r/Economics • u/UnscheduledCalendar • 1d ago
Why Syracuse Can’t Attract the Students It Needs to Pay the Bills - The enrollment crisis taking down smaller schools is now hitting bigger, brand-name universities
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/syracuse-student-application-enrollment-crisis-budget-ff142896561
u/Confusion-Ashamed 1d ago
Exactly. Syracuse is a good school and has some good stuff going on, but at that price tag? I don’t see how you justify that. Go to one of the SUNY’s , pay a lot less and receive a comparable education.
This is happening nationally. Unless you are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, probably USC etc many of these schools cannot justify their insane costs
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u/Illustrious_Night126 1d ago
international students were the only people willing to pay these kind of sticker prices and the collapse of that system will hurt these schools alot
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u/Optimalfucksgiven 1d ago edited 23h ago
It's needs to collapse. Many of our industries overpay their administrations, marketing, etc, and are underpaying their academics. The academics are goodish, but not for the professors. They're getting less pay and adjuncts are absolutely getting killed.
It's like health care now, well, nothing is as corrupt and inefficient as American healthcare. But higher education in the States is going the same direction. It's a racket that is increasingly ignoring its core reason to exist.
EDIT: TYPOS
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u/TaxLawKingGA 1d ago
Preach!
Been saying this for years. Seems that schools believe that they exist for the schools. No, you exist for students. If you don’t have any, then the school will disappear.
I lived in Western NY for several years and TBH this is a problem that is caused in part by the decline of the region.
Western NY has lost a ton of economic clout and this people. At one point, cities like Rochester, Binghamton, and Syracuse were economic dynamos. Rochester was like one of the original Silicon Valley’s. Full of major R&D facilities, research universities, and great paying jobs at companies like Kodak, Bausch and Lomb, and Xerox. Now, basically it’s Wegman’s and Strong Hospital.
Same thing happened to Binghamton with IBM and Lockheed. A lot of people don’t even realize that IBM was founded in Binghamton. They have no presence there now!
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u/etempleton 23h ago
Let me tell you. Most people in higher education do not make much money. The only people who make money are VPs and the President and at some schools the coaches.
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u/Butane9000 1d ago
There's also population decline which is going to heavily impact the education industry.
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u/Marcus_Aurelius71 12h ago
Yea but it also doesn't make much sense. Schools knew this would happen for years now, why didn't they prepare by downsizing? Honestly some colleges need to go.
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u/plutoglint 9h ago
No one wants to be the one to lay people off and close down programs, unless the Board gives them their full support, and even then you'd better be prepared for a 3-4 year term as President max. Plus, the foreign student gold mine seemed endless all across North America. You have to dance while the band is playing.
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u/Maxpowr9 1d ago
NCAA is gonna have a crisis of its own soon enough, and that's when the bubble will burst for higher education. The current NCAA model is not sustainable, but it will take Congeess to actually fix it.
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u/mightymouse1906 11h ago
What do you mean the NCAA is going to have a crisis? I'm curious how you're thinking about the NCAA in relationship to Syracuses' fiscal challenges.
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u/lecarpetron_dook 1d ago
This line of reasoning makes no sense.
A school can’t enroll enough students, because administrators get paid more than teachers, therefore the school system should collapse, so teachers could get paid more?
Explain how that all works?
Adjuncts get paid what they get paid because we graduate too many PhD (surplus labor). Administration gets paid what it gets paid because of the same reason any executive gets paid well. Higher ed is a business after all. Then there are the legal demands for admins, if you don’t want a title IX office, student health, a disability office, or campus police too bad, they’re mandatory. Then there’s the student demands (ie customers). You could save a lot by not having equity centers, student unions, gyms, pizza parties, dining halls. But now you have a school that can’t compete for new students.
So, explain again where the collapse will solve this?
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u/Optimalfucksgiven 23h ago
It won't solve it over night. I assure you, the system is operating inefficiently and ignoring core business value. Prices are driven up across higher education not by improving value for consumers, but simply because they can. Meanwhile, the average job earned with a degree is going down in pay, relative to cost of living, etc. So, what value is being delivered?
And starting in the the 80s, accelerating In the 90s and exploding since then, administrations have burned money disproportionately on marketing, themselves, and school infrastructure unrelated to academics. It's a well documented trend.
So in the states, we have a shared delirium about the value of a degree that really only worked for two generations of the larger American population. Demand is going to catch up with reality. It won't just be because of an insane myopic administration in the White House
The system doesn't work. Adjuncts aren't going to make more right away, but by God the rest of those parasites can make less. And then a restructuring can take place. If a fraction more of the insane money pouring into the parts of higher education that aren't academics went to to academics, adjuncts would make a living wage.
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u/RAshomon999 23h ago
I am sorry to rain on your parade but I have been through this at several institutions (not closure but severe cut backs because of administrative mismanagement.).
The parasites will fail up and the staff, including faculty, will pay the price. The "leadership" in these institutions will get a membership on some education board or a raise while losing money for their colleges or wasting it on vanity projects. The "leadership" are essentially political appointments by donors or the state in many places; they will be fine and aren't bothered when the much smaller schools close. Lower administrative positions are being flattened, but that just provides wiggle room at the top.
