Lately I’ve been accused of hating on Columbia University, but I still feel like its biggest fan. Having spent the bulk of my career there, eleven years across four schools, I got a panoramic view of the academic-industrial complex I couldn’t have found anywhere else. If I’m critical of the place it’s because I’ve chronicled its proud history and am in unique position to see how profoundly it’s falling short.
I decided to estimate how much tuition has gone up at my school since 1977 when I matriculated. Using the unskilled wage index as deflator, in 2023 dollars, tuition for the 2023-24 year is $8455 per year, compared to $3890 in 1977. Thus, for a student trying to pay their way, college costs about 2.2 times what it did back then.
If I do the adjustment using per capita GDP as deflator the cost in 1977 was $6470, 23% less than today. This is the deflator one would use for high-income individuals, elite professionals, managers and administrators. Such people's incomes tend to rise with per capita GDP, as all wages did before 1980's but now mostly only those in the top decile. So even for affluent families, college is modestly more expensive today than it was then. It is only for those at the top that college is cheaper (relative to their income) today than it was back then.
This is among the huge issues of student loan "forgiveness." There are certainly a lot of students who got talked into going into debt for vaporware programs unlikely to help them ever pay that back, and I'm not unsympathetic to their plight. But just straight up socializing the costs, i.e. throwing taxpayer money at predatory higher education institutions without demanding reform on that end will only make costs balloon further for more worthless degrees. Truly indefensible policy.
Your disillusionment with the Ivy League is very well written. Personally, I feel a strong sense of betrayal from the left by the Ivy League, in particular by their hoarding of status. By making entrance a zero sum blood sport, they have destroyed the youth of a generation. By driving up tuition cost to close to 100K per year, they make it impossible to consider any career beyond finance, law or medicine.
Who will discover the next deep scientific insights? Who will develop the next technology? Who will write the next great novel?
The people who get in are deeply unused to failure. By the time they finish, they are too seduced by rhetoric crazy money.
Thank you! I saw many talented people default to finance or law who might have made a greater impact in fields they were more interested in. But then again, the insane meat grinder of elite college admissions often selects more for eager grinds than applicants with more genuine intellectual curiosity, for a lot of students checking a long series of boxes is just their automatic life course.
If there's a silver lining to any of this it's that getting into "name" schools has gotten so arbitrary and unlikely that the pool of schools with prestige and elite credibility has been expanding quite a bit -- the Ivys plus Stanford et al enjoy less cultural/status hegemony today than 10 or 20 years ago. It's hard to imagine those sorts of places not remaining famous and where a lot of parents would love to send their kids, but in a sense they've been making themselves less and less relevant.
I think it’s a great idea for corporations and grad schools to look far beyond the cradle of elite schools. I worry that many other universities consciously model themselves after rhetoric Ivy League, and his in turn means that the students who come there are interchangeable with Ivy League students, with the same risk aversion.
Whenever I interact with people who are knowledgeable about higher education, I ask the same question: how would you bring down costs? This is a big ask, so maybe it ought to be its own post.
This is interesting, but it'd be a lot more interesting if you were more specific about what's wrong and specific measures to improve things. It may be obvious to you but to your readers it isn't.
Thanks for reading! This post followed up on some others from beforehand delving more specifically into what's gone wrong across different sectors of academia and the broader cultural of managerial elites. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, and the best course of action for a concerned alum will vary based on the school, its track record and their personal leverage: if you're a fairly high dollar donor with knowledge of specific pressure points at your alma mater, you're going to get a lot more attention than a misc. alum who might reliably have put 50 bucks in the annual fund each year. The important thing is cutting off the spigot of giving for programs that one determines is problematic, politely explaining to them why, and holding out the prospect of giving again if they can get their act together. Alternately, alums might redirect their giving exclusively to rock solid programs they're particularly confident in rather than to the more flexible general funds institutions prefer.
