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University Proposes Tuition Based On Major
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has proposed "differential tuition," a tuition structure that varies based on your major. An engineering major for example, would now pay considerably more than an English major. Liberal Arts majors would presumably get their education for free. From the article: "Charging different tuition rates for different courses of study is a growing trend among public research universities across the country. According to research by Glen Nelson, senior vice president of finance and administration for the Arizona Board of Regents, only five institutions used the practice for undergraduate students before 1988. As of this year, 57 percent of 162 public research institutions did so, including the University of Iowa and Iowa State University."
We're a country that's lagging behind on STEM (science, technical, engineering & math) education and experiencing somewhat of a shortage of people from the technical fields to fill jobs in our country because our educational system is a joke. What's the best way to go about remedying this? Why, yes, it's clearly to penalize people who want to study STEM majors by making them pay more for their education than for someone who wants a degree in comparative literature.
If you want to charge STEM majors more money for their degree, then fine, but don't go crying when you start attracting less talent to your school and your research grants start to dry up. In the short run, you'll raise a few bucks. In the long run, you're killing your most productive and profitable departments so you can have a tiny shortfall today.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Shouldn't they all be free or have just a symbolic fee in the public university?
The most unfortunate thing is that poorer people will start to study, not what they are good at/like, but what they can afford...
Yes, let's charge more of the harder degrees (like engineering, and maybe even law, medical and finance), so we end up with a bunch of liberal arts major and other degrees which won't be socially useful.
Soon we'll charge fat people more to ride the bus because they use up more gas. Wonderful.
"Our goal each year should be to increase the number of goals we set for ourselves!"
Liberal Arts majors would presumably get their education for free.
I understand this was satire, but the unfortunate reality is that I can see an army of English and Art majors lobbying this battle for the win. Its getting closer to moving out of American time, for the tide of idiocracy is becoming to strong.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Engineering is still better than Liberal Arts for finding good jobs so this isn't really a horrible idea. You get what you pay for.
Sports make more money for university than they use.
That's some pretty disconnected administration there. My focus was law and philosophy, but ended up having a passion for education and am currently working in TDM.
I have a friend who majored in aeronautical engineering and he's teaching in Queens. And another friend who majored in sociology and is current in nursing school. And yet another who majored in psychology and works in an academic department wrangling university faculty.
Too many assumptions by people too far removed from reality...
should be the cheapest. Seriously, we need science and engineering majors more then we need liberal arts majors.
Which doesn't mean liberal arts isn't worth anything, it's just that as a country, we needs engineers and scientists.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
And I hope the difference in tuition fees will be pegged to some kind of index which I could baptise the "Income Potential Index" (IPI).
You see, a graduate of English will earn potentially less than a graduate in law. Just an example and a fact.
I think you are failing to consider the substantial factors of housing, faculty, general facilities, and overhead/administrative costs when saying "substantially more expensive". The labs and equipment STEM majors use are expensive, but are only a fraction of the total cost, and have a long life span.
Sorry but I can flip this coin as well, your willing to penalize those with other majors with higher costs to support science and technical majors? Some of which have very disparate costs. Hell, if you separate out the costs and such you might end up having more people complete college as it would be affordable for those doing "soft" degrees.
If the cost of an education is a discouragement to these "STEM" degrees then I would suggest investigating other schools who have lower costs or realigning one's desires with reality. If that discourages some then so be it. Why so cavalier? Because some people get into majors they won't finish. Perhaps seeing the upfront costs difference will do two things, discourage those who should not be there and encourage those who are incurring the costs to work harder to get the most from it. Plus it can be used as leverage by these students to demand more from the schools for charging more. Simply by the fact their education is costing more they should feel the school is obligated to ensure it is worth it.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Engineering and medical education takes more equipment and resources. Lab costs, technicians to run the machines, have to compete with the industry to get qualified teachers etc. So it makes sense to charge more for these disciplines. But these tend to pay more salaries to the graduates and they have an easier time getting a job. So they should be able to pay more. But it would be a better idea to charge the same tuition fees to all grads and ask for a percentage of salary earned in the first two years as additional fees. It would be a radical idea to reduce the tuition fees to bare minimum for all grads and ask for a salary sharing arrangment.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
When I was an undergrad studying computer science at the University of Michigan, they wanted me to pay the higher engineering tuition level, even though my CS degree was in the college of Literature, Science, and Arts.
Therefore, I didn't declare my major until halfway through my second-to-last semester. Why pay the higher level tuition for all the LS&A courses they required me to take as well? Engineering level tuition for French, Creative Writing, and my Race & Ethnicity Requirement? I don't think so.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
Shouldn't we be valuing each profession in terms of its value to the whole, and discounting based on necessity. For example, we need more nurses, so nursing should be considerably less expensive than a folklore major, which contributes less to the whole.
This is not to start a flame war with folklorists, just stating that our society requires more nurses than folklorists to function. The cost benefit analysis should support producing more of what we need, rather than more of what we don't.
