after a carreer as a Prof. can anyone tell me (us) why college is so expensive? Why are the books allowed.....

Question

Text books change every 34 yo 35 months when the disciplines change very slowly. whem you add up the cost of profs. teaching assistants, facilities, etc..... Then figure in the grant money from

Answer 1

You don't write like someone who has spent a career as a Prof.. or you would know that the cost of textbooks has nothing to do with the colleges. So first on the textbooks, the audiences for most of them is pretty limited, so the publishing companies, which are, after all, for-profit enterprises, need to set high profit margins in order to pay for the cost of publishing these texts. These aren't Stephen King novels which can spread out the costs of publishing over millions of copies, after all. As to the frequent updates, I don't know if this is true across the board, but I generally find that my students give no credence to anything which was written more than a year or two ago (the same goes for films, cases, etc.). Of course, I am in a discipline which does change rapidly and, in fact, there is a question about whether, given the length of publication cycles, any book published can be current enough to be useful. I don't think that books in slower-paced disciplines DO change as quickly.

Then the cost of the education itself - it is a very labor-intensive enterprise, which is always more expensive. In addition, some areas are more expensive than others to fund - science labs and film schools come to mind. We are all paying for the demand for those disciplines, because it costs far less to offer a program in philosophy, for example. In some disciplines, the faculty are very expensive because with their training they could be doing something else (think accounting or law professors, who could otherwise be practicing accounting or law).

The facilities are expensive, but universities compete for students, and if they don't have the latest in fitness centers or classroom technology or the most popular dorm configurations, students aren't interested. Another big cost is for financial aid. Our budgets were slashed this year specifically to be able to offer competitive financial aid packages to students, so that we could get the kinds of students we are used to getting.

Grants generally pay for specific programs, mostly research agendas. Also, they aren't consistent. Schools can't count on getting the same grant annually, so usually the grant becomes either a one-time windfall or it serves as seed money for something which must be maintained from other sources later on. While most schools gave some grant money coming in, it is often a case of the rich getting richer while others get very little. Money attracts money. The top universities can afford to structure themselves to attract grants, which then give them more money to make themselves more attractive to granting agencies. Other schools have trouble breaking into that pack, so they get less, which makes it harder for them to compete.

Answer 2

Part of the reason college is so expensive, to be frank, is probably consicious or unconscious price fixing. Harvard charges $50,000 a year so Yale also charges about the same as does USC and NYU.

It's Obvious you can go to a California State University for under $5,000 a year which 1/10 the Ivy League amount. Sometimes you get as good, if not better education, but to be frank the Harvard or Yale diploma looks better on a wall than Cal State LA

The California University system charges about a 1/3 of what the Ivy Leages charge. It's up to around $15,000-$20,000 a year.

Now, part of the cost changes also includes Property Tax, which goes up and up and up. Acquistions of new land, which goes up and up and up. Buidling new buildings. Acquiring books for the libraries.

Salaries go up, generally 7% a year across the board from the Janitor to the Chancellor.

Aquiring talent, that's like getting a star for a movie and you may have to pay a huge bonus to get a major player in Music or Sports or Theater or Art or Chemistry to come teach at your University. Yes, they do buy away un-tenured Professors or people from the real world.

Cost of heating, electricity rises each year. REpairing equipment.

Buying NEW equipment. The Medical School or Teaching Hospital might want to buy an Upright MRI machine and that's going to cost big bucks. Yea they get grants to help and raise money from alumni, but the individual college may have to throw in some general funds.

The Music and Cinema and Computer departments need to upgrade some of thier gear yearly. Move up from Apple G-3 to G-5s so the students have the most current equipment to use.

Putting in 25 G-5 Macs is a pretty penny, even with the allowances provided by Apple.

The staff is huge, they have their own Police force, 24/7/365 janitorial. Since the libaries (plural) are open 7 - 11 7/360 they have to have a lot of full time librarians in all sections.

Then we have to get down to services provided. At USC Film School generally 100% of all services is provided by the school, including raw stock and processing. AT UCLA you have to handle your own incidentials. They just provide facilities. There are also probably no "lab" fees at Harvard or USC, while at the state University level every course may have a separate lab fee.

Finally there is the calibre of teaching talent you find at the "high ticket" schools.

Christopher Parkening was once the head of the Guitar Department at USC.

John Houseman was once the head of the theater department at Julliard.

Julliard has also hosted Segovia to their classrooms and he must cost a bundle!

If you want to be a chemist you go to a Grad school where Linus Paulling is teaching and doing research.

He's not going to be found teaching at SUNY Cortland, he's going to be at least at Cornell or NYU or Harvard.

The University of Chicago is renouned for making good doctors, possibly MORE so than Harvard or USC.

I'll bet their Medical school ain't cheap!

Answer 3

I wrote this in another inquiry and felt it would be great to add this one here.

Unfortunately college education is in it's own realm when it comes to its pricing. Supply and demand hardly affect the price per semester, it's the pork-barrel projects that colleges indulge themselves in that raise prices, far above whatever inflation usually designates all other prices in the USA to rise.

I'll give you an example at my own school. At TxState there was a recent project (about two years ago) that replaced all toilets in the University with motion-detector toilets. There was no need for it, the toilets before were perfectly working fine. But now all the hundreds of toilets were replaced with these $1,000 or so toilets. That's literally hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on this project for the toilet seats alone, not to mention the money spent on contracting these jobs out. Because of this, along with other special projects the school goes into, the fees go up for students in order to compensate for them.

Why would any school like to indulge in these projects if they know that it'll inevitably increase tuition and fees? Because like any beauricratic organization, if a certain department's budget goes down one year, then by the next year the school will come to the conclusion that said department will only need that same amount of money again next year. So a department essentially makes more money by doing projects that force it to ask for more money. That money is then granted and the costs are passed onto the state (homeowners taxes) and the students (tuition and fees). Great system huh.

The same applies for liberal arts department and science department professors and so on that ask grants for research, projects, and so on. The more they ask for this year, the same amount they'll receive next year because of it.

I saw this in a very fascinating special one time on Fox news about why college costs are going so much.

I too also believe that it's a lot like someone mentioned about gasoline. The prices on colleges are placed to what the market can just about bear so as to reap in the maximum profit without bringing in government actions against it. Colleges have the great advantage where the driving workforce (at least in most places) have placed a degree as a must have item in order to even be considered. With an economic factor like that, where one side is forcing attendance into colleges, colleges can practically charge whatever the market can barely bear without worrying about a decline in the number of students since colleges know the students need these degrees.

Also if the market has also deemed a college a certain prestigous status (such as "X" employers loving students that have graduated from "Y" university) then said university can also charge higher tuition because of this prestigous and intangible status.

Answer 4

You would be the best one to answer that question, being that you were involved in that profession.

My own opinion is that, like gasoline, the price is based on what the traffic will bear. I have never heard of any reports giving the profit margin and who is getting that profit. It all seems to be hush hush.

You have the opportunity to become very famous as a "whistle blower". The news media needs something else to talk about besides the war and politics.

Edit: Stop the bull crap and reveal the truth! Who is getting all of the left over cash? Any fool can justify his costs, but the proof is in the pudding. They are pricegouging!

Answer 5

I paid $35 for my college chemistry textbook in 1982. The price for a college chemistry textbook now is about $140. Over 25 years, that's a rate of inflation of about 5%. It doesn't really seem that bad to me. What I think has changed is that students today are much less willing to anticipate this extra educational expense and save for it diligently.