Tuition at the University of California (1970)

https://thebackbench.blogspot.com/2007/08/tuition-at-university-of-california.html

by eaguyhn • 7 years ago

47 90 7 years ago

thebackbench.blogspot.com

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

It's amusing to read this now when tuitions for the UCs have grown by a factor of a hundred.

tombert• 7 years ago

I have to wonder...where does this money go? Unless all my professor friends are lying to me, it's not going to the professors' salaries. When I went to school (Florida State University about ten years ago), the dorm was absolutely dreadful, but that wasn't even part of the regular tuition, so it wasn't going to increasing student living conditions.

dsfyu404ed• 7 years ago

Administrative bloat (think about all the jobs that have dedicated people that used to just be the side job of a particular professor) and all the BS you piss money away on when budgets are dependent on what you used last year (which many university department budgets are).

idoh• 7 years ago

For the UC system, here's a tool that gives a breakdown: https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/revenue-an...

commandlinefan2• 7 years ago

They (the universities) are constantly begging for more money, too, in the form of grants. According to my professors in grad school, tuition revenue is a “drop in the bucket”.

travisoneill12• 7 years ago

Useless administrators. There has somehow been an increase in administrators over a time period when the introduction of computers should have cut the number drastically.

At public research institutions specifically, there has been a particularly marked rise in the number administrators. In 1990, there were approximately twice as many full-time faculty at public research institutions as administrators. In 2012, the two groups were nearly equal.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

barbecue_sauce4• 7 years ago

Administrators. Not to one super administrator that's soaking up all the money, but to an array of administrators in various, emerging roles.

Anecdotal: When I went to undergrad, all of the student advisors were tenured faculty members doing it as part of their job responsibilities. When I went to grad school a few years later, the advisors were all full-time advisors, and all the departments had instructional designers to consult when creating courses.

ludwigschubert• 7 years ago

The UC budget 2019–20 suggests:

68% staff + faculty salaries and benefits 15% financial aid 17% equipment

From page 7, https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2019-20...

If someone knows a more detailed breakdown of the budget, I’d be curious! :)

bryanlarsen• 7 years ago

There are about twice as many teachers per student as there used to be:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/bl...

yardie• 7 years ago

Mortgages and more administration. I watched my school build new building after new building (New Residence Hall, New Chemistry Hall, New Engineering Building, etc.) and then wait for a benefactor to donate enough to name the building after them. These donations never approached the costs of maintaining and furnishing the new building. Just like lots of other things in America larger rooms were in demand as well. An old dorm with 200sqft dorm rooms housing 2 students was knocked down for dorms with 1000sqft suites housing 4 students.

kart232• 7 years ago

https://www.ucop.edu/operating-budget/_files/rbudget/2019-20...

I think UC is first and foremost a research institution. A lot of these professors are barely involved in undergraduate teaching, and the massive staff employee count I think is a lot of people related to research and assisting these researchers. That's why the undergraduate student experience is going down at UCs, with worse class sizes, and less engagement.

logfromblammo• 7 years ago

I'm betting people will say administration, but I don't think even the swarms of useless educrats can account for the entire difference.

Other possibilities:

Direct funding from states to public universities has decreased. Some portion of tuition increase has gone to replace the revenue lost from reduction in subsidies.

Capital costs from new campus buildings have gone up, as universities add expensive features that are not strictly required for education, such as apartment-style dormitories, or luxurious fitness centers for faculty and students. The university's money is usually fungible, so housing and recreation fees may be higher for students using those buildings than for the palmetto-bug dorms and century-old fieldhouse, yet still subsidized out of tuition revenue.

The aforementioned swarms of useless educrats may be corrupt, diverting university revenues to their own pockets via schemes that require their academic credentials or administrative authority.

Universities may be underwriting student loan debt, trading cash now for future income streams from future repayment. In that case, the money isn't even there yet, and the students first have to graduate and start earning before there is any of that money to spend.

I know that Indiana University dumped a lot of money into its "18/20" retirement plan, to attract better quality professors. It sounds very expensive. At some point, they realized it would bankrupt the university, and stopped offering it, but current students will still be paying for it until all those old professors that got it die off. So, maybe tuition increases are going to retired employees.

Last, we have accounting fictions. Universities charge $X on paper, to receive or maximize some third-party benefit, then rebate $Y to the student in the form of grants or scholarships. The money was never there, except on paper.

dhimes• 7 years ago

Go 'Noles! 80% of a college's costs are personnel. Not only are there a heckuva lot more services being offered, and the services offered are being offered more broadly, but colleges are also trying to be all things. A college that was a famous teacher's college in the 1960s now wants to have top tier science departments as well. I think when boomers like me came along the number of people going to college increased so dramatically (because a. there were so many of us and b. more people were seeing a college education as valuable) that colleges expanded.

