Trying not to debate the long term cause/effects etc, just wondering if FFEL Fed loans will qualify or if and How I consolidate in preparation?
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I think that chart paints too rosy a picture. I’m not sure what university that is, but I did a little calculating myself.
The University of Virginia is known as one of the best public school values in the country.
In 2000, they had $1.043 billion in total education related expenditures (2020 dollars). In 2020, that number was $1.941 billion. UVA had 12,463 undergrads in 2000 and 17,314 undergrads in 2020. So the education expenses went up 86% while enrollment went up 39%. That means that the cost per undergrad went up 34%. During that time, in-state tuition went up 111% and out of state went up 83%.
I don’t have the figures for how much the state subsidies went down (assuming they went down in VA too), but as a taxpayer seeing those numbers, I would be happy if they went down. I don’t understand why anyone thinks that taxpayers should be kicking in more money to an institution that acts as though it should cost 34% more to educate each student in 2020 than it did in 2000. Especially considering how regressive state subsidies for higher education are.
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Its the average of all universiities in the USA
THe figures are also NET tuition (after financial aid)
From just '08 to '18 the state of VA cut spending per pupil by about $1200:
Yeah thats a lot. I don’t know why it would go up so fast.
Administrators and state of the art facilities would be my guess.
From 2000 to 2020, the in-state tuition went up $7,200 ($6,485 to $13,682). Unless they cut spending per pupil by $6,000 from 1998 to 2008, I would say that the increase in total expenditures has much more of an effect on the rise in tuition than the cut in state funding.
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Could be yeah. DId you read this article? Cause the title matches your guess …
THey say:
“During the 1980-1981 school year, public and private institutions spent $20.7 billion in total on instruction, and $13 billion on academic support, student services and institutional support combined, according to data from the National Center for Educational Statistics. By the 2014-2015 school year, total instructional costs had climbed to $148 billion, while the same grouping of administrative expenses had risen to $122.3 billion.”
later, a guy makes this comment :
" literally, nobody knows who all these people are or what they’re doing,"
Which is pretty much what I remember from my time in school.
" the number of faculty and staff per administrator declined roughly 40% at most types of colleges and universities between 1990 and 2012, "
Also looks like NET price at UVA has gone up similar rate :
UVA increases are higher than average that I posted above though. It is just one school in one state. We’ve got 50 different states with 50 different versions of the same problem, some bad and some worse.
On the other end look at UW :
I think a big part of college costs is driven by the need for a college degree to be employable in nearly all good jobs. Stay with me if you want, because it’s a long story.
Why should this be, that nearly everyone needs college, when it wasn’t the case 100 years ago when colleges were much more narrowly for academics and advanced professional careers like medicine that required a lot more education? Certainly it’s not because we teach our kids more in secondary schools now than we used to, as those have been getting dumbed down. Along the lines below,
You could indeed cut out a lot of the expense and waste of college by getting people directly into entry level jobs out of high school. And it’s not that they would be qualified due to experience, because no one has experience for entry level jobs, but rather the company seeks candidates who they will be able to train and later promote into productive career employees. And if they can find those people selectively then this is a huge win for everyone - the student doesn’t have crushing college debt, the company can pay them less early on, and the worker can start getting paid 4 years sooner.
The problem in a large part goes back to a little known law case, Griggs vs Duke Power 1971, where a company was prohibited from using a general IQ test to screen applicants for jobs. Why should this matter? Because now screening for smart new entry level candidates who might eventually take on more responsibility and higher roles was not allowed - tests had to be directly relevant to the job being applied for at the time.
This set up the role of colleges as a legally approved gatekeeper, unlike the now disallowed but much cheaper IQ test. The colleges would screen for general intelligence through their application process, the students would pay the colleges large sums in part for an education of modest value and in part for the certification that they had been smart enough to get in (“the hardest part of Harvard is getting in”). And once the colleges were the gatekeepers to good career jobs, they could extract larger and larger tuitions for their certification. The fact the government along the way got into subsidies for student loans just added to this trend in rising costs.
Here you can see the way costs in inflation adjusted dollar for public and private college have exploded around the time this ruling came out in the early 70s. Costs are up about 3x in constant dollars from then, and in addition, the % of people getting college degrees more than doubled from 10-15% to more like 35% now, so this is a huge burden and on an increasingly large fraction of the population.
When you adjust these dollar figures for inflation, the change is smaller, but still unsettling. For instance, $329 for a public four-year school in 1969 adjusted for inflation is $2,323. That works out to an increase of 340 percent from 1969 to 2019 with inflation included, or nearly three and a half times the cost in the past. For private schools, the inflation-adjusted price of tuition and fees was $10,499. With a current cost of tuition and fees at $35,830, that works out to an increase of 241 percent.
