EPTThe reality is that a large organization like a university needs a lot of admin. It exists because there’s a need for it, nobody is forcing admin on them. If you took away the admin then the organization would lose efficiency. The same applies in every organization. Outsiders will decide that there is waste and redundancy but there was generally a business need for whatever was created, at least at one time.
US Politics Mega-thread - Page 3272
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KwarK
United States43221 Posts
The reality is that a large organization like a university needs a lot of admin. It exists because there’s a need for it, nobody is forcing admin on them. If you took away the admin then the organization would lose efficiency. The same applies in every organization. Outsiders will decide that there is waste and redundancy but there was generally a business need for whatever was created, at least at one time. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21953 Posts
On August 11 2021 04:14 KwarK wrote: But then the question becomes, what is it that is driving tuition costs so high if not wasteful admin costs?The idea that admin is what is driving tuition costs is pretty silly. Admin needs to be done, people need help enrolling and unenrolling in classes, scheduling needs to be done, budgets created, compliance performed, loans administered, and professors suck at those roles. They’re also paid a lot more then admins, it doesn’t make sense to make your professors spend their time doing work that could be done by lower paid admins. The reality is that a large organization like a university needs a lot of admin. It exists because there’s a need for it, nobody is forcing admin on them. If you took away the admin then the organization would lose efficiency. The same applies in every organization. Outsiders will decide that there is waste and redundancy but there was generally a business need for whatever was created, at least at one time. | ||
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KwarK
United States43221 Posts
On August 11 2021 07:43 Gorsameth wrote: But then the question becomes, what is it that is driving tuition costs so high if not wasteful admin costs? Quality education is expensive and the consumer expects a lot while not being price sensitive due to loans. It’s possible for something to be both expensive and fairly priced. Students demand a lot and they have a lot of money to spend. | ||
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micronesia
United States24740 Posts
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On August 11 2021 08:51 micronesia wrote: Hasn't the price of university education gone up way more than other indices over the past few decades? Has the quality of the education gone up to match? (maybe partially? I doubt fully). Perhaps related, how do you measure quality of education over time? Any measure like “learned more” is nebulous to the point of uselessness, measures like dropout rate are not favorable, and ones that measure useful outcomes like job placement or post-graduation earnings are both unfavorable and not entirely fair (given the generally worsening state of the labor market over the decades). | ||
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Mohdoo
United States15725 Posts
On August 11 2021 08:35 KwarK wrote: Quality education is expensive and the consumer expects a lot while not being price sensitive due to loans. It’s possible for something to be both expensive and fairly priced. Students demand a lot and they have a lot of money to spend. Students demanding a lot sounds like a great reason to control it federally. Students want stupid shit and then universities have to compete. Bunch of wasteful garbage. Speaking with regards to Oregon State University and University of Oregon, the waste is just sickening. So many completely ridiculous things. | ||
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Starlightsun
United States1405 Posts
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Salazarz
Korea (South)2591 Posts
On August 11 2021 04:14 KwarK wrote: The idea that admin is what is driving tuition costs is pretty silly. Admin needs to be done, people need help enrolling and unenrolling in classes, scheduling needs to be done, budgets created, compliance performed, loans administered, and professors suck at those roles. They’re also paid a lot more then admins, it doesn’t make sense to make your professors spend their time doing work that could be done by lower paid admins. The reality is that a large organization like a university needs a lot of admin. It exists because there’s a need for it, nobody is forcing admin on them. If you took away the admin then the organization would lose efficiency. The same applies in every organization. Outsiders will decide that there is waste and redundancy but there was generally a business need for whatever was created, at least at one time. Admin isn't the only thing driving tuition costs up, but it's not as if universities only discovered their need for admin stuff in the last couple decades. If anything, you'd think globalization and tech advances would help keep admin costs down since stuff like reviewing applications or scheduling classes is significantly quicker and easier now than it used to be, yet admin costs keep growing nonetheless. European countries manage to keep their universities operational without runaway expenses on bullshit and without compromising in quality at the same time, it's difficult to come up with an explanation that doesn't include bureaucratic inefficiency and corporate greed as key factors for what's going on in the US. | ||
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EnDeR_
Spain2774 Posts
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Oukka
Finland1683 Posts
On August 11 2021 16:44 EnDeR_ wrote: With regards to why the costs at university are so high nowadays: student satisfaction. That's it. Students have become customers and they demand a high quality product. Universities cater to that, but the money has to come from somewhere. There's been a big shift in university education over the last couple of decades to the point that it's no longer about delivering the best content but more about delivering the best "student experience". I feel like it's not that simple here, is the pursuit of student satisfaction a cause or an effect? I'd wager a guess that increasing tuition fees mean that students (or their parents etc.) are more interested in what they get for the money, leading to a race between different providers. Now if it meant a race to provide maximum value inside a fixed budget, the outcome shouldn't be ballooning costs, but it looks like that isn't the case and improvements in student experience are funded by pushing the tuition fees higher and higher. And the more folks pay, the more they demand to be added on top of a degree course. Repeat until at equilibrium. My armchair hypothesis is that free tuition would strip the all the 'extra' from the competition between universities and it would mainly happen on the basis of labour market outcomes, or university rankings based on publications etc. That would however require overhauling the funding of the whole tertiary education system to a tax-funded direction, which doesn't seem likely. | ||
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Salazarz
Korea (South)2591 Posts
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Zambrah
United States7384 Posts
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Belisarius
Australia6233 Posts
On August 11 2021 17:16 Oukka wrote: I feel like it's not that simple here, is the pursuit of student satisfaction a cause or an effect? I'd wager a guess that increasing tuition fees mean that students (or their parents etc.) are more interested in what they get for the money, leading to a race between different providers. Now if it meant a race to provide maximum value inside a fixed budget, the outcome shouldn't be ballooning costs, but it looks like that isn't the case and improvements in student experience are funded by pushing the tuition fees higher and higher. And the more folks pay, the more they demand to be added on top of a degree course. Repeat until at equilibrium. My armchair hypothesis is that free tuition would strip the all the 'extra' from the competition between universities and it would mainly happen on the basis of labour market outcomes, or university rankings based on publications etc. That would however require overhauling the funding of the whole tertiary education system to a tax-funded direction, which doesn't seem likely. I think you have it backwards, honestly. As kwark said, students are not particularly cost-sensitive. They are not paying up-front, the government is paying for them and they eventually maybe pay it back. This creates a situation where the government can end up paying for a whole lot of things that students might want, but which do not provide much benefit to society in terms of educational outcome. If you try to do free tuition via the current model without changing anything else, we go from "not particularly cost-sensitive" to "completely cost-insensitive" and the effect simply accelerates. Imagine if we ran high-schools based on what made the most teenagers want to go there.... To do it without that happening, you would need to control universities in a similar way to public schools, with governance structures that ensure most of the funding goes to actual educational outcomes. These structures are in place in most first world countries to some degree, but don't seem very effective in the US. I should note that I have no idea what fraction of student fees actually go to these things. I suspect it is lower in reality than everyone is assuming, but the mechanism is still in play regardless of the size. | ||
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LegalLord
United States13779 Posts
On August 11 2021 22:25 Belisarius wrote: I should note that I have no idea what fraction of student fees actually go to these things. I suspect it is lower in reality than everyone is assuming, but the mechanism is still in play regardless of the size. It's the part of education costs that has been ballooning at the same time that education has trended towards the unaffordable, so it might not be a bad thing to assume. | ||
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Oukka
Finland1683 Posts