It's interesting to consider how college costs have increased compared to other indexes:

US inflation : ~300% https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1980

US college costs: ~300% https://www.businessinsider.com/this-chart-shows-college-tui....

US GDP per capita: ~500% https://mgmresearch.com/us-gdp-data-and-charts-1980-2020/

Keep in mind that those college and gdp graphs have inflation removed.

lordleft• 7 years ago

There has to be some upper bound to the cost of education, right? Or will I have to put aside a few million to send my kids to college twenty years from now?

koolba• 7 years ago

As long as the government continues to give people loans (ie demand side) rather than directly provide a competitor to schools (ie supply side), the price will continue to grow.

tzs• 7 years ago

I haven't been able to find much online historical tuition data, but the little I have found (about 100 years of Stanford tuition) shows that it was increasing before there were government loans at about the same rate it increased after government loans.

This makes me doubt the theory that government loans are behind high tuition.

larnmar4• 7 years ago

Also as long as US education remains a strongly positional good — that the value of your education continues to be mostly dependent on where your university sits in the pecking order, rather than on some absolute value (e.g. of the knowledge you actually learn).

With a positional good, demand can never be really satisfied, because everyone always wants something further up the chain, so prices expand to whatever people can possibly pay.

00000111112• 7 years ago

Government loans for college could very well cause the next recession. https://www.npr.org/2019/12/09/785527874/student-loans-a-lot...

The economic effects will be more indirect than the last one. Folks will delay homebuying, they will have fewer children later in life. Schools and Colleges will be competing for fewer people. Many small liberal arts colleges will close.

virmundi• 7 years ago

You’d think but with Siemens requiring a college degrees because people can’t read at a 9th grade level, probably will have to take out a million Dollar loan.

rjkennedy98• 7 years ago

I think tuition can keep going up as long as its offset with grants and aid (insured by the federal government). A few weeks ago there was an article about how University of Chicago was on track to have 100K per year tuition. That would put you at almost half a million to send you kids to school.

wahern2• 7 years ago

A few years ago, shortly after the birth of our first child, our financial advisor recommended $350k in case we wanted a private college. We're nowhere near making that goal, nor do we have any particular preference for a private school, but it's an interesting number nonetheless.

But I think the trend to keep an eye on isn't the price of an undergraduate degree, but a graduate degree, as an undergraduate degree won't be nearly as useful as today, which already isn't as useful as 20 years ago in many fields. Indeed, both my wife and I have graduate degrees.

My wife came from a middle-class family that was college oriented. I came from a working-class/poor environment. My mom sent me off to college with $200 and a suitcase, and I subsequently paid for everything else, including housing and tuition, myself. But I barely made it through; I just wasn't culturally or academically equipped to do college. For example, my first week of school I was preoccupied with finding a job, I always prioritized working over school even when, financially, I didn't need to, and I didn't appreciate the value in developing relationships with professors (that felt more like cheating, reflecting not enough time spent studying). So what concerns me more than college right now is primary and secondary school--preparing my kids so the transition to college is seamless and natural. Fortunately, San Francisco has many excellent public and private schools. The public school district has language immersion programs in several different languages in addition to non-immersion early language programs, as well as other enrichment programs; and the parochial private schools in particular are relatively affordable--cheaper than daycare, even. (Though daycare can be crushingly expensive--whether run out of a garage or attached to a fancy private school, rates are similar--so I guess that doesn't say much.)

So the price of college? Meh. That's poor people thinking. My goal is to put my kids on a college trajectory and let that carry them through--hopefully to graduate school. Of course we'll save as much as we can, but that's not something I'm concerned about. In my hometown middle school and high school counselors often discouraged kids from college because the costs were presumed insurmountable for most families. In truth 1) they were ridiculously misinformed and misleading about the options and alternatives, and 2) setting kids up for failure whether or not they ended up going to college. Nope... worrying about cost right now is counterproductive.

beefield• 7 years ago

A few years ago, shortly after the birth of our first child, our financial advisor recommended $350k.

Amazing. Land of the free seems to be quite keen to come up with innovative ways to enslave its citizens...

