I am not convinced that the will to change to bare bones college exists (notwithstanding that NEO and usual support it). Even in this thread it seems to me that most people who favor free college have no interest in the bare bones approach but simply want other people to subsidize it. And as NEO admits, the “just more subsidy” approach would be a disaster. Subsidies are a large part of why college costs have risen as quickly as they have in the last couple of decades. Further subsidies will only make it worse.
And my expectation is that if the “free college” discussion moves to also include the bare bones education model, you will see a huge drop off in support for free college. Result will be high ed system of haves and have nots. Will there is for less not more of that.
And I come back to my confusion again in terms of the goal of free college. One response here (and the one most often given generally) is student debt. To support that claim, an article is linked which states that student loan debt isn’t a problem for the typical undergrad student. How does that support making college free for large numbers of kids? And one response to me question there (after noting the most debt is at the grad school level) is we need to make grad school free too. Said article notes that forgiving graduate school loans (and free grad school amounts to forgiving them from the start) would amount to a windfall to upper income people. Yet another argument for free college is the income inequality. How do windfalls to those with upper incomes help with that inequality?
@tutumom2001
That is so far from what I said that I’m not even sure how you even came up with that.
The job openings are determined by the market. That is solidly in the hands of private individuals. However, it’s disingenuous on the part of schools not to play a role in stopping students from making stupid decisions, career-wise, by allowing them to go towards a field without job prospects. Instead, majors should provide a wide enough skillset that they would be able to find employment with what they learn.
The limits would be a sanity check. If all forecasts suggest that we’ll need X more people with Y skills over the next 10 years, it would be insane to think that we need three times X people there. But 10-30% more is perfectly reasonable if they can find employment elsewhere if things don’t go as planned.
@snarlatron
As I said, a “college as it is now but FREE” model wouldn’t work. You need large-scale overhauls or else the price goes crazy. There needs to be a systematic effort to make things cheaper or nothing works out in the end.
The model I’m proposing is straight-up socialism. It will be a long time before that variety of model sees any widespread consideration because people have a natural aversion to that that goes beyond specific reasons. Though rather than bare-bones, I would think of the model I describe more so as a “cheaper on average” model, in which more people go to schools that are less expensive to operate and get the same quality of education as before.
People want college not to cost as much as it does. But very few people have the will to do what it actually costs to make that happen. My plan talks about less of the “fun” of college, and more taxes. Not really most people’s idea of a popular proposal to just make things free by taxing something that most people don’t like, like Wall Street speculation.
I don’t think it would lead to that. It will more so just lead to matching people to their proper skill level. There are always people who can do more than others in a given field and that’s not going to change. Anyone who has the proper skill level would be able to attend the schools they want and get the education they need for the jobs they’re looking for, as long as those jobs are reasonably existent.
I will admit that the existence of private schools that you actually have to pay for will lead to a severe degree of explicit classism where people who go to private institutions will get opportunities that are simply not open to the less wealthy. I have never seen a society in any country that has ever managed to effectively address the issue of classism.
I’m going to have to ask you to give more details about how you actually think that making things free for everyone will lead to the “upper class” being better off. I can’t really figure out exactly what you’re saying and I’d rather not attack a strawman if I don’t properly understand the point you’re trying to make.
Are dorms really that big a driver of costs at most universities?
At most universities, it is mainly non-commuter frosh who live in the dorms, while upper level residential students live nearby off-campus. Also, a university could operate its dorms so that the dorm prices could cover the costs of the dorms. If the dorms are expensive, that will, of course, create incentives for students to live off campus, reducing the student demand for more dorms. Many universities are have mostly commuter students anyway.
Also, when new universities are built, they are often located in areas of cheap real estate. Of course, if the university later attracts other things around it, the real estate could get expensive later, which could constrain future expansion.
Good question. Though it depends on specific universities, I’d say that yes, that probably does contribute a lot to the costs. The majority of the expenditures are on infrastructure and its expansion, and on the salaries of people who work for the school on administrative tasks. From what I’ve seen the on-campus living arrangements contribute a lot to those expenses.
Again, things differ between schools but I’m not sure if I can corroborate your experience. Of all the particularly egregious expansion plans I’ve seen, at least half of them have a lot to do with dorms and on-campus living arrangements. Specifically, I’ve seen some schools that add severe pressures on students to move into expensive dorms because the schools made payment arrangements in which the schools buy dorm buildings on credit, then pay off the investors in rent gains for the next decade.
Off-campus is also an option, and I’ve seen a lot of students move towards it. It’s unfortunately not generally as cheap as one would hope; proximity to the university allows them to raise prices. But it would be interesting to see how much of tuition money actually goes into maintenance of on-campus living arrangements and their related infrastructure.
Always an issue. Universities are often built at least 50 years in advance of when they actually grow large enough to start becoming a hub and increasing their own price. It’s an inherently expensive arrangement but perhaps universities themselves go too far in a lot of ways that exacerbate those costs.
Out of all of the California public universities, only two appear to have the majority of all undergraduates living in the dorms (UCSC and CMA). All campuses besides CMA are heavily biased toward frosh students living in the dorms.
