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I wish everybody could see what the life of a university student looks like right now.
The dorms have morphed into all inclusive luxury apartments. “Student loans” are spent on food delivery, and fast casual restaurants like chipotle.
Go visit a college town and look at the apartments and the restaurants and everything around it. It’s unsettling.
A university should be surrounded by dive bars. Dorms should continue their long tradition of being just barely habitable, and students should have jobs that they use to pay for their tuition. Anybody who can do basic math saw that as the availability of money increased (unsecured student loans), the cost rose to meet it. There is no gating function on university cost. It will continue to go up until it either reaches infinity, or until we stop giving unsecured loans to children to pass on to these massive multi billion dollar institutions.
“Forgiving” these loans is insane. We’ve robbed billions and billions of dollars from the American people and given it to a small minority of elite wealthy children and massive real estate investment firms which also happen to teach a few worthless classes.
I like the proposal to have the universities act as guarantors of the loans of their students. They have control over how employable their students will be, over how much debt they will accrue in tuition and over how long the ones who will fail will stay on before being failed.
If a university then decides that that they can not provide a course at a cost where the students can on average pay back the costs, then it seems reasonable to conclude that their course is not a sound economic investment. They might still attract students who are independently wealthy and just want to study something for fun, but there should be no student loans for such courses.
Of course, over here in Germany, we don't have tuition. Bafoeg, our student loan system (used by 20% of the students) is capped at some 900 euros a month (most of which will go towards rent, in the big cities), and you have to pay half of it back. Universities don't have famous sports teams here.
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I actually agree that what happened was awful, but I don't think the students are the people who deserve blame and financial punishment. The people who actually profited off all these dodgy loans are not just still there, they're insanely rich - just look at the immense amount of money in University endowments.
Personally, I think that non-performing loans should be clawed back from the educational institutions that actually profited from the whole affair. Many of the students with these shithouse loans are victims living in poverty and deprivation while the people who scammed them are still flush with cash. That's where the money actually went, and that's who should be paying back those loans. I can't really see any other reason to go after the victims (many of whom have qualifications that are either useless or actively harm their job prospects) and further depress fertility rates when the people responsible for all this wasted money are still enjoying the profits they made from it.
The "victims" spent 4 years partying at government expense without thinking much about what would happen when the loans came due and they had a degree in something either worthless or harmful. Personally I'd leave them on the hook for some reasonable value of 4 years of partying and take the rest from the universities, but either way, there's no reason to worry about their fertility rates: depressed rates are negative eugenics in these cases.
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What are you talking about?
I graduated from a state school in the 2010s. Our dorms had been standing since the mid century. They did demolish some even older ones to put up new dorms, and those fit your description, but nobody wanted to live in them because they were too expensive. I think they were either a donor earmark or part of the athletics rat race.
I paid $400/mo for my room in a bedsit, and it showed. Could have gone cheaper, too, in one of the complexes with a reputation for fire risk. I only wish my current town had anything close to those prices.
Most people I know either worked, or had parents rich enough to pay their way. Occasionally both. The best scholarships (outside of athletics) just wiped out the outrageous out-of-state tuition without covering housing or the ridiculous fees. Wait, unless you were Native American, in which case they gave a better stipend as a mea culpa.
Boomers like to complain about Chipotle or whatever. Sure, I guess the standard for fast casual raised a lot. Want to take a shot at how many burritos it takes to meet the average $11,000 tuition?
Nobody did delivery, either. If we really needed to get off campus, we walked to the shitty Asian restaurant across the street and came back with fried rice, as God intended. Same goes for the bars. They probably made most of their money on game day, anyway.
Two things:
First, depending on if you were at the beginning or end of the 2010s, there will be a vast difference. The money pouring into luxury (by any stretch of the definition) is staggering. By the time I left my alma mater we had completed 2 brand new dorms that competed directly with off-campus apartments, and a new fitness center with golf simulators, rock walls, and the best equipment money could buy. When I visited 10 years later, even more new dorms, stone buildings, and high-end food options were available - with the dive bars replaced by chains and uber-high-end apartments. The story is the same at many other formerly sleepy state schools.
