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The Answer To the High Cost of College: 42% Cut In Tuition
McGruber writes: Utica College, a small, private university in upstate NY, announced it is cutting its annual tuition by 42 percent. According to College President Todd Hutton, the change will reduce the sticker shock that many parents and students have when seeing the tuition price. Hutton says there are fewer than a dozen students who pay the full price. Currently, 61 percent of the tuition revenue coming from freshman is grants and subsidies directly from the college's pockets. Under the new tuition rate this number, called the "discount rate," would go down to 29 percent. Essentially, Utica College would spend less of its own money to pay the tuition of students who can't afford the full price. It expects to make up the lost revenue through increased enrollment, which would come as a result of the college appearing to be more affordable. Even though some of it sounds like a shell game, students will all make out better in the end, Hutton said. The least a student will save is $1,000. The most is more than $5,000, Hutton said.
On the FAQ page they explain:
Q. Why is Utica College doing this?
A. Colleges and universities all across America are dealing with affordability issues. Even though colleges like Utica provide high quality and great results to make the investment worth it, the pricing models used by most private colleges can result in published prices that give students and their families “sticker shock.” America’s colleges and universities are reaching a point where they can no longer keep raising their already high tuition amount year after year – at some point it starts to seem just too high, and not every family knows that the sticker price will most likely be discounted for them with scholarships, grants, and other financial aid. The overall result is that too many students and families are not even considering a private college as a realistic possibility.
So we are doing this because it needs to be done. And we are the right college to do it. Many private institutions are in the same position as Utica, with the ability to reset their tuition to a better price. But Utica is one of the few colleges in the nation – and the first among those we compete with for students – that has been bold enough to actually do it. There’s a reason UC’s brand signature is “Never stand still.” It captures the entire forward-moving spirit of Utica College. Ever since our post-WWII founding to serve area veterans on through to our early adoption of online learning and our development of cutting-edge programs like economic crime and cybersecurity, UC has remained flexible and innovative, growing and thriving specifically because we are always committed to meeting marketplace needs.
Why go to a lesser college for still lots of money when you can go to a great college in Germany for free?
$1000-$5000. Out of how many tens of thousands? I guess it's a start. Probably a start without an end.
An even better solution would be if they laid off all their faculty and provided an administration-only education service: the students can pay $20000/year sticker price to have administrators move paperwork around and print diplomas. That way they can really compete with the for-profits.
It turns out that Utica College is where Andy Rubin got his BS in Computer Science.
Desymbolize the university degree. When a freaking personal trainer at a regular gym needs a bachelor's degree, there's maybe just a little bit of degree inflation going on here, no??
More enrolment means more workload. And it seems that their salaries won't increase.
While I like that colleges are becoming more open to the idea of reducing tuition, this ever-increasing push to send every man, woman, and houseplant on a quest for higher education may have unintended consequences. Let's say that 99.9% of the population earned a four year degree after high school because of tuition reductions, government intervention, et cetera. How does one stand out among the masses to a potential employer? More schooling, of course. More cost. More time. So instead of getting out into the workforce by one's mid-twenties, now we're looking at the late-twenties to early-thirties. Then, the process will likely repeat itself because there will be more demand for people with master's degrees. Then doctorates. Then a full-blown, omniscient understanding of all things tangible.
Eventually, no one will be able to get a decent job until after they're in a coffin.
The explanation wasn't very clear, but I think this is how it works.
Student in 2015: "We charge you $34k tutition, but you are eligible for $20k grant, so you pay us $14k."
Same student in 2016: "We charge you $20k tuition, but you are eligible for $6k grant, so you pay us $14k"
(NOTE: $14k is just an example, number made up from top of my head.)
For that student, there is no financial impact on the university for the cut in tuition. There will be some loss because of students who were paying over $20k after grants, who will now be paying only $20k, but they say there are very few of these students. They anticipate getting more students because $34k tuition was scaring people off from applying, even those who in the end would only have been paying $14k (or whatever) after grants. This extra volume will supposedly offset their losses.
