The number of administrators has doubled at my university while the number of faculty is up about 20% in the last 15 years. I do worry about conservative engineering professors getting rich off of government grants. That was almost my path ... before I read AS.

The explosion of non teaching staff is at every level, not just at the college level.

Fighting over that in my town all the time.

We have one school employee for approximately every 3 students. It is ridiculous.

One item not covered in this entire blog so far regarding students loans and the federal government is that now that Obama has outlawed private institutions from making student loans, he has made it impossible for many students and parents who would like to bypass Sallie Mae (i.e. the government) to do so. Moreover, this has given the government considerable control over a private university like mine. I am outraged at this development.

I agree completely. Add in the state subsidization for state universities and community colleges, and the value of many college degrees has been cheapened. Fortunately that's not the case at my university.

As far as I am concerned the government should not be part of it at all.

The easier they make it for people to get a degree, the less the degree is actually worth outside of school.

Do you really think half the degrees being offered currently would exist if school was a true buyers market?

A large chunk of the degree catalogs are worthless for a real world job.

Bank of America (and others) were passing out student loans like candy before the government stepped in. We were heading for another market crash on defaulting student loans. *shrugs*

I have a question and a couple of comments...

Doesn't the price of the school allay some of the loan risk? If Stanford is $50K/year and Alcorn St. is $10K, Alcorn can have a higher default rate and still not pose the same risk per loan? There just doesn't seem to be proper quantification in that article.

Under any circumstances, government interference in the marketplace is:
(a) Subsidizing pricing, which is (b) allowing schools that would fail financially to remain open, which are (c) keeping liberal professors employed and (d) causing them to be overpaid due to false competition for their services.

Gotta follow that bouncing ball. I'm sure there are many more bounces in this string...

This has been hashed over many times within the academic communities, of course. For one thing, surprising as it is, FINE ARTS majors with advanced degrees find work, because of their internships that bring them to the attention of museums and galleries.

For another, the student loan is for LIFE: you cannot get out from under it with bankruptcy protection. However, they cannot take back your degree, either. If you stop paying, they harrass you like any other collectors, but there is not much they can do.

As for paying it back, the fees come to something like $300 to $500 a month, about like a car payment or car payment plus insurance. If you actually have the job they promised, it would not be a problem. But the line "get a good education to get a good job" was a come-on. There were no jobs... and still are none...

Moreover, such jobs as do exist demand a four-year degree just to apply. After 20 years as a technical writer, I could not even respond to ads because I did not have a degree. So I went and got one. And a master's. I think that moving to Austin from Ann Arbor did me more good, but having the degrees removes one barrier. Again, if the major employers had not set this as a standard, it would not have become a norm.

Just to say, I am seldom an "employee" and usually a contractor. But every hiring manager with a project needs to check off the box for "degree." Experience is just something else to bring to the table. And - my biggest complaint - they have no way to measure quality. I do. I have delivered talks at programming user groups on documentation. I can prove that my work is readable. But the hiring managers have no little box for that.

This applies across other disciplines, of course. The problem is deeply cultural.

In both the old _Whole Earth Catalog_ and the Delorean autobiography, _On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors_, the point was made that a hiring foreman needing a machine operator or machinery maker would ask to see the worker's toolbox. He wanted to see the tools that they worker MADE for himself. That said it all. We have modern equivalents and they do work that way in some areas, software being the primary.

But if you want to work as an office clerical, showing your clever spreadsheet will only scare the manager: no one today wants to hire someone smarter than them. Of course, in _Atlas Shrugged_ that would be the ticket to the job...

I've covered this topic before on my blog:

Popping of the Student Bubble: http://dannesrepossessions.wordpress.com... Long story short, you can't slowly deflate the bubble. It NEEDS to be popped hard.

If college isn't as important, that means High School needs to be: http://dannesrepossessions.wordpress.com...


And lastly, disproving the liberal lala fantasy myth that Education makes the world a better place: http://dannesrepossessions.wordpress.com...

