[iambateman]

Btw, I am a University employee who serves (among other things) children affected by parents who abuse drugs.

My organization employs hundreds of people working on everything from low income nutrition education to researching Medicaid expenditure.

We belong to the University, but we don’t have anything to do with undergraduate education.

This is the problem with looking at higher-Ed ratios like that…there are a lot of good things happening at a University which don’t reduce to “teacher in classroom.”

[alaxhn]

I don't have first hand experience with your situation and I would imagine that you believe you are doing a great thing for society and I don't want to disparage thats so I don't intend my comments to speak to your specific institution or situation. I apologize if you see my comments this way.

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Broadly speaking the spending and staff levels at universities have grown over time while the number of enrolled students have stagnated and tuition costs per student have risen. There is a desire to reduce the per-student cost without providing additional subsidy and a straightforward way to do this is to look at the side of the university that doesn't have anything to do with undergraduate eduction and see where cuts may be made. One clear example of what we perceive as administrative bloat in the recent past was the Stanford Harmful Language Initiative (https://stanforddaily.com/2023/01/08/university-removes-harm...). Every institution makes mistakes but if a tax-exempt and grant receiving institution has the bandwidth to produce something that to the eyes of the right appears to be fairly silly while charging ~$60k for tuition, this does raise some eyebrows.

[iambateman]

I think where we agree is that we need to reduce the social costs of college, one way or another.

But we don’t agree on how that should happen.

The underlying problem as I see it is that there aren’t enough slots for students in schools that are socially viewed as “reputable.” It’s not much different from beachfront property in that way.

We’ve allowed schools to build up a “mystique” for generations that a Harvard education or a state school education was the only ticket to the upper middle class…of course it’s expensive. As long as there are waitlists a mile long at nearly every state school, we will never see meaningful reduction in costs. The other way to fix that issue is to insist they build a plan to enroll 30% more students over 5 years.

[alaxhn]

US College enrollment peaked in 2012 and has been declining every since. It is projected based on demographics to continue declining. I'm not buying that a shortage of slots is responsible for the increased cost. This could be true at select institutions (e.g. Harvard like you mention) but I don't agree that the data supports the overall trend across the board.