CPHoya's post is the fire I wanted to spit were I knowledgable enough about the US college system. My gut tells me there is a scam going on.

I'm colored for sure by my own university experience, where both the government and I spent tens of thousands of dollars getting probably a couple thousand dollars worth of education. About half of that could have been averted if anyone in careers advice had pointed out to me that there are, rounded down, zero jobs available for people doing chemistry degrees. Most of the other half could have been averted if someone had explained to me that I could learn that stuff myself and didn't need the piece of paper.

I went to the best university in my city and the experience of seeing that a Computer Science degree from there was well regarded, while actually it was a complete piece of ****, makes me skeptical of the quality of tertiary education in general.

In what world is this a bad job market? I have very few skills and a meh degree from a meh state school and I have to beat back recruiters calling me on a weekly basis.

Also saying financial outcomes are not as rosy as they seem is silly. How are you measuring that? The bendits take a while to be realized but they're still there and they're still massive.

There are multiple aspects to this, but one thing to recognise in taking the r/redpill on college quality is that a business demanding a college degree for something pays zero in cost for that demand. Good jobs are always a scarce resource, if a business says "Ivy League Only" it costs them nothing unless Ivy League graduates are in short supply compared to their sweet job opening, which is never the case. The other suggestion libertarian aspies might make is that businesses would suffer against competitors if they hire Harvard grads rather than simply the best people available.

The problem here is the supposition that a way of identifying the best people avaiilable exists. For Google, when they analyzed their own hiring procedures, they found that the predictions of how well new hires would do, compared to how they were actually rated by their managers, bore absolutely no correlation whatsoever. So basically, there is no way to pick a good hire.

I don't necessarily disagree with your general point, but here's something I'm curious about: where do you think the excess money is going, if it's not covering costs? Putting it something like this:

Tuition and endowment income = Academic costs + Administrative Costs + Infrastructure Costs + Endowment savings

Do you have a sense for where the increased tuition is going? Based on my understanding (largely from my own university, I'll admit), faculty salaries aren't going up that much and the endowment isn't growing that much. So that leaves administrative costs and infrastructure costs. And at that point, I think the question is "Are these costs necessary or are they just dollars being sucked in by useless administrators and unnecessary expenditures on rock-climbing walls and velodromes?"

I do think that one factor is not as well understood as it should be (not attributing this to you), and that's the decline in public support at most schools over time. A large university could maintain constant costs over time, but receive steadily decreasing state funding, and have to charge higher tuition just to tread water. That increase in tuition is going to show up as inflation, but it's really not an inflation in cost or a sign of price-fixing.

Anyway I went to 2 years of Community College then transferred to Stony Brook University, a state unniversity that is a top 100 school that was like 6500 per semester at the time.

In total my college degree cost less than 40,000 dollars.

I'm all for bashing baby boomers but seems odd to blame them for entitled millenials being idiots taking out 250k in student loans to go to aome overpriced private university and then continue to be entitled by whining that you didn't immediately get a sick job that you're not qualified for becauae all you've ever done in your life is homework and group projects.

Great hoya post, especially the finance industry pushing loans bit

Hoya, tuition only can increase because people are still willing to pay it. If people stopped paying it then it would stop increasing, but since it is still worth the cost to many people they keep paying it (and others make errors in judgment by thinking its worth it).

Also, I completely disagree that an 18 year old can't properly price a student loan decision.

This is mostly my view as well, but it's important to shame schools for their fraudulent reporting that misrepresents the likely payoff of attending. Thinking especially of law schools here.

Law schools take the cake in the fraudulent inducement department.

I can't see anyway in which you're correct here. Like mau be you're correct when speaking about those with whom you associate, but man, there are a lot more people out there. They're dumb, very dumb

18 year olds get loans pushed on them because it's the "thing to do" and go to overpriced colleges that really offer no better education than lower colleges other than name brands

also more people getting pushed through college leads to more competition and less value of the degree itself

Also i'm pretty sure the push for more liberal arts style learning/degrees is just to keep kids there longer. Also it justifies the existence of the liberal arts programs a bit more.