Student loans are so all-encompassing, that they no longer pay merely tuition. I knew one girl who also got gas money - when it ran out, going on trips, she stopped attending school. With no degree, why pay.
We paid cash for our daughter's 4 years at a pricey university. When she showed no ambition, but wanted to stay on the gravy train for a Masters, we told her it was on her. She got a student loan, proving living expenses, tuition, books, whatever she wanted, running up the tab. She bought furniture, a gun for her husband, new laptops for both of them, and on and on. Then, she could not understand why she owed so much. Meanwhile, her husband did the same thing. We refused to bail them out, and we have no idea where they stand with the loans. It is on the backs of the financial institution and the government, for making these students feel there is a free lunch, and they are entitled. Parents have no control after a point, and can only stand back in disgust.
Loans used to be for tuition, maybe books. That left a level of responsibility on the student. Now, it high living and party time, with some academics, all financed.
When my brothers and I were ready for college, dad paid for tech school, with the suggestion we save for the four year college tuition. We each paid our own way to universities, no loans, on money we saved working at jobs from the tech degrees. Good experience, a taste of the real world.

Then we missed each other. As I did my BS in Lakeland and finished that in 04 then started taking classes in Tampa.

I took classes part-time from '01-'03. Spring of '04 I was there full-time. I moved back to Madison, WI and finished my last two classes remotely.

Why should our youth, our children, our students, or anyone else be financially responsible, our government isn't?

I went to USF as well. Got my MS in MIS from there in 07. When were you there?

This is the real issue that has then necessitated the need for even more easy money for student loans. The ability to acquire money for school thru student loans has led to vast increase in the number of students who try to go to college. This has led schools to build more, hire more, and try to bring more students in. To build all the new buildings, pay all the new administrators and teachers and so on, the school charges more. Then the next cycle begins, with an even greater percentage of the students needing even more money in loans, to pay a higher price for the same product. The extreme ease of government backed student loan money has fueled the inflationary spiral that is higher education cost. How do you stop it? Cut down or reduce the amount students can borrow. My kids are either doing 2 year degrees to start, or doing community college first and all are working to pay all they can with cash. Only 1 is going to a 4 yr college from the start and that's because she got a 34 on the ACT and is getting a lot of scholarship money and some grant money. We have a decent middle class income but our share of debt and with 5 kids we told them from the start we couldn't pay. They know debt is bad and are doing their best not to have any. But alas, this is not the norm.

Yes, and to make things worse a lot of these "colleges" are set up just to collect student loans. Devry, Bryman, et al cost $10K+ per year for about the same thing you'd get at a community college. It's outrageous.

That makes sense. Schools are now spending more resources on finding new revenue streams (via administrators) than they are on the revenue stream that comes from producing a finished product: a graduate.
Not surprised by the split between sociologists and engineers, but there must be a lot more of the lefties, because every poll I've seen about college professors and their politics are overwhelmingly Democrat biased.

The worst thing about student loans is that they buy an inferior product.

My wife made a mi-life career change and became an attorney. It was all financed via student loans. She pays a little or $400 a month, and because she is in a public sector job the balance of her loans will be forgiven when she has worked there for 10 years (5 to go). After she graduated she strongly encouraged me to go to law school as well. I did, but my payments for student loans for a standard payback are $1285 a month. What was the difference? Her student loans were pre-2007 and were all with private lenders which enabled her to consolidate all loans to a lower rate when she graduated. Mine are all federal and fixed by statute at 6.8%. I have no option to refi them at a lower rate as she did.

The money is not going to liberal professors who are overpaid. The influx in federal funding caused an explosion in ADMINISTRATORS. These facts have been the subject of many articles for over ten years for instance in _The Journal of Higher Education_. Those liberal professors would like to see more money, for sure, but they don't. Also, more to the point, while education is politicized and I have studies to show it, those divisions are along academic disciplines. Sociology is to the left; engineering is to the right. You cannot be surprised. Do you worry about conservative engineering professors getting rich off government grants?

If they were pricing risk intelligently, they might look into the borrower's health, grades, etc.

It mentions South Florida as having high defaults. My masters is from the U of South Florida. I paid for it by working at an electronics company with a tuition reimbursement program and by teaching an analog electronics lab. I never borrowed any money.

In electronics engineering, even for undergrad, you can usually get someone else to pay for tuition. There's no need to borrow money.

Student loans are still handed out like candy. All they are doing with government involvement is letting the bubble get bigger. There is an opportunity to "deflate" it slowly, but that needs more time, control, and ability than the agencies have.