Colleges and universities seem to have a lot of responsibilities for students outside the classroom. This includes safety, physical/mental health, conduct, etc. sometimes it seems excessive what they are “required” to do or are held accountable. Outside of the military, other organizations are not responsible for their users welfare or conduct to the same extent. Do people think that is too much or too little?
My employers had very similar responsibilities. I never felt they were excessive.
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I think when you pay for something, you are entrusting a safe environment.
Colleges play a big role in everything from nutrition to safety. If they didn’t want to, they shouldn’t promote themselves as doing so.
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My employer also has the same responsibilities for students outside of a classroom. While it can be overwhelming, I understand why it’s important.
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It is certainly an American college anamoly, but parents and students seem to want it.
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Agreed. I wish the American college system were set up like the model found in many European countries with lower cost and fewer amenities, but very few seem to agree with me.
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We have that model. Most states have a branch of the state U system in or near a large population center (likely not the flagship, but a branch). Most students commute from home or live in a low cost not-so-elegant apartment shared with a bunch of other students, and find their recreation off campus on their own time.
We read SO many complaints about this model. Why is U Mass Boston lacking in “school spirit”. Why doesn’t the U Conn Stamford branch have better sports facilities? Why is U Vermont (which IS the states flagship) so rural (Burlington is not rural. It’s just not Chicago or Los Angeles.)
We already have it. No need to reinvent the wheel. But people vote with their feet and their pocketbooks- just read the latest High Point post by TSBNA about the “differential” housing options and what they cost-- I am gobsmacked…
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Even public universities in the US offer far more amenities and hand holding than their European counterparts. And charge tuition accordingly.
We certainly pay a lot for it, but I haven’t seen any evidence that our students are any happier than foreign students or better prepared for post university life as a result.
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U Mass Boston- nobody ever accused this (fine) academic institution of too much hand-holding.
It’s not the flagship- which has dining halls frequently rated the “best college food” in New England. It is a commuter school tailored to the needs of the residents of MA densest part of the state- with good mass transit options. And yet students for whom it would be a solid option regularly post (or complain IRL) about the lack of amenities, school spirit, tailgating, frat parties…
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Yes, if by “needs” you mean multiple school-owned workout facilities, a separate department for intercollegiate sports teams with a director paid more than all but a handful of professors, multiple school-owned restaurants, multiple school-owned housing facilities, a department devoted to social and recreational programming in the aforementioned school-owned housing, a school-owned medical clinic, and its own police force.
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European students tend to be older, more equivalent to American grad students. The subjects they study tend to be more specialized as well.
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They are more equivalent to grad students because they are treated like adults. University students are not more than a year older in Canada or Europe.
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Aren’t you putting the cart before the horse? Maybe Americans should start treating their young adult children less like children.
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Some of us already do, and just wish we had access to even a single excellent low cost pared-down university. (Not trying to restrict anybody else’s access to lazy rivers and all the rest!)
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Colleges tend to have more responsibility when they are more residential and/or offer some sort of official recognition to student organizations like fraternities and sororities, organizations that dip into politics, etc.
Live near a state flagship and have the student commute to college at lower cost than living in their own?
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Oh, for sure that’s a possibility. Our flagship is a school that is strong in some majors (not really strong in the ones my kids study, but strong in some others.) Tuition and required fees is ~$18-20K/yr depending on the major. And I would say we are luckier than most states on the quality/cost ratio, which is pretty sad. But hey, the school has an athletic director paid $1 million/year and its own scandal-ridden police force!
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I agree with the others that our robust system of community colleges and commuter universities seems to provide most of what you are asking for.
So I think the holdup is you also want that college or university to be “excellent”. And depending on what that means to you, it is true that may not exist in the United States. But that is almost surely because the extremely stiff competition to be considered an “excellent” college/university in the United States has made it impossible to compete with such a model.
Like, sometimes, unbundled service providers can carve out a market niche by offering lower prices for the more limited set of services they provide. But in this case, colleges/universities competing to be excellent can offer lower prices to their more price-sensitive customers.
Even more so, unbundled service providers can also struggle the most in markets where there are a lot of network efficiencies, not least in what are known as two-way markets where the intermediaries are what are sometimes known as multi-sided platforms:
That’s a pretty good model for “excellent” colleges and universities, where the stakeholders include not just students but faculty, donors, alums, and so on. And to summarize a complex topic, that model of giving price breaks to price-sensitive students/families is likely going to best allow colleges and universities to serve the interests of those other stakeholders.
Like, a common example is college athletics, where a lot of people who do not care about athletics wish there were more “excellent” colleges with little or no athletic program at all. But the usual response is these colleges know from experience that a critical constituency of alums and donors do care about athletics, and so they cannot simply abandon those athletic programs and continue to compete effectively to be an “excellent” college.
So yeah, the way the “excellent” college/university markets work in the US, it is understandable why the unbundled service provider model may not be competitive in that market.
So what about in other countries? Well, just to begin with, other countries largely do not have the same private college/university system at all. Virtually all the other “excellent” universities around the world are some form of public institution, and most don’t actually really rely on, say, donor support the way “excellent” US private colleges/universities do. And then flagship publics in the US want to compete with those private US colleges/universities, and here we are.
But there are a few examples of where donor support does matter outside the US, like the constituent colleges at Oxford and Cambridge. Oh, and look, those are in fact residential colleges closer than normal to the US model. Maybe not so much the athletics, but the other stuff.
Again, from a market analysis perspective, this all makes sense. So if your notion of “excellent” points to the most popular US private colleges and universities, and the publics trying to compete with them, and the most similar non-US universities like Oxbridge . . . it is understandable why your desired unbundled service provider does not exist. It cannot efficiently compete in that sort of market.
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Exactly. As my first comment mentions:
“I wish the American college system were set up like the model found in many European countries with lower cost and fewer amenities, but very few seem to agree with me.”
It’s not unlike the healthcare system in the United States. Our system costs more than 2x more than any other country’s system while providing worse results. But to set up even a single “european style” clinic or hospital you would have to get everybody from the doctors to the nurses to the sellers of otoscopes to accept way less than they are accepting now. And that would be just the first hurdle. But just because it can’t be changed (in the current climate) doesn’t mean we have to pretend that it’s a great system.
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By the way, a good example of a two-sided market with a similar dynamic was the old pre-streaming cable TV market. People had the same basic complaint: I do not care about athletics (say), why do I have to pay for an expensive basic cable bundle that includes all these sports channels I never watch?
The basic explanation was the same. Cable TV was a two-sided market connecting content producers and content consumers, and content producers valued larger networks. But for Cable TV intermediaries to build larger networks, they need to offer a variety of programming, and they did not find it efficient to try to offer ala carte programming.
It looked for a while like streaming was busting up that effect–but maybe not so much? Individual services are running into network expansion limits that are making it impossible to finance as much content, and expensive bundles are starting to reemerge. We’ll see what happens, but that might have been a relatively brief golden era for unbundled, high-quality content, as the economic logic of competitive two-sided markets reasserts itself.
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