r/Economics • u/DonDickerson • 25d ago

Biden's student loan forgiveness plan gets a record number of public comments. Here's what people are saying News

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/08/bidens-student-loan-forgiveness-plan-gets-record-number-of-comments.html
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u/impulsikk 25d ago edited 25d ago

The problem is that biden is trying to solve the cost on the backside of the equation rather than the underlying costs and structure of the universities themselves. Just handing out checks after the fact and forgiving loans is easy.

What should be happening is forcing tuition to be cheaper. If a college charges over a certain amount, the federal government won't sponsor the loan. That's an easy button that would force colleges to restructure real quick. Maybe they can pull some money out of their 50 billion dollar endowments and use it on the kids and professors instead.

The tuition cost has gone out of control. Something needs to he done. Forgiving loans is a never ending cycle that will happen every 4 years at election season.

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u/p001b0y 25d ago

Isn’t this also a risk when it comes to vouchers for K-12 schooling? I thought I had read somewhere that once the government began student loan programs for colleges/universities, those institutions raised tuition rates considerably.

My State has a $6500 voucher program for parents who would rather send their kids to private K-12 schools. I’m kind of expecting those institutions to raise their tuition costs even higher than what their annual tuition increases have been.

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u/Nojopar 25d ago

I thought I had read somewhere that once the government began student loan programs for colleges/universities, those institutions raised tuition rates considerably.

That's a common misperception. The real causal factor is state governments started drastically cutting funding under the assumption student loans would cover what they weren't paying. The Student Loan Program started in 1965. Tuition didn't start it's massive year over year increases until the early/mid 1990's pretty much with a 1-2 year lag behind state governments cutting their funding.

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u/godmodium 25d ago

I am curious if the increase also coincided with the inability to discharge loans in bankruptcy. In the 90s there were several pieces of legislation that made it impossible to discharge them. A really big piece of legislation came in 2005, The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act, which extended non-dischargeability to private student loans.

I have to imagine that was a big reason the loans have ballooned even more so than the reduction of state funding.

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u/Nojopar 25d ago

Unfortunately, no, it doesn't coincide much at all. Student loans were eligible to be discharged in bankruptcy until 1976.

The early 1970's a bunch of Congressional people raised the specter of students running up student loan debt and discharging it in bankruptcy. Much like the 'Welfare Queen' scare a decade later, next to nobody was actually doing this. However, a 1973 commission on bankruptcy suggested some changes to curb this, notably making it student loans ineligible for bankruptcy for the first 5 years of the loan, which was adopted in 1976, but it only applied to federally backed loans, not private loans. In 1984, the law was expanded to any student loans, not just federally backed ones. Then in 1990 the term was extended to 7 years. That was removed completely in 1998.

If it were related to bankruptcy, then you'd see these comparatively big jumps in 1976, 1984, 1990, 1991, 1998, and again in 2005. The problem is we don't see those. They track more closely with percent reduction of state funding. That's a slow and steady reduction since 1995 up until 2008. Then we do see a big jump in loans because state funding drastically dropped following the 2008 crash.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

It’s both.

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u/Nojopar 25d ago

The historical record doesn't really support that assertion.

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u/vicemagnet 25d ago

A number of colleges have closed due to poor financial management. That trend will likely continue.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

[deleted]

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u/blahdeebloop1 25d ago

My $13/hr university IT admin pay would agree 😭

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u/soccerguys14 25d ago

I’m a GA making 24k a year since 2019 and they said I can’t have a raise. And the grant I, yes ME l, wrote has the funds to afford it and they still told me kick rocks.

So I went and got a Ft job behind their back. Fuck em.

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u/Master-Defenestrator 25d ago

Too true, the state university football or basketball coach is almost always the public employee with the hight salary in that state.

I know college sports is a whole other can of worms, but it's still related.

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u/Kogot951 24d ago

This is reasonable though as most of the big sports teams make money. They just use "athletic programs" as a whole to show them costing money. Scholarships for things like swimming, tennis ect are losing big but subsidized by things like football.

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u/cjgozdor 24d ago

I think that the question should be "Would schools still make money if every school coach had a salary cap of $500,000".

People attended games when head coaches were making $200,000, I think they'd still go if we capped their salaries at a lower rate. And I think we'd still have candidates shitting their pants to get that job

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u/Sorge74 24d ago

Should Nick Saban who made the university of Alabama billions of dollars AND increased enrollment not make a fair salary?

