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Should College Tuition Vary By Major, Based On the College's Costs For the Major? (qz.com)
Registered Coward v2 writes: Vault, in a blog post, discusses whether colleges should base tuition on the actual cost of providing the education rather than on a one-price-for-all-credits basis. Their argument is based on a Quartz article that shows engineering and science degrees cost schools a lot more than liberal arts degrees for a variety of reasons, including higher professor salaries and equipment/infrastructure costs. As a result, those majors are subsidized by the cheaper ones even though they also have the highest earnings in aggregate. The new paper on the topic estimates that it typically costs the universities more than $62,000 to educate an engineer (including professor salaries, facilities fees, and administrative costs), while an English or business major costs nearly half that. Quartz has a chart embedded in its report that shows the cost of education by major at the University of Florida. There's also another chart that shows the earnings of past graduates, up to age 45, minus the cost of each degree. According to the paper, even though it costs more for an engineering degree, it pays off.
They already charge more for Engineering degrees. It's called "lab fees" rather than tuition. Another good one is "Engineering major surcharge" that I had to pay.
This is just one data point - the University of Florida system. It says nothing about how much education costs at other colleges/universities.
Logically, education cost should be highly correlated to class size. Does UoF have smaller engineering than English classes by chance? That would explain the difference. But at the university I went to, English classes were the small and labor-intensive ones.
I'm fine with that - at the least I think our world has changed since the high school diploma became the de facto public education cutoff and I believe that we would benefit collectively from having public education at least through associates/trade school.
But the expectation of what you get for free needs to come way down. There are so many amenities on college campuses today that are just not necessary to the educational mission. I don't mind people using their own money to pay for these, but I think we'd need to take a serious look at how tax dollars are spent if it becomes entirely publicly funded. At the end of the day, you'd be subsidizing the entertainment of the top 50-ish % of the population that actually continues school after high school.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Long ago, college dorms were more like Army barracks. Now they are private apartments. Food was served in a cafeteria, and you ate what they had today. Now they are more like food courts, and require far more staff. Students expect this kind of service, and if a school doesn't upgrade, they lose students to schools that do. It's overhead that has risen the cost of education, not the cost of professors. The difference in equipment and classrooms between engineering and liberal arts is small compared to the school environment costs.
We don't need 70% tax to cover it, just stop wasting it on dropping freedom around the world
The current administration suggested that, but the left seems to have problems reducing our role in NATO.
There should be exactly one deciding factor dictating whether or not you can get a degree: Your brain.
Most European countries follow that idea. My university gets stormed with new students every September and their solution was quite simple: Radical testing. 3 semesters in about 10-20% of the students remain and most of them actually finish.
If you got a LOT of people wanting a degree and you're not dependent on them paying you, you can test brutally to eliminate anyone who isn't willing to put in time and effort above and beyond anyone else, and what you get in the end, holding a degree, IS the best you could possibly get. Everyone who isn't perished.
Who said that "free" cannot end up in ruthless competition that makes any cold blooded capitalist beg for mercy?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There's no such thing as free. There's merely shifting costs.
K-12 in the US is saddled to homeowners in the form of school tax. It's easy to see school tax in the range of 5-10k a year regardless if you have kids.
College is fairly expensive and typically non-local. Why should a homeowner be taxed at least double their current school tax if their kids (assuming they even have children) take a course online at a different state?
Instead of schools being saddled to tax payers, why not focus on the real problem which is the increase of how much a college degree costs? It clearly has not increased in-line with inflation. It used to be the case 40-50 years ago that a degree could be paid for while working part time. Today that's practically impossible.
And the answer is almost always "administrative overhead". Some universities have more new administrators than new instructors. . .
Several Links:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
https://www.thestreet.com/stor...
I don't know who Kimeye is and don't suspect it's worth Googling. I do recommend dropping TV, it improves mental health.
It's not "paying it forward", free education is about greed. I want less lower class around me. I want colleges to be free and have a good program for "teenaged bullshit ruined my grades in high school but now I'm ready to get my shit together but can't afford to on minimum wage."
People bitch about the lower class draining them, but refuse to be part of the solution. If you want a better, cleaner, safer society, you have to educate the lower classes. Primary and secondary schools fail in the ghettos. You have to wait until they are in their 20's.
Want to make it even better? Offer free education but remove drivers licenses from anyone who doesn't complete at least two semesters of college or trade school by 23. Easy justification is... if you didn't do college, you likely can't afford a car that should be on the road and you'r fucking up my lungs. There should be an exemption exam as well. :
1) Write a polynomial and apply it to a real world problem.
2) Write an essay explaining why useless federal jobs are so important and explain why it is important to fund these jobs by increasing national debt.
