What has risen 400% in 25 years? Not housing prices in San Francisco, but that’s an excellent guess. Nope, it’s college tuition. That one-liner factoid takes me out at the knees and makes me want to hurl.

Phenomenal amounts of money are spent, borrowed, and paid back over lifetimes for higher education. At some point, one hopes, the college students will become educated enough to figure out when the price of education is just too damned much.

Since that hasn’t happened yet, two professors were interviewed on NPR recently so they could explain WHY college costs so much. It turns out that any and all tuition payers (students, parents) are at the sticky bottom of any given school’s list of people to impress or keep happy. The violent rage I’m feeling makes me warm inside.

Economist Richard Vedder of Ohio University and Stephen Trachtenberg of George Washington University tell NPR host Neal Conan what in the hell is going on with college costs.

You can read listen to the story (30 min.) or you can read the transcript in its entirety here.

Excerpt from the transcript:

CONAN: I wanted to ask, you wrote an op-ed for CNN.com, “Why Does College Cost So Much,” you argued essentially that colleges have absolutely no incentive to reduce costs.

VEDDER: That’s right. Now, there are a few exceptions to that. The for-profit higher education sector is certainly a clear exception, but by and large, most colleges do not get rewards. The presidents of the universities, the senior officials, the key faculty do not get rewarded by being efficient, by teaching more students for the same amount of money or whatever, by using buildings efficiently, six, seven days a week, et cetera. There’s no incentive in that for them.
So there’s no great compulsion to reduce costs, and yet spending more money often has rewards. It can help improve your rankings in the magazine rankings that go on by magazines like US News or Forbes. And it is actually beneficial to colleges, or at least it’s perceived to be beneficial to colleges, to spend more money: nicer facilities for students so you attract more students, better students, whatever, lower teaching loads for faculty so that they’re happy and content and not likely to cause a lot of problems.
So the job of a university president is to raise a lot of money, tons of money, and distribute it, and not too much attention is placed on lowering the cost to the consumer.

CONAN: In fact you argue that the consumer, the student and then the student’s parents, but they come last in a list that includes, you mentioned the faculty, key faculty members are bribed with lower teaching loads. You mentioned alumni, who are in a sense are bribed to make donations to the school through successful sports programs and other things like that, and trustees.

VEDDER: Yes, I think that’s right. Remember, colleges and universities don’t have the profit motive that compels people in the traditional private sector to cut costs, be efficient, try to get more bang for the buck, as it were. So that is sort of lacking. It’s a nonprofit sector, and there’s a lot of third-party payments, that is government money and also private, philanthropic money, that comes into universities that reduces the need to depend utterly, solely on the consumer to foot the bills, to pay the freight, as it were.

Related Posts:

How To Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt
Watching America’s Higher Education Creams Go Down In Flames
College Tuition: Save Or Borrow?
Ways To Kick The Ass Of Student Loan Debt
International Students Bring $18.8 Billion To U.S. Economy
I Live In A Van Down By Duke University
College Or Gambling?
The Cost of College and the Three-Year Degree Option
Streamlined and Fuel-Efficient Three-Year Degrees
Economy Makes Being an RA Seem Like a Good Idea
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(image: new Stanford University library)

Pamela Yellen over at the Huffington Post gives advice on How to Avoid Graduating College Summa Cum Debt. I’ve read dozens of articles on this topic over the years and none have irked me and impressed me with their proposals and solutions the way Yellen’s article has.

Her main piece of advice is to flat out not head off to college at all “unless or until you can afford it.” Not the standard higher education version of the American Dream. Usually everyone’s telling young adults to do whatever they and their parents can in order to acquire a college diploma, regardless of how many decades beyond graduation both parties will be swimming in debt.

Whether you agree with her or not, it’s interesting stuff to think about:

Four Paths to a Debt-Free College Education
1. Save it first.
2. Postpone it.
3. Do it smarter.
4. Skip it altogether.

Further Reading:

Ways to Kick the Ass of Student Loan Debt
Number-Crunching the Effects of Student Loans
Adventures in Education: Paying for College
The Economy and Higher Education
No One Likes a Recession
Calculating Potential
Investing in Students’ Futures
Extremely Useful Guidance for the Newly Salaried
Fall 2011 Facebook App for Financial Aid
College Grads and Student Loan Debt
Arne Duncan: Direct Student Loans
Increased Tuition Increases Some More

Posted by Alexa Harrington

If you’re a decent soul who sees your fellow humans as basically good until they prove themselves otherwise, then by all means, stick around. And watch this quick video from My Fellow American[link]; it illustrates the point that being a Muslim doesn’t make you an evil asshole, being an evil asshole makes you an evil asshole.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s painful receiving the short, simple advice that paints one pristine illustration which you will never ever be able to remove from your mind. The kind of advice you understand you need to know, but that you sorely wished you’d never heard, read, or seen.