Problem: "We're losing money on every student, but we make up for it with volume". Unless that $14k after-grants payment is actually enough to cover the university's costs for that student, getting more of them won't help.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
while benefit the societies is to force all the college publishing their graduate's salary income (average, medium, range, etc) after graduate in 5, 10, and 20 years in every program, just like some law schools right now. Then the students will have a clear expect ion on much much they will earn after graduation even before application.
It would be even better If the statics showing the difference between the student's income and their parents' income. The larger the difference, the better the education. ( I know money is not the only standard for success, but it is one of the easiest way to quantify.)
This is a good part of the solution. The other part would be removing government backed loans and grants. These kinds of things are "free" money to colleges at tax payer expense. It distorts the market by making extra funds available that wouldn't be there otherwise, which means schools can increase their costs. Then in order to make it affordable, they offer discounts and subsidies and whatnot. It's all a stupid mess.
This school is doing the right thing. I hope others follow suit. Then I hope we can get the government out of the tuition racket.
Maybe we'll see fewer people using my tax dollars to take classes on "The History of the Philosophy of Under Water Basket Weaving in Southern Sudan, 1591-1611".
Says this is all just a smoke screen to fire their better paid profs so they can bring on cheaper ones. There's no talk of profits going down, heavens no.
For my money raise taxes on the rich. They make their money on the backs of the workers, they should pay to train them. Don't like it? Leave.
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There are two things you're missing. The two end up working well together.
First, many, many people choose not to do the hard work, the studying, to really understand high school level curriculum. They're just not interested in studying. High school is 100% paid for by the government, yet "are you smarter than a fifth grader?" is often answered in the negative. Look at 6th grade exams from 1980 and high school is exams from today. You'll notice they cover much of the same material. Probably about half the people won't earn a college degree. You can pay their tuition, but it'll be wasted because they don't have the desire or drive to do it all - college level studies while taking care of their kids, etc. Much fewer have the desire plus fortitude plus the mental talents to achieve masters and even phd degrees. At my college, many of the students pay less than $4,000 / year after grants. Yet, fewer than half graduate. They don't/ can't do the work even though (because?) someone else is paying for it. For their own reasons, people don't want to spend 25 years studying.
Also, it so happens that houses need to be painted. Tile needs to be installed. Pancakes need to be cooked. Apartments need to be shown. Tires need to be installed. MOST of what needs to be done in order to have a nice society doesn't make use of advanced education. Spending $100,000 teaching someone Homer before they get to work spraying for bugs doesn't make their pest control services more valuable. It just wastes their time and our money.
Most people don't want to spend their lives studying, and most jobs which need to be done don't require a lifetime of study. A phd for a DMV clerk doesn't make the job more valuable, it just wastes time that they could have been working.
Unfortunately , there are a whole lot more middle class people than rich people. As in orders of magnitude more. There just aren't that many rich people. You could put 100% tax on rich people and get enough revenue to run the governmnet for a few _hours_.
You may recall that Obama's proposal to "tax the rich" ended up including teachers and firefighters . That's because there are only a few billionaires and there are 320 MILLION other people. If you emptied Donald Trump's bank account, you could give everyone in America 50 cents.
The other way to do it is to say that anyone who has enough of a nest egg to pay for their own retirement is "rich". That's 90% of the millionaires- people who have saved between $1 million and $3 million. The government could take their retirement fund, but then they'd end up on the government dole, so the net result is nil. All that accomplishes is teaching people they shouldn't bother saving to take care of themselves.
If your going to college:
1) Find a collage that is cheap, move out of state if necessary, if you get in state tuition in another state it could save you tens of thousands and offset the cost of flights you might have to take home
2) Pick your major before you start, then can get exactly the classes you need
3) Learn the system - know more than the school councilors do and pick your own classes, do the research. It will save you time and money. Know all dates of when you can add\drop classes.
4) Get decent grades - don't retake classes
5) Make sure you get an appropriate workload
6) Get a scholarship, if you don't then work. If you get a scholarship, school is your job
7) Don't spend money. I had a roomate that would spend about double every time we would grab some food. They would also throw there money around and buy stuff they didn't need. If your on loans, every dollar spent has the potential to be a 2$ to 4$ loss down the road. So a 5$ fast food run could be a 20$ meal depending on how diligent you are in paying your loans.