Griggs it turns out is a legacy of the civil rights era, where the court applied a “disparate impact” theory, despite alleging no ill intent by the employer, and denied the intelligence testing due to historical trends in unequal access to education that predated civil rights era. Not to put too fine a point on it, but 50 years later and after decades of desegregation, huge sums spent on public education for the poor, and heroic academic efforts to remove any possible cultural biases from testing, the outcomes of an IQ or SAT test today still widely vary by ethnic group. And for this politically inconvenient fact, we’re stuck with a hugely cumbersome and expensive certification process.
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Holy shit dude. Referencing a book by a eugenics promoter? Well done.
I would bet based on what I know that if you control for things like poverty, access to healthcare, and educational opportunity (including emphasis on education that some cultures are more famous for than others), there’d be no difference in IQ or SAT scores.
It’s not politically inconvenient, it’s wrong.
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Don’t bet too much. Here’s a liberal Berkeley prof who tried to find exactly what you describe among a million odd UC CA system applicants and he concluded… that they needed to use affirmative action based on race, because the differences were too intractable and that was after controlling for both income and parental education.
Large and growing gaps in SAT scores, by race and ethnicity, are nothing new. The College Board and educators alike have acknowledged these gaps and offered a variety of explanations, with a focus on the gaps in family income (on average) and the resources at high schools that many minority students attend. And indeed there is also a consistent pattern year after year on SAT scores in that the higher the family income, on average, the higher the scores. But a new, long-term analysis of SAT scores has found that, among applicants to the University of California’s campuses, race and ethnicity have become stronger predictors of SAT scores than family income and parental education levels.
Or if you prefer to look on the very high end, consider the Harvard class SAT scores where presumably you’re getting nearly all people with good to great backgrounds in education, reasonable income and healthcare, etc. we have these numbers because they’re being sued for fairly blatant racial discrimination and favoritism. See for yourself.
But in some sense it doesn’t matter why people score well or poorly, whether it’s culture or genetics or the environment where they grew or most likely all of these in some combination. If the test is useful to predicting future success in your college / job / career at that stage of a person’s life, why is it wrong to use it, especially if it could save half the people the cost of going to college unnecessary?
Remember too that the SAT was the great equalizer for many decades, allowing smart but poorer students to beat out richer more credential ones (legacies, fancy prep schools, etc) for spots in elite schools. This was a big win for equality of opportunity and social / economic mobility. Sadly, with the excuse of “covid” and to cover for legally questionable and discriminatory admission practices in many universities, many schools are giving up using the SAT test altogether so they can admit based on skin color the way they want these days without any pesky paper trail to get them in trouble.
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Nice vocab. Well done!
I don’t know who the guy is, but can’t you object factually? Just because Napoleon was short doesn’t mean his theory of tall guys getting rained on first should be dismissed out of hand. In fact, it turns out he was right.
In addtion to your incomplete list, why not add race, gender, presence of parents, etc. Oh, and lets not forget church attendance. We may also want to consider whether the zip code ends in an odd or even umber. Yes, that is umber, because it makes about as much sense. 
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Or because a high school degree isn’t worth
Why the heck should a secretary/assistant need a 4 year degree?
In the not too distant future, a college degree will be worth the same as today’s high school diploma, and you’ll see requirements of Master’s degrees for secretaries.
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Ok if IQ test is not acceptable, couldn’t you use another screening method that is cheaper than 4 years of college tuition?
Colleges do this estimate of the quality of applicants to admit people so why could companies not do the same? Since universities are allowed to select applicants based on GPA + Tests results, why could companies not do the same?
Just use much of the same criteria that universities use for predicting college success at their institution but apply it to select who to train for their jobs. Level the playing field a bit by offering a test prep class to all applicants, have them take the SAT and ACT on your dime, and then have them compete with their high-school GPA for those entry jobs. Companies could refine using their own criteria (say emphasize the value of some sub-scores more depending on the type of jobs they’re looking to fill).
The issue is you don’t get to control this in the real world. At least not in an immediate fashion. And for a business, they don’t give a damn about why candidate A is better than candidate B. They’ll hire the better candidate whichever it is because they have the potential to add more value for the same level of compensation. Sure at equal qualification, there is a lot of evidence that diversity is much more advantageous for your company. But the companies are still gonna discriminate first on candidate quality (regardless of origin), then second on diversity.
There is no question that the ACT/SAT tests skew with wealth, parent education, and ethnicity. But affirmative action at the college level is at best a bandaid and a poor one at that. I won’t get into details but in my graduate class, there was ample evidence that affirmative action was not working well based on graduation rate especially.
