Yeah, but most colleges are non-for-profits and state institutions. They didn't have any imperative to respond to increased demand by raising costs. They could have just expanded enrollment, or become more selective.

Good point. There's no necessary reason to assume that demand would lead to a price increase unless I presume the university behaves like a market actor which a university is not supposed to be, or doesn't have to be.

I think there's an overlapping issue here in that administrators started seeing themselves as market actors in this way. There has been a cultural change in universities toward seeing the university as a business selling a good to consumers, and this has been driven mostly at the administration level. I don't think they believe this hypocritically, just in order to enhance their own wealth. They also see it as what a university is or should be. It happens, like so many ideologies, to correlate rather nicely with policies that expand the wealth and power of administrators.

I attended Harvard

My situation was quite similar to Snapper's. I had slightly more on my "resume", but I strained to fill out the Ivy applications. MIT (and especially CalTech) applications, on the other hand, seemed to be written with me in mind. In the end I decided to go to an Ivy league school

I could have gone to Harvard or any Ivy League school if it wasn't for the vicious discrimination against students due to arbitrary things like "grades" and "lack of tuition money". Those were cruel times. Thank God for Meridian JC.

I'm not sure. I think it's a driver, but I think the larger driver is the massive increase in demand for a college degree, driven in turn by cultural and economic shifts of the past several decades.

I think the biggest driver is easy access to student loans. A college degree has been desirable for a long time, since before WWII by far, but often people couldn't afford to go. Now, almost any idiot can get student loans if they want them, which freed the universities to jack up their prices.

My take is that the money comes first, and then you have the question of how to distribute it - to administration, to faculty, to non-faculty workers, to students, to building projects and endowment growth. And the administration are the ones who actually get to make those decisions. The faculty have some structural power, unlike non-faculty workers and students, but the administrators generally see themselves as directly opposed to faculty in a small-scale class conflict, so the faculty gets overrun. And then pretty much all the money goes to the administration, as well as to building projects and endowment growth, which enhance the status of the university and the administration without giving money to other competing groups.

I generally agree with this.

Some of the tuition growth is driven by the administration seeing they can arrogate even more money to themselves, but I think that's more secondary.

Not sure I agree with this. It might have been the case 20-30 years ago when they were first figuring out that they could keep raising their prices because they were floating on a huge pile of easy financing, but once they figured it out, you'd have to assume that university administrators are better people than other humans for it to be true. I don't believe that they are.

I think there's also the issue that declining governmental support versus real costs of operation caused administrations to start thinking more in terms of fundraising, which leads to thinking like a business in a market.

I think there's also the issue that declining governmental support versus real costs of operation caused administrations to start thinking more in terms of fundraising, which leads to thinking like a business in a market.

Did gov't support really go down, or did the schools just decide they needed a whole bunch more "operations"?

My sense is that gov't support has risen continuously, just not at the rate that schools were expanding expenses.

Yeah, but most colleges are non-for-profits and state institutions. They didn't have any imperative to respond to increased demand by raising costs. They could have just expanded enrollment, or become more selective.

The only reason to raise tuition was to enrich administrators. As you rightly note, the faculty got bupkus.

That isn't true. It is almost impossible to stay the same once you've decided to not change. These colleges and universities are competing with other schools for employees and for students as well. A college can say we only want 500 students and we want those students to be of X quality but if the school doesn't have the faculty that the students consider to be of proper quality nor have the facilities that prospective students deem to be acceptable then that school isn't going to get students of X quality. So to simply maintain one's standards one needs to grow with the times. One needs to buy and build the facilities that are necessary for top notch education or middle of the road or whatever level it is you want to be.

I'm probably among the last generation that could get into Ivy league and equivalent schools based on pure academics. All I had going for me was GPA/SAT/GRE.

Then you must have attended the only elite school without legacy admissions or favoritism towards athletes or applicants from underrepresented geographic regions. If such a school has ever existed, I'd sure like to know about it. I know damn well that Duke has never been one of them, certainly not for the past 89 years since it got its foundation money and became Big Time.

I attended Harvard. I had no legacy, was from suburban NY, had no sports beyond JV baseball, and a trivial number of clubs/activities (most of which I joined junior year for resume padding).

At that time, I would guess that ~40% of the class was there on pure academics.

Based on my classmates at Duke, I'd tend to say that sounds about right. But that wasn't what I was reading into your initial comment.

