All Democrats want to talk about is the funding side, NEVER the cost side. This goes for medicine as well as education.
There should only be one non teaching position for every 25 professors. That includes administration, janitorial, grounds maintenance, accounts payable / receivable, and every other position.
The number of bullshit departments and degrees should be wacked down to the basics.
The bullshit general "education" requirements should slashed. Nobody should be required to take Woke 101 to get a degree in engineering.
Why do they have so many empty fucking buildings? Increase classroom usage, flatten buildings, and lower your fixed costs.
No your athletics department doesn't "make money".
They don't have to do any of this because they can cry: "Invest in "education"", "it's for the children", and everyone lines up to throw money at the morons.
YES! The cost side is never discussed and that's where the scam lies. You have extremist liberal professors teaching the most useless Marxist garbage pulling in $100-400k. It would be impossible to earn this salary anywhere else and it's only possible because of government-backed student loans. No bank would lend money to a kid to study useless trash unless they had the assurance from the government that the kid's student loans are guaranteed by the feds.
The federal government should also mandate that the financial accounts for athletics departments are kept 100% separate from educational institutions. Schools could affiliate with athletics programs but they would be separate legal entities with separate accounting books. Since schools claim athletics make money so this shouldn't be an issue. Look, I love sports but it's ridiculous that students are paying thousands of dollars in student loan funds to finance multi-million dollar salaries for head coaches. It's disgusting.
Schools shouldn't be allowed to mandate that freshman live on campus. This is just a moneymaking con job by colleges and universities. They mandate that freshman have to live in $2,000+/month dorms for the "learning" experience.
Dorm buildings should not have elite luxury amenities. Going to school shouldn't be a 4-year luxury cruise. It drives up the cost and the schools get into an arms race over amenities like luxury condo buildings. The feds should require as a condition of federal funding that luxury amenities be banned or reduced. Tuition should never be increased because the school builds a rock-climbing wall and a golf simulator in a dorm building.
Grounds maintenance is also ridiculous. Schools spend MILLIONS on flowers and hedge trimming. Government funds should pay for exactly zero of that. It's nice to have a well-appointed campus but it should never come at the expense of impoverishing your students and financially crippling their futures.
The feds should also mandate, as a condition of funding, that school provide granular and precise job statistics for graduates. So many schools engage in this smoke and mirrors act about future employment that dazzles and confuses students (who really don't know which way is up or down -- they also don't understand that a lot of people get their jobs through family connections). If the school fails to provide sufficiently comprehensive statistics, they don't get federal funding. They can't just survey the 15% of their graduates whom they know landed good jobs. Every single student must be counted (and for some period after graduation -- maybe 3-5 years). If a student did not respond to this mandatory information collection, the school would need to detail (if it wants to accept federal funding) the efforts that were made to contact the student and any deficiency in reporting would have to be disclosed in job statistics. The job statistics would also have to be presented in a uniform, easy-to-read format that parents and prospective students could understand.
But yes, the "costs" are never discussed because it's not in the interest of these con artist colleges and universities that promise the world but only want tuition money backed by the government.
I also like what Australia does. I think students pay 10% of their income for up to 5 years after graduation, but they only pay the 10% after a certain income threshold is achieved. If a college's students aren't meeting the threshold and if tuition can't be paid off at a 10% rate over 5 years, the college is ripping its students off and should be shut down.
Of course, there is always the option to do something like Hillsdale where you don't except federal funding and you can do whatever you like. That's the best option but federal money is too easy to resist for most.
One of the things that truly pisses me off about the athletic departments, "make money" argument is their accounting practices. These major universities have billions of dollars worth of athletic facilities. That is an asset. What rate of return is the university getting for that asset?
In other words, if they have a billion dollars in facilities, it should be returning a market rate of 7%, or a 70 million dollar a year hole before they start. How many kids can be put through school on that annual 70 million. The local state school instate tuition is about 10 grand a year. That's 7,000 local kids tuition covered before the first ball is snapped, dribbled, knocked over a fence.
Excellent point. The education industry wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and professes to seek only the common good and betterment of its students. In all of modern history, this public perception of education's charitable purpose has protected the education industry from business accountability (really, social and political accountability as well).
The broadcast rights for top-tier athletics programs are also worth millions. Same with the athletic gear contracts (e.g., Nike paid the Ohio State $252 million to provide them gear).
If schools are raking in enough cash to pay Nick Saban $8.6 million to coach ~15 football games, why are out-of-state students forced to pay $30,000+ in tuition? It's really mindboggling and the injustice seems so clear.
Consider these numbers:
Penn President Amy Gutmann made $2,930,315 in 2017.
Georgia State President Mark Becker made $2,806,517 in 2019.
TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini Jr. made $2,644,209 in 2017.
USC President CL Max Nikias made $2,404, 232 in 2017.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger made $2,211,069 in 2017.
These education businesses would shut down immediately if the spigot of taxpayer funds was twisted off. Us regular folks have a huge chunk of our paychecks siphoned off for taxes and it pays for this garbage.
But anyone who questions this grifting operation is smeared as anti-education, anti-intellectual, anti-young person, anti-minority (even though there's good evidence that ludicrous tuition pricing disproportionately harms minorities), and so on. There needs to be accountability on the cost side of the education ledger.
All Democrats want to talk about is the funding side, NEVER the cost side. This goes for medicine as well as education.