But I think you could mitigate a lot of the socioeconomic differences by simply offering a free test prep class to every student before some kind of standardized evaluation. Even though we never paid a dime for test prep (used free resources like kahn academy and free local classes), our kids definitely got much better with practice. Difference was about 6 points on ACT before and after prep. Free prep class would not totally level the playing field but it could narrow the gap a lot.
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Why would you say this?
For example, these days 5th grade math is multi digit multiplication. This was 5th grade algebra at the end of the 1800s - Elementary Algebra by Hall & Knight. You can page through it easily and just look at random sections - it’s lots of fractions, square and higher roots, powers, variables, and all of these mixed together in the same problem.
Obviously basic arithmetic hasn’t changed but the level the students are getting taught is a fair bit lower. Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and more recently diversify based opposition to the very existence of gifted classes all have made it harder for those with the ability to learn to move ahead.
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Common core has it at 4th grade. Same year that we did it when I was a kid 4 in the 70’s
Whre does it say that was a 5th grade text ?
The preface says the book was developed in the authors experience preparing boys for Army and University exams. University prep level work doen’t sound like 5th grade to me.
HEre’s a document that includes an actual 8th grade graduation exam for 1895 :
- Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
- A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
- If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 pounds, what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
- District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven
months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals? - Find cost of 6,720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
- Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 per cent.
- What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per in.?
- Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 per cent.
- What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance around which is 640 rods?
- Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
THey had 90 minutes to finish that. Doesn’t look as advanced as what middle school kids would be doing today.
8th grade common core :
http://www.corestandards.org/Math/Content/8/introduction/
The Number System
- Know that there are numbers that are not rational, and approximate them by rational numbers.
Expressions and Equations
- Work with radicals and integer exponents.
- Understand the connections between proportional relationships, lines, and linear equations.
- Analyze and solve linear equations and pairs of simultaneous linear equations.
Functions
- Define, evaluate, and compare functions.
- Use functions to model relationships between quantities.
Geometry
- Understand congruence and similarity using physical models, transparencies, or geometry software.
- Understand and apply the Pythagorean Theorem.
- Solve real-world and mathematical problems involving volume of cylinders, cones and spheres.
Statistics and Probability
- Investigate patterns of association in bivariate data.
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IN the 1990’s only 40% of kids took coursework at standard or higher level. Today its 75% who do so.
High School Kids Today Really Are Working Much Harder Than Earlier Generations
The % of kids taking AP classes has quadrupled since the 1980s. Today a full 1/3 of students are in at least 1 AP course.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries less than 10% of the population graduated high school. Less than 5% of them took trigonometry
In the 1940’s half the kids didn’t even complete 9th grade.
88% of kids graduate high school now and 19% of them take calculus.
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I listed things that are most likely to impact someone’s educational achievement. You listed things that don’t make sense (except possibly the presence of parents, as that’s related to time/money investment in the child).
Alright, let’s look at the things you listed:
Before I can decide, or even consider whether your factors would most likely impact somone’s education achievement, definitions would help. Please define:
poverty
access to healthcare
educational opportunity
I know my factors made no sense. That was the point of listing them. My hint at the end was not as obvious as I estimated. However, I won’t ask of you something I won’t do, so:
race: a group of people who share inherited qualities, frequently physical
gender: male or female
presences of parents: a mother and father living together in the same home
church attendance: regularly attending religious services
zip code: zone improvement plan devised by USPS to speed the delivery of mail
umber (as I used it): nonsense
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poverty: Poverty. Kids who don’t have enough to eat or have to work to support themselves and their parents don’t have the time or attention for education.
access to healthcare: a bit broad, but I’m talking about regular doc checkups or things like therapy/support for any learning disabilities (i.e., people on the autism spectrum may have a brilliant mind by IQ / SAT standards, but they may not be able to achieve their potential if the parents don’t handle it right).
educational opportunity: Not having a good advisor or mentor or going to a school in poorer neighborhood, which often has fewer resources, fewer advanced classes, fewer parents at the PTA meetings, etc.
I really appreciate the effort, but can’t really work with those definitions … and not trying to be obstinate, but they seem, if not nebulous, akin to Miss America contestants wanting world peace.
How do you ensure world peace?
How do you keep a kid from being hungry?
How do you make sure someone with/without a learning disability is diagnosed correctly and treated properly?
How do you make sure someone has a good advisor? Is going to school in a richer neighborhood? Has greater resources? Has more advanced classes? Has more parents at PTA meetings?
If frogs had wings …