[pnathan]

College is an interesting situation. It might be argued that collectively we all have an interest in seeing a more educated society, regardless of the earning power. It might also be argued that collectively we need to focus more on not "going to college" but instead focusing on things like "learning a sustainable trade".

And, for an individual looking to maximize earnings & employment, a bachelor's in STEM/business is still a really good buy, supposing you didn't go to $$$ SLAC/Ivy League. Whereas subjects that are less fiscally shiny lead their students into a dark hole of debt.

One solution is to simply collectivize the cost: everyone gets free college. That's really expensive and without good cost controls, well, is susceptible to being taken advantage of.

Another solution is to go at colleges with the dieting plan. That's the current one. IMHO, that's exactly the wrong way to go about it.

Another solution is to aggressively force state schools to cut overhead; i.e. cut the administrator staff. Well, asking people to fire themselves is sort of utopian, doncha think? :)

---

I don't really buy any of the solutions that I currently know about in the US. My thought is that there are far too many colleges in the US. Too many states trying to stretch too few dollars over too many campuses. I instead think that federal funding should go to a select few - perhaps three or four - in the US. These colleges would be fully free and fully funded by the feds. Professors would be encouraged to congregate there and focus on having huge departments where all sorts of research could go on. The overhead per college is so high; it's considerably more scalable to focus on having a few large campuses than the small ones everywhere. Each campus requires a mini admin to be set up. Worse, the larger a department is, the more interesting collisions can happen: small departments work against this by not having that interesting person to run into(they are in the other state).

Anyway, that's my undercooked idea to help college education.

Education in the US is, I think, a wreck, and it has a variety of causes. Among them, the historic anti-intellectualism of Americans, the loss of historic mission, the rank foolishness of levelling egalitarians, the shrinking dollars for defense research, etc. More causes could be added.

[purplelobster]

About collectivizing costs, you speak as if it has never been tried and you discount the idea based on your own assumptions that it would be too expensive? As someone who has gone to university both at a free*(you actually get money to study) (~top) Scandinavian university as well as a (~top 10) US university, there is not much difference in the actual education from what I could tell. Where there's a real big difference though is research. US universities consistently outspends and outproduces European universities by a large factor. My theory is that the undergrads are paying for the professor's research and grad students, but I'm not sure. The money has to come from somewhere. Either way, neither I nor my parents would ever have been able afford US tuition + living costs. I took a loan for all the living costs that were not covered by subsidies, a loan with an interest of about 1.9%, so I can't even complain about that. My point is that in the US, I would probably not have been able to afford a decent college, and I think that's a broken system. Research and fancy campus gyms should not be funded by stepping on poor undergrads.

By the way, it also seems that student loans for US students mainly consists of tuition payments. There is rarely any mention of livings costs which I find curious. Do people just take it for granted that the parents will pay that part? Myself, after 5 years, I was roughly $50,000 in debt, all of it living expenses (note, that's only $10,000 a year in a country with high cost of living). My family didn't (and didn't have to) pay anything to put me through college. From what I can tell, this is the norm here, students take loans for their living expenses and parents are not expected to support them.

[pnathan]

Traditionally[1], I believe US universities have been funded by the government to a large degree. The defunding of the universities I believe corresponds to the ceasing of the Cold War and the dropping of heavy DoD/DoE funding.

My understanding of collectivizing costs is that it's proved extremely expensive for countries such as Germany and the UK, which are moving towards a paying model (last I heard). There's also a pyschological effect when you're paying for your own way vs. someone else paying for it. I'll let someone else more learned in physchology & motivation research comment on the details, but the change in mindset does exist. My gut feeling is that its entirely reasonable for society to generally pay the bulk of the cost of college in exchange for getting the benefit of an educated society.

If you examine the historical cost of education in the US, the tuition began its upwards run around 1980 and has not ceased. So did healthcare. I don't know if there's a connection; and, if so, why. I do know that educational costs have gone wildly up beyond inflation.

To your aside; my student loans were designed to cover the cost of housing & life in general.

I'm very sorry that you did have to go into such steep debt for college. I don't think it's right that higher education costs so very much either. I do want it reformed, but I don't want it done in ways that simply funnel money into someone's pockets without lots of people getting a quality benefit.

