Who'd Go To University Today? (spiked-online.com)

Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses? And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money? A slew of recent government and think-tank reports aim to tackle these questions. And the answers they give are not encouraging. From a report: The Public Accounts Committee announced this month that the value of the UK's student-loan system is falling. Last year, the government sold a tranche of the student-loan book at a major loss. The portfolio had a face value of $4.4 billion, but was sold for just $2.1 billion: a return of 48p in the pound, according to the public-spending watchdog. Clearly, the current method of funding higher education represents a bad deal for the taxpayer.

But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching, according to a report by the Higher Education Policy Institute. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration. These include admissions procedures, marketing, vice-chancellor pay and programmes to boost access for poorer students, as well as therapeutic services like mental-health provision and exam-stress counselling.

Universities today have far too much bureaucracy, fat-cat VC's salaries are far too high, and a great deal of what administrators spend money on is a hindrance to education. University bureaucracy is often at the forefront of coddling students, encouraging them to see exams and hard work as threats to their mental health. It is troubling to see that students are not only plunging themselves into debt at such a young age, but also that much of that debt does not go towards their actual education.

Comments

Another bubble

[zippo01]

I truly think we are starting to see the edge of an education bubble. For many years, high school pushed college so hard people got worthless degrees that did nothing to prepare them for the job market. This devalued the mostly none stem degree. Think about it. I can get a degree in communications and come out with 60k in debt and make 40k a year. Or go into a trade and make 80k with little to ne debt. Second, when politicians say make school more affordable they just mean make it easier to get loans.

Re:Another bubble

[godamntheman]

Not entry trade job. A trade job after 4 years experience instead of a college education, tough, $80k is on the low end where I live. And replace the student debt for a small income during those years.

But they will get free healthcare

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares if your universities have problems when you're getting free healthcare??? U.S. sucks! Go Europe!!

But in all seriousness - I think that if universities were required to clearly and cleaning break their "fees" into components as to what they fund, it would really open some eyes. A yearly invoice might look like this:

Tuition (funds professors and classroom activities: $XXX
Student Extras (funds clubs facilities that all students can use): $XXX
Privileged Student Extra (funds clubs and facilities that only SOME students can use): $XXX
Outreach (general recruiting and student support): $XXX
Specialty Outreach (recruiting and support for only SOME types of students): $XXX
Athletic Teams (anything funding the school's athletic teams - not all students can play): $XXX
Building & Grounds Maintenance: $XXX
Utilities and Related Operational Costs: $XXX
Administration (people not doing maintenance or teaching): $XXX

When people start to see their own dollar figures going to some of this shit, maybe they will care about it.

Then again, may not.

Value for money

[sjbe]

Are students being short-changed by their $60,000 degree courses?

Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. I think a better question is whether we are doing a good job directing people into schooling options appropriate for both the needs of the individual and society. For some reason we tend to look down on trade schools and anything else besides a 4+ year degree despite the fact that many jobs really don't require such education. Not everyone needs a 4 year college degree but we funnel a lot of people into college who probably don't need to be there.

And does a university education in 2018 represent good value for money?

It certainly can. The lifetime earning increase from a college degree very often substantially outweighs the cost of tuition. Not to mention that there are quite a few jobs you simple cannot get without having earned a college degree. I'm an engineer (among other things) and good luck getting a job as an engineer without a college degree. It's possible but really, really hard at most companies.

But do universities offer good value for students? Not when you consider the fact less than half the money that students pay in tuition fees is actually spent on teaching. The rest of the money from tuition fees goes into other services and parts of the administration.

That's kind of a dumb argument. Educating a large student body inherently comes with a lot of overhead. Let me use an analogy closer to the heart of many people here. Only about 10-25% of the cost of developing a piece of software is the actual engineering and code writing. The overwhelming majority of the cost to the company is in sales and administration. This isn't a good or bad thing, it's just how the numbers fall out. When you have a student body of 50,000 students, you need a lot of administrative staff to manage that. There is a lot more to teaching students than just doing a few lectures. That's not to say all schools manage their money effectively but the notion that administration isn't going to be pretty substantial at a large university is absurd.

Not to mention, teaching is only part of what universities do and arguably not even really their main purpose. They also are in many cases research institutions which has little to nothing directly to do with educating students but still carries very real costs. Part of student tuition often goes to pay for part of this even though the students may see little to no direct benefit from it.

Re:Value for money

[pz]

When you have a student body of 50,000 students, you need a lot of administrative staff to manage that.

Ah, you've hit the nail on the head there. The EFFICIENCY of management and administration has tanked over the last few decades. When I started my undergraduate degree, my university, one with a name you would certainly recognize, had 4000 undergraduates, about the same number of graduate students, and about 2000 administrators. When I left a decade later (after getting bachelors and then taking my time getting a separate masters and passing the qualifying exams for a doctorate), the student body was about the same size, but the tuition had gone up by almost double and .... wait for it ... the number of administrators had doubled.

Where, exactly, do you think that extra tuition went? I'll give you two guesses, and the first one doesn't count.