And the reason that "pure academics" can't get you into an Ivy or Duke nowadays is because the application pool is so much deeper than it was then. I went to what at the time was rated one of the top public schools in the country (Wilson in D.C.), and I doubt if we had more than at most two dozen grads from my class attending Ivies or their then sister schools (Radcliffe, Pembroke, Barnard, etc.). Second level schools like Duke got another couple of dozen, but even when you added the ones who went to elite undergrad colleges like Swarthmore and the best state universities (Berkeley, Cal Tech, Michigan) it probably didn't add up to more than about a sixth of the class. Something like 98% of them wound up in one college or another, but the majority of them went to schools like Maryland, AU and GW, which at the time at least were considered nothing but party schools that were virtually open admissions to anyone with the tuition money.

And the reason for the explosion in applications to the elite schools is obvious: People---parents---are obsessed with the thought that you need a degree from one of them to get a job that will enable you to achieve a decent standard of living. With cookie cutter 1 or 2 bedroom "luxury" apartments going for $3,000 a month in cities like Washington---triple or more what they were in constant dollars since the 70's---it's hard to blame either the applicants or their parents from being cold bloodedly realistic about their futures. Anyone who doesn't think that would-be middle class jobseekers aren't being squeezed on both ends these days by a combination of the tight job market and housing costs is simply being in denial.

And maybe none of this applies to young people in Iowa or Kansas City, but that isn't where they're gravitating to these days. Blame this sad development on any scapegoat you want, from selfish Baby Boomers to illegal immigrants to affirmative action, but it ain't making the problem go away.

One needs to buy and build the facilities that are necessary for top notch education or middle of the road or whatever level it is you want to be.

But, I don't think facilities are the cost driver. Most facilities are funded through fund raising campaigns, not through operating income.

Anyone who doesn't think that would-be middle class jobseekers aren't being squeezed on both ends these days by a combination of the tight job market and housing costs is simply being in denial.

And anyone who thinks taking on massive debt for a degree of questionable value is a solution is insane.

An expensive college degree is practically worthless to someone of average intelligence (if they even graduate, which is probably less than 50:50). They can never compete with the oodles of bright people with the exact same degrees for the truly high-end jobs.

BTW as aesthetically displeasing and philosophically disquieting those college administrative costs might be, they account for less of 20% of overall college costs. The reason for those ungodly tuition hikes lies much more along the lines of what McCoy was stating in #156. It's all those bells and whistles that students and their parents demand, and for the universities it's a simple matter of having to keep up with the Joneses Harvards and the Stanfords if you want to keep your degree properly branded.

Speaking of bars and restaurants I'm halfway through a stretch of 4 days off in a row and I decided I would prepare everything I ate for those 4 days and not go out and eat.

Went to Eastern Market and bought 3 kinds of protein. A whole chicken ($7.50), a NY Strip ($15.00), and two Pork Porterhouses ($11.50). A vegetable stalls I bought shiitake mushrooms, cremini mushrooms, green beans, parsnips, carrots, red potatoes, yukon gold potatoes, brussel sprouts, onions, and shallots. Picked up some chicken stock and beef stock as well as had some leftover herbs and citrus fruits in my fridge.

Saturday featured a roasted whole chicken stuffed with sage, rosemary, thyme, garlic, and citrus fruits, wrapped in bacon. Served with brussel sprouts, raisins, and bacon (from the roasted chicken), rosemary roasted potatoes, and a mustard sauce. Drank a bottle of Steele Pinot Noir with it.

Was so full from that that I decided to postpone my steak dinner until tonight. So yesterday I had pulled chicken tacos for lunch and then ate the rest of the leftovers for dinner.

This morning featured a scallion and stewed tomato omelet with avocado and monterey jack cheese. Tonight will be the NY Strip steak with a mushroom red wine jus, smashed yukon gold potatoes with sour cream and scallions, and sauteed green beans and shallots. I've got a 2004 Simi Alexander Valley Cab I think I'll try with it.

Tomorrow will be pork porterhouses with mango salsa, roasted parsnips and carrots, and black beans and rice with roasted peppers.

Not counting the wine I think I spent less than 70 dollars on what will probably amount to 7 or so meals.

Anyone who doesn't think that would-be middle class jobseekers aren't being squeezed on both ends these days by a combination of the tight job market and housing costs is simply being in denial.

And anyone who thinks taking on massive debt for a degree of questionable value is a solution is insane.

Perhaps so, but then you and I were lucky enough not to be entering college in a time when such debts were necessary to take on. The total tuition and housing cost at Duke when I was there was $16,000 a year in 2012 dollars. That's still a steep chunk of change, but it's a third of what it is at the Duke of today.