3) Explain in terms of the laws of motion how high a ball dropped from a meter will bounce if in a vacuum and the ball and surface are rigid.
4) Create a spreadsheet which calculates how much money you would have to earn per hour and the minimum number of hours you'd have to work to
- Pay 23% federal,state,county & city taxes and social security
- Pay for health, dental, life, automotive and unemployment insurance
- Pay for a $19,000 car amortized over 4 years at 5% dealer interest rates.
- Pay for gas, diesel, hydrogen, alcohol or electricity to travel to and from work
- Eat out once a week for an average cost of $20 a head
- Pay rent on a 60sq. meter apartment
- Pay electricity, gas, water, and Internet
- Pay for groceries at an average cost of feeding 2.1 people per income meeting the requirements of question 5's diet
- Pay for 3-5 doctors visits per year as well as medication averaging a cost of $100 a year
- Cover up to 10 days unpaid sick leave from work per year
- Cover a 1 week unpaid vacation at an average cost of $100 per day per person with a 2.1 person per wage earner.
5) Create a weekly diet and grocery list to meet the government specified daily caloric intake recommendations. Provide the grocery list to correspond to the diet and the planned days to visit the grocery store to manage consumption and spoilage.
- Each day should contain at least some form of meat (bologna and hot dogs meeting the definition of meat 1 in 4 days) or protein and vitamin supplements.
- Vegetables should be present in at least 60% of all meals while containing fatty vegetables (like corn) at most in 30% of all meals. Ketchup absolutely does not count as a vegetable.
- Sugar and some substitutes should be limited. Minimize excessive use of real sugar (think Coca Cola) and excessive use of high fructose corn syrup or substitutes proven to increase thirst as opposed to quenching it.
- Include cooked in salt while limiting the need for added table salt.
As a matter of fact, I'd recommend forcing anyone who can't answer 4 and 5 unsuitable for living unassisted in society and believe they should be required to visit probation officers regularly to audit their personal finance.
I earn more money than I spend. This is not because I'
Just because school is free doesn't mean you don't have to get accepted. Thats the way it works in those countries that have higher admission standards. Of course part of those higher standards are likely driven by the fact that they get more applications because more people can afford to go, meaning they end up turning away a higher percentage of people.
The thing is, if state schools are free, private ones cant cost what they do now or they would have practically no students... or only students who couldn't get into the state schools. Prices would have to fall to the point where the school could show that the outcome for student is worth the cost of paying tuition in order to attract the best students.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The whole point in getting a degree is Credentialism. So a more prestigious University gives a shinier credential.
Quality education? Be careful. If they catch you acting like you actually want to know stuff they'll accuse you of being a nerd. If you take 5 years to get a four year degree because you take extra courses that don't match your 'degree track' your counselor will be upset about it because it will statistically count against the school.
Most superstar Research professors bring in money through NSF grants rather than use College money (besides their salary). Those grants are used to pay the college for the tuition of the grad students working for the professor so the college actually makes money from superstar researchers. It also helps to attract undergrads to a college who are attracted by being able to attend a class with a Noble laureate.
Similarly large college teams make money from the ticket sales and are net profit for the colleges.
College education costs are going up because they are beginning to reflect the real cost. Earlier academics were underpaid for their worth (they were paid in respect) and govts picked up a large portion of the tab for colleges (these direct grants to colleges as opposed to research grants are disappearing)
Also with a large strata of society which never went to college beginning to go to college a lot more scholarships are being handed out. This is compensated for by charging higher tuition to the rest so the sticker price of college tuition is going up. Many of these students have gone through low quality high schools and are not ready for college and end up taking 6 years to pass what used to be 4 year college hence also driving up their costs. Sad part is even those who could graduate in 4 take 6 so as to enjoy the party atmosphere of college and these folks are not on scholarships so end up paying for 6 years all of it at the higher sticker price.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Not only should the costs be the same but the article nicely explains why: those getting science, engineering etc. degrees generally earn more and so will pay more tax. This extra tax should be more than enough to offset the cost of their education and is also a good way to justify why higher salaries should attract a higher rate of tax.
Eighty Percent of students switch majors at least once in the United States. The more of an obstacle you create to that, the less likely you are to have people studying what they want to study. Also, the more expensive you make it to teach chemistry or computer science, the fewer kids will take a side class in chemistry or computer science.
There would be some advantages, though. It would make it easier to take a few early, basic courses where they take one professor and have 80+ students in the class. And it would make it easier for someone to get a minimal degree in something that doesn't cost the school much to run. But that's a small set of people you're helping, at the expense of STEM education and the ability to switch majors, etc...
The best solution is probably to have a few inexpensive-degree-only schools for people who absolutely know they want to major in Shakespeare, but still keep tuition flat across majors or relatively flat at most schools.
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