I recognize that tuition "can only increase because people will pay it." That is not the discussion we're having. The discussion we're having is about the incentives that have caused it to increase and the lies made in justification of that increase.

And I know you disagree that 18 year olds cannot make reasonable decisions about university costs, but that's because you are, as ever, applying your bot calculus experience to everyone else and concluding that because you did A, everyone else is equipped to do A as well, which is simply wrong and a simple logical fallacy at the same time.

You may as well say "labor costs can only decrease because people agree to work for less" but it's obviously more complicated than that.

The people who are very dumb should not be going to college. If you can't make basic decisions like this by age 18 then you're probably not smart enough to figure out which degree to get, how to get good grades, and how to get a well paying job out of school either.

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possibly the best demonstration of the point that could have been dreamed of, offered up in service of the argument for tuition increases

kind of amazing

Lots of things that are the "thing to do" are really stupid to actually do. Drugs are the "thing to do" in high school too, but if you start smoking meth then you made a bad decision. Getting married and having kids is the "thing to do" in many social circles for people our age. If you do that because other people tell you you should rather than you wanting to do it and making a well thought out decision to do it then its a bad decision.

Man, the people you describe seem pretty helpless in the face of a well organized machine designed to exploit their ignorance. Should we have a few laws designed to protect them from that predatory practice?

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the decision to pursue an education is not supposed to be a "bad decision," yet here we are where the financial burdens coupled with job outcomes are so bleak that it is possible to make a "bad decision" when deciding to pursue an elite higher education

this was not true for prior generations, this is unfair, this is damaging to our generation and all future generations unless we can fix it, that is the point we are discussing

you have twice in a row ceded - if not actually adopted as true - that point while purporting to argue sort of against it but really sort of in the margins or something

Umm, you seem to be seeing this as some sort of happy little exchange between customer and folksy insurance company. I can tell you the reality is a lot more of a Kafkaesque mind****, especially when your doctor says, "No, we actually need the better resolution offered by the newer MRI machine at St. Marys" and it turns out to not be "asking" so much as refusing to authorize and you spend several months going through an appeals process. This is purely a GTO calculation of it being more $lucrative$ in the short term to try to haggle with the ignorant prole patients than the actual doctors' offices that are knowledgeable enough to actually make these decisions. It's essentially predatory but the larger problem may actually be that it would discourage innovation and investment in newer, frankly better, facilities.

For instance, radiation therapy is expensive, and hospitals are still purchasing new but nearly exact reproductions of machines from 30 years ago not because they are "good enough" (they have a lot of problems) but because they are "better than nothing" and they know insurance companies will pay for them instead of demanding their patients go get treated at St. Jo's where it really is a 40 year old device. The companies that make the machines aren't even doing R&D any more.

A real solution will probably need to get rid of the middleman profit motive.

If you're smart enough to go to college you're smart enough to figure out if its worth paying for. Figuring out the cost/benefit analysis of a college degree or even a specific major with a reasonable degree of certainty is like 1000x easier than freshman classes.

If we could wave a magic wand and make all universities/colleges and all insurance companies not-for-profit, how far up does our standard of living, as a society, go in 5 years time?

Then do you agree that graduate degrees should also be in the same bucket? I'd personally be in favor of subsidizing graduate degrees BEFORE undergraduate ones as I think they have more added value to society and they definitely cost more on average.

I mean I think its lol to in any way regulate what private universities can or should charge. I think in-state public colleges should be free to students who meet a specific academic hurdle. If Harvard wants to charge $1mm/year for tuition though I think they should be able to.

When people talk about overbearing student loans though they mostly come from private, out of state public, for profit, or graduate schools. Very rarely do you see an instance of someone racking up huge amounts of student loan debt at an in state public college for an undergrad degree.