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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.
It turns out that Utica College is where Andy Rubin got his BS in Computer Science.
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.
It's not free. Someone's paying for it: the German taxpayer.
I saw an article on this, and supposedly the German government is allowing it to try and motivate (soon to be) educated intelligent foreigners to be enticed to Germany and stay afterwards for the local job prospects.
Or at least are more likely to influence businesses to trade with Germany, either by starting one themselves or by going to work at a big business and having the contacts needed to form the trade.
And it appears to be working, so far.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
One gets what they pay for, then sometimes not. Education has been a social gathering for a very long time now. Students "do what they need to" to pass and not so much as what one would consider to be in terms of being educated. Education at this stage of the game should be about survival skills, nothing more as there is no way to undo the mistakes that prior generations made to put the US in the shape it is in now. Any question in this, then the answer to that will reveal itself in the sky in December.
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.
Fire professors? Why? The school is simply reducing the published tuition rate to better reflect what students actually pay. The school had been acting like a 'rich uncle' and paying 61% of the tuition bills for their students, by changing the number printed in the catalog the school is still paying the difference between what students pay and what the school actually costs - just like always.
Ken
And what, exactly is the school doing? They are no longer pretending anyone pays 'list price' at Utica, they are lowering the list price to more closely match what students historically actually paid to attend Utica. Utica will still 'pick up the difference' between the cost of running the school and what students actually pay.
Ken
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 $100,000 teaching someone Homer before they get to work spraying for bugs doesn't make their pest control services more valuable. It just wastes their time and our money.
Most people don't want to spend their lives studying, and most jobs which need to be done don't require a lifetime of study. A phd for a DMV clerk doesn't make the job more valuable, it just wastes time that they could have been working.
If your going to college:
1) Find a collage that is cheap, move out of state if necessary, if you get in state tuition in another state it could save you tens of thousands and offset the cost of flights you might have to take home
2) Pick your major before you start, then can get exactly the classes you need
3) Learn the system - know more than the school councilors do and pick your own classes, do the research. It will save you time and money. Know all dates of when you can add\drop classes.
4) Get decent grades - don't retake classes
5) Make sure you get an appropriate workload
6) Get a scholarship, if you don't then work. If you get a scholarship, school is your job
7) Don't spend money. I had a roomate that would spend about double every time we would grab some food. They would also throw there money around and buy stuff they didn't need. If your on loans, every dollar spent has the potential to be a 2$ 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.
The value of a tertiary degree is that graduates earn more, right? Therefore they pay more income tax, have more disposable income which is subject to GST, etc. IOW public education is already a loan which will be paid back by way of taxes (and then some), and as such it's an investment by the government on behalf of current taxpayers to increase tax revenue in the future; so sure, say free education isn't free, but amortized over the tax paying life of the student it costs YOU nothing. All student fees do is create wealth disparity and disincentives for the individual students, which if you read TFA is exactly why Utica is doing this.
Blank until
and it's a good investment
the usa will educate rich entitled douchebags with connections. connections to more rich entitled doucehbags. that's a bubble that will collapse
and germany will educate middle class and poor highly motivated hard working smart kids
some will stay. and even if some kids leave after their education, their experience in germany will always serve as a source of contacts, goodwill towards germany, and potentially even relocation, or establishment of businesses
germany comes out ahead on many levels, short term and long term
the free market is powerful and applies in many things. but not all things. things like healthcare, education, fire departments, police departments, prisons: these have nothing to do with the free market. that the usa thinks that some of these topics are "free markets" (actually, natural monopolies is the correct economic concept) is simply a source of national weakness. i am pretty sure intelligence triumphs in the long term over blind dogmatism. so we will have universal healthcare and free/ low cost higher education in the usa in the future. you can't fool people with nonsense and wish fulfillment fantasy over simple economic facts forever. that we hobble our youth with massive debt just because they want to learn is fucking retarded in terms of national policy (or that people lose their house if they get cancer)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Grandparent said they were letting some of their "top professors" go, but maybe that's not true.