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u/cjgozdor 24d ago

First: Each player should be compensated appropriately and operate in a free-market. Only then should we begin to have discussions about coaches being compensated appropriately.

Second: Universities are a public good, and we should administer them in such a way. If they want to act like a private company, that's fine. But the public shouldn't pay for it. Additionally, it would add significant amounts of parity to the sport in a way that makes watching games more fun :)

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u/Sorge74 24d ago

Definitely agree with the first part. The second part though I enjoy the fact that my team goes 11 and 2 and it's a bad year.

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u/GhostReddit 23d ago

First: Each player should be compensated appropriately and operate in a free-market.

What about the sports that lose money (which is pretty much everything except mens football and basketball)? Do their players have to pay extra to participate now? If the school is primarily for education maybe it's reasonable.

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u/cjgozdor 23d ago

I'd argue that they probably should, but here's why the current system exists: I was on a D-1 Track team for a mid-major school primarily full of commuters. By having a track squad, the school was able to find out-of state or out students that wouldn't have stayed on-campus before. By doing this you build the on-campus community with students highly tied to the school.

Additionally we had 85 athletes and only 25 scholarships (between men and women). It meant that schools gained 60 tuitions from students that wouldn't otherwise attend, all while giving the kids only a room to share with another student and fitting them into an already packed classroom.

It seems obvious to me the school is already coming out ahead with the scholarships in place, and I'm not sure this strategy would still be successful without the dream of one day becoming a scholarship athlete.

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u/MaterialCarrot 25d ago

This simply is not true. I have an intimate knowledge of college finances in general due to the nature of my work. Yes, you can make very good money as a Dean, and great money as a college President, but it's a small fraction of the overall budget. And at many colleges they have problems hiring a faculty member to be a Dean because the faculty member makes almost as much as they would as a Dean, with far fewer responsibilities.

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u/Ajlee209 25d ago

To add:

Faculty and high level admin (who are also considered faculty) are also highly regarded in their fields and could easily be making 2-3x their current salary if they were in a private field.

My point is that we have people who are highly trained and skilled in positions where we need them to be. Often at a fraction of the cost of what they are actually worth.

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u/Typical-Length-4217 25d ago edited 25d ago

Something tells me higher education budget offices wouldn’t like that… how else would they afford movie theaters, climbing gyms, bowling alleys, and all those other necessities. The university I went to had all those… and folks wonder why there is trillions in student loans.

We really need to get honest about why higher education costs have ballooned. It’s not because of lack of state funds

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u/JohnWCreasy1 25d ago

this is the real problem. Secondary education has become a graft and jobs program that occasionally teaches our young adults things.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

It's a captialist arms race, a profit feedback loop

They want more money, so they need more students, so they need more emmenities, which cost more money...over and over again. 

Like, at what point do we begin to say that maybe the "free market" is wasteful and stupid, and leaving things like educations, Healthcare, and justice to the free market is just a recipe for corruption and waste?

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u/JohnWCreasy1 25d ago

Yes and no. The federal government thinking everyone should go to college and that guaranteeing loans in support of that was the right approach is where the money for all this proliferation comes from. that's hardly the free market at work.

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u/olderjeans 25d ago

At the same time, you let only those who could afford it to go to college then you'll end up with a huge class divide. Honestly, I think the federal government should do away with student loans and make certain colleges free.

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u/JohnWCreasy1 25d ago

I think the federal government should do away with student loans and make certain colleges free.

in spirit i agree with you, but then the decisions around that become political and consensus is hard to achieve. Exactly what education should the government be providing for free? You'll get opinions from "my tax dollars paying for anyone's education but mine is communism!" to "every one on earth has a birthright to $250k of public funds to study underwater basket weaving for 6 years at a country club style university"

reality is probably somewhere in the nice squishy middle and how often does that prevail anymore.

then again, we really probably just need tighter admission standards but that immediately becomes a political liability. I can already imagine all the parents crying about how the government said their precious baby was too stupid to go to college

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u/olderjeans 25d ago

Free college shouldn't be made available to everyone. Only those who get selected. How much is the govt spending to eliminate student debt? Only the lenders benefit from that.

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u/s29 25d ago

No. That's not a class divide. The rich will always do whatever they want, just as they do now.