WhompingWindows• 7 years ago

You're assuming that graduate education is going to be highly valuable in the future...that may be, but it may also be that white-collar occupations get heavily automated, as a few analyses recently have shown.

tropo• 7 years ago

You can save for college, but then this gets deducted from your "need", causing financial aid to be reduced. There isn't much incentive to save when that just drives up the costs.

asdff4• 7 years ago

Many graduate programs are funded either completely or partially by research fellowships and/or TAships. Med school loans iirc are pretty low interest and aren't as much of a burden given you can do things like moonlight to generate a lot of instant income as a doctor (most docs pay for a month of childcare by taking a night shift or two).

The real stick is law school. If you don't end up in a top program, you better end up at the top of your class unless you like starting salaries of 45k after a >200k education.

barry-cotter• 7 years ago

Fortunately, San Francisco has many excellent public and private schools.

San Francisco public schools are awful.

https://californiapolicycenter.org/san-francisco-unified-dri...

No issue has been more contentious in recent years than how the SFUSD has handled the new Common Core mathematics curriculum. Algebra has been taught in middle school for ages, but because so many San Francisco middle schoolers have done so poorly at it, it is not even taught until high school anymore. Parents whose children didn’t do well with Algebra are OK with postponing it until the 9th grade, but for families eyeing college and looking ahead, this is a complete disaster.
One parent who toured a government school for her 4-year old who could already read was told that she could tutor other students still learning to read; she ended up in a private school because her mother felt there would be very little challenge for her with so few children at her level.
when she toured another government school and asked about challenging her daughter with math, the teacher looked down her nose superiorly and informed her that it was wrong to give any child any opportunity all children didn’t receive and she would never let any kid do more advanced work than the others.

https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-sf-educational...

On the most recent round of tests, 87% of San Francisco Unified’s black students performed below standards in math, as did 79% of Latino students and 78% of Pacific Islanders. Ninety-six percent of districts in California that serve black students had better reading scores for low-income black students than San Francisco did, Innovate found.

wenc2• 7 years ago

our financial advisor recommended $350k in case we wanted a private college

That's too much cash for an undergrad education, and the payback is often not there. Here are some other options:

* Canadian universities -- similar quality of education to most U.S. state universities at a significantly lower cost. Close to home (cheap airfares, or within driving distance for most U.S. states), culture is similar, education system is very similar to U.S.

* Continental European universities -- free or close to free in many countries, plus your kid gets to have a study abroad experience in Europe at no extra cost. Many colleges in Germany for instance have instruction in English nowadays so there's not even a need to learn a foreign language (well, one should but one doesn't have to). The downside is the style of education in Europe tends to be very hands-off and less pedagogical (sink-or-swim), so if your kid isn't that independent they're not likely to survive.

The only things to take care of:

* Make sure your kid does summer internships in the U.S. if they want to get hired in the U.S. Studying abroad means losing the U.S. network, but that is remedied by summer internships.

* FAFSA -- most Canadian schools as well as schools abroad are FAFSA eligible.

For me, a U.S. education is only worth it if you're going to a top U.S. school. Otherwise education abroad can be as good as (and in many cases, superior to) the average U.S. college.

geogra42• 7 years ago

You can send them to study for free in Germany, in English[0]. That's my plan.

0: https://www.daad.de/en/study-and-research-in-germany/plan-yo...

brewdad3• 7 years ago

Last time I looked, most undergraduate universities in Germany required proficiency in German as the courses are not taught in English. Graduate study courses frequently are however.

bjourne2• 7 years ago

Pretty sure that's for EU citizens only. Some EU countries used to offer free tuition even to non-EU nationals but most are now charging fees meaning that they are roughly as expensive as American universities.

Reedx• 7 years ago

Or will I have to put aside a few million to send my kids to college twenty years from now?

No, because that wouldn't make sense as an investment. Already it often doesn't make sense. Hence the student debt crisis.

Colleges will have to adapt and bring costs down as people increasingly opt for alternatives.

vkou3• 7 years ago

Send them to study in Canada.

Even paying international student rates, their education will be much cheaper.

jhedwards• 7 years ago

I don't understand this sentiment. In-state tuition for state school in still only around $15,000 a year. Assuming your children get no financial aid and take out zero loans, you still only need to have $60k saved for four years. That's not much more than it was when I went to college fourteen years ago.

brewdad3• 7 years ago

Tuition is only about half the cost of attendance at most state schools. Room and board, books, living expenses. I would expect the total price tag to be at least $25,000/yr at a school like your example.

vkou3• 7 years ago

Add $800-1000/semester in must-buy-brand-new-because DRM books, a mandatory meal plan, enrollment fees (That all active students pay, regardless of their course load), mandatory dorm housing, and you'll be hitting $35,000/year.

