A solution to higher education costs?

But will it?

My prediction: you will continue to argue over higher education until some Democrat passes a bill under which the Federal government will pay 80% of your fees and lend you the rest at no interest.

As the left abandons the white working class in favour of intellectual whites, the collective guilt will take over campuses and any dissenting opinion will be repressed.

 

This is another thing. I talked to some high school students once, and I tried to explain to them that it didn't matter where they went for their undergraduate degrees. Pretty much everything you learn in undergrad is stuff that has been know for decades or more. Spend all that money on a graduate degree from a good school.

There are some exceptions to this. Better universities will offer more opportunities for undergraduate research, and their faculties will be privy to new developments, but generally going to State U is going to learn you the same stuff as going to an expensive private school.

 

Universities are a business, just like any other business. They will set their prices as high as what they are able to get. Trouble is the government will give any person a loan (with interest of course) to pay whatever the university wishes to charge. So, of course tuition is high. If student loans were doled out by banks/financial institutions, looking at whether the person would likely be able to afford the loan, whether they are a good risk, there wouldn't be as many, and tuition would have to go down to reasonable.

Another bonus is that employers have begun to require degrees for jobs that shouldn't require one, because they are looking for what they consider "a better grade of person." That would change too.

I am not a big Marco Rubio fan, but he did say something that resonated with me: that not ALL kids are or should be on the college track. We need people to man our lower level jobs too. Children and their parents have been told for the last 30-40 years that it is impossible to have a good life without higher education. Not true and money isn't everything.

 

For engineering and the sciences, it would seem that research centers are the way to go. Students would have to be within commuting distance to attend the facilities. But undergrad and graduate research programs could still operate normally this way. b

For some majors you could probably live anywhere. A kid in Florida can take classes at UCLA.

With a standardized series, one even starts to question the idea of having different schools. As you say, they are all teaching the same thing. I haven't thought about this before but it's worth a ponder.

 

Wow, I was just checking. One can purchase the Feynman lectures for as little as $40. I think I paid almost $300 for mine decades ago.

 

I wonder if this is because students who live off campus have heavier personal loads - jobs, family, adult responsibilities.

In my world, only the rich kids lived on campus. And daddy was paying the bills.

I swear to god, sometimes I thought my ex wife planned to start fights before midterms and finals. I think my stress rubbed off on her and almost like clockwork, we would have a big fight when I could least afford the time or the emotional trauma. Nothing like fighting when you're going to take a final on 3 hours of sleep as it is.

 

That, and I think a lot of the hard core party folks are living in apartments off campus.

 

Yes! This is absolutely essential. College in America has become a coming-of-age rite of passage rather than actually servicing its intended purpose. This is a completely dysfunctional model. It leads to tremendous waste of resources both for universities and for the students attending them. I can't tell you how many cases I've encountered of students dropping out after one or two semesters because they spent 99% of their time and energy on partying rather than actually doing the work they paid thousands to get the opportunity to do.

Jordan Peterson had a good idea of how to make public universities run more efficiently and that was to announce a like 15% cut in funding and then have the faculty go to war with itself over what was most important to retain in the university. This would ideally eliminate much of the excess and uselessness that is present in much of the humanities. I'm not anti humanities, but when you are offering courses that are essentially Left-wing propaganda and acting like you are actually educating people, we would all be better off without such things.

 

Raise the standards drastically, and eliminate quotas. Make the colleges compete for worthy students

 

Back in my day, the way to keep costs within budget was to do as many credits as you could get away with at a community college, and then do your last two years at a proper university where you got a good deal just by having established residency in the state. Between what your parents could chip in, grants, scholarships, and what you could earn at a part-time job, there was no reason to even take out student loans.

What some of you fail to account for is that universities aren't simply to pump noggins with as much useless information as possible, but to establish relationships with other future movers and shakers of the world. It is a riff-raff filter that separates the future sanitation engineers from the future masters of the universe. It's also quite useful to immerse yourself with people who aren't just warm meat, but are capable of thinking like doctors or lawyers or bankers. You don't want to have to reinvent the wheel or live through the enlightenment every single time you step into a lecture hall, only to be surrounded by dullards.

 

Let's not forget another drain on money, all the university administration system with all the overlapping administrators making loads of money. Chancellors, Deans, department heads, vice presidence, presidents. At the university I work, they hired a Chancellor of Diversity and that person make $650K. What the hell does a chancellor for diversity do? So many redundant offices. Lots of money going to the top

 

Exactly. Admin costs are one of the big drivers of tuition increase. Professor's pay and students/prof haven't changed much. Students per admin have gone down.

 

That would be great for fields like economics where theorist are truly all over the ball park with everything from what I would call hyperkeynesians like Krugman to the so-called Freshwater. school to the Austrians.

 

If you don't have one you could get sued for racial discrimination. If you have one at least it looks like you're trying. I fair percentage of the admin at most colleges and universities is dedicated to keeping their ass covered.