi-governmental mega companies is not to efficiently produce goods/services, the goal is to ensure distribution of public taxpayer money to jobs, no matter how wasteful they are, in order to essentially bribe voters. Airbus, for example, could drastically cut costs and time in airplane production if they would not have to send airframes and parts sometimes three times across Europe, but that would not fly well with politicians as voters would ask "we pay r&d money to Airbus but why aren't we getting anything back?"...

Universities provided education that pushed society forward for centuries. In just 30 years of applying growth obsessed capitalism, that has stopped working.

Tech isn't my complaint. Tech helps, yet despite this huge boost, we are going backwards.

"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions." [1]

[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

The independent school (aka private school) sector has seen fees double or triple over the last 10-20 years. This is largely driven by rich foreign students, primarily Chinese, sending their kids to these schools.

I don't particularly regret these bastions of class division destroying their reputation for money, but there are a lot of knock on effects. Independent schools used to be one of the few paths for middle class mobility - scrounge enough to send your kids there, and they are basically guaranteed entry into the elite of British society. But these days the tuition is prohibitively expensive and prices out almost everyone. This just exacerbates the class divide even more in the UK.

The main issue though is that independent schools in the UK have non-profit status - so pay NO tax on the fees they charge. With the rising fees locking out most people from access to them, there is very little societal benefit to these schools. But as a taxpayer, I have to subsidize education for the very rich or rich foreign nationals. It's ridiculous.

Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education. The charitable status of private schools means that the money used for their education isn't taxed twice.

I agree that private schooling tends to exacerbate divisions. The majority of state school provision in the UK is atrocious. I have more concern that very little is being done about the second rate schooling we have than I do about the, relatively small, amount of first rate schooling in the private and state sectors.

I don't think this is really true anymore. I agree state schools were truly awful in the 80s/90s (my partner who went to state school didn't even learn times tables). Quality of state school has improved tremendously over the last 20 years, and I'd say it's very good these days. Especially as middle class families are priced out of independent schools. In fact I'd even say it may be better for your kids to go to the local state school nowadays, otherwise you are isolating them from their local community.

> Not a penny of your tax goes to subsidising their education.

I, of course, totally disagree :). I toured many London independent schools last year for secondary, and you just need to take a look at the amazing school grounds to see the benefits of charitable status. [1] These are for-profit institutions with huge bursaries that avoid paying almost all taxes. Any tax exemption is equivalent to a subsidy that I am funding as a taxpayer.

1. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/charities-detaile...

In what way are they for profit institutions? Who is profiting financially? They're charities (for the most part) and are legally obliged to be run like charities. Now if you're suggesting that some or all of them are paying dividends to some secret investor then sure. But you're not, presumably.

Again, it's fine for you not to agree with private schools. I understand that. But to suggest that you're somehow paying for them doesn't bear scrutiny.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-50563833

If it doesn’t have beneficial owners it’s not a for-profit. Eton is in the same position as Oxford as far as having owners who receive profits from it goes. Neither do. They’re run with some regard to the idea of a mission, on inertia with the biggest impact coming from current staff.

That’s not saying they’re perfect, or that they should be allowed to continue to exist. Plenty of UK citizens hate them and the class they represent and want them destroyed. If they get a government elected that wants them destroyed they will be. Nothing lasts forever.

An entity not paying some amount of tax in practice means the rest of us will have to cover that amount with our own taxes. Same thing with corporate tax evasion etc.

Boarding schools have always been for a minority and this hasn't changed because of foreign pupils.

Now, boarding schools are often keen on foreign pupils (esp. Chinese nowadays) because it IS actually good for their reputation: The Chinese education system is such that these pupils tend to ace maths and science subjects in exams and so the school can then market their outstanding GCSE and A levels results.

As for taxes: People who send their children to independent schools fund the public sector through their taxes in the same way as everyone else but do not use public sector resources at all. I think it is fair that they are not taxed twice on top of that.

Searching for "family boarding" shows this isn't unique.

I sincerely doubt this. I’m not sure if my father’s school had day students when he attended but boarders were definitely a large majority. The omnipresence of boarding schools in post WWII British fiction doesn’t make any sense unless there was at least rough parity among independent schools. CS Lewis, George Orwell, Roald Dahl, off the top of my head. Seamus Heaney after looking it up.

Obviously boarding schools are always going to be much more expensive than day schools.

There was an ongoing political debate on some of the news sites before everything got taken over by coronavirus: independent schools have charity status (which includes exemption from business rates tax that goes back to the local area) because historically they were indeed typical examples of charities. For example:

> "Eton College was founded by King Henry VI as a charity school to provide free education to 70 poor boys who would then go on to King's College, Cambridge, founded by the same King in 1441." (Wikipedia)

The debate was whether a school that mainly serves and lives off rich foreigners should still enjoy the benefits of charity status - public opinion seemed to be moving in the direction of "tax it like any other business".

