The current model of higher education based on debt is unsustainable.
Students often receive significant individual debt to attend a four-year college. This has led to the fact that the country has more outstanding student loans than credit card debt.
Where does the income from these trips occur? Not to your college professor! College teachers are faced with a reduction in the number of opportunities, since the positions they hold are replaced by auxiliary professors. Instead, the basic monetary costs are intended to finance a growing number of non-academic administrators. Another huge expense is the financing of large infrastructure projects.
While it is easy to point out the staggering salaries of these well-trained college administrators, we must take care to understand that this is just a symptom of a problem. After all, these administrators are absolutely looking for work that, like millions of others, are looking for the most attractive salary and benefits.
The real challenge is playing with classmates and universities playing against each other. Annual rankings of American universities are a familiar resource for any family with a child associated with college. Although many college administrators have signed these ratings, they nevertheless participate and participate in them. Many colleges seek to stimulate growth in the future, and for this to happen, more buildings must be built and more managers must be attracted to oversee these efforts.
These activities include both academic and sporting operations on campus. If the flagship university of the state system builds a medical school, for a second-level school there is nothing unusual in the same system to build your own medical school — all with the goal of “remaining competitive”. If a private university wants to build a satellite campus in China, a peer-to-peer educational institution will soon fail on a campus in South Korea.
Huge projects requiring large budgets, requiring more administrators to monitor them, have become the norm in college education. Colleges and universities are engaged in a zero-sum game, the goal of which is higher academic and sportsmanship. That's why college is so expensive.
The campus sports college has been clear for years. Despite the fact that supporters believe that they generate income, all too often the question of whether the college should even accept semi-professional programs is not taken into account. As Bill Friday, the former president of the University of North Carolina, once said: "We are trying to impose the entertainment industry on top of an academic structure, and it will not work, it never worked."
Blinded by these monumental endeavors, many high school graduates, naturally, suffer from them. As a result, their college choices are often stimulated by perceived prestige when attending a “higher level school” instead of a college that can better meet individual goals.
While the competitive spirit between universities unilaterally always disappears completely, sometimes the purpose of this competition can be redirected. Instead of focusing on “prestigious builders”, such as new facilities and high-octane sports teams, universities can take the opposite tact: to serve more students by providing cheaper higher education. Using distance education and other non-traditional teaching methods, the university can avoid many capital costs that fuel the need for higher incomes.
The age of huge expenses now leads to a decrease in returns. What offers unique value to the market is lower tuition fees. The time has come when universities break the cycle of taking on more debt to pay off past debts. The focus should be on the quality of education, not on the perception of prestige.
