US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning

https://www.ft.com/content/41bdaca1-1988-4fac-9204-4ff4e70b36cc

by hhs • 6 years ago

82 72 6 years ago

ft.com

merricksb• 6 years ago

https://archive.md/suoy4

sheikheddy• 6 years ago

We should probably change the link of the article to this, I couldn't see the original one due to the paywall.

code4tee4• 6 years ago

The Pandora’s box here is that far too little of these “fees” actually went to in-person instruction vs. bloated admin and other things not directly linked to core educational activities. Unless universities slash those bloated admin and other costs then they’re not really in a position to be giving everyone a “remote learning” discount.

edgefield0• 6 years ago

These fees aren't for bloated admin. They support resources like the library, general student use fitness facilities, techology, and other student focused items. I get why students want to stop paying these fees during the pandemic since they can't use many of the resources. The issue is that most of the costs for these resources are fixed, mainly personnel and facilities. If you cut the fees, the university would have to lay off many of its staff, librarians, IT support, etc. The facilities would also fall into disrepair. There's no easy solution here.

code4tee4• 6 years ago

Few would argue about fixed costs of libraries, but you be hard pressed to explain how libraries etc. are responsible for the cost of higher ed increasing far far faster than inflation to levels that are increasingly hard to justify. That has a lot more to do with the number of “Assistant Vice Provost of Underwater Basketweaving” type non-teaching non-research roles and positions that have developed over the years at many schools.

It’s a story similar to Healthcare in the US. It’s so expensive because so little is actually spent on healthcare vs paperwork and administration.

Retric• 6 years ago

Universities can still cut quite a few costs when facilities are underutilized without letting things decay. Buildings don’t need to be kept at room temperature without people. Most computers and lights can be kept off. Parking lots don’t need to be kept plowed and salted in the winter. Grounds can generally be less immaculate without long term issues. Bathrooms etc don’t need to be cleaned daily when not in use.

mc32• 6 years ago

How did they do it before? The fees widely outpace inflation. It’d be nice to see state schools be affordable to kids on a part time job —which used to be the case. That’s not been the case for a few decades.

thatcat• 6 years ago

The easy solution is for Unis to take an L for once and to cover costs with their enormous savings from the last 30 years of exponential growth. Those fees obviously are over actual cost to cover contingencies, a pandemic was inevitable on the time scale of a university. They probably should have gotten insurance, what do those admins do anyway if not plan for things such as this?

vkou• 6 years ago

My university had a dozen computer labs that were never utilized to capacity, (One in a dedicated, multi-story building), and a library that was far bigger than any of the other buildings on campus. And, of course, all the accouterments necessary to run a physics, a chemistry, a biology, an engineering department, etc, etc, etc.

All-in-market-rate-no-discount-no-subsidies-international-student tuition was ~100,000 CAD/4 years.

It's true, though, we did not have a stadium that could sit 60,000 people, or two olympic-sized swimming pools, or four-star-hotel-accomodation dorms that we were for some reason forced to live in, but we also weren't paying $100,000/year in tuition.

jdeibele• 6 years ago

"The number of non-academic administrative and professional employees at U.S. colleges and universities has more than doubled in the last 25 years, vastly outpacing the growth in the number of students or faculty, according to an analysis of federal figures."

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/higher-ed-administrators-grow...

alpineidyll3• 6 years ago

With all due respect, I don't think you've seen the finances of a the typical private US University. Admin spending has grown geometrically. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...

KoftaBob• 6 years ago

Not to be pedantic, but if anything it's probably the other way around. The fees are the things specifically for academic resources, and the core tuition is what's wasted on administrative bloat.

code4tee4• 6 years ago

Indeed. The article uses “fees” to include tuition but yes usually it’s called “tuition and fees.”

hhs2• 6 years ago

Well, the article does note universities that are offering discounts. They include Princeton, Georgetown, and Williams. So, it’s possible to give concessions for the short term.

lumost• 6 years ago

If you're sitting on an endowment big enough to fund operations for decades then discounts are easy.

tomohawk• 6 years ago

Not only that, too many schools are peddling worthless degrees to very unsophisticated buyers. Any other industry would be heavily regulated for such shenanigans. Instead, the government heavily subsidizes the activity and makes special laws allowing students to take on enormous debt that they won't be able to discharge if they get a worthless degree.