We here at UIC have tuition differential long time ago. Extra $1K per semester for Engineering is not new. The tuition waiver for graduate students does not cover differentials, and it has been a hot button issue for the grad labor union for a while.
New Economic Perspectives
You'd be amazed what a great background a technical writing degree is for IT. If it's got an instruction manual, I can run it. If it doesn't have an instruction manual and I figure out how to run it, I can write an instruction manual for others to use it. This is a valuable skill and I've become a vital part of my office because it's not something the rest of the techies know how to do, let alone enjoy.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
They're already doing it.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I would think it would be the opposite. That the gender studies and the dance majors should be paying the way for the STEM majors. After all, only one group will contribute to the economy after graduation.
I'd hate to live in a world run by you.
Can you imagine how boring society would be if nobody studied arts or humanities?
Picture street after street of dull gray buildings, no theater or art or even interesting architecture, etc., then tell me you want to live in that world.
Putting moderation advice in your
Absolutely.
If STEM majors are likely to make more money after graduation, aren't they also likely to give back more to their alma mater? Aren't they also more likely to participate in activities bringing grants and income to the school while still in school, such as research?
I don't want to come off like a nutcase 'Obama is Hitler and turning us into socialists,' but isn't this the textbook definition of communism? "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," compounded with gross misunderstanding of ability and need?
This was the case when I was an Engineering student at the University of Michigan in '03 and continues to be the case now.
http://ro.umich.edu/tuition/full.php#Lower_Eng
Your first two years as Engineering student will cost you about $100/$400 (out-of-state/in-state) more per semester versus general undergraduate. Those numbers shoot up to $1000/$1500 more your second two years (when courses are typically more lab intensive).
It's been my experience that those who go into the scientific majors are far more interested in the course subjects, whereas those going for the "catch all" degrees of Liberal Arts and Management are just in it for a degree so they can place better in the job market.
As such, it would seem that there would be an inverse tuition based on this: Show the university that you *really* want that boring degree by paying more for it. Hopefully this would get more people interested in a scientific degree, which they would hop out of when they discovered that it's too hard for them. But for some, they'll find that they actually enjoy science and engineering.
I decide to major in the lowest tuition cost field but decide to take a whole bunch of STEM class, along with those required by my major, as electives? Will schools then ghettoize majors, saying you can't take so much of the higher cost classes, or charge for them? Why not make all majors free, in exchange for a fixed percentage of you roost graduation income for a set number of years?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Because of this it makes perfect sense for the universities to scale. Engineering costs them more, so they charge more. Heck, if you want to bring in a Liberal Arts grad as a professor, go to McDonald's and offer him twice what he's making.
However this approach has obvious detriments to our country as a whole. So, let the universities scale but offer subsidies or scholarships specifically catered to the grads we actually need to keep the country running.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Being a bachelor of Literature and Communication ( or whatever academic award you should consider my Italian degree comparable to), I don't know if I should consider such idea offensive, ridiculous, or both.
It would make an already objectively more difficult degree such as Engineering even more distressing, and would dilute the already small relevance given to Liberal Arts degrees by giving them the reputation of being "cheap majors" (guess what, they become as much expensive and difficult as any other major studies if you actually care about what you are studying, instead of using it as an easy way out of getting a degree.)
Engineering and medical education takes more equipment and resources. Lab costs, technicians to run the machines, have to compete with the industry to get qualified teachers etc. So it makes sense to charge more for these disciplines.
They also bring in large research grants, so it makes sense to offset those costs with the grants. I doubt the English Department gets large sums of money from the DoD or private industry.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Since most sciences require a lab, the universities are already getting extra money. At least they were when I was in college.
It's the same mentality as progressive taxation schemes, and with much the same result likely. You get less of what you penalize, and more of what you subsidize.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
Private lenders are being pushed out of the market by the treasury. Making loans subject to bankruptcy won't work because students could just rack up two hundred K in tuition, go bankrupt, and get a job. Colleges are price sensitive but only slightly. There is no incentive to limit lending, yes, because the government effectively allows students to borrow infinite money on student credit. Bankruptcy won't do the trick, though, and there are collective action problems preventing any good colleges from keeping prices down.
Keeping prices down means not improving programs as much as you peer schools, which will cost you good students and good faculty, ultimately degrading the quality of education you can give even more than the mere comparative degradation that occurs if everyone else is improving their programs and you aren't. Everyone recognizes there is a problem, but none of the schools feel they can do anything about it--at least none of the good ones. It's effectively a multilateral arms race.
Note that this is for the portion of cost rising above inflation--you also have the cost of inflation to cover, at least nominally.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
So, uh, a university joins 57% of other peer universities in doing something, and it's news?
When I was an undergrad studying computer science at the University of Michigan, they wanted me to pay the higher engineering tuition level, even though my CS degree was in the college of Literature, Science, and Arts.
Therefore, I didn't declare my major until halfway through my second-to-last semester. Why pay the higher level tuition for all the LS&A courses they required me to take as well? Engineering level tuition for French, Creative Writing, and my Race & Ethnicity Requirement? I don't think so.