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I have seen no citation of this info, so I presume the AC is spreading FUD.
Firing professors is a serious offense in academia... the system is built around the idea that if you train so many years, and you earn a permanent job, it is really permanent. In the present climate people will take what job is offered, but any university that has abolished tenure will be handled with great distrust by the faculty.
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.
"the money magically appears out of thin air."
The financial sector creates $30 trillion a year out of thin air. The world capital total is approaching $1 quadrillion, over an order of magnitude greater than world GDP. Financial firms are creating tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars out of thin air, and backstopping it with public money creation by the Fed (which opens unlimited swap lines with the ECB, Bank of England, and other central banks).
Sources: A World Awash in Money, The Spread of Central Bank Currency Swaps Since the Financial Crisis.
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.
"a mass of young people that have a sense of self entitlement where they suddenly believe others will pick up the costs for them"
I'm reminded of William Dudley's words in the Federal Open Market Committee's transcript for September 16, 2008, page 11:
Thus, the Fed is willing to provide unlimited liquidity to banks, backstop them to get them out of problems they created for themselves; but we should come down hard on the poor because "self entitlement"?
MOOCs are free because professors like the attention, and they can manipulate the emotions of orders of magnitudes more students with their gotcha test questions than can fit in their classrooms.
Use technology to reach more students through recorded lectures with interactive components, and discussion forums where students can help each other.
Free in this context means free to use, not free as in lunch. It's free to use a public sidewalk - noting that fact doesn't mean claiming the sidewalk was free to build.
The people who paid full freight were subsidizing those that paid the average price.
The third sentence of the summary says, "There were fewer than a dozen people paying full price."
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
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."
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...
With free universities, many more people are able to get better education. People that are talented, but could not afford paying thousands of dollars a year for education and wouldn't dare to loan that much money.
When you give free education to those people, they tend to get better jobs. Companies can hire better employees, moving them ahead. Great people found new companies, creating more jobs. In the end, there are more taxes being paid by those people and companies, very likely paying off the actual cost of "free" universities.
Surely, there are quite a few people enrolling, that aren't good enough. But they notice rather early, that it is not what they thought it would be (being good with computers is very different from informatics) or they realize they're just not good enough (*).
* There are mandatory tests each term. When you fail a test, you have to repeat it next term. When you fail a test the third time, you're not enrolled anymore and are not allowed to enter similar courses and any German college/university.
When I started university (informatics engineering), there were nearly 1100 clasmates starting with me that year. After one year, we were down to around 300, after two year there were 180 left. Around 160 finished within 6 years. I think this is quite extreme, and other courses have a better input/output ratio.
But in terms on money spent, it still is acceptable, because in the first two years, there's huge classes for all the basic stuff (math, basic informatics, mechanics etc) with one professor for all 300-1000 students. Most of the university personnel cost is spent afterwards in smaller specialized classes with one professor for 20-100 students.
..but who is (in general) happy to pay for something that the whole economy/country profits from. (and is negligible to the amounts of tax money wasted somewhere else)
bickerdyke
No, what it does is create a mass of young people that have a sense of self entitlement where they suddenly believe others will pick up the costs for them Many students go to college that shouldn't be there, as what the hell someone else is paying.
Well, everyone (who qualifies) gets a try. I don't see anything wrong with that. But speaking on that sense of entitlement, you're wrong. It rather shows that you're only entitled to a university degree if you WORK for it, not if you pay for it.
If anything creates a wrong feeling of entitlement it's those astronomical tuition fees at so-called "elite" universities. It's not unusual to get something after paying that much money for it.
bickerdyke
Because the problem in both cases is not PAYING for these things, it is in the COST for these things. Changing who pays does not address the problem. As a matter of fact, as the government has picked up ever more of the cost of both healthcare and education, the cost has risen ever more rapidly.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That is nice and all, but then they can't get health insurance. Right? And if you want both, you can't have a wealthy population. Or there can't be any prosperous industry.
