Education: How to Make College Cheaper

So it took a few days to do the research on this, but I finally figured out why college is, on average, so expensive and what can be done about it. It is actually pretty easy, and the logic behind it points out one of the major failures of modern liberal ideology. Yes! Two birds, one stone.

Want to make higher education more affordable to the masses? End FAFSA, and rework accreditation standards. Though this may seem counter-intuitive, the economics of it is totally sound.

Imagine you own a business making widgets and whosits, and you want to make those widgets more affordable so more people can buy them and you make more money. How do you do it? You invest in greater efficiencies, economies of scale, and focus on driving down costs of production. Pretty easy, really. Now imagine you have some friends in the government instead of a decent brain. The answer then would be to lobby your buddies to subsidies widget production so more people can afford them. This drives the cost down too, right?

Wrong. The net effect is that costs and prices are now out of line. For you to sell a widget at a straight, non-susidized $30 you could make, say, $10. Now, though, imagine the government gives you $10 a widget. What do you charge? Most liberals would say $20, but those ones are not in charge of businesses, and for good reason. You would, of course, sell widgets for $30 and pocket the subsidy. Now that works until you decide to really push on your whosit production, which is more expensive, but gives your company greater prestige and justifies everyone's salaries. Easiest way to pump more money into that is to go back to the government and tell them that the cost of widgets is going up and they need to pay more in subsidies to cover it.

Then you take the subsidies and profits and split them down the middle into widgets and whosits, and your company becomes even more prestigious for whozits, so you can justify charging more for your widgets and giving yourself and your execs a bigger pay package...Then the cycle begins again.

Welcome to the wonderful world of Universities, where widgets are graduates and whosits are research. You take the subsidy out of the equation and costs have to come into line or widgets will just go to the colleges where whosits are not produced.

But, you may say, even non-research institutions are more expensive every year! And you would be correct. The reason: accreditation agencies. These places actually never take into account the quality of what is produced, just what goes into the machine. So a college that gives laptops to it's students with the entire Library of Congress on the hard drive to research from would not get an accreditation because it doesn't have enough books or libraries. Seriously. Essentially, they are saying you have to have no choice on the outlay for a massive library, all the books therein, and all the upkeep costs, so that your students can have less access to information at a higher cost. I am not kidding or exaggerating in the least.

And the reason they do this is simple: they are too lazy to look at the outcomes, which is difficult, so instead just look at the bells and whistles. Take a look at What happened to the University of Colorado Law School. 92% of their graduates could pass the Bar Exam on the first try, a higher proportion that either Harvard or Yale. But due to the fact they couldn't afford a new, larger library, the American Bar Association (the ones in charge of law school accreditation) threatened to revoke the school's accreditation. So in order to comply with a completely arbitrary wish, one with (obviously, based on Bar Exam pass rates) no bearing on quality of education. They spent over $40 million on a new library, then had to jack up yearly tuition from $6700 to $16,738 a year, and a whopping $30,814 for out of state students. This effectively priced out on of the best schools for under-privileged law students. Guess their dreams don't matter as much as the building does.

You want to know the average amount of time teaching students by a professor at an average university? 12 hours. The rest is filled in by graduate students so the lofty professors can do research and make their tee times. This means that prestigious institutions such as Harvard and Yale can charge exorbitant tuition rates to keep tenured profs on staff while they professors never actually see their students.

Remember that the next time a State University comes around for money and somehow says that tuition rates are to blame for them needing more money. The two are entirely disconnected. When a College President says that tuition doesn't cover the cost of educating a student, don't think for a second they are somehow noble or magnanimous, they are not. It's like Carl Pohlad saying that ticket prices don't cover the cost of the Twins (a nod to Tom Sowell), so he is being noble somehow. The majority of money comes to these places through outside channels such as research grants and contracts, the students are really just how they pay themselves more for just a few hours of work. Icing on the cake, as it were.

So when you hear about budgets coming up and Universities and Colleges start whining about how bad off they are, remember that it is all smoke and mirrors, and that the ones who are to blame for the skyrocketing costs are the same ones with their hands out.