Second - it still varies. The first school I went to for 2 years had far more rudimentary accommodations and we typically ate at the dining hall and that was it. Our dorm bathrooms were communal, there was one tiny kitchen to rent per 400 person complex, and "Luxury" was renting a ratty ranch house that still smelled like Natty Lite but had enough space, or a postage stamp of flimsy new-construction apartments. There was one nice dorm that you could get into, in theory, but that was about it. The dive bars were still losing ground to chains but....
And as I talk about this I'll revise a little. Three things, then!
I wish I had gotten student loans and spent a little more. I can't imagine what it would have been like to be able to take women out to eat, go on weekend trips since I could afford gas, and work out at that gym instead of slaving away at some fast food joint. It would have been un-fucking-believably fun. It also appears that there would have been virtually no consequences for it - either the government would have paid for everything, or I would still have been able to afford the ~$50k in loans at the end of it pretty easily.
This may seem tongue in cheek but to put it another way, I have enough money now I would kill to go back in time and give 20 year old me a ton of cash, even with a penalty. I think there's a lesson there about living beyond your means a bit when you're at the apex of your youthful vigor, even if getting taxpayers to pay this shit instead of people's future selves is disgusting.
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And, to note- students can opt out of cost disease. This isn’t a ‘no starter homes available’ situation. You can live with your parents, go to community college for 2-3 years, and then transfer to podunk state school of commuting for 1-2 years, and get a degree for like 1/8 the cost. This is the less popular option.
At some point, controlling the student loan problem requires either underwriting that will automatically get blown up into an algorithm based on throwing money after Shaniqua or reinstitution of sumptuary laws. Simply… cap the conditions available on campus. Require food halls to serve exactly the same food as the nearest prison, ban individual dorm rooms(and for an added bonus, require one-locker-room-per-floor level facilities), prevent the use of student loans for off campus expenses, etc. You want better than that, you pay with cash.
You can also opt out of a lot of problems by going and living in the woods like the Unabomber. Why are people complaining about inflation when they could simply opt out to go sharpen some sticks and hunt rabbits in the forest? There are incredibly severe outcome differences between someone who goes to Harvard or Yale as opposed to podunk state school of commuting and I feel like it is dishonest to claim that they're equivalent.
I, at 17, toured three local universities that obtained a substantial number of their students transferring from community colleges. These were large podunk state schools, and they were quite clearly 2-star resorts with colleges welded on. Oddly, the tour focused on things like having a five star chef(this is probably less impressive than it sounds) in charge of the dining hall and nice, new dorms with individual bathrooms.
The median student taking on debt for a bachelors degree is not going to Harvard, they’re going to a second or third tier public school. The difference between a state flagship’s commuter school satellite campus and podunk state, the hotel in nowheresville, is functionally nonexistent on your resume; I would actually imagine it runs the opposite direction when there is one.
This isn’t a ‘dodge rising gas prices by becoming Amish’ idea. This is a ‘you’re going to podunk anyways, just don’t party while you do’.
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The outcome differences are primarily due to the kinds of people who go to podunk state vs harvard. Once you control for that, the differences are pretty slight.
I think the estimate of the breakdown of the private returns to college education from Bryan Caplan (not a huge fan of the status quo) was around 50% ability bias ("the kinds of people who go to podunk state vs harvard"), but also 40% signaling (even if you're smart enough to go to Harvard, can you prove that to employers without the diploma?) and 10% human capital (Harvard actually does have some classes that teach you more because they don't need to worry about the slower kids keeping up). If he's right then you still want to steer clear of podunk; the net return to education is still too huge to throw away half of it lightly.
You're misrepresenting Caplan. That's his breakdown of returns to college education vs a high school diploma, not Harvard vs Podunk state.
Sure, but when I can't take a derivative I'll still prefer a finite difference over nothing. How would you think those estimates change when we reduce the delta?
I think the answer depends on what you think is the margunal value of Harvard over Podunk state, which is the very question we are discussing.