Right?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Countries with free college have stricter entrance qualifications: Germany has fewer college graduates per capita. Also college mostly just offers an artificial credential/screening tool without making students "better", one study indicated that most students' capabilities actually decline.
... 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.
This! The average American right wing nut decries Socialism, but fails to understand that a lot of those things they consider as American aa Apple pie, like a strong military, police force, fire stations, roads, public schools, etc. , are here because our forefathers were progressive enough to know that a society cannot just be made up of rugged individuals, but must also take responsibility for society as a whole.
The debate has long been over the responsibility of society in general vs. the responsibility of the individual. And a lot of other societies have found a different balance than we have, which lets us take the observation point to see how they are faring.
Let's take health care for instance. On an individual basis, in our system prior to the ACA, the average American spent 8 times the amount on health care in a given year than their next most expensive counterpart in an industrialized nation. And they received access to health care services on par with Uganda, according to the WHO (this ranking was mostly based on average ability to pay, not the actual presence of health care workers AFAIK). So what do we know from this? We pay too much for so little. Yet we continue to delude ourselves into thinking we are better off than the rest of the world, while medical expenses remain the #1 reason why individuals file for bankruptcy.
And, IMHO, the ACA is not the solution we should settle for, because it still allows the comfortable rent-seeking behaviors currently enjoyed by the health insurers and health care providers. Either completely do away with insurers altogether and make everyone pay from the same set of published fee schedules (the force of competition allows patients to choose the best balance between price and service) or bring everyone under the same coverage umbrella. Right now, insurance companies enjoy the ability to break us up into these artificial groups called "employer sponsored plans" and then tell each and every employer out there that they continually maximize the available funds in their pool and push the plan into more expensive brackets. And since the negotiated pricing between the providers and insurers is proprietary, and most providers don't even entirely understand how pricing is associated with the coding of specific services, this allows a lot of room in which the patient is essentially being ripped off.
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?
Because the problem in both cases is not PAYING for these things, it is in the COST for these things. Changing who pays does not address the problem. As a matter of fact, as the government has picked up ever more of the cost of both healthcare and education, the cost has risen ever more rapidly.
Your statement is somewhat misleading. The problem with your assertion is that we currently have the worst possible situation, i.e., a partially-regulated solution where the government partially funds things. That's generally vastly worse from a regulatory and cost standpoint than full (or near-full) government funding.
Another problem is that in both of your situations the government has deliberately introduced "middle men" into the transactions that obscure costs and give motivations to inflate costs.
Example: public higher-ed in the mid 1900s often had a lot more direct state funding. Costs were kept low because state representatives demanded it (in representing taxpayers) and state governments had a big "stake" in providing affordable education.
But then you introduce huge federal student loan programs that provide a giant tap of free-flowing money to irrational parents and students who are willing to take their dollars anywhere to get ahead. Colleges (both public and private) now realize they can charge more tuition, and often they have to because state funding starts declining significantly. Many colleges ultimate start to take advantage of this situation to funnel money into their budgets by getting students and parents to take out bigger loans.
By distributing the costs among hoards of "middlemen" (parents and students) who all have different agendas and policies, colleges can grab ever more government money. That just wasn't true when the state was funding public colleges to a greater level through DIRECT taxpayer support -- in that case, the colleges would need to convince state representatives to raise taxes and pay more to the college, which was a much harder sell.
The problem isn't the government funding in terms of increasing costs -- it's the indirect nature of it all.
Something similar could be said for insurance, by the way. Compare the administrative costs for a "single-payer" system like Medicare to the costs for private insurance companies. Medicare costs a FRACTION of what private insurance companies skim off the top in "administrative fees" (i.e., profits), not to mention all the extra money that goes in paying for staff at hospitals and doctors' offices to argue with insurance companies and try to understand the multitude of difference types of policies just to get procedures approved for patients.
Once again, the problem with healthcare costs is the appearance of "middlemen," this time the insurance companies. Who has an incentive to lower costs here? Consumers don't generally pay much attention to their bills, because it's mostly a negotiation between a bunch of other parties -- the consumer just pays the premium and lets everyone else sort out the details, which means there's less consumer oversight. Meanwhile, both healthcare providers AND insurance companies have incentives to raise costs (particularly now with Obamacare, where "administrative" fees to insurers are capped by percentage, so insurers now actually have an incentive to drive up healthcare fees in order to increase profits).
