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

[Drethon]

Yeah, I'd like to see a link on the trades with entry level $80K

He didn't say entry level, so I'm assuming he is talking high end for both jobs with or without degree. Some numbers for good paying jobs without a degree: https://careers.workopolis.com...

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.

Re:Another bubble

[110010001000]

How many criminals have you served with justice so far?

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.

Much of it is because students want that stuff

[jfdavis668]

Living at college used to be closer to living in the military. Dorms were spartan, you didn't have a choice at meal time, you ate what was served. Now, no one would go there unless they had a choice of on-campus coffee shops. Students are demanding housing that graduates couldn't even afford in the past. They want every kind of service imaginable. If the school doesn't provide it, they go elsewhere. So, schools are competing to offer great service and living conditions. If they don't, they don't attract the best students. Schools aren't investing the same way in the actual quality of teaching. Only the most dedicated students actually make their decision based on that. All this drives up the cost, and for some reason students are willing to pay.

Re:Much of it is because students want that stuff

[obenchainr]

"Students are demanding housing that graduates couldn't even afford in the past." My university has three students living in rooms that were built for one. This is true for most of the state college system (which also happens to be one of the best in the nation and the world). But let's not let facts get in the way of a good "cardboard box in the middle of the road" rant.

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

[jythie]

It varies from school to school, but 'amenities' is the fast growing cost among the expensive schools.

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.

I would

[110010001000]

I went to University for the same reason as everyone else: the women. There is a reason it is called "the best time of your life".

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?

Re:Reading comprehension failure

[Immerman]

One interesting take on "Free" university I've seen, that *does* address the problem, is to do away with grants and loans and have the university itself eat the cost of your education, and then claim a substantial percentage of your income for 5-10 years afterwards. Gives them great incentive to both give you a useful education, AND help you find jobs that will leverage that education into as much short-to-mid-term income as possible.

Admittedly I would assume such a university would drop a whole lot of the arts, humanities, and other largely financially useless "Renaissance" education, as well as refusing students whose high school performance doesn't speak well of their potential - but that's probably for the best all around. At least so long as universities are being marketed as white-collar trade schools.

Re:Reading comprehension failure

[magarity]

Yeah, but the author's idea of 'stolen' is pretty much anything they do not like. The author (and site) single out health services as esp evil and 'destroying the youth'.

When the football team coaches are paid in the millions (the top 25 coaches' salaries are 5M+) then yes, money for supposedly class tuition is being stolen.

Re:Reading comprehension failure

[bob4u2c]

Working at a CSU for about 5 years in the IT department I was able to gleen some insight into how the whole California University System works, financially.

Problems really start at the top. The Chancellor for 26 universities sets the budgets and target enrollments per campus. So right there you have someone who controls all the money but often never sets foot on a campus.

I know what your thinking, the Dean for each University is on top of their campus and it's needs. Well, no. See the Dean is there to raise as much cash for the University as they can, because the more they raise, the more they earn. How much you ask? At the University I attended (which was about middle of the pack for the 26) he earned about $300,000 in base pay, plus up to another $300,000 if he brought in the funds. To put this in perspective, the secretaries that worked for him earned maybe $30,000 with no chance for a bonus. So if you could just ignore the University and focus on getting funds from wealthy alumni to doubling your pay, would you?

Another problem, Calpers! A retirement program for the state of California that is usually 2.5/55 for CSU staff, which means that each year of service earns you 2.5% of your highest paid salary for life when you retire at 55. Sounds good, but people have found loop holes. For example, a Director was hired and started by earning about $80,000, not bad considering how much a secretary was paid. Then for the next couple of years their pay increased to about $90,000, still nothing wrong. Then in their fifth year, the pay jumped to about $150,000, in the sixth year about $280,000, in the seventh year their pay went down to about $120,000 and they left. Now they have 7 years at 2.5% or 17.5% of the highest pay, or about $49,000. So when they reach retirement age they will earn that amount for 7 years of service, until they die plus any other retirement they have money in (ie 4 grand a month for life for just 7 years of service). Also Calpers allows you to change jobs and add to existing years of service. So if that person goes to work anywhere else that has Calpers, they will add more years of service, still at the $280,000 amount. Ie if they take a job cleaning erasers at $5.00/hr and stick with it for a few years they add an extra $7,000 per year to their retirement pay. So the trick, get at least a year of obscene pay, then move on and retire like a king. (Compare that to someone who earns $80,000 consistently and works for 20 years would only get $40,000 at retirement, and each additional year would only add $2,000).