8) Party, but within reason. If you party your life away, a missed semester will not only set you back the money you had to pay for it. But you'll also get a job later which will also translate into lost opportunity.
If those 320 million people each gave you .50 cents you'd only have 160 million dollars, Trump is claiming to be worth north of 4 billion dollars.
That would make your calculation off by more than an order of magnitude.
MOST of what needs to be done in order to have a nice society doesn't make use of advanced education.
Given the choice between a society where people die of cancer and one where they don't - I'll take the one where they don't.
There's an essentially infinite amount of skilled work that needs doing. On the other hand, thanks to automation, the amount of unskilled work that needs doing is getting smaller and smaller. And, the more skilled workers we have to develop more automation, the less unskilled work we will need. Eventually, we'll have "robots" (automation) doing pretty much all the unskilled work.
Now, in regard to whether we currently have an excess or a shortage of unskilled labor, I'd point to wages for unskilled labor. If there was truly a shortage of unskilled labor then why are wages for unskilled labor so low? If people are really unable to hire anyone to flip their pancakes for them then why aren't pancake flippers paid $100/hour?
But the key point is that different societies "need" different amounts of unskilled labor. A society that consists of a small hereditary ruling class with everyone else living in desperate poverty will "need" lots menial unskilled sweatshop labor to produce the designer handbags and other luxury goods. On the other hand, a society that taxes the hereditary ruling class heavily and uses the money to fund cancer research will "need" lots of skilled labor to work on curing cancer.
It's a choice. We can an economy that produces mostly luxury handbags in sweatshops or we can have an economy that produces cures for cancer with jobs that pay enough to live simply but comfortably.
Bullshit! You're ether spreading misinformation on purpose or you honestly don't know. I really hope it's the latter.
2010 wealth distribution: ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
1% owns 42% and no that 42 is not my love for Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.
4% owns 30%
5% owns 13%
10% owns 11%
80% owns 5%
That said, higher taxes on the rich would most certainly help.
An exterminator may not need to know about Homer for his job, but neither do the vast majority of people whose jobs do require a university education. The reason universities teach about those "unimportant" subjects is because an education is supposed to be about more than just preparing people for a life of work. It's supposed to be preparing them for their entire lives- as workers, yes, but also as friends, parents, citizens, and whatever other roles the may choose to take on in their lives. Maybe we would have a better society and a better polity if we tried as hard as possible to give everyone a first rate education.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
No, there is no tax payer expense. These government backed loans stay with the students their entire lives and cannot be discharged via bankruptcy except for exceptionally rare cases.
Wrong. They can't be discharged in bankruptcy but they do get forgiven after a certain number of years of income-based repayment. Somehow they snuck it into the budget as if it didn't cost anything, but it will cost a fortune 15-25 years down the road.
2010 wealth distribution: ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Note that is wealth, not income, so changing the tax rates will get almost none of that.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Germany, Switzerland, the Nordic countries and even Canada offer a world class education for a lot less and even tuition free in many instances. Americans need to look abroad and soak up the opportunities that exist everywhere. It is absolutely baffling to me why Americans keep paying these ridiculous prices for a university degree.
Add in people in the high tax bracket actually paying their tax rate
That is is not going to happen. That didn't happen last year, 10 years ago, or 50 years ago...
There is a world of difference between the "top tax rate" and the "top marginal tax rate", or what people actually pay.
We are also still well below our tax rates from the 1990s when America was arguably at its most prosperous time for everybody.
Correlation is not causation... no one paid those rates either...
That's what more developed countries tend to do. If the United States wants to close its gap in healthcare and education with more developed nations, it needs to look at what they are doing right.
... that I have to get my lazy ass moving and see to it that I finally enroll in one of the countless tution-free universities in the rhine-ruhr area to ooph my education and academic rank for zero personal costs . I've been dragging this out for months now since I left the local GED evening high-school with a neat score.
Curiously, my indecisiveness is partially actually due to the abundance of choices available. I'm still not 100% sure which field to study in. ... First world luxury problems I guess.