------------------------------------------------------------

One needs to buy and build the facilities that are necessary for top notch education or middle of the road or whatever level it is you want to be.

But, I don't think facilities are the cost driver. Most facilities are funded through fund raising campaigns, not through operating income.

As are those administrative costs. There's no magic bullet that can scare the genie back into the bottle.

BTW as aesthetically displeasing and philosophically disquieting those college administrative costs might be, they account for less of 20% of overall college costs.

Do you have a citation on that? I would be careful, it's easy for the administration to hide admin expenses under other categories.

Did gov't support really go down, or did the schools just decide they needed a whole bunch more "operations"?

I'm mostly taking people's word for it. I don't know the actual answer to this question. My understanding is that government support for most state universities has gone down in inflation-adjusted dollars, but I haven't personally researched any figures.

BTW as aesthetically displeasing and philosophically disquieting those college administrative costs might be, they account for less of 20% of overall college costs.

Do you have a citation on that?

Sure. It's not that these costs aren't rising and aren't bloated, it's that they're not disproportionately so any more than they've been in previous eras.

I would be careful, it's easy for the administration to hide admin expenses under other categories.

No doubt, but what aspects of university life or government / corporate life does this insight not also apply to? The athletic facilities at Michigan or LSU? The Department of Health and Human Services? The Pentagon? The tax returns of the Fortune 500?

People---parents---are obsessed with the thought that you need a degree from one of them to get a job that will enable you to achieve a decent standard of living. With cookie cutter 1 or 2 bedroom "luxury" apartments going for $3,000 a month in cities like Washington---triple or more what they were in constant dollars since the 70's---it's hard to blame either the applicants or their parents from being cold bloodedly realistic about their futures. Anyone who doesn't think that would-be middle class jobseekers aren't being squeezed on both ends these days by a combination of the tight job market and housing costs is simply being in denial.

The funny thing is, many "working class" jobs are hiring, for very handsome salaries. My wife made more her first year of nursing than I ever have in one year, and I'm ten years out of law school. I have a friend who runs a manufacturing company, and he has guys in his shop just a few years out of high school, with no college education, making $75,000 as machinists. But our parents generation poo-poohed working with your hands because in their days, those jobs didn't pay as well (or have the prestige) as lawyers or bankers or academics.

Blame this sad development on any scapegoat you want, from selfish Baby Boomers to illegal immigrants to affirmative action, but it ain't making the problem go away.

SABERMETRICS ARE TO BLAME, MR. PRESIDENT

Speaking of bars and restaurants I'm halfway through a stretch of 4 days off in a row and I decided I would prepare everything I ate for those 4 days and not go out and eat.

That all sounds wonderful. I've recently started doing weight watchers (down 30 pounds!) and one of the unexpected benefits has been the amount of food I'm making for myself. Not only am I eating about 8 zillion times healthier but I love to cook and preparing meals for myself has been boatloads of fun.

Sure. It's not that these costs aren't rising and aren't bloated, it's that they're not disproportionately so any more than they've been in previous eras.

Link doesn't work, but I'll take your word for it.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-11-14/bureaucrats-paid-250-000-feed-outcry-over-college-costs.html

This link says that:

U.S. universities employed more than 230,000 administrators in 2009, up 60 percent from 1993, or 10 times the rate of growth of the tenured faculty

It may be true that Admin cost is only 20-30% of total costs, but if it used to be 10%, then it could still be the disproportionate driver of the increase.

No doubt, but what aspects of university life or government / corporate life does this insight not also apply to? The athletic facilities at Michigan or LSU? The Department of Health and Human Services? The Pentagon? The tax returns of the Fortune 500?

Everywhere. Our society has become very corrupt. The culture has shifted perceptibly to individual achievement and rights, and away from collective bonds and responsibility.

The funny thing, is that even the collectivists have become more individualistic.

Not counting the wine I think I spent less than 70 dollars on what will probably amount to 7 or so meals.

I guess this is supposed to be a low dollar total? Granted, your food is a lot classier than mine, but right now I'm living on ~$45 per week for total food.

I guess this is supposed to be a low dollar total? Granted, your food is a lot classier than mine, but right now I'm living on ~$45 per week for total food.

Compared to going to a restaurant it is. It could have been significantly cheaper if I decided on different proteins and didn't shop at Eastern Market for the protein and vegetables. The pork cost me something like $4.89 a pound, the steak $19 a pound and the chicken $2 a pound. I could have gone to Safeway and paid $2 a pound for the pork, $1.29 a pound for the chicken, a $3.99 a pound for top round. Vegetables would have cost me something like 25 to 30% less as well.