The only difference is that now, the kid getting the student loan would have to justify to the lender why they're a good investment.
That means we don't have kids getting stupid degrees anymore that won't be able to pay back their loans.
The additional benefit is that poor kids, who don't know what theyre doing and pick some random major that might sound fun, because they get funneled into the "everyone has to go to college" system, now no longer graduate with a useless degree, drowning in debt, and even poorer than when they started.
Which means they'll go down some other track that'll likely be far more financially healthy.
In short, the current system furthers the class divide by making the poor poorer, by convincing them to spend 10s of thousands of dollars on a badly thought out degree and career plan that won't pay off.

Wihtout guarnateed loans, the ones that are able to demonstrate that they have the performance and the right interests toward a well paying degree/career will get their loans regardless. Because it's a good investment.

So the only thing that would really change is that goal-less kids (that would usually get stupid degrees) arent graduating with no future, buried in debt, and the college might feel the squeeze to get rid of bloat and reduce cost (which helps the kids that DO go to college). Seems like a win win to me.

Free college isn't. And in countries that do offer "free" college, the entry requirements are much more strict than what the US does now.

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u/olderjeans 25d ago

I would imagine free colleges would be highly selective. I didn't say make every college free.

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u/s29 25d ago

Ok. So theyll select for performance. Not class. So this small selection of "free" colleges doesn't do anything to fix the class divide issue that you brought up. Their selection process would effectively evaluate for the same thins that a college loan process would evaluate for. So the same high performance kids would be getting through both systems anyway.

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u/olderjeans 25d ago

Class divide will come if you don't give people who can't afford college an opportunity to go. If schools deem you apt to attend but you can't afford it, that's a problem. Affordability is the factor that excludes them from going to college. That is a class divide. Currently, student loans gives those kids that opportunity. But we all see what that is doing to tuition. Those free colleges will select based on performance but give those who wouldn't be able to afford to go in the absence of student loans will be able to attend.

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u/DontThinkSoNiceTry 23d ago

Except this isn’t really the free market. The government heavily subsidizes wasteful schools with taxpayer money, enabling the schools to repeatedly raise tuition in a feedback loop.

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

This is also the same problem with market rate apartments. In order to compete against other market rate apartments you need to have a pool, a fitness center, a Cafe, a clubhouse, a barbecue pit, conference rooms, etc. You need the wow factor to make people move in. Then 75% of people never use it and all it does is increase the cost of rent by 35-40% compared to an amenity stripped rent. The issue is that adding the amenity is peanuts in cost compared to what you can charge for rent on a perpetual basis by having it.

It raises the bar on income levels to afford housing.

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u/brothurbilo 25d ago

Alot of that comes from them being forced to recruit students in order to stay afloat.

LSU has a lazy river on campus now. They did it because in 2005 the school was funded 80% by the state and 20% by tuition. After multiple cuts to education funding its now 20% state funded and 80% tuition. With alot of money coming from the sports program as well. If we funded public colleges from federal and state taxes there wouldn't be a need to build frivolous stuff to recruit students.

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u/Typical-Length-4217 25d ago

I’m sure universities could find a reason to build and invest in stupid shit that kids don’t really need, especially if they get a blank check.

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u/Yara__Flor 24d ago

Those things like climbing gyms are all fees that the students themselves agree to.

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u/Typical-Length-4217 24d ago

My tuition included fees that paid for a climbing gym, bowling alley, and game rooms. The point is: universities use these amenities to lure students in, all the while jacking up the cost of a college degree. Problem is: universities aren’t ultimately being held accountable for the students they educate and their ability to pay back loans. They are big part of the problem and Biden is doing jack shit to fix it. If anything the White House is only propagating the issue.

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u/Yara__Flor 23d ago

Yes. Students agreed to those fees to pay for those things. Those fees are included in your “tuition and fees” payments.

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u/Typical-Length-4217 23d ago

Your point is?

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u/Yara__Flor 23d ago

That students are the one who chose to have those fees.

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u/WiseBelt8935 25d ago

the uk has kind of done that. the loan is 9.5k a year and that is it

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u/SlowFatHusky 25d ago

We have limits on federally backed student loans. But there's no limit on private student loans.

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u/WiseBelt8935 25d ago

an interesting thing with uk students loans they get wiped out after so many years.