And people were, very cautiously, starting to ask the same of universities. Meanwhile in faculty meetings, I've heard this from many different places, it's an unspoken rule that you don't refer to home students as "second class students" or anything like that but management is finding increasingly creative ways to paraphrase that. Things like "pivot to high-margin students".

It's interesting comparing hospitals with universities, since both are supposedly non-profit but make obscene amounts of money. In the past 15-20 years, both universities and hospitals have increased their administrative staff and the percentage of revenue that goes towards paying administrators, and invest the increased revenue into new fancy buildings and a "better experience", treating their students/patients as customers instead of people who need education/healthcare. Universities have been relying more heavily on adjunct professors, who are paid very little compared to full time professors. The money they make is not being reinvested into education (or better healthcare, in the case of hospitals).

Charity status for public schools is a tax avoidance strategy. They're not really non-profits.

Eisenhower had pumped tons of funding into universities to help us catch up to the Soviets after Sputnik. This was primarily for what is now called STEM but benefited each university as whole.

Fast forward to the late-1960's and the costs of the Vietnam War plus social programs under Johnson led to huge cuts in funding to universities.

To make up the shortfall, admissions rates at many schools, including the Ivy League, went north of 50%. Coupled with the fact that being in college was an exemption from the draft meant that total enrollment skyrocketed.

This whole situation was made to clear to me when I was in high school and attended a UPenn information session. The rep from UPenn asked "are there any UPenn alumni in the room?" and numerous parents who graduated from the late 1960s to the early 1970s stood up. I remember thinking "Wow! Admissions rates at UPenn now are below 10% so these parents must have really been sharp!".

Finding out about the funding cuts and admissions rates changing drove home that an institution's reputation can change dramatically over the years; sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worst. It also highlighted how outside incentives can dramatically change the internal processes of a large school/company etc.

My current institution was founded on the principal that 33% of funding came from the feds, the state, and tuition. Now, it is 5% federal (excluding PELL grants), 11% state, and the remaining amount is tuition and PELL grants. Our incentive is to get as many students as we can, otherwise we close the doors.

If you want higher education to stop its sleazy processes, we need to fund it appropriately via tax dollars. It's a lot like people who want abstinence education, in my opinion. You can want people to do the right thing all you want, but at the end of the day, people are going to bang, so you need to set them up with the birth control they need. You can want institutions of higher education to act altruistically all you want, while cutting funding, but at the end of the day, they're going to do what they have to in order to keep the doors open.

There is a debate as to whether education should be for profit at all versus purely state funded, but if it is private then normally an industry bringing in overseas money and customers would be celebrated.

Besides, students are typically non-local in any university town.

This is of course by no means unique as the article says, Brown University almost went bankrupt in the 90s, so there was a program to target wealthy European families and admit their children to the school, in exchange for large donations and full tuition.

Many of these schools talk a big game about valuing education, but there is a reason many of them are older than the most storied for profit companies, and the fact that Universities are private and non-profit protect them from being audited.

/s

The latter point gets overlooked, enticing/stealing and retaining talent is a huge western soft power advantage. After separating the wheat from chaff higher up the academic chain, there's a disproportionate of foreign students in PhD and labs [1]. Without going into specific criticism of western secondary school education, the broad point is most countries just don't produce enough talent to fill demand. Also credentialism and educational inflation means many masters programs bend over backwards not to fail anyone. At least among my cohort who spans many types of masters and professional degrees, you get proportionally more unqualified locals getting pushed out of the program with just passing grades as foreign students who bought their way through. There seems to be pervasive pressure to hold graduation metric up because most people recognize, outside of some fields, what you learn is rarely applicable to what you do. And even fields where theres overlap, you have too much unqualified people getting the pass. Regardless, my point is, if we need to acquire talent, hedging against rich international students isn't the worst bet. The odds are overwhelmingly in the house favour. They pay you. Some of them are slackers, but many also received the best education from their home countries but can't make it to the top 1% cut off to enter extremely competitive and prestigious local institutions. Foreign students wanting to pour guaranteed money and potential talent into our society is something to be optimized for.

[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/81-599-x/2016011/c-g/c-g...

I don't have anything against immigration per se, and I don't want to be accused of xenophobia or any such nonsense, but this is not ok. We are catering to international populations while essentially leaving our countrymen behind.

It isn't just some blind nationalism that fuels my concern; if you don't fix your domestic problems, soon foreigners won't have any more incentive to immigrate...plus, in addition to the pitiful devaluation of the degree, there's already a glut of grads in almost every sector, including STEM. Something has to change. We will also see wages rise as the employee pool shrinks and locals are less likely to work for lower wages because they're not escaping third world poverty.

It's high time to limit foreign students attendance. And maybe after that we can raise standards to recover what little prestige our schools had because between this international cash cow and diversity initiatives I can easily explain why so many people are graduating college today with minimal competence. Lowering standards makes us all worse off in the long run, even if your metric of "national college graduation rate" improves.