This will simply accelerate the outsourcing of engineering to other countries as well as hiring of grads from offshore universities from countries that want to promote engineering, etc.
Clearly something is broken in American and isn't getting fixed.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A university exists to make money for itself. (I know they are not-for-profit, but that's just a tax thing.) If it can charge more for one product than another, guess what? It doesn't exist to provide for the greater economic beniefit of society (or even to educate society, really). If you want for universities to exist for society, they should all be government run, and presumably free for every one. That would have the most positive impact on our society and economy.
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MBAs are graduate degrees. Clearly graduate classes cost more than undergraduate classes.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
I understand market-based pricing for items, but education isn't a consumer product. Education is about raising the next generation of experts, leaders, and elders so that you and your culture can survive. If an engineering degree costs the university more, then charge more, or figure out a way to improve the efficiency of the education. If the professors think they need to earn more, then they should go out of the university and try. University faculty are there for a reasons that have less to do with money and more to do with power/prestige/esteem.
Have the english/liberal arts majors thought this through? They're proposing a situation where the science and engineering majors are where most of the revenue come from and their majors are cost centers. What do you think is going to start happening in the budgetting process?
"Yes, I realize the English building is about to collapse, but the Computer Science Department wants to buy another computer lab, and frankly we can't afford the hit to our revenue stream that would come from delaying that further. I'm afraid you'll just have to hold classes in the general purpose clasrooms for the time being."
This sort of thing happens at nearly every college but not necessarily by major. Any special program for selected groups of students, such as something for veterans, that allows them to pay a different tuition rate, is differential tuition. Doing it by major is less common but it also works out in some cases where they're paying less than standard rates because the department wants their programs to be more competitive, tuition-wise.
The reason universities compete so heavily for talented youth and issue scholarships is because college sports brings in boatloads of cash.
As much as I despise college sports, much of the scholarships come from groups that only provide sports scholarships.
There not really that much of a drain on universities.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Colleges are their to educate. If you can use the education to get a better job, then great.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
if your major has an average starting salary is really low then you should have to pay a really high tuition. Encourage majors where they can feed themselves.
I was about to spaz on UNL doing this (I am a UNO grad), but as I was reading it is just a case of jumping on the band wagon. My concern is the reasoning. If it was to fund up to date and more expensive equipment sure. Then again I thought that was what the mandated lab fees were going to when I was in school.
No.. they used the rational that "engineering kids will be making more money in the future so they can take on more debt". Ah, what? There are plenty of folk I know who were in an engineer program that are doing something totally unrelated after the fact. Teaching, legal, and so on. That makes about as much sense as doing a background check on the kid's parents to see if they are wealthy enough to get a higher tuition regardless of the program.
I would be curious to see what this sliding scale of tuition has done to the school programs. Has it killed engineering, or made it thrive with awesome equipment?
According to research by Glen Nelson, senior vice president of finance and administration for the Arizona Board of Regents, only five institutions used the practice for undergraduate students before 1988.
As of this year, 57 percent of 162 public research institutions did so, including the University of Iowa and Iowa State University.
According to Nelson, 18 institutions have adopted differential tuition based on academic programs in the past three years. Nelson, then a financial officer for the Oregon University System, studied the issue while earning his doctorate from UNL in 2008.
Charging more for majors that usually pay more doesn't have any kind of relationship to the cost of actually providing the education.
They would not be charging more to students who will get more in the future, but to students who cost more in the present. It then has a bit of a relation to reality (even though it may be a bad one).
If idiot students are willing to put themselves in obscene amounts of debt and the Government is stupid enough to encourage and enable that then obviously you charge a damn fortune.
If the government wants to encourage people to study science or engineering then they can easily offer scholarships and grants and so on for such studies.
if the government wants education to be more affordable then they can use their large negotiating position and instead of subsidising student loans (directly or via laws making that debt more valuable than other forms of debt) they can offer a voluntary funding scheme to universities. Of the form:
To the universtiies:
"We will pay you $X per student per unit enrolled in studying Y. However, you must offer at least Z places to such students, those places must be filled in order of acedemic merit and you may only charge the student at most an extra $A per unit. You are free to offer as many additional places at whatever price you want with whatever acceptance criteria you want."
To the students:
"If you are accepted under this scheme at a university then you will accrue a debt of $X to the government. That debt is only repayable when you have a taxable income of over $Y, is indexed to the CPI, and once you have a qualifying income the payment will be in the form of an additional Z% tax on your income until it is repayed."
Essentially the same as a student loan, but the banks are removed from making the loans. And the government has bulk purchasing power for negotiating a reasonable price from the participating universities. And Universities are free to not opt in so it's not a government take over or whatever...
The numbers can be adjusted and the two Xs don't have to be the same. If the government wants to encourage science they could pay the universities more per science place than they charge the students - essentially running a scholarship scheme.
It turns out the Nelson guy quoted did his dissertation on this. Well *OBVIOUSLY* an education major would find results that indicate his field should pay less.