BTW: How is that two-party gridlock and effed-up electorial and campaing financing system over there working out for you guys? *aaaah rub it in* ... Have you started supporting Lessig/Mayday yet? How about it? Get your lazy asses moving! *cheering from across the pond*
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The top professors will be fine.
Instead you'll just see more associates bringing cat food for lunch.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
> If people are really unable to hire anyone to flip their pancakes for them then why aren't pancake flippers paid $100/hour?
Pancakes aren't worth $100. Would YOU pay $4,000 for a floral arrangement, if for some reason that's what florists charged? No, you'd simply do without the flowers. Because flowers aren't worth $4,000. The amount someone will pay to have a job done is limited by the value of getting it done. When things are expensive, people simply don't buy them. You don't pay someone to feed you peeled grapes because the cost would be higher than the value. In other words, it would be a waste of money. Spending more than something is worth is just wasting resources.
Suppose everyone did spend their work days trying to cure cancer. In about a month, you notice something very interesting. They'd all be dead. With nobody farming, nobody wholesaling food, nobody preparing food, nobody packaging food, nobody packaging food, nobody driving food around in semis, and nobody selling food, there would be no food to eat. So we'd all starve. "Pay the farmers and truck drivers more", you say. Okay, we'll pay each of the twenty people required to get a burger from pasture to your mouth $50 each. That means it costs $100+ to make your burger. Which you can't afford, of course, because you (and everybody else) are still looking for a cancer-research job, because there are ten times as many cancer researchers as there cancer patients.
Maybe you imagine that when burgers cost $100 each and having your house painted costs $50,000, cancer researchers will earn $4 million. They wouldn't, but let's pretend they would. Congratulations, you just invented hyperinflation. Ask pre-WWII Germany how well that works.
The fact remains, most of what's needed to have a decent society (food, firefighters, road workers, etc) doesn't improve much with post-graduate education. We actually need road construction more than we need cancer researchers- living longer doesn't do much good when you're all living in a third-world hell hole. And teaching calculus to the road construction workers wastes his time and your money.
> Maybe we would have a better society and a better polity if we tried as hard as possible to give everyone a first rate education.
No, no we wouldn't. We'd have a hell hole with no food or clean water if we all spent our time reading Homer rather than getting a six month certification in water treatment and getting busy running the water trestment plant.
Studying Homer is nice and all, but what you liberals never understand is that everything has a COST. A first rate post-graduate education costs $150,000. You have to pay for it. What do you want to give up where that $150,000 is being spent today? If you want to look to the federal government to to pay for it, we could do that by moving all the funds from
highway construction, the school lunch program, the FDA, the FCC, welfare, and about a dozen other things. Is studying philosophy more important to you than having roads and safe food? If so, you'd stop spending resources on roads and food inspection and start spending those resources on liberal arts instead. I think that would be incredibly stupid.
His net worth is a matter of some debate. Since you don't seem to know the difference net worth and cash in the bank, let's pretend he had $4 billion cash. Divide that by 320 million people in the US. That's $12 each. $12 will fund quite the liberal utopia.
Of course 98% of it isn't cash, it's business equipment. It's trucks and buildings and ip phones that combined, are the businesses he invests in.
There are 536 billionaires in the US. If you take ALL of their stuff, and sell it off to Chima or whoever, you get about $3500 per person- once. You took all of their resources, so they longer have it and you can't take it again next year. Which is why that kind of action is what countries do as they are collapsing, after they've defaulted on their national debt. It's economic suicide because you've sold off your means of production, your golden goose that lays the golden eggs.
Way to miss the point, asshole.
If student loans were only available at schools that limited cost increases to the rate of inflation.
Businesses like universities with their own economics department on staff should know annual price increases of 5 - 7% can't last.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
There are now fewer than a dozen students who are feeling pretty stupid right now...
just deny all government grant to institutions charging more than $X (e.g. $25k) for tuition and board or do not contribute 50% into existing education debt repayment by former students.
He will never do it.
How do the rich actually produce anything? They simply tell others what to do. Not how to do it, they just crack whips. Can't we produce things without their oversight? Do we really need them to pay us for us to do anything?