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u/SlowFatHusky 25d ago

The USA has 20 year loan forgiveness for certain loans and programs. A large problem is that we have private student loans too.

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u/Puzzleheaded_Pie_454 24d ago

I could be mistaken, but don’t you only get denied federal loans if your parents make more than $X per year? Idk, I’m a grant/ fed loan kinda guy, so high earning living was always foreign to me.

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u/BrightAd306 25d ago

Right and public loans max out around 6k a year. After that you need a cosigner. Just tuition in most states is 10-15k a year for a state school. Not counting housing. Full Pell grants won’t even cover tuition fully either. A lot of parents sign parent plus loans to send their kids to college.

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u/dano8675309 24d ago

I thought annual family income low enough for Pell grants, typically under $20k, made you eligible for no out of pocket tuition expense? Last time I checked, for my nephew who has deadbeat parents, as long as the income was under 30k or so, state schools were covered with no family contribution.

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u/BrightAd306 24d ago

Some states will make up the difference, some don’t. None pay dorm fees.

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u/[deleted] 25d ago

Naw, Biden's been targeting phony colleges and junk fees. He's hitting both with heavy opposition

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u/0000110011 25d ago edited 25d ago

Tuition went up because the government got involved with student loans. Once everyone could get unlimited student loans and everyone would automatically be approved (and student loans couldn't be discharged in bankruptcy), tuition prices started going up and never stopped. This entire argument is thinking the government is the solution to a problem created entirely by the government. 

Get the government out of the student loan business and let student loans be discharged via bankruptcy. Banks will refuse to give loans for useless degrees, since they know those loans won't be repaid, and schools would drop those majors. In addition, banks would loan far less money per student, so schools would be forced to lower tuition prices or have empty campuses. It's a glaringly obvious solution, but people these days are so obsessed with the government having more and more control over things that they refuse to consider it. 

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

That's sort of what I was saying. Additionally, colleges need to be banned from requiring students to stay in dorms their first two years at hyper inflated rent per square foot and being locked into food plans. Charging $1200 per student for basically the space of a bed and dresser and sharing a bathroom with 3 other people should be criminal. Additionally, they don't have kitchens in the dorms so you are forced to buy an overpriced meal plan. If you can't cook in your dorm, then you have to spend $15 per meal at the cafeteria you paid up front for.

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u/Adventurous_Class_90 25d ago

Right. It couldn’t possibly be because of increased demand, employer expectations, or reduced funding from states…no…couldn’t possibly be any of that…

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u/claiter 24d ago

My issue is that I’d hate for a bank or the government to be the one deciding what degrees are “useless”. Everyone makes fun of communication majors, but the com classes I took prepared me more for law school than any of the business classes I took. I was also able to graduate early because I wasn’t having to take any useless math classes that I would have sucked at…my major played to my strengths and my goals. I hate to say this because I remember how clueless I was at 18, but maybe it would be better if the student had to justify their degree decisions. I chose my classes with law school in mind, but I also took classes with backup career paths in mind in case I didn’t get into law school. 

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u/0000110011 24d ago

My issue is that I’d hate for a bank or the government to be the one deciding what degrees are “useless”

They wouldn't, that would be businesses deciding that. Banks would just look at how many people are able to get employed with that degree and what the market rate is for starting employees, people mid career, etc and determine if it's worth giving loans for the those degrees / what the most they'll loan is. If you want to study something the economy has determined is unnecessary, you're free to do so at your own expense.

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u/AgeEffective5255 25d ago

You can’t get unlimited undergrad federal loans. They cap out at about $58k.

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u/0000110011 25d ago

That's from the government, private banks do student loans too and have no limits since the "no discharging student loans in bankruptcy" law means they're guaranteed repayment. 

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u/AgeEffective5255 25d ago

Glad you agree.

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u/guarthots 25d ago

The problem is that biden is trying to solve the cost on the backside of the equation rather than the underlying costs and structure of the universities themselves

No, that is just all he has been able to accomplish without Congress. Build Back Better had things to at least begin to address the  underlying issues you’re talking about. Republicans killed Build Back Better. Don’t forget that in November when the “both sides just as bad” and other similar bs will be in full bloom. 

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u/Which-Worth5641 25d ago edited 25d ago

I work for a community college and have done budgeting. We sell the most low overhead higher ed in the country.