Educational Administration, Department of Educational Administration: Theses, Dissertations, and Student Research
"Differential Tuition by Undergraduate Major: Its Use, Amount, and Impact at Public Research Universities"
by Glen R. Nelson
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=cehsedaddiss&sei-redir=1#search=%22effects+of+differential+tuition%22
Most universities are either privately run or state run. Cornell's a hybrid, with some colleges private and some state, and the tuition's radically different - Ivy-League prices for the private colleges, in-state or out-of-state prices for the state schools. So Agriculture, Industrial&Labor Relations, and Human Ecology were state-run, Engineering, Architecture, Hotel, and Arts&Sciences were private. Aggies could take some fraction of their courses over in the private colleges, and Engineers didn't get discounts if we took Aggie courses, and Ann Coulter (Cornell '84) could rag on Keith Olbermann (Cornell '79) for being an Aggie instead of from the Ivy League side (forgetting that the Ivy League was originally a football league for colleges that didn't give athletic scholarships.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Why are you attending a school that charges you to teach you a compulsory Race and Ethnicity class (which is bound to be 100% bullshit) when you came there for CS? It's like a car shop that requires you to buy theater tickets and sit through the performance when you come there to get you car fixed.
$100 per credit hour isn't nearly enough to compensate for the destruction the MBAs will cause throughout their careers.
No sig? Sigh...
University of Waterloo does this as well. Except the courses you need for the expensive majors (engineering, CS, accounting) are only open to people in those majors. So you could go into general math, take all the math and electives, and then switch to CS, but you would find that it will take you longer to get the degree as you have to follow the pre-req paths. It's a system that is slimy, annoying, and should be gotten rid of, but then the guy running the place might have a few less pennies for himself at the end of the year.
Yesss, yesss, Is it juicy my preciousss? Can we eatsss it?
This makes some sense. An engineering program might require more investments in equipment and personnel than other departments. If people are willing to pay it where is the problem?
On the other hand if we had a free market for student loans professions that earned more would be able to get cheaper student loan rates. If you are more likely to pay back your loan your rates are cheaper. If you are not likely to pay them back then your rates are higher. This would require eliminating tax payer financed student loans.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
If they want a percent of income after graduation, they will need to come up with some significant enforcement measures. Otherwise every STEM grad will be making 15k/year at McDonald's when they come asking.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
Engineering majors should get low interest rates. They very rarely have non-payment issues, for both financial and cultural reasons.
Most majors should pay moderate interest rates.
Liberal arts majors of various types should have to use credit cards. Nonpayment is pretty normal for such folks.
I seriously believe that Edu is a collossal scam in the making that needs to have a ruthless but quality operation drive the price down. Thought experiment, do it in batches of five - "For $100,000 , teach the following 5 (quality) students a good degree".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
As an English major, let me talk about practical uses of cheaper degrees.
This country needs lots of professionals in lots of areas, and many of those areas don't pay big bucks, yet the degrees cost a bundle. Thus, you wind up with people avoiding such fields. One solution to such a conundrum is to charge less for lesser paying fields. If students don't come out of school with a crushing debt, they will be more tempted to be social workers, physical therapists, teachers, or any number of less-glamorous professions.
There are two reasons to go to college. First is to learn something. Now that universities such as MIT put their entire curriculum on the web, the access to knowledge is not expensive. Second is integrating into society. This is where the grades, recommendations, internships, and social institutions such as fraternities pay out in terms of jobs that become careers. Failure to realize the latter reason is why students do not get enough value and college tends to be a waste of time. If you are really motivated to learn something, you will find a way. Bill Gates did not need Harvard to learn how to build Microsoft. He did find people like Steve Ballmer there. Harvard embraces Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, the dropouts, because they understand their value as a social network. Most schools do not promote this enough, and most students never realize the true value of it.
It is not what you know but who you know. This should be the motto of every college.
Because he went to a University, where education is supposed to make you well-rounded.
If everyone wanted to hyper-specialize, I.T.T. Tech would be a lot more popular.
Some of us enjoyed our electives and are happy we took them.
I generally like the idea of charging a percentage of post-graduation income, but it would encourage discrimination against women who prefer to get the MRS degree (marriage) and become full-time mothers. Universities would try to avoid recruiting such people and would make crazy rules to discourage it.
Highly intelligent full-time mothers are extremely important to society. Neither moronic nor part-time mothers are as likely to produce children who become useful to society.
This is nothing new, though perhaps the scale is larger. Engineering students have been paying more than most other students for decades. The difference was that these differences were called "lab fees" rather than differential tuition. However, they were just as mandatory as tuition. Now by calling tuition, it may occasionally benefit students in terms of some loans and scholarships (occasionally, money can be used for tuition but not for things called fees).
Differential tuition also occurs for business schools, particularly for MBA programs.
What I don't understand is why the /. crowed is so shocked this. The truth is that engineering degrees are more expensive to produce. Usually if a good or service is more expensive to produce, it costs more to buy. The lab fees that engineering students pay covers only a small fraction of the additional cost of engineering education. Have you ever looked at the difference between the salary for an engineering professor and that of a professor in a liberal arts field? This is a consequence of supply and demand.