(CMA = California Maritime Academy, a small specialized school.)
Do public universities elsewhere tend to have a higher percentage of undergraduates (not just frosh) living in the dorms?
To be perfectly honest I’m finding it hard to find good data on that. I’ll list a few sources I did find.
[US News Rankings](http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/most-on-campus)
Suggest that a lot of the big “80-100% dorms” schools are private universities and colleges. A few public California schools make the list but you would be correct that they’re not that common (maybe it has to to with real estate costs). It would be interesting to analyze correlations between part-time enrollment and student housing numbers.
[Google Answers](Google Answers: Number of on-campus college students)
Census data from 15 years ago. The number seems to have been at around the 15-20% mark back then for on-campus living, with a higher number for off-campus living, and with about 50% of students living at home. Number of on-campus students is substantially higher for first-years. It covers all students in higher education and not just university full-timers though. And of course the data is ancient.
I spent some time digging through census data and I came up dry. But I can offer some slightly more recent data, from 2011, on general college enrollment: https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/p20-571.pdf
Suggests that 50% or so of students are full-timers, and 50% or so of UG students are in the “18-22 year old” demographic. Lots of data to look at but the format of the census seems to have changed a lot and I simply haven’t even seen the question of living arrangements being considered in recent years.
Despite what the candidates say, high student debt is NOT the primary problem with higher ed. The stories of the kids (which really has to be the parents) with $100k in debt are the exception not the rule.
The REAL primary problems with higher ed are 1) the majority of kids don’t graduate, so their time and money is mostly wasted, and 2) the degrees that are obtained don’t turn into good jobs enough of the time. We are actually way OVER-investing in traditional 4 year colleges (as currently structured) and making it free will only make that situation much worse. The goal is to break up the current model completely imho, not expand it.
My answer is free stripped down 13th and 14th grade at CCs for academic and technical training. If you make it free, then middle class families will start using that path. Which will then greatly improve the quality and variety of what goes on in 13th and 14th grade. Right now, few middle class parents on these boards are going to be excited about using the down-market CC path for their kids which, as is pointed out above, is already quite inexpensive. If it is considered “cheap”, middle class families will shun it. If it is “free” and typical (like free K-12), middle class families will use it.
What would be best if we could get the new standard model to be (i) many more kids getting associate and technical degrees, (ii) those associate and technical degrees prepare kids for good obtainable jobs, (iii) FEWER kids than present go on to university for a four year degree (since a good job is obtainable after 14th grade and the stigma to middle classers of going that route is gone), and (iv) the costs of obtaining a 4 year degree (for that smaller number for which that is actually appropriate) are low enough that most can afford to pursue that path. The Europeans do this way way better than we do.
I have several family members that got 4 year degrees (at substantial cost to their parents) and who now are employed as cops, plumbers, electricians, etc. The parents and kids felt the need to pay the “college tax” since they were middle class. While the ultimate career outcomes were fine and appropriate, it was very stupid and wasteful to do it in such an indirect and expensive way.
An annoying thing about that dataset (beyond having to prune through schools manually) is that it is pretty incomplete. A lot of schools don’t report any data, and I think that differentiating between commuters and off-campus is quite important. The money doesn’t all go to the university in both cases, but both on-campus and off-campus is money paid as a part of the debt incurred for attendance.
Nevertheless, trends I noticed:
California is significantly lower than average on on-campus living arrangements for all public schools I saw within the Cal State system, but not so much for the other school systems. I guess that answers your question.
Of all schools, it seems that it is overwhelmingly common that 50-100% of first-years live in dorms. The years after it drops to somewhere in the 20-40% range for most schools. The breakdown of where they go after that would be pretty helpful and that’s one of my problems with this data set.
The name-brand schools have a very high tendency to be above 80% for freshmen and above 40% overall. I’m guessing that that has a lot to do with the fact that they probably retain a massive number of traditional students and a lot of out-of-state students.
Overall, it does look like university housing is a pretty substantial part of the cost of attendance.
Many careers like cops and firemen ‘require’ 4-year degrees to get hired. If you are trying to make a preferred list, and one of the areas where you can get ‘points’ is education, it becomes required.
Many federal government jobs require 4-year degrees.
I don’t see it as a ‘college tax’ but as an employer preferring a work force that is educated. I think there is a benefit in having a cop that not only knows how to shoot a gun or gather evidence but may have some knowledge of government, of history, of different cultures, of psychology.
I looked at some police department recruiting web sites. It was common to see some college (about two years worth, including relevant subjects) as desired or required, but a bachelor’s degree was not listed.
Law enforcement agencies are all over the board on this. In my county, the Sheriff’s Department requires a 4 year degree, but none of the 5 local police departments do. You need a 4 year degree to work as a probation officer, but not to work in the juvenile hall. @twoinanddone is correct, however, that a 4 year degree has become a de facto requirement to advance beyond an entry level position in most law enforcement agencies.