I'm NOT saying the necessary solution is full government intervention or regulation, but the reason for the rapidly rising costs and market inefficiency is not due to government intervention per se, but by the introduction of unregulated or partially regulated middlemen (student loan customers and insurance companies).
"the money magically appears out of thin air" - said no socialist ever
The cynic in you should say this is only benefits rich people.
Many private colleges and universities (Utica included) have outrageous sticker prices that almost no one pays. These schools practice need-blind admissions and "pay" themselves the difference between nominal tuition and what the student can actually afford. This is touted as a great way to let any qualified student get a Utica (or Harvard or Stanford) education. Nominally, it works by overcharging those who can afford tuition to subsidize those who can't. In practice, it's a way to get just a little more than each person can comfortable afford. We're giving you $80,000 - surely you can take a $20k loan for the balance. Sounds a lot like those lotteries where you have to pay $1000 tax to receive your $10,000 winnings, subject to $9000 processing fee.
If the grants and tuition waivers are paid by the school's endowment, then it just moves money from the highly flexible endowment fund to the dedicated instructional fund. It (probably) doesn't change the actual university revenues (except to those people who think that money taken out of your left pocket and placed in your right pocket is "revenue"), it just give the administration more flexibility in distributing what they have.
The people currently receiving generous financial aid will see their financial aid packages drop by the same dollar amount as tuition. The small number of people from families wealthy enough to afford $35k tuition will be able to buy their kid a Mercedes for college instead of some lame-ass Honda, and that's a small enough number of people that Utica isn't going to notice.
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
You make some good points. However, Medicare costs a fraction of what private insurance costs at least partly because it does not actually PAY to full cost of procedures it covers...to the point that ever increasing numbers of health care providers are refusing to accept Medicare patients. As far as extra staff at hospitals and doctors offices, Medicare and Medicaid are responsible for more of those than private insurance companies.
I will agree that in many ways our funding for healthcare and higher education is the worst of both worlds. We have all of the problems of burdensome regulation and paperwork that serves no useful function that goes with government payment for a service, the burden of payment falling on individuals, AND none of the advantages that come from a free market.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
> 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.
By the time the loan is delinquent enough to be included in a bankruptcy, the college has long since been paid. Nice try, though.
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.
And that's the real crux of it. If we un-rigged the game so that small to medium businesses could get the fed to make some money appear out of thin air for them rather than having to pay rent to the financial sector, things would work a lot better.
How high are you planning on raising property taxes?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
> 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."
People talk about the Government saddling our children with debts, when in reality it's the private sector doing so.
Management and financial types pull all the value out of company and saddle the company with debt that will take decades to pay off. When there is extra money, they play tricks to pump up stock values instead of investing in the company, the workers, or passing the savings onto consumers.
This has been going on for over a century now. Here's a great reference,
http://www.goodreads.com/book/...
Cheap storage VM.
... as such it's an investment by the government on behalf of current taxpayers to increase tax revenue in the future; so sure, say free education isn't free, but amortized over the tax paying life of the student it costs YOU nothing.
The problem with this sort of analysis is that it ignores changes in who the actual taxpayers are over time. There is also the fact that not everyone pays equal amounts of tax or receives a proportional share in the returns. The up-front cost of this so-called "investment" is payed by the current group of taxpayers in proportion to their tax rates, but the benefits, if any, will accrue to a different group sometime in the future, proportioned according to different criteria. Even over the life of the "loan", and assuming a competitive return-on-investment, you cannot reasonably claim that there will be no negative impact to any particular taxpayer.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Excellent!
So socialism says that the most highly trained people in society must be slaves (literally, because they don't get paid) to the rest of society?
No wonder everyone claims that the reason socialism and communism never quite work out is because they were never fully or properly implemented.
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.