I'm not saying an engineering degree should cost 10x or even 2x what a LA degree costs. My point simply is that differential tuition is a reaction to basic market forces that we've been ignoring for a long time.
Perhaps the college and s/he both realise that there is more to life than CS?
Citation?
Considering the amount of money spent on the sports programs - e.g. my local public university, University of Connecticut, pays the basketball coaches seven-figure salaries - I'm not certain that a sports program always pays it's own way.
The University of Lincoln, NE is known for 1 thing - the Cornhuskers. I grew up in Nebraska, and the running joke was "What does the big red N on the front of the college entrance mean? Knowledge."
What do you expect them to say? They want more money, but are not the best thinkers... so they come up with something idiotic. Go team!
"To make a mistake is only human; to persist in a mistake is idiotic." Cicero
We have too many lawyers anyway.
Pay the University based on what the education turns out to be worth.
The entry tuition should be lowered over-all, then each student pays 10% of their actual income for the first 20 years after graduation.
The final cost of the education is then based on how the society actually values it, and the University receives a more steady source of income.
(The the argument becomes if 10 years is a better measure, since 20 year income may depend more on a student's innate talents than initial education)
These schools are just interested in making a quick buck, and they don't care about the long term consequences of such behavior. This kind of narrow-minded, short sighted thinking is the same as you find across all industries these days. One more reason not to go to college (or get a job, for that matter).
If your career goal is to use the rest of the world as your piggy-bank, you should at least prime that pump.
Oh, the irony...
It'll reduce the number of loans granted, yes. And that means that without a corresponding massive increase in federal aid, lots of people would be completely unable to go to college. Professional graduate school (medical, dental, legal, etc.) would be completely out of reach for all but a few, decimating the future ranks of those professions. (Okay, we don't need so many lawyers, but we don't exactly have an excess of dentists out there.)
Some of us enjoyed our electives and are happy we took them.
An "Elective" is, by definition, not "Compulsory".
"You must take N credits worth of courses from X department/dicipline" qualifies as "Elective". You can pick and choose which specific courses you take.
"You must take the 'Race and Ethnicity' course" leaves you with no choice in the matter.
Good luck, >80% of my credit hours were Computer Science courses.
Lies!
Mod Parent Troll. The GP used the correct version of "their" and the economics of selling an education are not the same as selling widgets.
It is this way at the university of waterloo, and I believe canada. I paid 2500 a semester (3/year) whereas CS and ENG paid double or more. Doesn't seem to have reduced enrollment. If anything, the long-term effect is that the higher value departments (those that can charge more per student) become more important in the school to the detriment of the others. Waterloo does have a bit of an engineering/math/CS specialty, and I'm sure the increased revenue does nothing to dissuade this continuing.
Charge more for engineering majors, but give the engineering professors more pay and don't pay the English professors squat...
Hate to break it to you, but most English professors don't get paid much anyway.
They legally have to.
It would be easily and eagerly circumvented by bonuses set into the future.
Never go to sea with two chronometers; take one or three.
I just recently graduated with my BS in Electrical Engineering from Missouri University of Science & Technology (formerly University of Missouri - Rolla, UMR) in Rolla, MO. This isn't a huge change, although I never really understood it in the first place. I could understand lab fees and the added expenses for physical equipment and upkeep (although the rates were ridiculous), but we had to pay an "Engineering Supplemental Fee" for each Engineering course. So my 3 hour lecture for Circuits cost $986.4 instead of the expected $784.80; add to it the IT Use fee and Student Activity Fee (see below) the cost goes up to: $1123.38 [note: the student activity fee costs cap at 10 hours]... all for ONE lecture in a single semester. Current costs: Cost/credit hour: $261.60 Engineering Supplemental Fee/Engineering Credit hour: $67.20 IT Use Fee/credit hour: $13 Student Activity Fee/hour: $32.66 Total Cost/credit hour of engineering course: $374.64 for 3 hour lecture (not including associated lab): $1123.38 Source: http://enrollment.mst.edu/documents/Cost_of_Education.pdf The largest crock was the student activity fee. This was lobbied for and set by a council of students, so it could be said that the fault lies on the students, but this cost kept growing. It paid for student design teams (legitimate) and other extracurriculars. Ones I had problems with: Ethnic/Racial Associations (Black Man's Think Tank, India Association, Chinese Students Program, etc): Not that I am racist in the least, but its unfair to expect all students to pay for events and clubs that are racially, religiously, or ethnically biased on membership. Nonvarsity Sports: Clubs like Trap & Skeet, Paintball, and Rugby would require members pay a nominally semesterly or yearly fee (on the range of $15-30) but would have budgets in the thousands to pay for hobbies, IE Ammunition and Sporting Clays, Paintballs, CO2, Rugby jerseys (new one each year/person, each one costing upwards of $100 each).
Thus: The Fix -- create a trust fund and increase the rate of taxation while the baby boomers were still working. Here the boomers put in capital in excess of the systems needs over the course of their employment (starting in the 80's I believe, though there were early tweaks in this direction). The trust fund would invest in Treasury bonds (safest most secure investment in the world, aka "IOUs" from the U.S. Government backed by a constitutional requirement that the government MUST print money to cover those debts if they cannot raise the capital elsewhere).
