I do think cb's article highlights one of the issues, which is an explosion in 'administrative' costs from departments that include things like diversity initiatives. The creation of deputy assistant VPs for finance, or student affairs, or real estate development, etc. certainly are bearing a lot of cost that didn't previously exist.
I think this quote from USAFA83gradwife gets at much of it:
Let's face it, universities are businesses first and foremost.
Universities didn't used to operate like businesses, and now they do. Brown's a good example, actually -- it and it's cohort sit on these massive endowments and barely spend them down (one of the reasons the diversity initiative isn't that big a deal at Brown -- their $3.2 billion endowment made a 16.1% return last year). They've become cash hoarders.
How did that become a reasonable way for a non-profit educational institution to operate? Personally, as an alum of a university with a $25 billion endowment that barely spends any of the interest each year, I'm in favor of revising the non-profit guidelines for universities to force them to spend down their endowment interest and/or pay taxes on it. I think that Yale could, for instance, use some of its largesse to underwrite tuition at the local public colleges. Or something, anything, that works toward the civic good. It's insane that they're racking up billions a year in interest, not paying any taxes on it, and still charging tuition. It incenses me, and seems entirely at odds with the purported missions of these institutions. They're becoming hedge funds with a school attached. What the heck do they need that kind of money for?
I do think both cb and Jcleppe have it right -- the availability of federally-backed loans has helped create the problem, especially without according oversight of where those loan dollars were going. There are other factors too, but I think the insanity of the loan system -- public and private -- is a huge part. There hasn't been a lot of motivation for the schools to keep their costs down. Instead, they want to increase enrollment. And until recently, they didn't even care about completion rates!
So how do we turn that around? Now that all of these people have gone to college -- now that the seats in colleges exist, and the presumption in the hiring marketplace is that a college degree is needed for all kinds of things (not rightly, just observationally -- it's there in the hiring descriptions) -- how do we re-orient colleges toward offering affordable higher education options that prepare people to meet the entry-level requirements for jobs w/o being saddled with debt? And without, as Kyguardmom says, blaming the very kids who are stuck in this terrible system we've constructed. That's the only thing I'm interested in.
Though it might seem really counter-intuitive to some people, states like Georgia that have offered tuition remission to state residents who meet certain standards seem to have a model that could be used more broadly. In no small part b/c it takes the 'loan' process out of the mix. By doing so, it loosens the grip that the loan providers have on higher ed finance. The public university has gone back to actually acting in the public interest. I think that's a good thing. When I think of 'free' education, that's what I think of.
Momba -- sorry that I misremembered your post. For some reason I thought Kyguardmom was referring to "cocktail parties" b/c it had been cited in a previous post. I must've been wrong. I know you weren't advocating for that kind of conversation, and I just thought it was used in that post as a reference to what someone else had said with a rhetorical flourish; I genuinely didn't mean to misattribute.
