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Bbefore the automobilePrior to the Statue of Liberty, before the vast majority of contemporary colleges, the rising cost of higher education shocked the American conscience: "Men must pay their sons in one year more than they do." spent in four years. their course ", the New York Times lamented in 1875.
Decadence was to blame, according to the author: student flats, expensive meals and "athletic sports mania".
Today, the United States spends more on university than almost any other country, according to the 2018 report on education in sight, released this week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). ).
In total, including contributions from individual families and the government (in the form of student loans, grants and other supports), Americans spend about $ 30,000 per student per year, almost twice as much as developed countries. "The United States is a class of its own," says Andreas Schleicher, director of education and skills at the OECD, which he does not want to say as a compliment. "Expenditures per student are exorbitant and have virtually no connection with the value that students might possibly have in exchange."
Only one country spends more per student and this country is Luxembourg – where tuition fees are nonetheless free for students. In fact, one-third of developed countries offer free college to their citizens. (And another third keeps tuition fees very low – less than $ 2,400 a year). Finland makes the college free even for foreign students from other countries of the European Union. The further you get from the United States, the more confusing it is.
Back to school, L & # 39; Atlantic is studying a classic American mystery: why does college cost so much? And is it worth it?
At first, as The author of long ago 19th century, I wanted to blame the curd indulgences of campus life: fancy dormitories, climbing walls, lazy rivers, dining rooms with open fire grills. And above all, university sports. Certainly, sport deserves reproach.
At first glance, new international data support this story. The United States ranks first in the world for student welfare services such as housing, meals, health care and transportation, a category of expenditures that the OECD associates in the form of ancillary services ". $ 3,370 on these services per student – more than three times the average for developed countries.
One of the reasons for this difference is that American students are far more likely to live far from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a slow river. Experts say campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dorms and dining rooms than campuses in the United States. "All of the services offered by an American university and a French university are very different," says David Feldman, an educational economist at William & Mary's College in Williamsburg, Virginia. "Reasonable people may wonder if American universities should have this type of service, but the fact that we do it does not mean that US universities are inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.
But if you take a closer look, the data suggests a bigger problem than luxury rooms and meals. Even if we had to zero all these ancillary services tomorrow, the United States would spend even more per student than any other country (except, again, Luxembourg). It turns out that the vast majority of American college expenses are spent on routine educational activities – such as the payment of staff and faculty – and not on canteens. These costs amount to about $ 23,000 per student per year, more than double what Finland, Sweden or Germany spend on basic services. "The lazy rivers are decadent and useless, but they are not in themselves the main culprit," says Kevin Carey, author of The end of college and the director of the New America Education Policy Program, a non-partisan think-tank.
Feldman and his colleague Robert Archibald, in their 2011 book, say that providing education costs so much that the university is different from the other things people buy. Why is the cost of college so high? The college is a service, on the one hand, and not a product, which means that it is not cheaper than the evolution of manufacturing technology (economists call it "cost sickness"). In recent decades, the college is a service provided primarily by college-educated workers, whose wages have increased more dramatically than those of low-skilled service workers.
Feldman and Archibald point out that the university is not the only service that has been more expensive in recent decades. According to Feldman and Archibald, since 1950 the real prices of the services of doctors, dentists and lawyers have increased at rates similar to those of higher education. "The bad guy, even if there is one, is economic growth itself," they write.
All of this makes sense if we focus solely on the United States. But what about the rest of the world? These broader economic trends also exist. So why does college cost on average two times cheaper in other countries?
Othe quirk of American higher education is in fact made up of three different systems: a system of public colleges, another of private non-profit institutions and another of for-profit colleges.
The most important system is by far the public system, which includes two-year community colleges and four-year institutions. Three out of four American students attend a school in this public system, funded by state grants and local grants, as well as student tuition and some federal support.
In this public system, the high cost of college education has as much to do with politics as the economy. Many states have spent less and less per student in higher education over the last three decades. Overwhelmed by the ideology of the small government (and forced by law to balance their budgets during a period of rising health costs), states once left world-class public universities to obtain money. The cuts were particularly marked after the 2008 recession and caused a series of consequences, some of which were never contemplated.