Thus, until very recently you were paying into a system that was saving funds for your own retirement. However, when the recession hit and unemployment broke 8%, the income stream going into the trust fund tanked. (thanks in large part to early claimaints). Now the system is running "in the red" and "as designed." SSI is drawing down on the trust fund. Currently there is enough money in the fund to cover full SSI benefits for everyone who retires out for the next 27-35 years (based on how much you fiddle with unemployment and salary shrinkage in the math -- the expectation is that aggregate salary in the workforce will decrease as the bulk of older more experiened workers bow out).
The myths: There are additionally a bunch of mythical attacks that come after SSI -- for example that it can't work now because we're living older than we used to. We're not. If you survive to age 18, life expectency is roughly flat since 1930 or so -- but when you include the massive number of people who didn't die as children from polio, dysenterry and malnutrition, the number bounces up.
Social Security is driving the deficit -- no, its not -- medicare is. End of life care is growing in cost at an exponential rate at the same time that the boomers are retiring. This is no accident -- there are identifiable market drivers (increase profit margins in the pharma-tech and insurance industries chief among them) but the basic answer is this: We've embraced miracle drugs and research medicine in the United States. That shit is expensive. Fix that? Only if you kill people or socialize the technology. Or, we raise taxes and ride it out. Personally, I'm good either way.
-GiH
eh, semantics. it's still outside the realm of Tech/Math class. and clearly it was deemed important for all students for some reason.
take your suppository and settle down.
It's always interesting (and sometimes amusing) to try to think of ways that a rule change can be "gamed" by its victims. So how could the students undermine this idea?
Back when I was an undergrad, I took a lot of classes in both math and music, and ended up graduating with exactly the same number of credits in both of them. And, although I'd satisfied the requirements for both degrees, a second degree required more credits, and I didn't want a second B.A. enough to stick around for another year. So I chose the math degree, of course, because who needs a degree in music (unless you want to teach music at a university)?
With the proposed variable tuition rates, I could see a student like me (which includes a lot of math majors) being officially a music major, and then changing their major to math during their last semester. That way, (to explain it to the math impaired ;-) they'd get charged the low rate for a music major, but they'd get the high-value math degree.
Now, I'd imagine that the administration would wise up to this after a few years. But again, note that I'd actually satisfied the requirements for both degrees. Music wasn't a "fake" subject; it was something I was interested in. In a different world (where the recording industry hadn't destroyed the profession of musician for all but a handful of top stars), I'd likely have become a professional musician. Georg Telemann did this, for example, and during his lifetime, it was a practical career decision.
So the administration couldn't reasonably argue that I was "gaming the system" by registering as a music major when I was also interested in math. I'd guess they'd find some bureaucratic way to deal with students like me. So maybe we should be talking about this situation before it becomes a major problem.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I disagree that a workforce tilted toward humanities majors is "better" than a less educated person free from debt and in the workforce sooner. There are many ways to educate the populace, like supporting PBS and culture events in their home towns -- but colleges often promise the world only to deliver a shitty job and a debt load that drags you further from owning your own home and being sefl-sufficient.
I wish it was not so, but that's my opinion. Shit on it as you will.
-GiH
I had a few choices for my "race and ethnity" core requirement at my university - and actually got a 1-2 combo punch by taking "Bible in the Black Church" and getting my multi-cultural core requirement knocked out at the same time as my religion/philosophy core requirement. That said, it was one of the most difficult classes I ever took in my life, with tons of reading, writing, and memorization. I spent three hours in the library every day for that class alone. Compared to that, some of my STEM core classes were a breeze. Really though, the issue is that everyone can benefit from the core classes, which is why they are required regardless of major. Universities are not technical schools, and they want to produce high quality graduates with a broad underlying level of cultural understanding, not robots that are living calculators or communications majors who think Africa is a country.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
1. Declare major to something so esoteric that the school has to pay YOU to attend
2. Take Engineering courses
3. Switch major to Engineering at end of senior year
4. PROFIT!
I put the 't' in electrical engineering.
They also bring in large research grants, so it makes sense to offset those costs with the grants. I doubt the English Department gets large sums of money from the DoD or private industry.
It may make sense, but it is against the law (at least as far as federal money is concerned). Federal funding agencies regularly check that the funds they give (including overhead) are used specifically for the research project they were allocated to, and not for general university expenses. Overhead can be used for general university expenses to the extent that they are targeted for research.
Tuition should be based on the value to society, not necessarily the simple cost of the teaching. English major should pay a lot more given that their contribution to the tax base will be much lower than an actual degree.
Like English perhaps? Maybe so they can learn to spell words like discrimination?
America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed. -Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936
I know! Let's get people to pay an even higher fine to get the education they and our economy most need! That will make more people study the most important disciplines! Let's call it "tuition" and con people into believing that it is the magic of market capitalism at work in higher education! Nobody will know it's really a disincentive! You're actually buying education, not paying a penalty for it!