That all sounds wonderful. I've recently started doing weight watchers (down 30 pounds!) and one of the unexpected benefits has been the amount of food I'm making for myself. Not only am I eating about 8 zillion times healthier but I love to cook and preparing meals for myself has been boatloads of fun.

I probably consume more calories when I make my own own food as compared to going out and eating.

And the reason for the explosion in applications to the elite schools is obvious: People---parents---are obsessed with the thought that you need a degree from one of them to get a job that will enable you to achieve a decent standard of living.

Well, maybe it's parents' "obsession" per se. I don't think so, though. I think it is about trying to improve the odds for their kids. I am in corporate America, and as part of my job, I have been involved in on-campus recruiting for many years, for two different companies. My companies can't go to all campuses for recruiting, nor do we need to in order to hire enough people for the openings we have. We will go to the schools where we will get the best ROI on our dollar invested. The school selectivity aids us--it is simply easier to fill an interviewer's schedule with qualified students at a top school than at an average school.

The qualified students do EXIST at other large universities, but it's very hard to a) reach them with marketing in a pool of tens of thousands and b) assuming you do get a lot of resumes, conduct a low-yield process to sift through all them to find the right ones.

If you were to look at the caliber of employment opportunites available through on-campus recruiting at various schools, I have little doubt that it would be highly correlated with the school's long-term reputation as an elite institution (which I would posit has some grounding in merit). I think you'd find the same thing in terms of grad-school opportunities offered to a given undergrad school's students.

My own kids aren't college-age yet, but I will definitely encourage them to go to the most selective school they can get into, that also offers a degree in the fields they want to study.

Full disclosure: I fit Snapper's self-description (thank goodness for grants and student loans):

I'm probably among the last generation that could get into Ivy league and equivalent schools based on pure academics. All I had going for me was GPA/SAT/GRE."

And....I ALSO met my wife in a Chicago bar. Perhaps the problems people have with bars isn't the bars, it's the city.

My NY Strip dinner is out of this world, folks.

I don't know about private universities, but state university costs are rising because states have cut back funding, to the point where many state universities are largely private in all but name. That, and Baumol's Cost Disease: labor in so many other fields has become immensely more productive, but there are still thirty people in my World Lit classes, same as there were 30 years ago.

McCoy is a better cook than I am, but in the past two days I took four scrawny rainbow trout a friend gave me and made a huge vat of stock, made oyster chowder out of half the stock, froze the other half, and just ate fish tacos with the poached trout. Four people are eating for 2 days on that exercise.

And reading in bars = yes. I never go into bars unless I am traveling, but when I do, I bring a book. They are impersonal spaces full of white noise, and reading with a good drink at one's elbow is a great pleasure of life. For that matter, I bring books to ballgames and read between innings or during other commercial breaks. I am getting too old to care whether this is cool or not. Before the game, or during a rain delay, I like to sit in a bar at the Ballpark and read. So there.

This thread is gold. Primeys galore.
I started laughing so hard that I cried around #60 or 70.
(Well, to be fair, finding out TFA wasn't an Onion piece re: Rice & fundamentals made it an easy trip to Laugh Street.
Now known as LOL Street?)
I have to txt my friends and tell them to read this thread.

@42--Sure, Greg. I never made claims for anyone other than the eight people I mentioned.

Maybe one of your relatives is in this program? I kid, I kid. But I can't believe how much more mature this trio was then my siblings were that age. So there's hope out there!

I'm sure there is. Like I said, I wasn't deploring that generation (never remotely suggested it, afaict). Outside my family the 17-25 cohort doesn't seem any more or less bright than they ever were. I remember at that age being appalled at what a lot of my cohort was into. The only difference, now versus then, seems to be in attention spans.

Also, I tend to date women 20 to 30 years younger than I am, and there's no shortage of bright, quirky, interesting women out there.

An expensive college degree is practically worthless to someone of average intelligence (if they even graduate, which is probably less than 50:50).

I don't think we're too far from a future where an expensive college degree is worthless to many people of above-average intelligence. With an increase in the availability of high-quality open-learning environments, I suspect self-education will become more compelling and recognized by employers.

Maybe I'm a little too technology-centric, but I think the ability for the talented to demonstrate their skill to a large number of potential employers has never been higher.

"What mythical bar was this where three perfect strangers are all sitting next to each other and they all end up talking to each other?"