Meanwhile, my entire education (5 years, 144 credit hours, compared to the usual 4/120) cost me ~$32,000... In Canada. I didn't live in a dorm, didn't buy a meal plan, and paid for pretty much all of it over two summer internships, and one fall one.

cleandreams• 7 years ago

Another great cost saving idea of Ronald Reagan was the closing of all the mental hospitals, supposedly to be replaced by community clinics (which never happened). The unrolling disaster of homeless with severe mental illness continues, on and on and on. Thank you, Ronald Reagan. What a legacy.

larnmar4• 7 years ago

a) off topic, and (b) representative of a global trend that was going on at the time, led by the psychiatric profession, rather than being any kind of personal whim of who your president happened to be at the time. We in Australia closed our mental asylums at the same time, with the same effect.

Blame Jack Nicholson if you want to blame someone; or rather the rash of 1970s “aren’t asylums terrible?” asylum fiction.

retrac• 7 years ago

Asylums were terrible. It's a dynamic that's extremely prone to abuse. I do think some people should probably be institutionalized involuntarily, but I can see the argument where, even as a mentally ill homeless person, you at least still have the freedom to physically escape someone who is abusing you. That's not something to be deprived lightly.

And yes, it was very much a global phenomenon, largely predating the 1980s.

astura• 7 years ago

Reagan did not personally come up with the idea of deinstitutionalisation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation

ltbarcly3• 7 years ago

The increasing tuition of most college is the result of intentional fraud. When the US Government computes your 'financial need', the two primary inputs are your parents' income and the cost of tuition. If your parents' income is low enough, then the government will give you a grant based on the cost of tuition. Schools that have low tuition get a smaller check from the government for the same student than schools that have high tuition. As a result, schools push tuition higher and higher, then give grants to students to cover the high costs that remain after the government grant.

For example, say school A charges $5000 per year. A low-income student is accepted and maxes out their government grants, the school can get a check for up to $5000.

School B charges $50,000 per year. For that same student, they can get $23k per year (or something like that), plus the student now qualifies for subsidized loans to pay for room and board. The school can then give that student a scholarship for the remaining $27k.

For this student, the higher tuition school is much cheaper.

This isn't a theoretical exercise, this is exactly what Universities have been doing for over 20 years.

alexhutcheson• 7 years ago

In-state tuition at the UC schools is now moderately above the median tuition rates at comparable flagship state universities. However, it's worth pointing out that the California State University system has done an amazing job keeping tuition and fees low[1]. You can get a nationally ranked education from San Diego State, Fresno State, Cal Poly Pomona, etc. for less than $7,600/year in tuition and fees.

This is obviously still a lot of money, but it's far cheaper than comparable options in most other states. Florida, North Carolina, New Mexico, Montana, and Wyoming are the only other states that have similar options at that price.

[1] https://www2.calstate.edu/attend/paying-for-college/Document...

hackeraccount• 7 years ago

I think University prices are like some weird mirror of airline ticket prices. Time was that airlines sold tickets at a premium but the service was great. Now you can get tickets at incredibly low prices but the service is at cattle car level. People complain but at a fundemental level - that's what they want.

The airlines say "If you want 60's service then fly first class and pay 60's level prices" And the response of virtually everyone is - No, thank you, I just want to get to wherever I'm going as cheaply as humanly possible.

It seems like the same thing in reverse happened with University. Have you seen or read about dorms in the 50's? Or all the ancillary things that went with going to a university? It was all crap. And it's like everyone went "I would like a very nice University experience. I want a nice dorm. I want a beautiful campus. I want a sports team that wins and gym to go to. I want administrators that will hold my hand." And the Universties resonse was "You go it. If you want the cheap version go to community college"

Now by bent I'm classically liberal. If you asked me why prices have gone up I'd tell you a tale of government action. Make student loans widly available. Making student debt non-dischargable in bankruptcy. You may not but I find the argument plausible.

What if that's not a root cause though? Because truelly none of that stuff happens by chance. It's everyone who votes putting people in government. It's everyone who votes saying- "These are my priorities" and then the people in government saying "this is how we're going to meet those priorities" and both walking away happy to some greater or lesser degree.

All of which indicates to me that free University for all isn't going to cut it. If it's publically financed it won't in the long run be able to afford what people seem to want to get out of University. If that's true then they'll all run to a non-free private system and get the politicians to help them to pay for it.

Tuition at the University of California (1970)

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