[djoldman]

It's hard to have any substantial sympathy for the troubles of teaching private US college and university students.

Given the absolutely wild increases in tuition, administrations should have massive resources to bring to bear to solving this and other problems.

The reasons they don't feel more like excuses than legitimate explanations.

[secabeen]

The wild increases in tuition are for the nameplate price, not the actual price paid by median students net of grants. See pg. 12 here:

https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends-College-P...

Published tuition has gone up, but grant aid has matched it, making the net cost at 4-year public institutions to be flat, or even down slightly over the 10 year period. The same applies at private 4-year institutions, large increase in nameplate price, matched by large increase in grant aid, actual net tuition flat.

Expenditure data also show that they are not spending significantly more. See the chart at the end of this page, which gives expenditures in real, per-student dollars. They are up, a little less than 20% over 10 years, but half of that is increases in hospital costs of their associated health care systems, which have nothing to do with tuition. The rest is a mix of various activities of universities, much of which are not tuition-funded.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_334.10.a...

[djoldman]

Interesting. I'll have to dig into this more. Thanks for the links.

[acbart]

No no, that money goes to the administration. They are not involved in the teaching. That is left to the faculty, who are paid inverse to the amount of teaching they handle. Teaching is an afterthought at universities, the primary activities instead are research, building football stadiums, and paying for the revolving door of administrators.

[bradleyjg]

These institutions are not about teaching students. That’s a fundraising exercise for their actual purpose. And even the actual purpose is under heavy stress from cancerous administrative growth.