The simple answer is to get rid of government backed student loans and have the schools back the loans and aid themselves. That way, they will be incentivized to not indebt 18 year olds when it is unlikely they'll be able to pay back the loan. It will also incentivize them to focus on more important things.

trianglem• 6 years ago

Everything in your post is oft thrown around conjecture. Do you have sources?

mishftw• 6 years ago

In fact some institutions like my alma mater, University of Michigan, are charging additional remote learning fees on top of the usual tuition increase.

boromi• 6 years ago

What is the justification and are people accepting this increase

bachmeier• 6 years ago

Because remote classes have higher costs. It's always been that way.

mlthoughts20183• 6 years ago

“convenience fee”

“accessibility surcharge”

“e-xpense”

“we just want more money payment”

code4tee4• 6 years ago

Universities are starting to sound like car salesman.

Look at this great deal! Now we’ll just add on the winterization fee, rust prevention package, delivery fee, admin fee, admin recovery fee, tag fee, boat payment fee, tire rotation fee, coolant flush and closing costs and we’ll get you on the road in a jiffy!

cm2187• 6 years ago

What happens to students who were financing their tuitions through athletic scholarships? Or by working on campus?

toomuchtodo2• 6 years ago

They become advocates of better educational public policy, because they’re currently (sadly) out of luck, casualties of a broken educational system.

jmeister• 6 years ago

Yes it’s great that they’ll join your pet political cause, but what about right now?

They need to get their degree and graduate.

treebornfrog• 6 years ago

What I don't understand about the whole education sector is these massive endowments.

If they're so big and managed so well, why is there a need to charge so much in the first place?

LockAndLol• 6 years ago

Profit. It's always profit. Higher education is nearly mandatory to get a good position and good salary. It's nearly a gateway. 30% of the population has a university degree in first world countries.

Forcing multiple thousands of dollars is a toll for a bridge where few alternatives exist. And in a country that considers so many things a business, this is of course run like a business ergo profit is very important.

erdos4d• 6 years ago

I think you are confusing schools like Harvard with your run of the mill state university. The latter rarely has much of an endowment to fund itself with.

katmannthree• 6 years ago

My run of the mill state school has an endowment larger than than $500 million and still sent out emails begging alumni to donate to a fund to make sure students didn't go hungry in the early days of covid.

tony0x02• 6 years ago

Last I read, those endowments have many restrictions on their use.

ThrowawayR2• 6 years ago

Endowments aren't slush funds that can be used for anything; they are frequently restricted towards specific purposes, like an endowed professorship/endowed chair. See, for example: https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/AAU%20Files/Key%20Is...

"A typical endowment consists of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of individual funds. In most cases, the donors who have created these funds have set restrictions on how their donations may be spent. In 2007-8, about 78 percent of endowment assets at public institutions were under such restrictions; an average of 55 percent of the resources contained in private university endowments were restricted (See National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) 2008 Endowment Study). In such cases, money restricted for research in a specific subject, for example, may not be applied toward student financial aid, and vice versa. Donations are typically restricted to fund student scholarships, conduct specific kinds of research, finance specific programs to enhance undergraduate and graduate education, create professorships in specified fields, develop or maintain teaching and research facilities, or improve a wide range of campus activities, including the arts, public service, student housing, and athletics."

However, other articles go on to note that money is fungible, making the restrictions less onerous than they appear. If, for example, a specific restricted endowment fund is restricted to providing scholarships, it still reduces the amount of scholarship money the university has to provide out of general funds by the amount the restricted endowment provides, freeing up that money to be used elsewhere.

rayiner• 6 years ago

Defund higher education.

fortran773• 6 years ago

I would love to see a two-part program

1. No more government-backed Student Loans. (Tuition would drop like a rock.)

2. Build many more free/cheap community colleges and make that much more accessible to everyone.

thaumasiotes2• 6 years ago

Build many more free/cheap community colleges and make that much more accessible to everyone.

They're already cheap, accessible to everyone, and ubiquitous. What would change?