To benefit from “free” grad school, you need to go to grad school. Those who go to grad school will tend to have higher incomes. Linked article about debt indicated that about 1 in 7 or 8 grad students with student loan balances in excess of $50,000 are doctors and attorneys. Majority of the student loans to grad students (certainly owing by doctors/attorneys) are presumably being repaid on time. So to the extent you now make grad school free, you have created a windfall to folks with higher incomes. That may well be offset all or in part by higher taxes on such folks but the concept is still there.
Given the opportunity, a lot of employers will take a college grad over a non-college grad. Likely more smarts than non-college grad. And some dedication and discipline as well. Doesn’t mean it should be required or that everyone should pay for it.
“Overall, it does look like university housing is a pretty substantial part of the cost of attendance.”
At an in-state public college, room and board is typically half or more of the COA. Also, recognize that the majority of college students already are commuters.
Requirement creep is a real issue and part of why the whole “everyone has to go to college” trend even exists. The problem is that when you take it to its logical extreme it ends up making everyone overqualified for the work they actually do. Germany for example has this problem, where over-certification paralyzes the workforce. You have to have a ridiculous amount of education to do even the simplest jobs.
If you mean that people entering grad school have higher incomes, then that might seem like reverse causality: people who have more money can afford to get a higher education. If you mean that people who obtain a graduate degree are wealthier afterward, well duh.
The way the medical profession is structured, you are essentially guaranteed to get a job if you survive medical school. Law school, not so much because the restrictions on working in that profession have been loosened and a lot more law schools have been allowed to surface. The rest are not necessarily people who will have massive salaries - there are a lot of degrees like teaching or psychology that are more of a public service than a monetary gain. It benefits society to have people like that, but the cost in tuition is hefty and won’t be paid back. It pushes people towards careers that pay the debt instead of careers that may pay less (but enough) that are good for society. At the very least, there should be tuition discounts for people who choose to take a more public service oriented route than a money-oriented route.
Basically, paying tuition at the graduate level fails for:
People who fall through the cracks and either don’t finish or can’t find a good job in their field.
People who would choose to take a more socially beneficial route, but are constrained by their debt.
People who would like to pursue further studies but aren’t capable of gathering money to pay for it.
Taxes are probably a reasonable way to do it. A high achiever who is educated for an expensive profession on the government dime does have some form of obligation to repay it in taxes. Taxes are distortionary in that they reduce your effective income, but so does debt.
On the other hand, I’m well aware that a lot of those graduate programs are cash cows for the university that help subsidize their other students. Addressing that is also an issue that would take some careful financial planning. All in all it would probably have to be a compromise solution that will address the concerns of both universities and students in that regard.
so your thought process is pretty much that college should be free - but only for the elite and the government should only admit students to fill certain, predetermined, future job openings. Sounds like Soviet-era Russia to me, not America.
That is so far from what I said that I’m not even sure how you even came up with that.
These are your posts on how I “even came up with that”
223: “A system of "free" college will almost certainly have to be coupled with a significant tightening of admissions standards. I think for universities, the net effect will be a significantly smaller class size as they cut down on the weak students who took underwater basket weaving majors. Majors like English and History which are useful but have trouble in the job market will have to cease to cater to weaker students and significantly expand the scope of what is expected of graduates.”
225: “The simple answer is that colleges will have to do a better job of matching incoming students to projected job openings. Nowadays, we basically let students do whatever they want, good luck finding employment. Universities will have to do a much more deliberate job, in at least a broad sense, of matching skills learned in college to openings in the market. College is not merely job training and good degrees are wide-ranging in their applications, but there are nevertheless only so many people of any given skillset that are necessary for the country.”
237: “I never mentioned Germany or Finland and their model because that's not what I'm suggesting. I draw ideas from a few of them - West European (France Germany UK), Nordic (Norway Sweden Switzerland), and Soviet - but by no means have I advocated replicating them.”
Still sounds like Soviet-era Russia to me. We are not the land of entitlement, we are the land of opportunity. Every student has the OPPORTUNITY to have a K-12 education in which they have the OPPORTUNITY to gain the education and skills necessary for a four-year degree program. If kids work hard and study hard, and take concurrent or AP classes, they will have credits that will help lower college costs, and either a community college or four-year college.
But also, 43 of the 50 states have lotteries with proceeds going to scholarships. The intent was to make college affordable, but all it did was to drive up other costs as suddenly there was a large demand for college spots. The exact same thing will happen if we implement free college.
The fact is, kids today expect everything to be handed to them just because they want it (and yes, mine is included in this). The reality is that you can’t take out thousands of dollars in debt to get a low-paying degree and then expect someone else to foot the bill for you. Be responsible.
@tutumom2001
Talk about taking quotes out of context. I’m not even sure there’s much more I can say - those quotes basically just miss the entire point of the discussion and offer up some twisted interpretation of the facts. This is precisely why I mentioned that I want to talk policies, not countries; otherwise we get into pointless shouting matches of, “we are X not Y so Z doesn’t work” without even considering the merits and demerits of Z in its own right. Identity politics is just a pointless explicitly political emotional game that I don’t like to play.