This is the subject of my latest Bloomberg column, here is an excerpt:
There are a lot of numbers, but here’s a comparison I find most striking: Adjusting for grants, instead of taking sticker prices at face value, the inflation-adjusted tuition cost for an in-state freshman at a four-year public university is $2,480 this school year. That’s a 40% drop from ten years ago…
As expected, the trend in student debt is also low. About half of the students who graduated last year had no student debt. In 2013, only 40% did. That famous saying from economics – if something can’t go on forever, it will stop – is absolutely true. Due to formula changes, Pell Grants are higher, helping to limit both student debt and college costs.
Is the quality going down? Maybe a little, but with a caveat:
,,,various fixes come in to limit the scope of potential damage. Rather than cutting classes in computer science, a university might decide (as mine did) to drop the football team. Or the school may rely less on full-time professors and more on adjuncts. That’s often bad, but schools can and do fix it, for example by paying their extras and putting more effort into finding and keeping good ones. A school may also drop courses that attract fewer students and place more emphasis on subject areas with higher enrollments.
Admittedly, none of this is good. But such adjustments can keep serious damage to a manageable level. Many schools also release their own DEI offices.
And students will make their own corrections. If their classrooms give them less than what they want, they can turn more to the Internet — to online education or, these days, AI. To argue that the big language model is wrong as a professor is to miss the point. These new methods should only cause some deterioration in quality.
With apologies to Peter Thiel, I believe that US higher education is going to be a mess.
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