At the outset, I feel extremely lucky that a major and reputed academic institution employs me. I also am really happy that my institution ranks among the top in the nation for the percentage of students who are Pell grant recipients. But this post is about cost of 4-year college in general and how my industry (which it is after all) needs to get better at making education more affordable and not offer a one-size fits all solution.
We all know the price of groceries and gasoline but how many of us know what we pay for say an X-ray or what we pay for a lecture in a college (let alone what is the true cost of each before insane markups both health care and our noble universities apply)? There are a lot of things we dont know the price of and that is ok and it doesn't mean we are irrational or flying entirely blind. There are good reasons why price of groceries and gasoline are prominently displayed voluntarily but not at the same granularity and transparency when it comes to healthcare or college lecture. For one the "university industry" sells you something that one cannot buy piece-meal (we used to be outraged that Microsoft shoved us a bundle of bad products along with their OS but which pales in comparison to how Apple extorts you today). It is like subscribing to a 4 year health plan at the end of the which you can see how you look in the mirror and there is no guarantee you will be any slimmer let alone healthier. But I want to just discuss the price students pay for a lecture in typical public undergraduate university in US. I wanted to know what my students are paying to learn from me.
At UCLA In-state tuition is $14,500 per year. Students need 180 units spread over 4 years, which is 45 units per year or a cost of $320 per unit. Each unit is 10 hours of instruction which implies a tuition cost of $32 per hour. You pay the same if you sit in class of 400, 100 or 10 students which seems unfair. Clearly, in a class of 10 you get much more focussed and more personal attention from instructor yet you pay the same. Even in a cinema or concert hall you dont pay the same price (even before dynamic pricing, which makes sense but I hate as a consumer came about) then why do we make students pay the same. I am confident I offer $32 per hour worth of benefits one on one with a student, in fact even 5 students at a time and if I push it to 10. But do I provide $32 per hour per student when the student is in a class of 50 may be not, 100 and above, surely not.
So why should 100% of all students in a university be forced to spend 4 years and pay the same tuition in total irrespective of what degree they earn and what broad type of returns they can expect to derive? What percent of degrees really need 4 years of education? Also given that the class size diminishes drastically from Year 1 to Year 4, should the tuition in early years not reflect the lower cost and quality (not in the sense bad quality but lower teacher-student ratio and less advanced topics). Start cheap in the 1st year and make the student take most credits and progressive increase cost per credit hour and require fewer credit hours. Also let people get a certificate of completion that can be used for employment and offer a proper Bachelors degree in 3 years with 80% the units of 4 year degree. I actually feel students can do 100% of the units in 3 years if they worked harder and partied less or took some summer classes. This is how it is many other countries including India, if people with 3 year degrees and good programming knowledge can take jobs away from Americans, lets empower American students to do those same jobs in America. If they have to spend less on education debt, they can also afford less paying jobs and bring more jobs to America.
So how is this is not exploitation of our students by the industry called 4-year college? And I am not even talking what our big universities might be doing to the reputation of institutions like community colleges when we treat people from those places as less talented or qualified. Yet the option of reducing time spent getting a degree never seems to get brought up or discussed in discussions on how college education needed to change. Academics speak a lot about innovation, inequities in society and are paid to be critical of old ideas and developing new ones but how much do they really question the inefficiencies and non-competitive nature of their own enterprise because that means changing how they operate which no one wants.
I will in a later post discuss tuition revenue per hour as compared to faculty salary per hour. You can guess or estimate what share is the latter of the former!
By the way, the cost of tuition quadruples in private universities and if wealthy folks choose to voluntarily spend more that doesn't bother me one bit.
No comments:
Post a Comment