1) Be a fucking idiot ass-kissing corporatist tool
2) Get a position of power and influence in politics and/or higher education
3) ???
4) Profit!
What could be simpler?
So this plan would encourage more people to get Liberal Arts degrees and fewer people to get engineering and science degrees. Yeah, that makes sense for the nation :P
They'll just require you to sign over access rights to your IRS tax transcripts in the agreements you have with the university.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
That would require federal legislation to authorize. They might get it, but it isn't as easy as just restructuring tuition and fees. After a couple of years and millions of dollars in lobbying they might get authorization to peoples IRS records.
The purpose of language is communication, If the idea is clear the grammar ain't important
I think this has been gong on for a very very long time. For example it seems to me universities charge more for being a law student or medical student...
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
I received my undergraduate degree in computer engineering from UNL. This idea was being thrown around by the kids in the English department even back then, when tuition was a third of what it was today (did I just mention that tuition has increased 3 fold in 12 years?)
It's a bad idea to do this unless you also plan on paying instructors in the lower cost departments less pay and reducing their support staff as well.
That's not the case here. You are taking an extremely shallow view of education. It is as valuable to individuals as it is to society and our economy for everyone to get as much education and/or training as possible. Charging a higher fee for highly desirable major is not like charging a higher price for a better pair of shoes. It is a disincentive, and its market effect will be to keep people who can't pay the higher price from studying it. This is a stupid disincentive for society. We should be doing the opposite: making it easier for more people to be able to pay for such studies. You just got conned by pseudo-capitalistic bullshit, one of America's favorite superstitious belief systems. By the tenets of capitalism, you would want to make STEM careers cheap, free, or even pay people to study them, and charge people more for the less useful or desirable majors in order for market forces to guide people's decisions. This is the exact opposite of what is being proposed. Beware of knee-jerk reactions.
So the university tuition structure would provide a great incentive for people to study things that don't result in being able to earn a living. OK. In that case, please charge business majors $10million a year in case they grow up to be The Donald. Oh wait. Really rich people don't go to college.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
The point is sensible... majors will have a proportional return on their investment. Engineering majors can pay more because they will earn more than people in the humanities. However, perhaps a better approach would be to admit fewer people into the humanities and fine arts programs, this would ensure to an extent, that people in these programs will be quality, and also help the oversaturated market.
Here at the Harvard grad schools neither the Med School nor the Law School give their students any funding because they will easily earn their tuition back. While at the Divinity School where we train ministers and the academics in religion about 70% of students get a full ride, and they were pushing for a full ride for everyone at the Div School before the economy crashed. Obviously a minister is not going to be able to pay back $150k for a graduate degree, but Lord knows we need some educated ministers...
I assume the other issue is endowments - funds are usually thrown at the sciences constantly but much much harder to come by in the humanities. This may be an effort to produce some funding that could be redistributed to other areas that are lacking in funding. If you think things are bad for STEM take a peek at the local university arts and humanities departments.
It seems like the problem people have with this is their assessment of the value of math, science, etc against other programs like art, history, anthropology, religion, etc etc. I think they're both equally valuable for different reasons.
University simply means high-end academic content. No one is begrudging you from choosing to buy lectures about something that interests you - in fact that's what everyone supports. I really doubt you can make someone a well-rounded individual by forcing them to sit through lectures and memorize facts for exams. Instead I think you can make someone decidedly less well rounded by putting them off going outside their field. I'll take a second of self-directed horizon expanding over any amount of force-fed material someone else thought appropriate. I don't support systems that kill the self-directed horizon expanding right out of people. Your muscles don't get strong by someone else moving them, and neither does a capacity like self-directed learning and motivation.
Well...there is always the choice of going to a school that doesn't require that course. There are hundreds of such schools all over the country.
I'm not sure why this is news. Many STEM courses already have extra lab fees.
Government funds tend to support graduate students with scholarships and a wage. I am supported by the Army, NIST and DoD indirectly.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Go back to the OP, based on phrasing I'm going to bet "my Race & Ethnicity Requirement" was probably satisfiable by more than one course
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Schools should do what keeps them in business. If someone is going to pay them to subsidize expensive STEM education, that's what will keep them going, so they should run with that. Without subsidy, they should charge according to costs, since running the program at a loss makes no economic sense and will just lead to them closing their doors.
Why don't we have more US citizen STEM majors and STEM students going into industry? Because people who have citizenship and speak US English fluently are also likely to know the score: you make much more money working for financial manipulators than for productive industry. Foreigners often don't know the score, or they have a harder time swimming in the culture of the business sharks. They go to industry jobs because they are able to get them, don't know any better and anyway industry jobs are a huge improvement over the crap they put up with in the 3rd world. Then there's the people who just love doing it and wouldn't sacrifice their passion just for money. I guess. Those people are, as expected, pretty rare.