Thanks! I bet your readers would really relate well to specific stories of specific events that happened with colleagues from your own experiences and those of others you know about, that gave you insight into the existence and nature of the problems.
I decided to estimate how much tuition has gone up at my school since 1977 when I matriculated. Using the unskilled wage index as deflator, in 2023 dollars, tuition for the 2023-24 year is $8455 per year, compared to $3890 in 1977. Thus, for a student trying to pay their way, college costs about 2.2 times what it did back then.
If I do the adjustment using per capita GDP as deflator the cost in 1977 was $6470, 23% less than today. This is the deflator one would use for high-income individuals, elite professionals, managers and administrators. Such people's incomes tend to rise with per capita GDP, as all wages did before 1980's but now mostly only those in the top decile. So even for affluent families, college is modestly more expensive today than it was then. It is only for those at the top that college is cheaper (relative to their income) today than it was back then.
This is among the huge issues of student loan "forgiveness." There are certainly a lot of students who got talked into going into debt for vaporware programs unlikely to help them ever pay that back, and I'm not unsympathetic to their plight. But just straight up socializing the costs, i.e. throwing taxpayer money at predatory higher education institutions without demanding reform on that end will only make costs balloon further for more worthless degrees. Truly indefensible policy.
Your disillusionment with the Ivy League is very well written. Personally, I feel a strong sense of betrayal from the left by the Ivy League, in particular by their hoarding of status. By making entrance a zero sum blood sport, they have destroyed the youth of a generation. By driving up tuition cost to close to 100K per year, they make it impossible to consider any career beyond finance, law or medicine.
Who will discover the next deep scientific insights? Who will develop the next technology? Who will write the next great novel?
The people who get in are deeply unused to failure. By the time they finish, they are too seduced by rhetoric crazy money.
Thank you! I saw many talented people default to finance or law who might have made a greater impact in fields they were more interested in. But then again, the insane meat grinder of elite college admissions often selects more for eager grinds than applicants with more genuine intellectual curiosity, for a lot of students checking a long series of boxes is just their automatic life course.
If there's a silver lining to any of this it's that getting into "name" schools has gotten so arbitrary and unlikely that the pool of schools with prestige and elite credibility has been expanding quite a bit -- the Ivys plus Stanford et al enjoy less cultural/status hegemony today than 10 or 20 years ago. It's hard to imagine those sorts of places not remaining famous and where a lot of parents would love to send their kids, but in a sense they've been making themselves less and less relevant.
I think it’s a great idea for corporations and grad schools to look far beyond the cradle of elite schools. I worry that many other universities consciously model themselves after rhetoric Ivy League, and his in turn means that the students who come there are interchangeable with Ivy League students, with the same risk aversion.
Whenever I interact with people who are knowledgeable about higher education, I ask the same question: how would you bring down costs? This is a big ask, so maybe it ought to be its own post.
This is interesting, but it'd be a lot more interesting if you were more specific about what's wrong and specific measures to improve things. It may be obvious to you but to your readers it isn't.
Thanks for reading! This post followed up on some others from beforehand delving more specifically into what's gone wrong across different sectors of academia and the broader cultural of managerial elites. There's no one-size-fits-all solution, and the best course of action for a concerned alum will vary based on the school, its track record and their personal leverage: if you're a fairly high dollar donor with knowledge of specific pressure points at your alma mater, you're going to get a lot more attention than a misc. alum who might reliably have put 50 bucks in the annual fund each year. The important thing is cutting off the spigot of giving for programs that one determines is problematic, politely explaining to them why, and holding out the prospect of giving again if they can get their act together. Alternately, alums might redirect their giving exclusively to rock solid programs they're particularly confident in rather than to the more flexible general funds institutions prefer.
Thanks! I bet your readers would really relate well to specific stories of specific events that happened with colleagues from your own experiences and those of others you know about, that gave you insight into the existence and nature of the problems.