There should only be one non teaching position for every 25 professors. That includes administration, janitorial, grounds maintenance, accounts payable / receivable, and every other position.
The number of bullshit departments and degrees should be wacked down to the basics.
The bullshit general "education" requirements should slashed. Nobody should be required to take Woke 101 to get a degree in engineering.
Why do they have so many empty fucking buildings? Increase classroom usage, flatten buildings, and lower your fixed costs.
No your athletics department doesn't "make money".
They don't have to do any of this because they can cry: "Invest in "education"", "it's for the children", and everyone lines up to throw money at the morons.
Democrats [Communists] don't believe in money. They think it all just magically appears when you stop stealing labor from the proletariat
YES! The cost side is never discussed and that's where the scam lies. You have extremist liberal professors teaching the most useless Marxist garbage pulling in $100-400k. It would be impossible to earn this salary anywhere else and it's only possible because of government-backed student loans. No bank would lend money to a kid to study useless trash unless they had the assurance from the government that the kid's student loans are guaranteed by the feds.
The federal government should also mandate that the financial accounts for athletics departments are kept 100% separate from educational institutions. Schools could affiliate with athletics programs but they would be separate legal entities with separate accounting books. Since schools claim athletics make money so this shouldn't be an issue. Look, I love sports but it's ridiculous that students are paying thousands of dollars in student loan funds to finance multi-million dollar salaries for head coaches. It's disgusting.
Schools shouldn't be allowed to mandate that freshman live on campus. This is just a moneymaking con job by colleges and universities. They mandate that freshman have to live in $2,000+/month dorms for the "learning" experience.
Dorm buildings should not have elite luxury amenities. Going to school shouldn't be a 4-year luxury cruise. It drives up the cost and the schools get into an arms race over amenities like luxury condo buildings. The feds should require as a condition of federal funding that luxury amenities be banned or reduced. Tuition should never be increased because the school builds a rock-climbing wall and a golf simulator in a dorm building.
Grounds maintenance is also ridiculous. Schools spend MILLIONS on flowers and hedge trimming. Government funds should pay for exactly zero of that. It's nice to have a well-appointed campus but it should never come at the expense of impoverishing your students and financially crippling their futures.
The feds should also mandate, as a condition of funding, that school provide granular and precise job statistics for graduates. So many schools engage in this smoke and mirrors act about future employment that dazzles and confuses students (who really don't know which way is up or down -- they also don't understand that a lot of people get their jobs through family connections). If the school fails to provide sufficiently comprehensive statistics, they don't get federal funding. They can't just survey the 15% of their graduates whom they know landed good jobs. Every single student must be counted (and for some period after graduation -- maybe 3-5 years). If a student did not respond to this mandatory information collection, the school would need to detail (if it wants to accept federal funding) the efforts that were made to contact the student and any deficiency in reporting would have to be disclosed in job statistics. The job statistics would also have to be presented in a uniform, easy-to-read format that parents and prospective students could understand.
But yes, the "costs" are never discussed because it's not in the interest of these con artist colleges and universities that promise the world but only want tuition money backed by the government.
I also like what Australia does. I think students pay 10% of their income for up to 5 years after graduation, but they only pay the 10% after a certain income threshold is achieved. If a college's students aren't meeting the threshold and if tuition can't be paid off at a 10% rate over 5 years, the college is ripping its students off and should be shut down.
Of course, there is always the option to do something like Hillsdale where you don't except federal funding and you can do whatever you like. That's the best option but federal money is too easy to resist for most.
One of the things that truly pisses me off about the athletic departments, "make money" argument is their accounting practices. These major universities have billions of dollars worth of athletic facilities. That is an asset. What rate of return is the university getting for that asset?
In other words, if they have a billion dollars in facilities, it should be returning a market rate of 7%, or a 70 million dollar a year hole before they start. How many kids can be put through school on that annual 70 million. The local state school instate tuition is about 10 grand a year. That's 7,000 local kids tuition covered before the first ball is snapped, dribbled, knocked over a fence.
Excellent point. The education industry wraps itself in a cloak of virtue and professes to seek only the common good and betterment of its students. In all of modern history, this public perception of education's charitable purpose has protected the education industry from business accountability (really, social and political accountability as well).
The broadcast rights for top-tier athletics programs are also worth millions. Same with the athletic gear contracts (e.g., Nike paid the Ohio State $252 million to provide them gear).
If schools are raking in enough cash to pay Nick Saban $8.6 million to coach ~15 football games, why are out-of-state students forced to pay $30,000+ in tuition? It's really mindboggling and the injustice seems so clear.
Consider these numbers:
Penn President Amy Gutmann made $2,930,315 in 2017.
Georgia State President Mark Becker made $2,806,517 in 2019.
TCU Chancellor Victor Boschini Jr. made $2,644,209 in 2017.
USC President CL Max Nikias made $2,404, 232 in 2017.
Columbia President Lee Bollinger made $2,211,069 in 2017.
These education businesses would shut down immediately if the spigot of taxpayer funds was twisted off. Us regular folks have a huge chunk of our paychecks siphoned off for taxes and it pays for this garbage.
But anyone who questions this grifting operation is smeared as anti-education, anti-intellectual, anti-young person, anti-minority (even though there's good evidence that ludicrous tuition pricing disproportionately harms minorities), and so on. There needs to be accountability on the cost side of the education ledger.