Want to make the US competitive, r.e. high tech industry? Want to avoid pitfalls like raising STEM education prices? Fix business climate. Let me say right now that it's just not going to happen before a truly major catastrophe hits us. Wall St. owns the gov't and hasn't suffered at all in comparison to the rest of the nation for the crisis they created. Anyhow, here's a short list of things to fix:
* Remove or short-circuit the political influence of the controlling elite. Their interests normally align well enough with society to allow them the privilege of their economic and political advantages. This is no longer the case. They're now eating our lunches so fast that the real economy is shrinking and they don't realize that they're going to eventually have things much harder when they aren't leeching off a fat and growing middle class but a poor and hollowed-out one.
* Stop externalizing all non-monetary costs. Foreign outsourcing is profitable for the elite and terrible for the society. Destroying the ecology by ruthlessly sucking out natural resources is fantastically profitable. So is keeping dehumanized workers hard under the thumb of management. This single item addresses so many problems that we face, it's not even funny. Almost all economics research should be directed at properly measuring the real costs and benefits of economic activity and giving us the tools to properly decide what to pursue.
* End corporate personhood. Corporations exist as vehicles for accumulations capital and resources to survive changes in management and ownership. The incentives for all parties involved is so far tilted to the short-term that it is really just a mandate to slash, burn, rape and pillage by any legal (or otherwise) means necessary. Personhood rewards this behavior with both unfair advantages and immortality.
* Adjunct the single corporate mandate of profit-seeking with the proper mandate that each corporation has a net benefit to society (including non-monetary costs).
* Demolish regulation and lawyer-strangulation in health-care and replace it with a highly visible system of certification. Make the patient pay for his services and let him decide what he's going to buy. Right now we're all forced to buy health care in the form of Cadillacs. Services have an enormous burden of administration and regulation. There are no health-care pintos. If the huge regulatory and insurance burden is removed and Sally the nurse can treat everyday injuries and colds out of her house or her van without two hired paperwork shufflers to make her legal, then her competition will reduce costs because the Caddy dealership doctors and hospitals will have to compete to survive. You really shouldn't be able to sue your caregivers. They're human and they're going to make mistakes. The key is to focus on making those mistakes both rare and less costly for you and for them. Modern medicine CAN do wonderful things but the ex
It is fair to charge different rates for classes that cost more for the university to host - whether because of the professor, the equipment or anything else. But it is the classes that cost. The article suggests they'll be charging engineering students more for attending the same History class as the music major. That doesn't sound right. Not only is it unfair, but how will they handle the loads of music majors who take a lot of engineering electives for 3 years before discovering in their senior year that their true love has always been engineering?
Charging more for engineering classes isn't all bad news for engineering students. It means 1. fewer competitors, 2. you'll be able to command a higher salary if you become a professor.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
Genius!! So you get somebody else to pay a portion of your schooling on the promise that you'll pay it back when you have a career - sort of like a loan... For students...
I know! We can call it the student loan!!
+1 Disagree
Liberal Arts majors should be charged 100 times more then Science majors. We don't need another French Lit basket weaving expert in the world, we need people who can cure disease and find alternative forms of energy.
The average "science" major ends up doing absolutely nothing for the progress of science and/or technology. Ooh, pharmaceutical sales and PHP code monkeying, wow, those things are really going to create the future.
What they need to do is charge it based on the class itself. English 101? $50 per credit-hour. Engineering 101? $150 per credit-hour. And so on. If they're actually doing this based on declared major then they're going to find a crapton of liberal arts majors taking advanced engineering courses an switching majors the last semester of senior year.
Spoken like a true monarchist. People should know their place and all that. Poor people should clean floors and not aspire to university education.....
Perhaps in the USA your chances are life are judged on the wealth of your parents, but here in Europe we go for a more meritocratic model and the state subsidises education for everybody so poor as well as rich people can go to school and university. It doesn't always work, and there's pressure to move to an American model, but it does even up inequality a little.
Hey! Hold up. I don't care what the school of Literature Science and the Arts does. He took Computer Science in LS&A. The University of Michigan also has a College of Engineering, and has a Computer Science Engineering degree. The Engineering school limits it's bullshit requirements to requiring 4 consecutive semesters of calculus for all Engineers where C is a failing grade. His problem was that LS&A has all these breadth courses they make you take to try to justify your cost of Tuition. Race and Ethnicity is *not* required for CSE majors (or other Engineers).
The Engineering school by itself does not make that mistake, they charge you the cost of your classes, and there's a forfeit (expensive things discounted + cheaper things sold at higher rates) so that you don't have to weigh and balance the materials cost for every class and every professor. That forfeit is calculated ahead of time based on the individual cost of the average distribution of courses they expect you will take, and Engineering degrees (among others) requires more expensive lab equipment and more expensive professors and infrastructure than something like Art History or Philosophy.
I applaud the GP for picking the economically viable course of action in delaying his major-declaration. That's optimizing his benefit from the forfeits, and that's a game between him and the beancounters that set the tuition rates. That said, the fact that CS is available in LS&A as well as in Engineering is the primary-local cause of this loophole.
Gravity Sucks
Why would they need enabling federal legislation when they have your consent?
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs