Colleges
Having observed undergraduate education as an undergraduate, as a professor and as a parent visiting schools, I have some thoughts on the subject.
Why Colleges Are Expensive
College tuition has increased faster in recent decades than most other prices.1 After spending a good deal of time visiting schools that my son and daughter were interested in, I thing I know some of the reasons.
1. Such schools practice extensive price discrimination, I think more than in the past, so tuition substantially overstates the real price. Judging by figures I got at one school, the average student receives scholarship support equal to about a quarter of tuition.
2. The environment the schools provide to their students is more luxurious, and more costly, than it used to be. A few examples:
All of the schools I visited, so far as I could tell, provide the equivalent of free taxi service in and near campus, usually from the security department, to any student who calls in and says that he is worried about his safety, at some schools to any student for any reason.
The food service ranges from better than I remember to luxurious.
Freshman year may start with a several day expedition to some carefully chosen vacation spot — sailing off Santa Catalina island, for instance, where “sailing” meant being a passenger on a tall ship.
At one college, practically every floor had not only a resident assistant (student) but a “Wellness advisor” (also student — these are jobs with which students help pay tuition). The same college had both an “Office of the Consultant for Sexual Misconduct Services” and a “Gender and Sexuality Center,” in different buildings.
At another college, when I asked about help for students finding summer jobs in their field, I was told that students could volunteer somewhere as unpaid interns and receive a stipend from the college.
The college athletic facilities were more like a high end athletic club/fitness center than what I remember — and I went to Harvard, the richest school in the country then and now.
Expenditure on services arguably related to education has increased too. There are writing centers, where students doing papers can go to get help from (paid) upperclassmen. There is the equivalent for math. Class sizes are very small. How much good this does in terms of outcomes I do not know but I expect it makes the learning experience pleasanter.
All of these were high end schools: six top liberal arts colleges, one top university. The general impression was of a gold plated education: cost no object. It is not surprising that it is expensive. How much of what I observed is true of a wider sample I do not know.
Why the change since my day? Part of it may be a result of more money being available for college due to student loans. Part may simply be that people have gotten richer over the sixty some years since I was a student. The students who go to such schools are mostly children of well off parents; what looks to me like luxury may be what they are accustomed to.
While college purports to be about education, a large part of its role in our society is as a place where young adults can spend four years enjoying themselves, searching for friends and mates, developing useful social contacts. If the smart children of well off parents are going to spend their time that way they might as well do it in comfort. And for very smart students whose parents are not well off, the schools have an extensive system of discriminatory pricing in the form of financial aid.
One other thing that has changed is a sharp increase in the ratio of administrators to teachers. That could be expected to raise costs and I do not know the reason for it.
In Loco Parentis: Mark I
I was a college student in the early sixties, when in loco parentis mostly meant the college trying, with limited success, to restrict student sexual activity on behalf of the presumed wishes of the parents. One rule I still remember required that, if a male Harvard student had a female visitor, three of their feet must be on the floor at all times.
That form of the doctrine vanished shortly after I graduated, to be replaced by an unconditional surrender to the sexual revolution: mixed gender dorms, contraceptive services, and the like. On a visit to a California campus I noticed flyers advertising a talk on the subject of the G-spot.
In Loco Parentis: Mark II
Parents, even in loco ones, abandon one attempt to run their children’s lives only to replace it with another. When I went to college there were mixers but for the most part the matter of finding friends, romantic or otherwise, was left to the students themselves. No longer. On the same California campus I got a description of the elaborate procedures by which the college makes sure that none of their students is at risk of a solitary existence. Dorms are divided up into carefully constructed groups of freshmen: football fans in this one, movie fans in that, each group with a couple of sophomores to provide wise advice. Each group is allocated its chunk of the dorm. The year starts with a several day expedition to some carefully chosen vacation spot.
Most of the students who described the system to me seemed happy with it, but I did wonder about what sort of wimps the present system is producing. No practice at all in evading parietal rules — most of them have probably never heard of parietal rules. And being taught that the job of finding their own friends is too hard for them, so must be done by someone older and wiser.
I gather, however, that relationships outside of the preselected groups are not entirely unknown.
In Loco Parentis: Mark III
The preceding passage was lifted from a blog post I made in 2007. Over the intervening years a new attempt to control student sexual behavior has emerged, this time under the influence of feminism and related ideologies. Responding to exaggerated statistics on sexual assault on campus and pressure from the Federal Department of Education, schools adopted policies that make it easy for one partner to a sexual relationship, usually the woman, to impose serious costs on the other by accusing him, without evidence, of some sort of sexual offense against her. That makes it risky for a student to engage in sex unless he is either very confident that he can trust the future behavior of his partner or has prudently arranged for a signed, or at least recorded, advance statement of consent.
Which brings us back to where we started, university policies that discourage student sexual activity. It replaces rules that amount to “students are not allowed to have sex” with rules that say “students are free to have sex with each other but if something goes wrong with the relationship one partner has the power to inflict costs on the other ranging up to expulsion on a charge that will make admission to another school difficult.” The advantage of the new approach is that it lets a university discourage behavior which many parents disapprove of without having to proclaim socially conservative views now out of fashion.
If conservatives retain their present control of the federal government for another term or two, universities may have to come up with a Mark IV version. Some may even consider a return to Mark I.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States. See also https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college, which shows the average cost of a four year private college (tuition, room and board and fees), inflation adjusted, increasing about four fold from 1970-1 to 2022-23
Marvelous! I know this is a serious subject, but I chuckled at least once per paragraph.
I can maybe say something intelligible about price. Tuition has risen [apparently it has stopped rising recently] because the demand is there. When I was an older child, my factory worker father uttered that there's too much money around! This was before I started studying economics, but I immediately thought he was bonkers. But like Huck Finn's father, mine grew in wisdom as I aged.
On the supply side, I came across Bowen’s Laws:
1. The dominant goals of institutions are educational excellence, prestige, and influence.
2. In quest of excellence, prestige, and influence, there is virtually no limit to the amount of
money an institution could spend for seemingly fruitful educational ends.
3. Each institution raises all the money it can.
4. Each institution spends all it raises.
5. The cumulative effect of the preceding four laws is toward ever-increasing expenditure.
As for the other elephant in the room, administrative bloat, the money is there by all of the above, but that would best be for another comment.
Nevertheless, my feeling -- I can't prove this -- is that the heyday of higher education as country club is behind us. My guess is that it'll stay for the filthy rich, but no one else.
On administrative bloat, here are a few thoughts on why some people want to become college administrators and why there is demand for them. The first is for amusement, but it's nonetheless true:
[Robert] Conquest's Third Law of Politics [1980’s]: The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies. [Recall MI6 actually was!]
In turn, that is explained by O'Sullivan's First Law [1989]: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. "I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don't like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world."
At which point Michels' Iron Law of Oligarchy [1911] takes over. All organizations eventually come to be run by a leadership class who often function as paid administrators, executives, spokespersons, or political strategists for the organization. This leadership class, rather than the organization's membership, will inevitably grow to dominate the organization's power structures.
The administrators are financed because there's too much money around and because of Bowen's Law. They are demanded on account of Michels' Iron Law. The leadership class makes the contact to government and the politicians -- the financiers -- and the cartels called accreditors.
Actual teachers are not so important. This means the adjuncting class, which works cheap, is used a lot.