[Niuhuru]

Maybe if students didn’t get worthless degrees in the first place, they wouldn’t have problems finding substantial jobs.

[mountainlion]

Colorado University announced that they had lost $65million. They still have $700 million or so, so their decision is to raise tuition.

[pnh102]

And lost in all this are the numerous college students who are not going into debt, or who are working their own way through school. If more students worked, it would significantly reduce the amount of debt they have. I know had I not worked 2 jobs through graduate school I would have owed far more money than I did when I graduated.

I think the plan I related in a previous thread would work quite well in reducing student loan debt:

Basically... you make students pay a fraction of the actual payment while they are in school. This fraction could be small, say, 10% or 20% of the post-school loan payment. These payments would go directly towards principal and the dollar amount would increase as the student borrows more.

Such a regime would serve to remind students that loans are not free money and that a student loan payment, if not low enough, can seriously impede someone's progress in life. It might even entice some students to reevaluate the worth of their degrees and possibly go directly to the workforce instead, or it might entice them to work during school to cover some of the expenses.

[tvdog12345]

Why is college expensive? Professors selected for their political views, engaged in producing “research” nobody cares about, published in journals nobody reads. Professors who, when they bother to teach a class, teach classes students do not need or want to take. Colleges, in turn, which require those students to take those classes, as a “liberal arts” or “distribution” requirement. Often, the majority of a student’s time in school is taken up by these useless, yet required classes.

It is not like the students are learning the classics of Western civilization, or even the history of their own country. The majority of what is taught in colleges today is completely and utterly worthless, and indeed destructive. Every department of women’s studies, African-American studies, art, philosophy, speech communication, and English in every college in the U.S. could be shut down tomorrow, and it would be a net gain for the country.

We need to close down all the colleges and start over. We need to eliminate tenure and make professors work for a living. We need to fire all the administrators and replace them with business managers (and a lot fewer of them) who know how to get work done. And we need to kill and bury, once and for all, the whole idea of “liberal education” and the poisonous political indoctrination that is has led to.

[ccmay]

That’s what happens when the purpose of higher education becomes the subsidization of useless termites like Ward Churchill, teaching racial grievance mongering in a couple of tiny seminars each year, and writing impenetrable gibberish for journals nobody reads. University professors with tenure, outside the hard sciences, return less to the taxpayer for the money spent on them than any other government employee. I would fire half of them, double the laughable work load of those remaining, and close many departments entirely.

[LuxAerterna]

Colleges have no incentive to contain costs because any increases in tuition will be absorbed by higher subsidies, financial aide, etc. Its really a vicious cycle.

[KarlInOhio]

One problem is that the government is passing out money to go to college. The demand is controlled by the students' out of pocket costs. If the government is passing out "$1,000 off college" coupons, the demand for a college education will go up. The college can then afford to raise prices by that same $1,000, get more total revenue and the same number of students. More federal money isn't going to solve it because it will just chase up the price.

I've thought that what we need are more bare bones, teaching only colleges. These will be full four year colleges, but without sports, restaurants, research, nice afternoons lazing around the quad, etc. They will have all the romance of an office park. If you want somewhere to life weights then join the local YMCA. If you want to eat then go to the Pizza Hut down the road (or they could even rent space at the college). If you want to discuss how wonderful Obama is and how he will change the world you can find the local DNC or Starbucks in the phone book. If you want a good, solid education matching an average to above average (not really trying to compete with the Ivy League or MIT) then this will be the place.

The professors will be hired to teach and that will be their primary or even sole job, not an afterthought to be squeezed into their research time. These could even be set up as a chain with a common curriculum. Each professor doesn't need to review text books and decide the lecture topics.

However, I have a feeling that the universities running the accreditation boards would never allow such a college to get the accreditation it needs.

[Jibaholic]

The college tuition thing is a myth. It is a textbook example of price discrimination (an economic principle, not a form of bigotry). Suppose widgets cost $50 to make. One person is willing to pay $120 for a widget but another is only willing to pay $100. If the firm charges $100 they lose an extra $20 to the highly-devoted consumer. If they charge $120 then they lose a sale - and $50 of profits.

What they do is find ways to charge different consumers different prices. Airlines do this by charging less for flights with a saturday stayover. Business travellers are willing to pay more for tickets and do not want to stay over the weekend. Movie theaters do this by charging less money to seniors, or by offering "early-bird specials." Colleges do this by raising tuition and then offering more financial aid to qualified students who make less.

In fact, colleges have the best system of price discrimination. It basically amounts to "send us all your financial information, and we'll charge you as much tuition as you can afford." Another way of looking at it: regular middle class students are not paying more, but students from affluent backgrounds are.

[Nathan Zachary]

Teachers Unions are doing the same to Publik Edjamikasion as what Auto worker Unions did to the Auto plants.

[bvw]

Simplest explanation

A lot of free feed to the dumb cattle herd makes for indulgent, indolent, inefficient cattlemen and slaughtering houses.

The cattle are the students, the cattlemen are the schools, the slaughterers are the banks and collection agencies.

More refined explanation

+ Oodles of "Easy" up-front money
+ Borrowers too immature, 18 is now age of major contracts
+ Parental oversight of major expenses beaten-down by cultural consensus
+ Borrowers not educated in understanding long-term debt and payment burden
====
Easy $$$$$ in weak hands with deep pockets!

Add more:

+ A parasitic cancer-like bureacratic structure of "research" and "education" grant makers in the fedgov, and to some lesser extent in the stategovs.
+ an external parallel structure in academia set up to receive grants and grow and grow by bigger grants
+ the easy money from the four-years-from-entry-to-slaughter-house cattle
+ active support of media and cultural PR
=====

ACADEMIA, the city of GOLD!

The slaughtered as ignorant uneducated debt-zombies. Working in menial jobs when they can get them. Constantly scrapping to stay ahead of the collections agency and living in multi-apartment flop houses that used to be used by the illegal workers from Central America and Eastern Europe.

Final accounting:

Sad. Worst to come. Sorry.

[Nonstatist]

IMO, they describe the problem well, but not the reasons for it; they leave out most of the explanation...

For ex, full scholarship aid to the "underpriveliged" is income redistribution and is a huge amount (conveniently omitted), and all the layers of college beauracracy ( tons of useless administrators, Angry studies B.S. departments (ie womens studies), ) The biggest facillitator is the government subsidizing and guaranteeing student loans. If that pipeline were tightened, half the colleges would go under.

Just look at the growth in U of Phoenix ! Thats the solution, especially for boys, I would say.

I have one kid left to go, Ill be damned if Im paying full price at some status ridden overpriced Club Med -like P.C. re-education resort/school.