[ayakang31415]

The problem with this approach is that the private universities still get benefits of federal funding through student aids and research grants. If no federal money was used for the undergraduate students, I would have no problem with this. Private university can do whatever they want with their admission as long as no public money is spent on the admission process and the admitted students.

[throwup238]

The funding and grants mostly benefit the students and researchers though.

The bigger problem is their endowments and tax exempt status. The amount of wealth going through top universities is insane, with schools like Stanford and Harvard becoming appendages to giant hedge funds.

[ayakang31415]

I don't care how the money is spent as long as it is their money. But the federal funding is not; it is tax payer's money. Tax money should be allocated based on decision made by the congress, which is the will of the people in the country. but to me it looks like the tax money the private universities get is spent on their terms, not the citizen.

[drawkward]

Well, life sucks. Here in Ohio our tax dollars fund vouchers that can be used to pay tuition at religious schools.

[rahimnathwani]

Here in San Francisco:

- Our tax dollars fund government-run schools that cost an $26k per student per year. Fewer than half the students at those schools meet or exceed grade standards for Math and English.

- The median cost of a religious school is about half the cost of government-run schools: https://x.com/RahimNathwani/status/1840965145604079997

- Parents who choose to send their children to non-government-run schools get no vouchers: we pay taxes to fund government employees, and then use what's left to pay for the schools our children need.

[sharkjacobs]

I'm not from San Francisco, I don't have a horse in this race, I was just looking over the link that you posted and it doesn't seem to support what you're saying at all

- The link you posted doesn't talk about public schools at all, only private school tuition.

- This 2024 census.gov report[1] says that San Francisco public schools cost $23,654 per student

- According to graph on the link that you posted only 12% of private schools in San Francisco charge < $25000 annual tuition

- According to the article from the link you posted religious schools make up 48% of private schools in California, so mathematically, at least 3/4 religious schools charge more in annual tuition than a year of public school costs (according to census.gov)

- According to the article from the link you posted, religious schools offer special lower rates for families who belong to the parish, meaning the "cost per student" is even higher than tuition

[1] https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/public-s...

[rahimnathwani]

  > The link you posted doesn't talk about public schools at all, only private school tuition.

Yes, that was to show the cost of religious schools which is the type GP was talking about. I did not provide a source for the $26k cost of public schools.

  > According to graph on the link that you posted only 12%
  > of private schools in San Francisco charge < $25000
  > annual tuition

Yes, the charts on the bottom half of that graph show tuition for parochial (religious) schools, which was GP's topic. Ignore the top half (non-religious) as it's not relevant to this discussion.

The median sticker price for parochial schools in San Francisco is:

Grades K-12: $10.9k

Grade 3: $10.4k

Grade 8: $10.9k

Grade 12: $27.0k

All of the above are calculated by weighting each school equally, as I don't have access to per-school per-grade student counts. Feel free to recalculate these. They're based solely on the data the SF Chronicle intern collected.

  > This 2024 census.gov report[1] says that San Francisco
  > public schools cost $23,654 per student

Well, that 2024 report is based on old data from 2022. That's two years old! Let's look at more recent data.

SFUSD's operating budget for 2024-2025 is $1.3 billion (https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...).

It has 48,000 students (https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sfusd-closures-b...).

That's $27k per student per year, which is more than it was the last time I looked!

  > According to the article from the link you posted,
  > religious schools offer special lower rates for families
  > who belong to the parish, meaning the "cost per student"
  > is even higher than tuition

I don't have extensive data to back this up, but from anecdotes I've heard it's swings and roundabouts. Some families pay more than sticker price, and others pay less.

[ZeroGravitas]

Are those other schools half the cost because they exclude anyone with disabilities or poor upbringings and just cream off the easy students?

If so then you are enthusiastically cheering for kids to be thrown on the scrapheap to save you a few bucks. And using religion as a cover for it, which only makes it worse.

[rahimnathwani]

No. They're half the cost because they don't spend half their money paying for a central bureaucracy. They spend almost all their money on buildings and teachers.

[drawkward]

1). You can lead a horse to books, but you cant make it think.

2). This statistic is meaningless unless without data about the inputs and outputs. I assume that that student populations are vastly different.

3). That's your choice. In Ohio, I get to fund religious education, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.

Have you considered that, perhaps if you and like-minded parents didn't remove their students from the public education system, perhaps the test scores would be higher?

[rahimnathwani]

  Have you considered that, perhaps if you and like-minded parents didn't remove their students from the public education system, perhaps the test scores would be higher?

I didn't 'remove' my child from the public education system.

Government schools in my area are not an attractive option. I spoke with the principal of one of the top 3 most popular elementary government schools (measured by ratio of applicants to kindergarten spots). She made it clear that, if my son were to attend that school:

- my son would never be allowed to skip a grade

- under no circumstances would a teacher in grade X teach material normally covered in grade X+1

My son is in 3rd grade, doing math with the 4th grade class, and studying 5th grade math at home.

If he were at a government-run school, he would be in 2nd grade, and spend math lessons at school covering material he mastered 2 years ago.

  In Ohio, I get to fund religious education, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.

In San Francisco, I get to fund an inefficient bureaucracy set up to benefit adult employees, which I am vehemently opposed to doing.

SFUSD has 1 adult employee for every 3.5 students. A minority of those adults are classroom teachers. Average class sizes are not 3.5, or 7, or even 14.

[EasyMark]

Meanwhile I bet those schools are exempt from standardized tests because they know the students (most) would flunk them. That’s the way it works here in Texas, there is no oversight or feedback that home schooled or private school kids actually meet any kind of standards at all. Now the governor wants the same type of vouchers and he was -heavily- “inspired” by money from charter school/religious school owning billionaires.