SeanLuke• 6 years ago

Neither of these would be as disruptive as:

3. Student loans no longer survive bankruptcy.

voxl• 6 years ago

Nothing like a two step plan where the first step alone would cause a wide divide in educational opportunity between the wealthy and the poor and the second step is a half baked attempt to fix the obvious problems with the first despite it being insanely difficult and costly to implement.

valuearb• 6 years ago

We should have strict price controls on university tuition and fees. Roll them back a couple decades, and cap compensation at $250k a year for all employees and contractors.

fennecfoxen• 6 years ago

State universities — the bulk of public universities in the nation — are already subject to control by state legislatures. The problem is that this central planning capability is not in practice used to improve education and its affordability, but rather to enrich and empower the university staff (and occasionally faculty) as they siphon off public funds, loans, fees and tuition, in a classic illustration of the principal-agent problem. Even the retirement systems seek overtly political ends with their investments.

Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!

(Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.)

qserasera• 6 years ago

Private universities should of course be free to do as they wish in this regard, because who do you think you are; mind your own businesses.

Thanks for the chuckle.

Unwinding this debacle will involve dealing with the entire university's staff, who will be dead set against it, and who will have contracts that are in place to protect them. The legislators who do so will face extensive public criticism from these highly paid, highly motivated people, who wish to protect their pay. Good luck with that!

I reject the framing that this system is promoted or even protected by university staff. It is of course in their interests to keep it largely intact but the true system facilitators have been in place for centuries perhaps with different names and agendas.

One thing that has been discussed here is removing government backed loans. Doing so would perhaps reduce overall population exposure to higher education. I think the trend of expanding costs of education will continue without government help via positive feedback loop from parental investment and other society wide changes happening today.

So in essence university value is being justified each day without a thought of future consequences. To that end the government may act for increasing government sponsorship loan forgiveness where you work off your loans at a discount rather than a dead stop bailout of loans that may never be repaid in a lifetime. The government could probably make a variety of optional part time/full time 'loan forgiveness' programs for the public good. Unfortunately assigning the public good would probably be too hard to decipher in a bipartisan manner.

twirlip• 6 years ago

They can keep their tuition rates high, but online only schools should be allowed regional accreditation. Massive open online courses (MOOC) and other disruptive EdTech can offer equivalent educational instruction for a lot less money than traditional higher-ed options.

mathattack• 6 years ago

Certainly every university should cut them if they’re no selling brand and access to an alumni network.

Harvard/MIT/Stanford can get away with it because they can get you into Google/Goldman/McK purely based on their screening. The market pays a high price for that.

Schools with more open admissions policies can’t expect to charge much more than Coursera for similar offerings.

ntsplnkv2• 6 years ago

People just don't understand on here. It isn't like buying a loaf of bread.

Kids want to go to college. It's an exciting time in everyone's life, you get to go away somewhere, meet knew people, all while earning a degree, which because of the corporate worship of our nation, is now required to get a job.

And you wonder why fees are so high? And tuition skyrocketed?

No one shows anger towards the corporations which don't train anymore for their BS job in their BS department which doesn't do much of anything. We ignore the corporate bloat and regulatory capture across the entire spectrum for the select few corporations that have our politicians in their back pocket.

jameslk• 6 years ago

I read this article a different way: instead of being under pressure to cut tuition, schools just realized they can cut a bunch of amenities and students will still pay their tuition, and even more. With that knowledge, they might as well keep it that way forever and pocket the extra income. Students will complain, but until they start dropping out, tuition can apparently be driven up endlessly. It's a lucrative business.

mdavis68902• 6 years ago

This problem is not complicated. If students don't like the fees - don't go to school there! A little more price-shopping in higher education would go a long way toward reducing the tuition.

iso12102• 6 years ago

Many career paths have gatekeepers who expect new entrants to follow same path as they had 20 years ago (and the generation or two before that), which means alumni from specific schools will get the advantages, not because of any actual different in the quality of the education, but because of bias - concious and unconcious.

mdavis68902• 6 years ago

Companies who have gatekeepers that bias toward (or away from) certain groups of people will tend to perform more poorly than peer companies that don't. They will pay more for similar performance, or fail to hire better qualified candidates. This is not perfect, and takes a lot of time to play out - but it does play out eventually.

Sometimes you have to wait for those gatekeepers to retire, so it might take a generation, but it will happen over time. Sometimes it can happen much more rapidly due to innovation and new industries replacing old very quickly.

In the meantime, focusing on acquiring useful skills as cheaply and efficiently as possible is a winning proposition. Much more likely to be winning than spending a whole bunch more money on a less valuable educational product.

US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning

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