You must be from the northeast.
:)

Foul!

I'm from the NE and when I was working on my master's thesis all but lived in bars and coffee shops (the latter which, w/o alcohol, you'd have to think is a tougher place to socialize than a bar), and conversations with strangers who became anything from friendly acquaintances to good friends and gf wasn't at all unusual. It all depends on your attitude (and coming across as the right kind of friendly--open, but not too open; not needy or overeager; enjoy listening but not to your detriment...), but it's not hard at all to strike up conversations. As for the poster who mentioned women, that's easy enough. If she looks interesting and smiles at you twice, go talk to her and see what she's about.

but there are so many factors that go into its development that pointing fingers at individuals doesn't really explain all that much.

??

I made no claim for anything beyond the very small number of people I mentioned in post 28. Since when does describing a handful of individuals involve "pointing fingers"?

The Millennial generation, statistically, is more involved politically than their Boomer / Gen-X parents. They are more likely to have volunteered, more likely to consider political activism to be a useful thing. I see no evidence that we're raising a generation of checked-out apathetics - quite the opposite in fact.

Well, sure. Nothing whatever to do with what I wrote, though.

"The one thing that strikes me, though, is how utterly ####### dumb my nieces and nephews and cousins in their late teens and early twenties are."

I, like everyone over 25, was once in my late teens and early 20s, and I have no problem recalling how mind boggling stupid (and yet self assure) I and my peers were at that age, what I've never understood is how so many people seemingly deny or forget how dumb they and their friends were at that age.

Well, sure, but I was talking about eight people specifically, none of whom take an interest in anything meaningful. The one thing I can extract from this is that the BTF generation is unable to read in context when there are straw men to be whupped.

Spending one's entire life in a continuously networked world is the new generation gap. Definitely Future Shock-y where things change before we have a chance to understand impact and best practices of them.

What's weird about this is that my young nieces, nephews, and cousins know how to manipulate the digital world for the sake of entertainment, but not to research, or study, or engage the world. People have always found ways to piss their lives away on trivial pursuits (like making rude cave paintings, rereading dime novels, or posting on baseball sites) but it just seems more completely what their lives are about. None of them act like work can ever be something genuinely rewarding. It's just something you have to do until the next Hobbit movie comes out.

I don't even *have* a cel-phone. Top that.

Does it count that I only have one to keep my evil sister at bay? I refuse to give her my home number any longer, and this way I can claim I only get reception when I go into town about once a week.

When you get into your 20s and have no interest in film, art, or literature, except as pure entertainment; when politics is boring; when you create literally nothing, not even for the pleasure of beating a drum or sounding out a poem, or chiseling a piece of wood, or even just making a meal, something's wrong.

What is wrong, specifically? You could have just described me instead of your niece. I won't pretend that there's nothing wrong with me, but I'm just not an artsy-fartsy guy.

What?

This implies that art is inherently 'artsy-fartsy'. What is there to say to that? I also mentioned things as simple and satisfying as cooking a meal. One doesn't have to be interested in art, science, literature, the meaning of life, interrelatedness, religion, philosophy, metaphysics, the nature of love, the role of government, the question of extraterrestrial life, Bracewell probes, or making short films in order to take a little pride in knowing how to make a good cassoulet for company. Or, just see McCoy's posts for the obvious pleasure he takes in preparing interesting, enjoyable meals.

"As an intellectual 25-year-old man, I am interested in any and all early-20s intellectual nieces who need a trophy husband with a JD but no employment prospects."

I have another one in that age range who graduated with honors from the Manhattan School of Visual Arts. At least she make a fine cartoon of your predicament, and she is cool as hell.

also one who is an enviro college student, another who is in nursing honors fast track, and another who is sassier than Mackey Sasser.....

With an increase in the availability of high-quality open-learning environments, I suspect self-education will become more compelling and recognized by employers.

Don't see that happening anytime soon. As someone else already mentioned businesses like respected colleges because it concentrates the talent pool into easy to reach/low risk centers. If you move away from that to self education then the risks to businesses go up as well as costs as they now have to spend much more time, money, and energy finding qualified applicants.

Bracewell probes, or making short films in order to take a little pride in knowing how to make a good cassoulet for company. Or, just see McCoy's posts for the obvious pleasure he takes in preparing interesting, enjoyable meals.

After 4 days of eating massive amounts of proteins and carbs while doing little moving around I simply did not have the stomach for a 1 pound pork porterhouse tonight. So I stuck them in the freezer and settled on pulled pork tacos.