[rahimnathwani]

The feedback is provided by the market mechanism. Private schools and charter schools that don't do a good job would fail to retain and attract students, and shut down.

For government-run schools, most of the students have little or no choice. Standardized tests (like SBAC) show poor results in California (most kids fail to meet grade level standards in the test), but parents have little ability to change how school districts are run.

[seneca]

Home schooled children out perform government schooled children across the board. That's not even a disputed point.

[odo1242]

To add, a lot of universities will reimburse education/administrative/maintenance fees on top of research contracts, so about 30% of the money they get for research actually doesn’t go towards research. While this is old, there was a 1988 event where a Stanford administrator bought a yacht from research funds.

[int_19h]

> The funding and grants mostly benefit the students and researchers though.

The question is, which students and researchers should benefit from it? It's not like that money wouldn't be used for education; it would just go to more meritocratic institutions, and their students and researchers.

[nashashmi]

Why would you want to leverage federal programs that were set aside for certain purposes like research and student assistance to also manipulate college programs?

It is sort of like you want to place colleges on similar to a terrorist list where no funding can reach them unless they get in line with the western world.

[ayakang31415]

The word "manipulate" is dysphemism for "audit" in my opinion. As I commented below, I don't care how the money is spent as long as it is THEIR money. The federal funding is tax payer's money, and it should be spent according to the will of the people in this country. If the tax money was spent to favor your family members because you are an alumni, I am sure other people would have problems with it.

[nashashmi]

If you want colleges to behave in a certain manner, the word manipulate is correct.

Federal funding goes to institutions that uphold the federal Govt, not those that oppose it. The federal govt works in the interest of what its representatives seek. Those representatives are enforced by a variety of constituents including corporations, NGOs, non profits, and individuals.

You believe that taxpayers should say where the money goes. In such cases, it only goes back into the taxpayers pockets.

[ayakang31415]

I am not sure where the line lies. If you fund a program that is not run by the government, say 100 billion dollars, should the government not "manipulate" how the program runs? I believe there should be some sort of accountability. To my knowledge the government spends over 7 billion dollars on Pell grants, and if the government has little to no say in whom it should be awarded to, it makes no sense to me. If the University decides to accept less qualified students through legacy admission and give the money to them, it should be challenged I believe.

add: come to think of it, I guess private university can just not accept financial aids from the government and keep their own admission policy if they have enough money to subsidize students who need financial aids. Whether you like it or not, federal money comes with (or should come with) strings attached (or manipulation in your words)

[nashashmi]

Manipulation and accountability are two different words. Manipulation is when you take an existing program, provide the students who go there with an aid package, and then condition the program to change because you are providing its students with a benefit. That’s not accountability.

Pell grants are not given to universities. They are given to students, who choose the university. The student has a say where the student goes and where the pell grant goes. Pell grants are responsibilities of the student.

The only workaround is to blacklist the university to ever be chosen by the student, because the govt will not allow the student to get aid. That’s akin to a terrorist list.

[ayakang31415]

Pell grants are given to the students, but in order to become a student you first have to be accepted to a University. If no universities accepted you because of unfair admission policy, effectively the universities transferred the money from you to someone who got in unfairly (maybe you can argue that there is going to be at least one university that will accept you, but that is a different story). I am just simply advocating fair admission policy that is in agreement with the spirit of the citizens who are effectively providing such funds. Tuition money, a huge part of it, comes from the government (I reject the semantic argument that university gets student money, not the government money if the money was not directly given to them, such as "Pell grants are not given to universities"), and we have a say in how it should be given. We can definitely contest the legacy admission or even affirmative action if the university accepts government money one way or the other. Pell grants ( tell me if I am wrong ) already has other restrictions on how it could be spent and whom it should be given to. We can definitely add one more restriction (i.e., give it to students who got in fairly).

To me, you are advocating (tell me if I am mistaken) that university can have any admission policy (including unfair policy) they want (free from requests of the government) even if federal money is provided to them (indirectly of course) as a result of such admission policy. I disagree with this. If you're advocating to grant total freedom to university with regards to admission policy and get rid of federal support for all schools, then I am in agreement with you.

[otteromkram]

Alumni aren't taxpayers or people?

[ayakang31415]

I don't think it is fair to accept Alumni as a sole recipient of lots of tax money for unfair admission.

[nashashmi]

Alumni are not recipients of tax money. They are funding the university with their own tuition expenses.

[ayakang31415]

On average I guess alumni contribute more through donation than they receive through the financial aids. I don't know the numbers on this topic, so please pardon my ignorance.

[cryptonector]

Crazy idea: stop with the federal funding.

Every time federal loan guarantees and grants increase, so do higher education prices. Drastically cutting back on those loan guarantees and grants should lead to a drastic cut to higher education costs.

> Private university can do whatever they want with their admission as long as no public money...

We must distinguish "student loan guarantees" (or vouchers) from direct funding, otherwise there will never be such a thing as a "private school", only public schools masquerading as private.

[ayakang31415]

I would very much like to get rid of federal funding for schools, and allow private student loan with the possibility of purging the borrowed money through bankruptcy procedures. I am not sure if such proposal is realistic.

[sokoloff]

Nearly every student will graduate owing vastly more than their personal assets.

Declaring bankruptcy at that moment would be the optimal financial strategy if it wiped out the student debt.

[creole_wither]

Solution, don't lend money. Sell education in exchange for a promise to pay x% of salary for y years. Students won't go unemployed just to avoid paying it back and it aligns incentives. If colleges want to make lots of money, they will have to make sure their students get good jobs upon graduation.

[cryptonector]

That'd be nice.

[frontalier]

crazier idea: stop profiting off of education

[cryptonector]

That's silly. Why profit off anything? Without a profit motive, why do anything?