The easiest way for universities to offset the cuts was to transfer some of the costs to the students and to find richer students. "Once these sustainable public finances were removed from these schools, they started to act more like companies," says Maggie Thompson, executive director of Generation Progress, a nonprofit education advocacy group. State cuts did not necessarily make colleges more efficient, which was hope; they made colleges more enterprising.
Some universities have begun to recruit more foreign and foreign students at full pay to make up the difference. In the last decade, for example, Purdue University has reduced its student enrollment by 4,300, while adding 5,300 international and foreign students who pay three times as many studies. "They stopped working to educate people in their area to compete for the richest and most elite students – in an unprecedented way," says Thompson.
This competition eventually spread beyond climbing walls and mess rooms, resulting in significant long-term operating expenses. According to OECD data, for example, US colleges spend, compared to other countries, a surprising amount of money for their non-teaching staff. Some of these people are librarians or career counselors or mental health professionals who directly benefit the students, but many others are doing concrete jobs that have more to do with student attraction than with the learning. Many US colleges employ fundraisers, sports staff, lawyers, admissions and financial assistants, diversity and integration officers, maintenance officers, security guards and
International data are not detailed enough to reveal exactly which jobs divert the most money, but we can say that US universities spend more on non-teaching staff than on teachers, which is the case. OECD (with the exception of Luxembourg, of course).
In addition, most of the world rankings of universities place a high value on the amount of research published by teachers – a measure that has nothing to do with student learning. But in a heated run for students, these rankings are attracting the attention of college administrators, who are pushing faculty to focus on research and pay star faculty accordingly.
Similarly, the new data show that US colleges currently have a student / teacher ratio slightly below the developed country average – another key measure in college rankings. But it's a very expensive way to compete. And among educational researchers, there is no clear consensus on whether small classes are worth the money.
At first, university administrators may have started competing with students who pay for freight to help subsidize other less fortunate students. But once the other colleges became racketeers, they became an arms race. More and more universities have had to participate, including private colleges not affected by state reductions, simply to increase their number of applications. "There is such competition," Charles Clotfelter, professor at Duke University and author of Unequal colleges in the era of disparity, m wrote in an email.
That said, it is also true that state budget cuts were uneven across the country. Today, tuition fees in Wyoming represent about a third of Vermont costs, for example. In places where higher education has not been emptied and the cost of living is low, a US university degree can still be an affair, especially for students who are not afraid to live at home and who are sufficiently poor to receive federal assistance. Given living expenses, says Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates, a student at a Mississippi public university is likely to face similar costs as a student in Sweden.
Usher, who is based in Toronto, is one of the few researchers to have carefully examined the costs of higher education globally. And what he often finds surprising. In 2010, he and his colleague, Jon Medow, created an intelligent ranking of higher education systems in 15 countries, using various means to assess accessibility and accessibility. Read the report, it's like peeling an onion. The first layer focuses on the most obvious question: the affordability of the college, based on the cost of tuition, books and living expenses, divided by the median income in a given country. By this measure, the United States is doing very badly, ranking third from the bottom. Only Mexico and Japan are worse.
But the United States moves one place when subsidies and tax credits are included. "Your grants are really very generous compared to everyone," says Usher. Tuition fees are higher in the United States, so grants do not fully cover the price, but 70% of full-time students receive financial aid, according to the College Board. In this perspective, sometimes called "net cost", Australia costs more than the United States.
In the United States alone, the United States is in the middle of the pack in Usher's analysis, over Canada and New Zealand. These data date back to 2010, and things may seem less appealing if he had to redo the study now, warns Usher. But despite everything, he seems strangely optimistic. "The public system in the United States works as well as most systems," he says. "Some parts of the United States look like France."
The problem, of course, is that other parts of the United States are more like a Louis Vuitton store. America basically contains 50 different higher education systems, one per state, each with public, private and for-profit institutions, making generalizations almost impossible. The United States is doing relatively well in college access, but the price varies widely by location and by people. In one way or another, students must find their way through this competition and choose wisely or suffer the consequences.
