[Daniel_Newby]

> The system assumes good will on the part of parents, and pretty much has to, to avoid free riders.

That's the second time I have read this lie in this thread.

Firstly, state governments are bound by the equal protection clause to ignore the assets of relatives (and all similar irrelevancies). They do just fine not soaking people for their ancestors wealth.

Secondly, university costs are in a financial bubble, for the exact same reason as house prices in 2007. The bizarre funding schemes and underwriting are a temporary state of financial cprruption, not the natural order of things.

Thirdly, the free rider problem only applies to zero sum games. If FedGov stopped blackmailing parents, it would not be education that collapses, just the bureaucracy grown fat on the back of ill gotten money.

Fourthly, to the extent that higher education is a zero sum game, that problem is trivially solvable by funding it with taxes. If higher education is a profitless necessary evil, like street construction and dog catchers, it should be funded the same way.

[fnordfnordfnord]

The equal protection clause is of no use to nineteen year-olds whose assets measure in the hundreds of dollars. What's your suggestion to the student who is wronged by the Fin Aid office? Hire a lawyer and sue? Ridiculous.

>Secondly, ... Thirdly, ... Fourthly, ...

What are you even responding to? None of your retorts are responsive to hga's or any of the other parent comments.

[hga]

Well, the 2nd is responsive even if the author doesn't know it. MIT is a genuinely expensive place: the last time I knew the numbers, it spent about half your tuition on you in your freshman year and quite a bit more on average for the 3 remaining years. STEM subjects are expensive, all have lab work, and one of the reasons MIT is MIT is that with the rare exception that proves the rule, all courses are taught by tenure track or tenured professors.

You can't get tenure without being an adequate teacher and the vast, vast majority I knew really cared about teaching undergraduates. The school also constantly makes sure the professors are doing an adequate job (I once both read all the student evaluations for a disaster (only one was not negative and she was a special case), and then overheard the department head tell the professor, who's name you probably know, that he'd never be allowed to teach that particular course again), and e.g. has no hesitation about taking a course away from a professor who violates the rules like what can be asked for at the end of the term.

MIT is also in a very expensive location, the cost of living is very high. That's also true for many of the Ivies, Harvard up chuck river from it, Columbia in NYC, Princeton in NJ, etc.

3rd doesn't apply so much to MIT, although, yeah, it has too large a bureaucracy like pretty much every other institution of higher education. Just not one grossly out of wack with the rest of the school.

4th, no, MIT's independence is unquestionably one reason it's so good and continues to be. Go to 100% government spending and it would regress to the mean as government bureaucrats enforces their own irrelevant fantasies on it (even more than they do now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grove_City_College_v._Bell).

[Daniel_Newby]

My comment was directed to the repeated claims that free riders mean the only viable way to pay for universities is to bill parents. I am apparently not able to make that clear after staying up to four in the morning.

Is MIT actually that expensive, inflation adjusted, compared to 1960?

Bureaucracy is not just about labelled bureaucrats, but about the well-meaning organizational structure that tends to spring up over time. Take an axe to the budget and the excess structure often disappears with no ill effect. (I'm looking at you, committee meetings and approval processes.)

[hga]

For academic year 2012-3, the MIT nominal cost is $57,010. Plugging that into the BLS inflation CPI inflation calculator at 2012, that's $7350 1960 dollars.

But that's somewhere around what the tuition was 2 decades later from memory and someone graduating in 1980, the same as my first academic year. Can't remember the rest, maybe $3,000, could be less if you went for less expensive housing (not sure if that was much of an option) and especially food.

Looks like MIT's inflation rate 1979-2012 was very roughly double the CPI; I'm comfortable saying it was around that, and it's congruent with the general reports I've seen on US higher education inflation.