The billionaires don't do any physical labor themselves, they don't write code. They mostly figure out how to work personal relationships to get funding. They play people games. They give IOUs to others, and roll over the loans, because of their personalities and con games.
If all the money was suddenly erased from the computers keeping track of it (as in the TV show Mr. Robot), would we immediately forget how to farm and build things, how to program? Would we immediately stop because there's no more money so we have no motivation to be creative?
Advantages: Get more money from the few truly wealthy people, appear to be more 'elite', fool the poorer people into thinking you are more generous with discounts than other people.
Disadvantages: Appear to be for wealthy people only, attracting students who are easily fooled,
2) Use an 'everyday low prices' strategy: Advantages: Make it clear to all that they can attend, being seen right off the bat as a 'bargain', reducing paperwork and bureaucracy. Disadvantages: Not getting a bit extra money from the wealthy, not appearing as 'elite'.
I bet they did a study about why people picked their school and why people choose others. If being 'elite' wasn't working, this strategy becomes an obvious choice.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Direct the federal government allow bad college loans to included with bankruptcy, then watch all of the schools tuition rates fall like a rock.
> How do the rich actually produce anything? They simply tell others what to do. Not how to do it, they just crack whips. Can't we produce things without their oversight? Do we really need them to pay us for us to do anything?
Let's suppose that's true. Rich people get rich by sitting there doing nothing, while companies magically spring up around them. "Can't we produce things without their oversight?", you ask. If you can, do it. If you can make a software company appear, why not do it rather than sit there complaining while working for the rich guy's company?
You don't need that damn idiot who built the company, you can build your own, right? So DO it, unless you'd RATHER stay up until well after midnight posting on Slashdot, then slog into your office half awake and watch YouTube videos while he makes sure you get paid on time. If you're working for the guy who built the company rather than building your own, that's your choice. Apparently you're getting something out of it, the rich guy is doing something for you that you can;t do for yourself.
Personally, I've done both. I've built and sold a couple of companies. I've been a lazy government worker, and right now I'm working for the rich guy who built this company. Right now, I choose not to be the rich guy running the company, but to be an employee because a) I don't want to work 80 hours per week, b) I want financial security - I don't want to risk what I have, but rather have a stable pay check and c) I want to spend my time doing the work I enjoy, not trying to take care of anything and everything a company has to do each day.
Maybe in a few years I'll decide I want to be the rich guy working 80 hours growing a company again. Maybe you'll want to work for me during the time. Maybe I'll keep doing this 8-5 thing, which is also pretty cool. You have the same choices. If you don't like the choices you've made so far, quit complaining and make different choices. I (and many others) wrote down the instructions for you on how to start a company. If you want a company without "that rich guy" and think you can do it without him, go do it. I did.
(Numbers for my local public university.)
Tuition: $1700/year.
Total costs (fees/housing/food/tuition): $26,000/year.
They can offer "free tuition!!!!1!" and it would still cost more than most new graduates make per year on their first jobs.
Not impressed.
(And, yes, those are in-state numbers.)
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
According to Google, Trump is worth $4 Billion:
https://www.google.com/webhp?s...
The US population is 318.9M
https://www.google.com/webhp?s...
I think your numbers might be a bit off, it looks like about $10/person. I could buy lunch with that, if I went cheap.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
US population 318.9M:
https://www.google.com/webhp?s...
Bill Gates $79.2 B:
https://www.google.com/webhp?s...
= $248.35
Please, don't pull numbers out of your ass when they are so easily accessible.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Add in property tax and recompute.
How high are you planning on raising property taxes?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Posting AC. I had this discussion with a professor involved with university administration at a small school much like Utica (although in a different part of the country) several years ago. They were on some kind of recruitment committee that was finding that prospective students and families didn't view the school as being as desirous as other schools that they considered their peers (private, small, regional, good name rec). One thing that came up over and over was cost - School X had a sticker price of $25K while their peers ranged up to $35K. If you could get in to School Y you were getting $35k "worth" of education. This is what much of the general public actually believes.