Re:Value for money

[rl117]

The explosion of administration staff is both surprising and absurd. For many years, I wondered what they all did! Lots of make-work, by the look of it. Lots of meetings, training, reading and sending emails to each other. But how much actual productive work? Precious little, IMO. How much "administration" do students and staff actually need to run a university? In the '90s, my department was run by three people, two undergraduate admins, one graduate. They handled admissions, collecting coursework, and all the other stuff. So three people for about 500 students. And some departmental secretaries/lab managers. It didn't seem too unreasonable. But a decade later, they increased their headcount by one or two as the department grew, while the central university administration had expanded from one building into four separate office blocks! W T F is all that for?! It's a bit of a mystery. I suspect that when they take ~£10k per student per year, they are so awash with cash (hundreds of millions, plus gouging overseas postgrad students) that there is simply no restraint upon their spending or expansion. They are charging such obscene amounts, which doesn't get spent on education for the most part; the amount going to lecturers, lab space and other teaching resources is a fraction of that, so where does it go? I can only guess onto admin, with liberal budgets and salaries to match. But where is the oversight of this, with someone to question the necessity of it all? I find the whole thing rather unsavoury and obscene, with vice chancellors on £500k and up, while students are fleeced and saddled with a lifetime of debt. Value for money, it isn't. While I have been fortunate to do an undergrad, postgrad and doctorate, it's most likely that I would not go today; it's not affordable given the cost, and hard to justify for the benefits it provides.

Reading comprehension failure

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed at least half the story. Less than half of spending goes towards teaching. It is a huge pot of money without accountability and is getting "stolen" by administration. "Free" education just makes this problem worse.

Many degrees are not getting students jobs anywhere near what the degree costs. Again "Free" education doesn't solve this, it makes it worse.

Its almost as if you fixed these issues, the problem of if its "free" or not becomes moot. Price goes down by half, and you get something worthwhile. If you can get a STEM degree that pays $100k a year for $30k, are you going to throw a fit because you had to pay for it and it wasn't provided by the government?

Oh is this the thread...

[Jahoda]

Where the rugged individualists of the Slashdot meritocracy, much smarter than their normal peers, decry the value of a college education even as their jobs are outsourced to H1B coders with multiple advanced degrees and willing to work for less, and corporate management who won't touch you without that bachelor's?

Lack of good alternatives in the US.

[jellomizer]

Colleges and Universities really shouldn't be Job Prep institutions. They are academic institutions who's job is to educate people, for the most part for a job in academia, where their research findings are often published, sold, or given to the public. Or received grants to do such research.

However the problem became the mantra "If you want a good job then you need a college degree" So people got college degrees, and businesses also bought into this and made job requirements to require college degrees, even for jobs that really doesn't require them.

American Vocational training seems to be limited to mostly Blue Collar jobs, which are good paying and often rewarding jobs, but white collar work still requires a college degree, even though the work has little to do with what you have learned in college with the exception of some soft skills, such as time management, being able to stick to getting a degree, interacting and learning about other cultures. However there are a lot of jobs out there that don't need a degree. An computer programmer doesn't need a computer science degree, but it needs more than just knowing what the commands do. There are a lot of principals of computer science that needs to be taught, but not a 4 year degree, mixed with classes in liberal arts classes.

Clearly my ***

[plague911]

"Clearly, the current method of funding higher education represents a bad deal for the taxpayer. " Governments of all kinds receive a MASSIVE ROI on education. By having you know, an educated workforce the government expands its tax base probably an order of magnitude over what it would have otherwise, dramatically increasing its revenues. The quote represents nothing but a short sighted conservative hyperbole. It amounts to "OMG I CANT IMAGINE ANY BENEFIT OTHER THAN A DIRECT INSTANTATIOUS PROFIT, I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT DELAYED GRATIFICATION IS"

Re:Much of it is because students want that stuff

[lkcl]

All this drives up the cost, and for some reason students are willing to pay.

... you mean, they're willing to go massively into debt without realising the consequences on the rest of their life...

Re: Much of it is because students want that stuff

[physicsphairy]

^This is exactly what we have discussed at faculty meetings about recruitment. As for why students are willing to pay, because they aren't the ones financing it -- it's banks, scholarships, and their parents. There is some good news about the high fees, which is that partly they are there to subsidize poorer students (a campus of only wealthy students is uninteresting and makes for poor recruiting) and it's not expected that an average would actually pay them. Of course, some people (e.g. with wealthy parents who have no intent of offering financial assistance) neither have the funds nor qualify for assistance.

My recommendation is this: go to a community college for the first couple years, then transfer to a small public school. While there are great teachers out there, for the most part Calculus I is taught the same way from the same book no matter where you go, and that's true for almost all core classes. So go to community college to get that education at a tenth the cost (or probably free) and then transfer to finish a four year program. A small school will give you the most options for getting help from your pofessors, buffering your credentials with TA and research opportunities etc. and be cheaper (esp. if you don't play sports and it doesn't have sponsored sports teams).

If you stick around for grad school, then that's where you should look at bigger schools. At that level you'll have a small group that you're working with and direct mentorship anyway no matter where you go. If you're STEM you will probably earn a stipend instead of incurring more debt even at the expensive schools, and when you're doing research is when you actually care about having multimillion dollar NMR machines on campus.

Services and Bureaucrats real in Private Schools

[Koreantoast]

If you read the full article, they concede that this is only impacting public universities (i.e. state schools). For private universities, where some of the worst tuition bloat is happening, it's very clear that its services and admin.

The picture is a bit different at private schools, which do not receive state funding but have nonetheless seen substantial tuition increases. At private nonprofit colleges, the spending categories described above — student services and faculty and administrative salaries — together explain most of the tuition increase over the past two decades.

They still are

[rsilvergun]

except for the rich kid's dorms. I just put my kid through the dorms (moved her to an apartment after yr 1 because it was cheaper and nicer). Yes, there are "nice" dorms. They're crazy expensive and only for the rich kids. They're a profit center for the schools, and my kid got nowhere near them.

I've already put this link in the thread but it deserves repeating. Once again, Fancy dorms are _not_ the problem. Cutting state and federal funding so we could cut taxes on the rich is. And the rich don't care because you're expendable. They don't need you or your kids to be educated. They've got H1-Bs for that.