Lynn O’Shaughnessy sums up saving for college versus borrowing with this vomit-inducing blow:

Every $1 you stash away for college will save you from borrowing $3.

Stupid logical math.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Born too late for the homework-free society Race to Nowhere is bringing on? Sucks to be you. And me, I might add. Where in the hell was filmmaker Vicki Abeles when I was a wee slip of a thing, playing outside in the sunshine on my pink banana-seat BMX bike and feeling guilty about the 13 years of homework I never failed to put off until the morning it was due?

It’s amazing there hasn’t been a homework revolt before now; the kids have the numbers. School kids are like ants: If they ever decide to take over, there’s not a lot the human adults can do about it. I’m just saying.

I’m a firm believer that Thank-You Notes and the grandparents who force kids to write them are the devil’s work, but every public school student from K-12 should at least send Race to Nowhere’s Abeles a good thought, if not a huge-ass muffin basket.

Further Reading:

New Recruit in Homework Revolt: The Principal
Race to Nowhere

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(banana seat bike)

Allen Grove, one of my favorite college-advice guys, has calming and ever-so-practical words of wisdom for any college hopeful who’s recently blown the SATs. Stop panicking, all is not lost. There’s work to be done, so pull your freaking out little self up, take a deep breathe, and get to it.

And remember–or make yourself really listen if this is the first time you’re hearing this: Getting into the college at the top of your list is not a life or death situation. I promise you it’s not.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(bootstrap)

One family has managed to get it right—or do it well or actively walk away from being total whack jobs when it comes to dealing with their children’s higher education situations or whatever. However you’d like to put it, the Demarees of Bethesda are lovely in their lack of over-control. The parents have raised happy, successful kids. Three of them. Not one has flunked out of life due to the freedom allowed them by their parents. During the kids’ college-admissions-gauntlet years, Debby and Larry didn’t show a single SAT score to a single kid. It’s a good message: this number is not what it all comes down to. Move on.

It has been fully documented that there is no love lost between myself and the high-pressure helicopter parents of this country. I yammer on frequently about them and their crappy parenting skills. Classes are taken and volumes of how-to books are read so they can raise their offspring excellently; then unconditional love is tossed out the window so the whole damn family can focus on getting junior into a fantabulous college someday. The goal to be perfect, loving parents lasts until around preschool admissions time, and then it’s all about higher education for the next sixteen years or so.

Education is a right, and we all deserve to have as much of the learning as we can stand. College is a marvelous place; I’d live there if I could. I am all for higher education. But it’s not life or death, I promise. Relax, give your kids the tools and support they need, allow them their options, and then, for the love of all things holy, let them go. They’re not as stupid as some parents seem to think.

Previous Posts:

Tightly Wound Parental Units
Awesome Parent
What Makes A Good Parent?
Colbert’s Wickedly True Take On the SATs
Have Some Perspective
Media Frenzy Around High-Pressure College Admissions
Testing Season Begins
“Bursting the AP Bubble”
Play-Doh Smeared Credentials
Find Your Happy Place
(Possibly) The End Of Helicopter Parenting

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(freedom)

Brought to you by Teacher Certification Map and MAT@USC | Master’s of Arts in Teaching

Seriously, all of you possible teen drop-outs with too much reality on your plates to be able to handle the mundanity of high school: do everything in your power to avoid letting down the adults (parentals and the Dept. of Education) who have clearly done everything except get you through your childhood in one piece. You owe them so much.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The parents who will be driving their offspring to insanity as soon as the kids can spell S-A-T start in on the psychotic haranguing early:

Try to stay off of my sh*t list, lesser humans.

Further Reading:

What Makes A Good Parent?
Media Frenzy Around High Pressure College Admissions
Testing Season Begins
Play-Doh Smeared Credentials
Find Your Happy Place
(Possibly) The End Of Helicopter Parenting

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Tuition rates, in case you’ve missed it, have reached new and astonishingly execrable heights. Paying for college is like some kind of monetary gauntlet. Don’t make your folks do it alone—apply for as many scholarships as you can! (Unless your parents are lacking in kind souls and goodness, then by all means take them for all they’re worth.)

Three different bits of scholarship advice from the Scholarship Coach at U.S. News and World Report.

4 Dos and 1 Don’t for Finding Scholarships
Skip These 6 College Scholarship Errors
11 Sexy Scholarships Reward Fashion, Romance, and Humor

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(money roll)