School X's solution was to raise their sticker price and average subsidy by the same amount. Prior to the increase the average student was quoted $25K with subsidy of $10K. Students afterwards "paid" $35K with subsidy of $20K. I don't know if their incoming student demographics improved, but in their own surveys they saw perceptions about value differences between Schools X and Y go away.
> It is kind of funny, but society is solving the problems you list. We are designing better tools that can do the jobs for us and leave us all more leisure time.
> If a farmer can work 40 hours and produce 20 times more crops, the farmer will make more money.
That's true. Since 1764, we've been using more and more machines, increasing our productivity and standard of living.
> . This is where we are going, it makes me concerned for the people who can't do the jobs that require a brain (that can't easily be done by computers), as they will have no way to find work when they are competing with a machine.
I believe history shows the opposite - more mechanization has IMPROVED the job prospects for less-skilled labor. Let me explain what I mean.
When I was young, the low-paying jobs were at burger joints. Teenagers who were still learning to show up on time and treat coworkers with respect would fill drink cups and lift the fry basket from the grease when the timer went off. The illiterate gentleman in his 20s was an assistant manager. Will those jobs disappear due to automation?
Right now McDonald's is much more automated than it was when I was young.
the human doesn't fill the soda cups the same way way that you do at a regular soda fountain. Rather, the worker just places the cups and the machine decides how full they should be, how fast they should be filled, etc. People don't take the fries out when they are done, either. Rather the fryer ops up up they're done, like a pop-up toaster. It's largely automated, yet the teenagers, the stoned and the illiterate still work there, just as they always have. I suspect that will continue, and there's a reason I think that, beyond historical trends.
When my mom was starting out her career, she coded punch cards to use a computer. Today, my 16-month old daughter uses her own computer. In the call center where I did some system upgrades, junkies and slow thinkers tap away at their terminals. The machines have been idiot-proofed as needed so that idiots can use them.
In 1776, it took decades to become a skilled carpenter, making furniture with the tools of the day. Machines such as table routers were developed which allowed people with much less skill the create the same beautiful edge work, in much less time. If you walk into a furniture factory today, you'll find the machines have improved to the point where a new worker can be trained on each job in a day, maybe three. By their third day, their results will be more consistent than the skilled craftsmen of yesteryear. Better and better machines have meant that MORE jobs can be done by less-skilled workers, not fewer.
First set a threshold such that poor and middle class don't typically owe any. Raise the rate on the wealthy to balance it.
That was a strategic response that completely avoided answering the question. As good as a politician.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Since you don't want to do any math either this morning, call it double for the rich, zero for the rest.
Karl Rove and Bernie Sanders would be proud of your answer.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So Trump could improve the world by buying everyone in the US a meal and dying. Sounds perfect.
Excellent!
So your proposal is to get at Bill Gates's net worth (not cash) by liquidating Microsoft, putting 133,000 MS employees out of work, along with everyone who works for Microsoft suppliers and subcontractors. By doing so, everyone can get $248. Once.
Please, don't vote.
I've done both.
When I was young and single, I went through a period starting a business where I'd go to sleep whenever I was tired, then wake up whenever I was ready and do something cool with the new business. I might work four hours or I might work 20 before I went to bed again. I might sleep two hours, I might sleep twelve hours. When I wasn't sleeping, I was working, and it was fun to grow a business doing cool new stuff. The internet was new then, so there were about five of us doing search engine optimization- five people in the world who specialised in that. Later I started one of only two companies providing certain types of security services. That was fun too, inventing new technology.
Then I hired people. I had to be in the office certain hours, and I had to do taxes six times per year. I had to deal with the employment commission, unemployment taxes, and insurance companies of various kinds. That was much less fun.
Then I had a family. I had to stop working at 6:00 to help the kids with their homework , etc, then work some more until midnight or sometimes until 4AM. Not fun.
Later I worked for someone else 8-5. Now I'm working for someone else, but at a place where people are "ambitious" , a lot of people work late. They stress about getting everything don. I don't think I'll do that. I think I'll either work 40 hours for 40 hours pay, or I'll stress and work long hours for my own business. I won't get TOO stressed about a business that's not mine.