The more I studied the disconcerting American higher education system, the more it reminded me of health care. In both cases, Americans pay twice as much as people in other developed countries and get very unequal results. The United States spends almost $ 10,000 per person on health care each year (25% more than Switzerland, the second largest spender), according to the OECD 2017 report. Health at a glance report, but our life expectancy is now almost two years below the average of the developed world.
"I joked that I could simply take all my papers and statistical programs and replace" hospitals "by" schools "," doctors "with" teachers "and" patients "with" students ". some American economists who study both education and health care.
Both systems are more market-oriented than in almost all other countries, making them more innovative, but also less coherent and more exploitative. Hospitals and colleges charge different prices to different people, making the two systems surprisingly complex, Staiger notes. It is very difficult for ordinary people to make informed decisions, yet few decisions could be more important.
In both cases, the most vulnerable people tend to make less than ideal decisions. For example, among high-performing, low-income students (who have grades and scores that rank them among the top 4% of US students and would be eligible for generous financial assistance from elite colleges), the vast majority according to the research of Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. "Ironically, these students often pay more to go to a non-selective four-year college or even a community college than they would pay to go to the most selective and resource-rich institutions in the United States." said Hoxby to NPR.
With respect to health care, low-income Americans tend to become familiar with the concepts of deductibles, co-insurance rates, and provider networks, according to various studies, making it extremely difficult to choose a plan of care health. "These are the two areas where consumers are too poorly informed and the costs and societal benefits too great to leave decision-making entirely in the hands of individuals," wrote Isabel Sawhill of the Brookings Institution.
Ultimately, universities are expensive in the United States for the same reason that MRIs are expensive: there is no central mechanism for controlling price increases. "Universities extract student money because they can," says Schleicher at the OECD. "This is the inevitable result of an unregulated royalty structure." In countries like the UK, the government is limiting the amount universities can extract by capping tuition fees. The same goes for health care in most developed countries, where a centralized government authority contains prices.
The US federal government has always refused to play this role. So, Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals – and for college courses. Meanwhile, risks are increasingly being transferred from the government to families in both sectors.
At the very least, the US government could better share college quality information in a way that everyone can understand, says Schleicher. "You can not force people to buy good things or bad things, but they should be able to see what's the value."
Smeanwhile a lot of money may be worth it, if you get something great in exchange. "America has the best colleges and universities in the world!" President Donald Trump exclaimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. Former President Barack Obama said the same thing in front of him.
But is this really true? There are no significant data on the quality of universities in the world. America has a disproportionate number of elite colleges, which accept less than 10% of applicants, and these places employ brilliant researchers who do groundbreaking research. But less than one percent of American students attend very selective colleges like this one.
Instead, more than three-quarters of students attend non-selective colleges, which admit at least half of their candidates. No one knows for sure how effective these colleges are at educating students. But in one of the only recent and cautious studies on adult skills, the OECD program for the international assessment of skills of adults under 35 years of age earned a lower bachelor's degree than peers in 14 other countries. . In other words, they are only slightly higher than high school graduates in Finland. Graduates of American universities were more successful at reading, falling below six other countries, but dropped out again in another test, getting fewer than 13 other countries to solve problems using digital technology.
If US colleges do not add obvious and consistent academic value, they add financial value. Americans with university degrees earn 75% more than those who have only completed high school. In their lifetime, people with a bachelor's degree earn more than half a million dollars more than people without a university degree in the United States. In fact, no country rewards a university degree as rich as the United States and few other countries punish tirelessly for not having one. It's a diabolical cycle: colleges are very expensive to operate, partly because of the high wages of their skilled workers. But these higher salaries make university degrees extremely valuable, which means that Americans will pay a lot to get them. Colleges can therefore charge more. As Carey summarizes: "Students have more than one barrel."
However, the performance varies greatly depending on the college attended. One in four university graduates earn no more than the average high school graduate. For-profit university degrees lead to lower salary problems than the associated lower-cost community colleges. And two-thirds of for-profit students drop out before they graduate, which means that many of them will spend years in debt, which they can not afford to pay – and can not, under US law, discharge their debts.
This complicated, complicated and inconsistent system continues to exist and continues to be so expensive because the university in America is still worth the price. In some colleges, for some people. Especially after they finish. But that does not have to be that way, and almost everywhere else that is not the case.
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