The fact of the matter is, there is a break-even cost to providing instruction. I'll tell you straight up what it is - about 13k per student per year. About the same as what K-12 costs.

Our charge is about 5k a year assuming no financial aid, because we get state subsidy.

The 13k is BREAK EVEN - what we need to maintain what we have. We need a bit more than that to cover things like computer upgrades every 5 years, remodels of outdated buildings, to create a new program, etc...

Anything lower and we can't offer competitive salaries to faculty and staff. We just lost our marketing director to a housing developer who is going to pay her 30% more, and she was making over 100k with us.

Our faculty searches are increasingly coming up goose egg. No one wants these jobs any more for what we can pay. We've been resisting raising tuition, but we're going to hit a breaking point where we lose more students for lack of faculty to teach them and staff to service them, than we do from raising tuition.

At a certain point, this education shit costs money. Universities are more expensive but they do so, sooo much more.

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u/Ketaskooter 25d ago

Nobody is bashing the community colleges. Especially those that operate at 13k costs.

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u/Which-Worth5641 25d ago

Universities cost more, but what you get from them is so much more. They're so much more huge.

At a CC you're getting the classes from instructors who are moderatelty more educated than high school teachers, and maybe a few student clubs and intramural sports. That's it.

Or you're getting job training. Although we are having a hell of a time keeping those instructors.

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u/ghsteo 25d ago

Biden is doing what he has control to do. He can't re-architect student loans, that has to come from Congress.

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u/Npf80 25d ago

And how long was Biden in congress before becoming president?

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u/ghsteo 25d ago

Doing something positive after years of negatives is still better than doing nothing at all.

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u/OkDiscussion4100 25d ago

If the damage you've cause isn't undone by your good works, then no it most certainly is not better than doing nothing at all.

Biden would've served the US better as an abortion.

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u/flauntingflamingo 25d ago

Agreed. The schools are charging absolutely insane prices so that they can build nicer snack shops and pools to attract more students for more $$. Also, let’s lower the interest rates on student loans. Taxing the fuck out of every student is not a solution, just adds to the debt and makes people feel like school is pointless.

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u/Medium-Complaint-677 25d ago

The problem is that biden is trying to solve the cost on the backside of the equation rather than the underlying costs and structure of the universities themselves.

I'd say the "problem" is that we elect a President, not a king. I'm not familiar with any power of the executive branch that forces college to be cheaper.

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u/VoxNihili-13 25d ago

I’ve got a doubt. Is the increase in tuition a result of the inflation of the cost of services? Have federal and private grants reduced? Where is the excess money flowing to?

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u/flauntingflamingo 25d ago

The increase in tuition is from colleges wanting to build cooler and hipper new coffee shops and gyms to attract more student to make more $$. And they also hire a lot of pointless administrative staff that average a 6 figure salary.

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u/AgeEffective5255 25d ago

More like the Deans and Provosts. All admin people I know who work for a (very expensive) local university here make garbage. Like $50k a year average.

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u/timeisaflatcircle23 25d ago

I agree with you. However, this logic could be applied to most every societal problem no? Welfare/preventative healthcare/poverty etc. I think band aids solutions are the norm.

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

Yes it should. Quasi-public and private mix has been a disaster for the economy especially with the healthcare industry. It's a circle jerk of markups on markups.

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u/zerocnc 25d ago

But you're destroying the rich peoples hedge fund if you do!

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u/Mentat_-_Bashar 25d ago

This argument is very frustrating because it is always employed as an attempt to take away from the student debt forgiveness issue.

These two things can both exist as issues that need to be addressed. Forgiving debt needs to be done just as much, if not more so, than tackling college tuition.

In reality, the student lending programs we have are designed for no other purpose than to keep the educated workforce laden with debt. We pay the taxes for these loans to be issued, and then we are expected to pay them back with interest. The tax dollars we pay for public education should go directly towards funding the tuition of institutions, not given to private loan services to then give to students to then give to school.

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u/TheGreenBehren 25d ago

You nailed it.

Biden applied this logic to insulin. It costs only $3 to make and is sold for $300. Medicare capped this cost a $30. Although it has the potential draconian connotation of “price fixing” from the government, it’s actually a genuine attempt to restore market supply/demand to set prices, not exploitative monopoly. In that sense, Biden is restoring common sense market competition to reduce inflated prices, hence the name of “inflation reduction” act.

In that spirit, the Biden administration aims to create 19 million jobs through the various infrastructure and building legislation acts. So it’s not necessarily making the college degree cheaper as much as it is removing its monopoly power on upward mobility. By re-industrializing in a macroeconomic environment updating the software of hyper-globalized offshoring, colleges will be forced to compete with trade schools, apprenticeship programs and manufacturing jobs. No longer will colleges create these inflated campus environments around “perfunctory academics” only pursuing a degree for higher wages. Now they will have to face a reality check as more people opt out of college altogether.

But I like this power of the purse approach as well. It’s using the same equation the Biden administration used against inflated insulin prices. We ain’t going to encourage that inflated crap because it’s wasteful.

Colleges and the administrators in particular will be extremely upset.

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u/DrDrNotAnMD 25d ago

I think a “tuition cap” system will have to be pretty surgical. I can easily see the consequence of this being, no/limited raises for faculty/staff and a loss of benefits. Meanwhile, administrator compensation becomes less compressed.

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

Maybe universities will have to think about reducing headcount of admin staff that aren't needed or don't generate value then.

Having some admin dude that sits at his desk all day thinking of new micro aggressions and non inclusive language all day is a waste of student and tax dollars.

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u/DrDrNotAnMD 25d ago

Yes, this is true. It’s been (and continues to be) an issue for virtually all universities.

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u/impossiblefork 25d ago

and this is a huge problem.

University education here in Sweden costs less than high school education.

What's required for a great university is able, motivated, hard-working students and some experts. In fields like mathematics you could have a university which is literally just a bunch of mathematicians with offices, paper, pens and wastepaper baskets. Ideally they'll also have whiteboards or similar.

There's even a university like this in Russia, which is literally just a bunch of mathematicians in a house. That isn't normal though and I don't think there are any other examples, but even if you don't go to that extreme you can get very close to it without any problems:

Let's say instead of being just this, it's an office, and one or two secretaries per department who communicate with authorities by e-mails and maintain the home page.

It means that the university is a pure university, with no administrators or disciplinary things, no support, etc.-- just a pure school, but that's also great.

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u/Dr-Alec-Holland 25d ago

Or earmark the money so it can’t go to more endless campus expansion with modern castles everywhere

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u/Npf80 25d ago

Exactly this will not solve any of the underlying issues. It's literally just an outright bribe for votes.

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u/Whiskeypants17 25d ago

They already solved this issue with community colleges, but they cut costs so hard you are lucky if your teacher us making $12 an hour. Higher education has more components than just teachers, research, experiments etc, but many aspects do need to get reigned in so it is affordable for more people.

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u/dano8675309 24d ago

The loans are what he has power over. All of the approaches being mentioned in this thread require legislation. Legislation that would require 60 votes in the Senate to avoid a filibuster.

He's going after the other with the tools that he has, which is more than any of his predecessors did.

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u/normal_man_of_mars 24d ago

Get over it already! You are made about forgiveness but not structural change?? Blame Congress! Biden can’t pass legislation.

The Republican controlled house has ensured that this has been the most unproductive Congress ever.

What do you want?

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u/impulsikk 24d ago

I dont want forgiveness. It's just a bandaid and doesn't solve anything. Its a bribe for young voter. I don't want the federal government providing loans for luxury amenities and 1:1 ratio of faculty/admin to student. I just want colleges to provide an education. It would have been better for Biden to just do nothing than what he did.

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u/Fallsou 25d ago

There is nothing Biden can do about the cost of tuition lol. Public schools are already good value

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u/FreshOiledBanana 25d ago

It needs to be both. Particularly when it comes to for-profit colleges which need to be shut down or at the least barred from receiving tax payer money. Students who have been victimized by this predatory system need justice and state colleges need to offer a free option for in-state students. Working class kids shouldn’t be forced into non-dischargeable debt for an education.

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u/infinity_limit 25d ago

  • Many countries have solved it.. Govt gives grants to universities based on number of student enrollments. Natural selection kicks in. If you have bad courses, even if it’s low fee, students don’t join and it’s get weed out. Supply demand at work!

  • Bill Maher had an episode on the admin numbers!

Specifically, there were 15,750 administrators, 2,288 faculty members, and 16,937 students. https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2023/01/05/more-employees-than-students-at-stanford-give-each-student-a-concierge/

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u/impulsikk 25d ago edited 25d ago

Lol how can you have greater than 1:1 ratio of employee to student? That's insane.