We were discussing ability bias vs human capital - did anyone bring up signaling before I did? It seemed a very weird thing to leave out of the conversation, so I thought it was surely worth mentioning that it could be nearly as large an effect as ability bias despite falling on the opposite side of the "should I go to a cheap college" question.
But as long as I'm bringing up weird things to leave out of the conversation - what's your source for "Once you control for that, the differences are pretty slight"? I was providing what seemed to be a relevant counterexample to an assertion not yet tied to data, but if you do have more relevant data then that's a trump card - just go ahead and play it?
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A lot of that is path dependant though. 20 years ago you could control costs by keeping with cheap low level accommodations and facilities and declining to build luxury. But now, the luxury is built. What are you gonna do, demolish it to build shitty dorms? You can stop building more luxury and try to bend the curve back down, but you are starting from the new high level, getting back to old low level may be impossible at this point.
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The problem is that parents want their kids to leave and are happy to pay the tuition, availing themselves of the generous aid and other programs too. It's a win for students and parents. Boomers and gen-x parents have tons of $ specifically earmarked for college.
Ok, so they do, but if you cap amenities available to students, then colleges have to compete on price. Or on educational quality, which unlike luxuries is a reasonable thing to spend more money on.
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When I graduated in 2014 from a large state university (not my undergrad, mind) I was already wondering how much further it could go.
The campus had its historical parts that predated the civil war which maintained their classic look, but massive modern facilities were popping up on the periphery, and new 'luxury' apartments and home rentals were being added with dizzying rapidity. And while I attended classes in a classic/historical part of campus, they renovated the interior with furniture that cost upwards of $1500 a piece.
And of course my membership to the huge gym/recreational facility and campus life buildings and events and bus transit was all included too. I intentionally sought out bottom-of-the barrel accommodations, but every other aspect of the experience seemed designed to get you to blow out your budget on frivolities, even if you weren't actively partying.
The downtown area was a mix of dive-bar-esque independent establishments but well known chains were encroaching. There was a single lone strip club that was holding out on a side street. A quick google search shows that it is still there, though.
It was readily clear that the college was an anchor for the whole area in terms of funneling student loan funds into the school's coffers and tons of local businesses who were aggressively optimizing for getting naive students to spend more than they needed. The only constraint keeping the school from capturing all that money is that they couldn't build new facilities fast enough.
I think this has had the additional effect of giving college kids hugely elevated expectations as to what real life is like and how they can expect to live unless they snagged one of those FAANG tech jobs right out of school, at which point those expectations are probably accurate. Also they probably get used to having a billion subscriptions for things that simply don't require them and outsourcing all kinds of labor they could economically perform themselves.
And this helps explain why kids getting out of school get the 1-2 punch of realizing how all that consumption during college was financed by debt they now have to pay, AND realizing their standard of living will be slashed by like 40-50% unless they're willing to KEEP financing it on debt for a while.
Tuition will keep rising, as will debt, as long as college grads continue to earn a significant wage premium, which they still are. The gap stopped widening since 2021 or so, so that is some progress finally . There is so much aid , scholarship, discounts and other programs. Parents are happy to dump their kids off at a university whilst taking advantage of these many generous discounts. If college tuition were like any other big-ticket consumer good, maybe things would change.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/F2VANdobQAAVTvl.jpg:large
heavily subsidized items in which there is a the greatest disconnect between the price and what is actually paid, have seen the most inflation
Yeah, and I suspect colleges can keep adding amenities indefinitely because even if various individual students never take advantage of a particular feature, those can be a major selling point when competing to get more students to attend. So yeah, go ahead and add a rock-climbing wall, a beer garden, a third swimming pool, not like that money is doing anything useful anyway.
There's literally nothing stopping a college from competing on price by offering a stripped down experience (or use the Spirit Airlines model of charging piecemeal for each amenity) so students can see what exactly they're paying for, but there's simply no incentive that I can see for doing so. Price-conscious students aren't the ones they want attending, anyway!
I think the biggest threat to their model right now is, ironically, AI, both because it enables rampant hard-to-detect cheating and because AI will probably be able to replace most instructors in the extremely near future.
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In the US, increasing the drinking age and enforcing it ruined that.
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