Next biggest problem, everything is budgeted for. Each major area of the University has Directors who guess how much they will spend on each category. A category is something small like: phone services, Internet services, heating/cooling, water, paper costs, legal costs, travel costs, yard maintenance, key cost, janitorial costs, paper towel costs, staple costs, paper clip cost, etc etc etc. Each department has about 1000 of these categories. At the start of the year each department has all these set buckets of money. Then as expenses come in they are paid out of a specific bucket. At the end of the year any funds left over in any bucket are given back. Well they would be, but departments usually go nuts in May and June to spend these down. Why, well lets say you had $5,000 for paper costs, but you only spent $3,000; you would have to give back $2,000 and next year your budget would only be $3,000 for next year automatically. So to prevent that in June you buy like crazy so you don't get your budget slashed. Why would they do this, see the first problem, the Chancellor only sees the tops of each departments budgets, not the details. So if you spend your budget wisely over the course of a year, or if you just panic spend at the end the Chancellor never sees that detail, only the final dollar amount.

The next problem, budgets themselves. You can't transfer money from one category to another without a ton of paper work and usually a year wait. So its bet

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"

Root Cause

[Puls4r]

The root cause of current higher-education problem is government backed student loans. Why is that? Well it's fairly simple. Student loans can not be discharged by bankruptcy. In addition companies that offer student loans have little to no risk - because student loans in the US are fully backed by the government.

As a result, there is no incentive to means-check people prior to giving them a loan. In point of fact, there is very little means-checking. In addition, because of the government backing of the loan there does not need to be a correlation between what a particular degree is likely to actually pay, and how much the education might cost.

For instance, an electrical engineer could go to a university on all student loans. As long as that person gets reasonable grades, they will have decent earning potential. Another student could go to the same university and get a degree in basket weaving. It will cost them about the same. But the earning potential afterwards is nil. They are unlikely to pay back the loan.

This has led to universities charging insane amounts of money for degrees that are near worthless. We can't and shouldn't protect people from getting worthless degrees. That's their problem. We SHOULD, however, remove the liability from the taxpayer for those worthless degrees. That decoupling would result in far more stringent means-testing. It would also mean that loan companies would no longer give students loans for worthless degrees.

A college degree would be worth more. Trade-schools would likely make a return. People would be naturally funneled toward degrees that are in demand. We would be better off all the way around. Keep in mind, this is very similar to what happened to the housing market. As long as loan companies could gives loans and hide the risk they will do so. In the housing bubble's case it was through the clumping together of mortgages to hide the risk. In this case it's the government hiding the risk.

Oh, and those "fat cat bureaucrats" aren't real

[rsilvergun]

any more than fancy dorms are the cause of rising tuition.

Per the article I linked above tuition is going up because we slashed federal and state subsidies. I'm so tired of this lie being repeated...

Careful with the UK/US comparison

[damn_registrars]

Americans love to rant about how they think money is wasted in higher ed, but this article is from the UK. Not everything compares directly as their costs are a bit different.

As a full-time staffer at a major public research university in the US, I'd like to mention one cost that was not in the summary: building and grounds costs. Even if you don't want perfectly manicured lawns, you still need to maintain a level of safety on the grounds and make sure the buildings are collapsing on themselves. Many schools have faced year after year of reduced state and federal funding, and they have to pay these bills somehow. This isn't just an image thing either; a lot of grounds maintenance is about safety.

It is also worth noting that tuition helps pay for the costs of keeping the lights on, maintaining temperatures in rooms and labs, etc. Even as we go to smart(er) thermostats it is still not a trivial matter to provide efficient heat in the winter and cooling in the summer. Schools aren't allowed to bill these costs to grants.

Are executives overpaid at our schools? Almost without question. But the amount of the tuition revenue that goes to their pay is pretty small compared to other costs that the schools have to face.

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.