As policy, the US government gives the bar and AMA tremendous power to exclude foreign degree holders and greatly limit the number of foreign nationals at US med and law schools. At the same time, the US government created a visa program to bring in hundreds of thousands of competitors in STEM fields, and created special exemptions to the lottery that encouraged US graduate programs to fill their classes with students from overseas.

People can agree or disagree that this is good policy, but it seems pretty clear to me that the US interfered with the markets and created policies that encourage people who would like to live in the US but don't have that right to study engineering, and it encouraged people who already have that right to do something else, like law, medicine, or other protected fields.

Even if you agree this was bad policy overall, there's a tremendous amount of room to disagree about how to solve it. Restrictionists might say that we should restrict all professions equally. Libertarians might say the problem isn't that engineering is wide open, it's that law and medicine and everything else aren't open enough.

And then we wonder why college is so expensive? The current system gives them every incentive to charge whatever they want.

The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. With a $250k incentive to choose the former, that's what they choose.

The financial pressure to ignore their cheating makes sense to me, but it's not clear to me how that's related to language skills.

These US schools are teaching classes only in English, so the students' inability to speak, write, and (in some cases) read English means that they can't do the work.

I've observed them brazenly cheating during tests by looking at other students' papers, but I think it's more common to hire English speakers who know Chinese to do the work for them. They fail some tests, sure, but they end up with C's overall and a diploma to take home.

I actually had a classmate in college who ended up founding a successful business that exclusive connects American speakers of Chinese with wealthy students from China to write their essays and do their homework.

It's a scam on both sides and it devalues the degrees.

Failing someone on the grounds of cheating at the university where I attended was a huge time investment. If the student contested their failing grade, the professor/lecturer who was the accuser had to go with evidence and present it before an internal panel. The student would obviously be allowed to defend themselves.

The outcome of the panel would rarely be in the favor of the accuser and against the student. The student would have to have been accused multiple times before the panel would take the complaint seriously. The punishment would end up being something like turning the failing grade into just one grade above failing.

When you consider how much a lecture gets paid, and how little importance teaching is given for researchers, you begin to understand why lecturers/professors just hand out Ds and move on with their lives.

The amount of times I caught people with MOSS[1] was too damn high. Never had anything come out of it so I stopped going the extra mile past sending the results to the person teaching the course.

[1] https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

Initially it posed quite a dilemma for her since she had the power to give zeros for cheating, we determined the best course of action is to forward the evidence to the professor and forget about it.

Isn't the former exactly what they should be choosing?

As for what they "should" be choosing, I think the article hits on it: they should be running leaner operations that can survive without what is essentially a large scale diploma fraud operation, in which both the schools and foreign students are complicit.

Case in point: I found the perfect program for me: online CS bachelors, from a respected state school, very affordable. However, I cant even be considered a resident of the state I live and work in for several years and would be forced to pay out of state tuition, making it prohibitively expensive unless I want to be paying down loans the rest of my career.

Everyone knows how to solve the college problem. It’s just that colleges have no incentive to do so until they’re forced somehow.

Foreign students are not a bad thing. There’s not a limit in the number of professors. In fact, we’re graduating way more graduate students than there are slots of tenured teaching positions.

The problem isn’t too many foreign or domestic students or not enough people qualified to be professors, it’s administrations ran by greedy MBA types.

Financial aid because unchecked student loans allow universities to charge as much as they want for tuition. Student loans being the most predatory type of loan (being non-dischargeable)

I want numbers on these arguments.

What we need is to strengthen this by granting green cards to those who get advanced degrees in key fields.

Yeah, overspending is a big problem (cut Administrative overhead and highly paid deans, etc!), but foreign students are a sign of a healthy and competitive higher education system.

[0]: https://www.baltimoresun.com/coronavirus/bs-md-johns-hopkins...

[1]: https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2020/4/3/21207613/u...

Housing and meal plans should be refunded for the unused portion of the semester, yes.

Suppose you pay £8000 for a course of lectures, with materials and access to laboratories. Then the provider fire the lecturer, close the laboratories, ... surely you see there's an educational deficit then. It may be true you can pass an exam from the course texts and online materials that remain available, but the educational benefit would be exceedingly diminished.

None of the campus facilities are available. A large % of my course fees go toward maintaining labs, student groups and sports. I can't touch any of those.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WW7mhtp5a5E

The comments about having classrooms is because the Oxford and Cambridge colleges tend not to teach people in groups the size you might be used to at high school. You'd have tutorials with one or two students and a Prof in their office, and if your Prof was nice they'd even give you some booze while sitting like the characters are doing there. There are lectures as well with hundreds of students in huge halls. Depends a lot of what you're studying but I did a mix of engineering and social science, so had a sniff of both.

Both of them! [0]

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmOvEwtDycs

Now corporate espionage is off the charts, and our elite are too short-term and rootless to care about the long-term consequences.