US Supreme Court Upholds Affordable Health Care Act

[kandrathe]

Recently on NPR, they were talking about the cost of College in the US, and how we got to the current place of high tuition and fees that we are now. The logic went something like this:
Govt: "Everyone should go to college, let's make more money available."
Uni: "More money's available, let's raise rates!"
Govt: "Fees went up, let's make more money available."
Uni: "More money's available, let's raise rates!"
Repeat ad naseum.

Until a) Congress is held accountable for the corruption inherent in the system ( aka lobbyists ), b) "Socialism" quits being equated to Fascism and Communism, and c) The gov't realizes that they need to grow a pair and start cracking down on some of industries that are running rampant and ruining the quality of life for the citizens, nothing is going to change.

I happen to know much about this actually.

When it comes to college costs; This ain't your grandpa's college anymore.

1) Like most organizations -- the biggest costs are the salaries of staff and faculty. So, just like the general inflation in all other organizations, colleges face the same pressures from increases in wages, and more importantly benefits. Whereas other parts of the economy can benefit from productivity -- students expect to be taught by a professor, and they don't like their class sizes to get too large either. A metric within academia used to judge institutional effectiveness is the faculty to student ratio. Most aspire for about 1:13.

Here is our actual change in advertised tuition price;

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Compare it to this handy chart from the University of Virginia on the change in faculty salaries over the past decade. Our faculty aren't paid as well as those in Virginia, but they are within the same employee market pool of talent. When I break out our compensation between increases in salary and benefits, you'd see dramatic increases in benefits costs.

2) Non-academic activities -- beyond the classroom, most colleges have developed many programs for co-curricular, to extra-curricular activities, such as orchestra's, choir, marching band, intramural athletics, etc. They all need space, equipment, and personnel -- all things that are paid for with tuition money. These things are expected to be a part of the college experience.

3) Technology -- Universities and increasingly colleges are becoming quint-essential places of research, competing for grants and other funding, but they are expected and required to be as plugged into technological trends as any high tech office park in Menlo Park.

4) Security -- parents are fairly loathe to send their emerging butterfly into a den of hungry ravens. Not only do you need security, you need the appearance of security with visible security personnel, camera's, elaborate door codes, etc. etc. Throw in government regulations too, like the Cleary act. High profile media attention to violent crimes also adds pressure. Lock down drills are as standard as tornado drills now. Also, we have an emergency response system that phones, texts and e-mails everyone associated with the campus within 5 minutes.

5) More academia -- a huge cost not often discussed is the plethora of tiny little programs with few students (i.e. the proverbial joke of underwater basket weaving) -- No one ever wants to kill these anachronisms in the dusty corners of Obscura Hall. The counterpoint is that if no one taught Latin anymore it would become a dead language. It is fun though, working at a University. I once learned enough Aramaic to give one of my student workers ( a linguistics student) someone with whom they could converse.

6) Everyone needs to go -- culturally in the US we've set expectations such that everyone must go to college, or at least try and fail. Our society doesn't value education in trades. More demand puts more pressure on the supply, so the price is predisposed to inflate. It's not like our CFO, Mr. Scrooge, sits down to figure out how much he can milk the parents out of this year. The simple description is that they take the budget and increase it 3% to account for increases in salaries and benefits. So, there is an automatic 3% inflation built in -- but, populations fluctuate, so, the tuition is calculated in relation to the expected number of paying students. Pricing is not simple either (e.g. college discount rates -- most of our students get about a 30 - 35% discount). The governments infusion of money just enables more people to attempt college than ever before, which props up all the bad choices that colleges and universities have made over the decades.

As a member of the administration of academia, these are only the top few things that come to my mind as we wrestle with containing costs at our (non-profit) institution of higher learning. I imagine the problem as a bunch of metal BB's zinging around inside a box. As the box expands (more programs, more dorm space, more professors, more administration, etc) more BB"s can fill the box and exert more pressure on growth. Like the chaos in the box, there is little effort spent on the efficiency or meaningful purpose of that growth. Most ideas get tried whether they make any sense or not (often under the illusionary guise and spirit of academic freedom).