On August 11 2021 22:25 Belisarius wrote: I think you have it backwards, honestly. As kwark said, students are not particularly cost-sensitive. They are not paying up-front, the government is paying for them and they eventually maybe pay it back. This creates a situation where the government can end up paying for a whole lot of things that students might want, but which do not provide much benefit to society in terms of educational outcome. If you try to do free tuition via the current model without changing anything else, we go from "not particularly cost-sensitive" to "completely cost-insensitive" and the effect simply accelerates. Imagine if we ran high-schools based on what made the most teenagers want to go there.... To do it without that happening, you would need to control universities in a similar way to public schools, with governance structures that ensure most of the funding goes to actual educational outcomes. These structures are in place in most first world countries to some degree, but don't seem very effective in the US. I should note that I have no idea what fraction of student fees actually go to these things. I suspect it is lower in reality than everyone is assuming, but the mechanism is still in play regardless of the size. It could be that I'm totally in the wrong here. However, my understanding is that costs of education have increased the most in the US where the students should be more price-sensitive than they are say in the UK. (This has to do with how the student loans are structured and if the repayments are government insured or not) Correct me if I am wrong, but what I understand you are saying is that under these conditions the universities in the UK (less price sensitive students) should be doing much stuff "that students might want, but which do not provide much benefit to society in terms of educational outcome" to attract extra students than universities in the US (more price sensitive students) do? That questions is somewhat difficult to answer, but my hunch would be that they do not. Anyways, the key difference that I'm trying to point out is that if tuition fees are primary funding source, universities have an incentive to maximise tuition fee income to then maximise revenue side of their budget. I.e. provide stuff "that students might want, but which do not provide much benefit to society in terms of educational outcome" until the marginal benefit is zero. If instead they get a fixed (e.g. base block + fixed per student amount) budget, they will only try to minimise costs while providing education at some minimum threshold level (i.e. fills the student capacity). Most likely both funding models are inefficient and ineffective anyways, and the whole point of my ramble is to point out that tuition fees paying for "unnecessary" stuff appears to be a feature of one of the funding regimes. Also a big thing is that I'm constantly working under the assumption that in the US model undergrads bring in money that is then used to cross-subsidize everything else (post-grads, further research and whatever things universities want to produce as an 'end product') and therefore I'm only talking about undergrad fees and degrees above. | ||
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KwarK
United States43221 Posts
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Oukka
Finland1683 Posts
On August 12 2021 02:16 KwarK wrote: England has tuition price caps (currently £9,250/year for undergraduate). It doesn’t matter how generous the loans are if there is a price cap. Exactly, so as far as I understood Belisaurus' post should make students completely price-insensitive and balloon the education costs. And I disagree with that logic. | ||
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KwarK
United States43221 Posts
On August 12 2021 02:40 Oukka wrote: Exactly, so as far as I understood Belisaurus' post should make students completely price-insensitive and balloon the education costs. And I disagree with that logic. It’s not a fair comparison. You’re looking to compare the availability of student loans with price increases between the US and the UK but with price caps in England you cannot make a valid comparison. | ||
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Gorsameth
Netherlands21953 Posts
On August 12 2021 02:40 Oukka wrote: He is saying that currently US students are not very price sensitive because the government pays and they have to pay it back over time.Exactly, so as far as I understood Belisaurus' post should make students completely price-insensitive and balloon the education costs. And I disagree with that logic. Going from that to a full government payed 'free' education makes them complete price-insensitive (because the government pays) and causes tuition fees to balloon (because they can charge whatever, the government pays). The UK might have price-insensitive students because the cost is fixed but costs don't balloon because the government has put a price cap. Prices literally cannot go higher and so can't balloon. Obviously if the US were to ever move to a 'free' education system (I highly doubt that will happen) it would have to be accompanied by the government imposing a price cap. Which is why it won't happen because that is 'socialist'. And if the Democrats were to get it through by a complete miracle I would expect the Republicans to remove the price cap as soon as they are in charge and then simply wait for prices to balloon and then complain its unsustainable... | ||
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