The Business of Education

We interrupt our usual Peru based programming for this special angry message.

In high school, we were told "to dress appropriately for the business of education." It wasn't until a few years after I graduated that I really examined that statement. "The business of educaiton." This was the view of Boston Latin School, one of the most prestigious college prep schools in the country. Education, in this framework, isn't primarily a right, or work, or a duty. It's a business. And businesses are not primarily about goods or services, they're about making money. Reading the Boston Globe last week,* that idea is more obvious than ever.


Anyone who knows me knows that my four years of college were at best a period of frustration, and at worst a period of drowning desperation. There's a lot of reasons I don't like the "higher" education system we have in our country. One of the biggest reasons for this is price. The price of college is out of control. No. I mispoke. The price of college is completely under control, it's under the control of a bloated bureacracy more interested in attracting money than educating.

Behind the curtain of the administration
All of the Globe's articles are worth a read, but I want to highlight this quote from Peter Mandel's piece How Did Colleges Become Country Clubs?

Among the things I remember from my years as an administrator at Bryant University in Rhode Island is this: We administrators did not come cheap. And since we ran the place, we tended to bring more and more of our kind on board. We made sure we could find funding for our centers and special interests. We dreamed of a law school. We strategized about adding a football team and a stadium to go with it. (To be fair, a 2013study found that less-elite schools attract more applicants through added amenities.)

Since I wrote speeches there, I knew the party line on cost. Rising tuition was because of “faculty pay.” I used to smirk when I drafted that line.

Setting tuition, for us, and for our peers, was not just about covering costs. It was, at least in part, about perception. If we came out lower than comparable colleges, we would, we thought, slip behind them in the minds of parents, counselors, and applicants. Somehow, we feared, we would lose “prestige.”

It is this idea, that more equals better — that more amenities, more administrators, and a higher price tag in some way indicate quality — that lies at the secret heart of stratospheric tuition and student debt. Not professor pay. (emphasis added)

Some visuals for the unconvinced
If you're not enraged by the explosion of cost for a college education, you're not paying attention. Remedy that now. Pay attention to these graphs:

The cost of attending college has gone up over 1200%* since 1978. Bloomberg Business

We talk about how Healthcare costs are out of control. College costs have increased at a rate almost double that of Healthcare costs in the last decade alone. US News and World Report

College Tuition as a percentage of median income from 1986 to 2012. Huffington Post
Note: For some reason the x-axis is labeled with times of day. If you hover your mouse over the data points you will be given the accurate years.

It's important to remember that this chart is only showing tuition rates. There are mandatory beyond tuition costs associated with going to college. For example, here are the costs associated with one semester of my Brandeis education.

The meal plan was mandatory based on my housing. I tried to appeal this requirement based on the fact there was a kitchen down the hall from my room and I knew how to cook, but the bureaucracy gave me the run around and politely told me it didn't really give a damn. The housing itself was not mandatory (except in my first year). The Student Activity and the Undergraduate Mandatory Fee were non-negotiable.

Conclusion
The business of higher education is designed to take the money of families, donors, and government loans in order to fill the pockets of bloated administrations. Anyone who says differently is kidding themselves.

*For those interested, here are links to all four articles:

• What is it like to be poor at an Ivy League School?
  Hint: even when your education is paid for, it's hard to mix in with your affluent peers. 
• How did colleges become country clubs?
• Rejections from Harvard climb to a record high
  One wonders why a school as globally known as Harvard would spend any money advertising itself. Is that really a good use of its resources? Or really any school that, like Brandeis, rejects over half the applicants,
• College costs top inflation, even with financial aid

PS - I apologize for typos and for going on. It's hard to write cleanly through the anger. The wound, while healing is still fresh, and it was very deep.

*I know 200% is doubled, and 300% is tripled. What's the word for 1200%?