View Single Post
Old 09-13-2009, 03:48 PM   #36
Wheegiabe

Join Date
Oct 2005
Posts
411
Senior Member
Default
source? citation? Or are we supposed to take this on faith, like everything else you post?
I heard the quote on KYW, but what I heard was addressing the argument that a public option would put private insurance out of business. He said that the existence of Penn State (a public option) didn't put University of Pennsylvania (a private option) out of business. I thought it was a good point.

I'm not entirely sure what forces are causing education prices to skyrocket -- they aren't driven by stockholders to increase profits, as insurance companies are -- but I'm truly appalled by it. I know that when I was in my senior year of college, the administration was in discussions about what do about the decreasing population over the next 20 years: lower their academic standards so they would have a larger pool of students to draw from, or decrease the class size with a corresponding increase in tuition. They called it the Strategic Long-Range Plan. The school newspaper disparagingly called it SLuRP. Of course, now that the baby boomers' kids are college-aged, the smaller college-aged population isn't a problem any more.

Some of the costs seem to be driven by competition among colleges to create the best country-club-style atmosphere, because that's what the incoming students want and they won't go to your college if you can't provide it. No self-respecting Millenial would go to a college where two students shared an 8x8 dorm room with bunk beds, painted cinderblock walls, two-foot wide closets, and tables and drawers attached to the walls (no matter how good the handles were for opening beer bottles). That's what I had when I was a freshman at a small private college in 1982, and I was just glad to be away from home. Millenials wouldn't even tolerate the height of luxury in my day: a suite shared by four people, with four 4x8 individual rooms and a shared 8x10 common room. But today's more luxurious accommodations are expensive.

The technology costs are also driving it, because today's classrooms and facilities have to be very high-tech to appeal to the discriminating Millenial, and technology, aside from being expensive to begin with, tends to be obsolete within 2-4 years and expensive new purchases have to be made.

I suspect that you don't hear as much about education costs because they mostly affect only people with children between 15 and 25 (and to a lesser extent, those children), while healthcare costs affect a much broader segment of the population.
Wheegiabe is offline


 

All times are GMT +1. The time now is 10:08 AM.
Copyright ©2000 - 2012, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Design & Developed by Amodity.com
Copyright© Amodity