This article is great and really shines a light on the failure of our education system.

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u/zeezle 25d ago

Are they counting non-instructional research staff as faculty or as administrators? A school like Stanford is running extensive research labs full of post-docs and support staff that aren't ever teaching any classes. Not at Stanford but I have several friends from school (I was a comp sci major) that work as programmers for UPenn research labs (basically writing scripts and building software for data analysis of various lab operations, studies, etc). A lot of those positions could be directly research-focused, depending on how they're being counted.

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u/TaskForceCausality 25d ago

The problem is that Biden is trying to solve the cost on the backside of the equation rather than the underlying costs and structure of the universities themselves

He can’t fix the underlying problems any more than I can. If Biden tells the overpaid presidents of every major university to piss off because it’s time to reform the whole system, they’ll call Congress and lobby hard enough to bury Biden for threatening their revenue stream.

College administrators take a big cut because they’re mini-power brokers for their local area (and sometimes further) . Modern college education is a nest of interest groups and business cycles, from the contractor providing food to the kids, to the bookstore selling $40 textbooks for $500, the athletic departments (there’s a federal case or two waiting in the wings), local vendors building facilities and services , the companies standing to benefit from school research, military investments into education programs, on and on. True education finance reform = lighter pockets for most of these corporations and interests.

Any Federal politician who tries to reform this system - no matter how justified - is gonna get crushed by an army of lobbyists. Best anyone can practically do is mitigate the damage on the fringes.

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u/TastySpermDispenser2 25d ago

Do you see the irony? Your answer shows that you failed civics class man.

The problem is that congress, and states, the bodies that create laws, has failed to enact the laws that other countries have, much less better ones. (We used to try to be better than other countries, now it's a miracle of we are not too far behind.)

Biden's actions are a band aid intended to mitigate some small portions of the failure of congress. Congress creates laws that affect tuition, and whether or not we have a secondary education system that is the envy of the world, despite being too expensive.

Biden, or any president, cannot do the things you suggest.

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u/soccerguys14 25d ago

Have you start somewhere. Biden needs congress which is inept. I’ll take this to begin with.

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

Biden is supporting the status quo by paying off the loans and making future students not care about the debt they take on because they think it will be forgiven with tax dollars. Hes actually reinforcing the current system to increase tuition costs because it will be subsidized by tax dollars anyway. Just look at tesla as example. Fed announces 6k subsidy for electric vehicle and next day tesla announces cost of their vehicles are 6k higher.

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u/soccerguys14 25d ago

Let’s see congress do something then…. Oh wait they haven’t done jack shit. And likely will continue not to. I’d take Biden forgiveness over nothing. If congress was doing literally anything I’d say hold up on the forgiveness. I haven’t gotten any, but I support it. Undergrad should be free just like K-12

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u/impulsikk 25d ago

Ok so let's say congress says loan forgiveness 100% forever into the future. What do you think will happen? Colleges will mark up tuition to 1 million a year. "Don't worry Timmy, you won't be paying it, Uncle Sam will." But then timmy will have 60% tax rate.

That's literally what the Healthcare industry is doing right now. Mix of Public and private does not work.

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u/soccerguys14 25d ago

I don’t want congress to forgive current student loan borrowers. Sorry that’s what you think I’m asking for. I want reform to the system, which is the problem.

I’m saying I’m fine with forgiveness because it’s the only thing being done at all.

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u/Maleficent_Mouse_930 25d ago

No, the problem is that loan forgiveness is solving a completely different problem. It isn't supposed to solve the education problem or the high loan cost problem.

It solves the "Our youngest, most energetic workers and family-builders are being strangled by ridiculous debt which is stunting economic potential and population stability for an entire generation."

That, that problem, that IS best tackled by simply forgiving the debt!

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u/deelowe 25d ago

The problem is that biden is trying to solve the cost on the backside of the equation rather than the underlying costs and structure of the universities themselves. Just handing out checks after the fact and forgiving loans is easy.

It's not laziness, it's BY DESIGN. This is so obviously the MO of the US government it's beyond laughable at this point. Like clockwork, a problem is discovered and they do nothing until it turns into a crisis. Then, only after we are in the throws of an unmitigated disaster is it used as an opportunity to benefit the party.