[sct202]

It's going to be a rough time for a lot of colleges that have been using foreign students paying full price to fund their operations. Especially now that the incoming college aged population is beginning to shrink and the percentage attending college has peaked, so the domestic population probably won't be able to fill the seats at less competitive colleges.

[antonymoose]

Perhaps they should tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat. It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.

[ModernMech]

It's not administrative bloat that makes colleges so expensive. "Administrative bloat" happens when a school becomes a city. Harvard/Stanford/MIT et al. cannot go back to some time when tuition was affordable while still being the research powerhouses they are.

Bigger organizations require more overhead and those costs don't grow linearly. I'm not saying that I think all those administrators are necessary or they all make things more efficient, but at the same time many of them are in place precisely because they are running an office that does make things more efficient. You get rid of one administrator and you may end up increasing the workload on everyone else by 20%, which seems like a win on paper because you lose their budget while not giving anyone else a raise. But getting rid of them made the whole organization less efficient.

e.g. My university's IT office has a huge budget and a bunch of administrators. It makes my life as a professor easier, and it gives students a better experience. It's very easy to say that the entire IT office should be eliminated to "tighten their belts and reduce administrative bloat". Which may be true, but at the same time it exists for a reason, and getting rid of it doesn't teleport us back to the 70s when campuses didn't need an IT office.

> It’s not as if American society hadn’t collectively called for this for decades while tuition has risen astronomically.

American society has called for better education, more teaching styles, more research, more technology, more subjects and classes, more majors, delivered to more students every year. There's no way we are going back, it's just not happening, the expectations are too high at this point. We can either decide maintaining these kinds of institutions are worth it, or trade off for worse outcomes and just give up on being serious about research. Seems like that's actually what this administration wants to do, but the public decidedly does not. However the public wants to have their cake (world class research institutions) and eat it too (low tuition affordable by the general public) and that's just not going to happen.

[bix6]

If I’ve learned one thing from studying economics it’s that supply equals demand.

If I’ve learned another it’s that prices never go down

[esalman]

Can you explain in this context? Because prices do go down if supply exceed demand.

[bryanlarsen]

The economics concept behind this is "price stickiness".

https://www.tutor2u.net/economics/reference/what-is-price-st...

[ModernMech]

Education is weird as a product, because you're delivering the same experience to students but they each pay a different bespoke price. Sometimes schools even pay their own customers!

When a rich person sends their kid to school they get charged full sticker price. Then schools use some of that money to subsidize the educations of the other students. Given those dynamics, there's really no reason for the tuition sticker price to ever go down unless the uber-rich can't afford it anymore, because the actual price anyone pays is floating and can be whatever it needs to be for them.

[more_corn]

The students also get wildly different outcomes based on the choices they make. And it’s not always clear what the right choices are.

You can drift, you can work hard, you can work hard on the wrong thing, you can gain work experience, meet your future colleagues and life-partners.

[bix6]

Theoretically yes but not when everything has perfect pricing as seems to be the case these days.

[addicted]

Yes, they should.

Which is a completely unrelated effort from the free money you're getting from abroad.

Unless governments institute policies that require them to "tighten their belts" they won't tighten their belts by cutting their own pay. They'll tighten belts by cutting out the least paying students, and scholarships, instead.

If this does push governments to get universities to tighten their belts, then why not have governments make them do that anyways without losing a massive chunk of export earnings, and a form of export earnings which has demonstrated positive effects many times greater than the dollars they bring in.

[toomuchtodo]

U.S. colleges poised to close in next decade, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171434 - September 2025

Looming 'demographic cliff': Fewer college students and fewer graduate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42634596 - January 2025

[spwa4]

Yep. This is, of course, what's really happening, same as before. The next step is that highly educated jobs in the industry disappear, which then gives you cheap colleges with great teachers, but not much reason to study, and then we're back where we started this whole debacle in the 1990s.

[ModernMech]

Next step is expensive grifty colleges with bad teachers, as all the good teachers will flee or just not go into teaching, and nothing will be cheap because then what’s the point of the grift?

Picture Bob Jones U at Harvard scale. Or the Musk school of engineering where they teach that sensor fusion is a bad idea actually.