[1] between 1945 and ~2000

[purplelobster]

You don't need to feel sorry for me, that loan is a government loan that every student is eligible for. The interest is 1.9%, so the government is actually losing money on it. I pay roughly $900 a year in interest, which is very manageable with a near 6-figure salary that this education gave me.

I think it's a pretty good system, it's good both for the students and their parents. Students don't have to rely on their parents (if they are rich enough to support their children anyway) and parents don't have to save up for years for tuition and living expenses. It still hurts though, it's not like it's free to get an education even without tuition and with subsidies and favorable loans. You also have to think about opportunity cost, you could be making money for 5 years, but instead you're in school. So I don't think you need the additional expenses to feel motivated.

[vizeroth]

The formulas used to calculate eligibility for various forms of financial aid as a US student include an assumption (up until the age of 25 if I remember correctly) that the parents will be paying a certain amount, based on their income. My parents' expected contribution was not within the realm of their economic reality, especially with 4 kids graduating from high school in 3 years.

My wife went straight from putting her parents' income on her student aid forms to my income, so nearly all of her higher education not paid by her parents is on student loans (because by the time we got married my expected contribution to her education was outside the realm of our financial reality).

These calculations do include the estimated costs of room, board, & books, though, and student loan eligibility is largely based on those numbers. Of course, the room & board costs are often based on living in dorms and eating entirely on campus meal plans, each of which, depending on where you go to school, can be significantly different from the cost of living off-campus.

[pathy]

Just a slight country point: The US is actually quite low in number of articles published per million citizens.[1] Now that doesn't say anything about the quality or distribution of research areas of course. Switzerland is in a clear lead with Sweden second.

Does US universities really outpace European ones? I don't know if that statistic means anything in reality. I guess it also depends on the percentage of the population with a degree.

[1] http://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/details/innovation/scienti...

[purplelobster]

Maybe my perceptions were wrong. I went to a Swedish university, and I suppose there is a lot of research going on, but I would guess there's not nearly the same amount of money in it. The US also tends to attract the smartest people, while Sweden is less attractive (not being an English language country) and with less money for doctoral students. Also, international rankings seems to favor US universities, probably because they produce good research, not that the education is in any way superior.

[dnautics]

"I instead think that federal funding should go to a select few - perhaps three or four - in the US. These colleges would be fully free and fully funded by the feds. "

We have those. West Point, Annapolis, USAFA, USCGA, and the Merchant Marine academies.

[pnathan]

Not everyone cares to go to a military academy...

[enraged_camel]

>>Anyway, that's my undercooked idea to help college education.

So undercooked, in fact, that consuming it would make everyone sick.

[pnathan]

That's not very constructive, but let me engage in a metacomment.

Good ideas are born out of bad ideas sharpened and the bad bits thrown out over time. I am not a professional administrator in college, but I did spend time at a variety of institutions of higher ed and wound up with a Master's degree and experience teaching, researching, and studenting. I think my thoughts are not entirely worthless. But they are not taking into account the full picture, as I've not been a professor, support staff, or an admin. However, if experienced people from each side of the University structure contribute their ideas, perhaps out of the pool of undercooked ingredients will be the parts for some really great pieces; and those ideas would be truly awsome.

So. Yes. My idea is undercooked. But maybe it can help contribute to a better solution. Maybe. :-)

[enraged_camel]

Your own comment was not very constructive. You listed three existing proposed solutions, and dismissed them prematurely with minimal explanation. For example, you said free college for everyone would be taken advantage of, yet it seems to have worked wonderfully for Europe. The second solution you listed, you also dismissed, saying it is the "wrong way to go about it" but did not explain why. And for the third solution you said forcing schools to cut overhead would require administrators to fire themselves, which is not true. But you dismissed it too.

The rest of your comment assumes that we can actually find a solution to the mess that is US college education - or education in general. That is unlikely to happen. Despite the fact that most people here on HN are very smart, we are overwhelmingly technologists and don't know much about the problem domain (education) to begin with. We may have participated in it as clients (i.e. students) but that's the extent of most people's exposure to it. This is why everyone has different opinions on what the root cause of the issues are. Debating them might be interesting, but a solution is unlikely to emerge in a medium like this due to the sheer complexity of the problem.