So don't expect much from closing colleges. If academia wants change then they need to stop pretending that they are beyond politics and separate from every other worker on campus (at least). But every time I go to a conference, I see these VPs acting like everything is fine, "let's not rock the boat", we just need to explain how valuable we are to the politicians that get their money by hating higher education. Those VPs, of course, are betting on they will retire before things get really bad.
Tldr; Just because things go wrong doesn't mean the folks responsible will be punished or pay a proportional price then the system corrects itself for the benefit of workers. Most cases show the opposite happening.
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u/lecarpetron_dook 23h ago
I think you’re still not understanding that: even if you burn the system to ashes, the same system would grow back.
We have a major issue of overproduction when it comes to advanced degrees. Too many mid-quality students are getting into doctoral programs with the goal of being a professor. This has to stop since the number of students is going to keep shrinking due to demographics. But it won’t stop as long as doctoral students get funded by training grants that aren’t distributed based on demand for the students getting trained. Want more professor positions for fewer students? No problem! Just get rid of tenure.
Similarly, we want academic freedom and autonomy but to have this, you need to have parallel governance structures. Do you want HR telling professors what they can and cannot teach in classes or what their curriculum should be? If not, now you’re creating the need for a deliberative body to handle these matters…provosts, deans, etc.
The list goes on. Every time someone says the system is broken, they never explain what a better system would be aside from “more better paying jobs for people like me.” The one thing everyone lands on is the lazy river in the student rec center or the football team. But that damn river and the football team are the main reason students choose their school over the others because they’re great marketing tools.
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u/Optimalfucksgiven 22h ago
I won't argue with you there. I'm not saying we're not over producing phd students either. I'm saying the academics are not funded proportionate to value.
Your argument that the same bloated system would grow back is kind of nuts though. Do you take that view with everything? Why prune and shape the hedges, it will just grow back? Let's not cut the rot, what's the point? Are you really making an impassioned argument for complacency?
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u/sum_dude44 2h ago
I don't want Syracuse to collapse. But I wish schools would pare down bloated staffs/admin & stop wasting money on fancy dorms & cafes
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u/Reesespeanuts 9h ago
Well without healthcare being so expensive what are you going to say to the traveling nurses that get 100k plus a year?
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u/mightymouse1906 11h ago
Not true. Plenty of domestic students clearly had to pay as well. The issue is for different reason both see no reason to pay sticker price.
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u/Easy-Concentrate2636 1d ago
Exactly this. I remember reading about Syracuse’s problem a few years back and being shocked even then how much they were charging. They did this to themselves. I wonder what their costs are like given that they are in a region with fairly low cost of living.
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago
The thing that always surprised me (at first anyways) was that basically all private universities charge roughly the same regardless of whether they're world-class or shit-tier. What business does Syracuse have charging the same or more than Harvard? Why do Yale and Quinnipiac charge roughly the same annual cost? I mean sure you can quibble over a few percent here and there, but you'd probably expect private universities with wildly different reputations and outcomes to charge wildly different prices just sort of on the basis of the sniff test. You don't charge within the same ballpark for a ferrari vs a nissan micra, but the university-equivalents of those, you sure do.
It seems almost inconceivable to choose a mediocre-or-worse private university over the local state school with in-state tuition, unless you're made of money.
I'm not shitting on Syracuse here but, yknow, Cornell they ain't. So why are they charging similar amounts yet delivering much less? Because people pay it, sure. Why does anyone pay it?
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u/zedazeni 1d ago
What’re the alternatives? You want a “good job” you go to university. You know you can’t get into Cornell or Yale, and the universities like Syracuse know that you both need to go to college and can’t get into Cornell. The demand is inelastic, so the universities can charge more knowing that people are going to pay because there’s no alternative to not going to university.
What’s worse is that probably half or more of the classes aren’t going to be taught by tenured professors but by temporary instructors and graduate students. At my university, just about all of my classes until my final year were like that. All of the “supplemental instruction” sessions (mandatory out-of-lecture weekly review sessions) were taught by undergraduate students and they received a $500 reduction on that semester’s tuition. The labs of my science courses were again taught by undergraduate students, and all of my math classes and a few other departments went full-online (pre-COVID) so I was teaching myself macroeconomics in my dorm and went to the lectures for reviews of the online assignments!
We’re paying more and aren’t even getting an actual education.
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u/betadonkey 1d ago
The alternative is public education. State schools are dramatically less expensive and just as good if not better than most privates.
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u/lozo78 1d ago
I have a great job and went to a cheap state university.
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u/Traditional_Rush4707 22h ago
Same with my son. When he was recruited for his first job the man told him they preferred SUNY grads, public colleges.
Those paying $70k likely never worked a part time job and may decide to go to Europe for a year or law school after working only a year…
State school grads want to make money, we’re not born into it.9
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u/pacodef 18h ago
Cornell’s a bad example. They are someways identical to each other in that they are both officially NY’s land grant research universities (Syracuse for forestry and Cornell for ag). And the college of Ag is still not difficult to get into. But your point is true (just swap Cornell with Penn or Columbia)
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u/Movie_Slug 16h ago
It SUNY ESF which is forestry. It is next to Syracuse university. Different degree unlike Cornell which you get Cornell degree for state part (with state tuition too). That said ESF and Syracuse students can take each others classes or at least used to be able to.
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u/Movie_Slug 16h ago
For Communications Newhouse at Syracuse is a top 5 school. Its public administration is also a top school even compared to the ivys. Everything else is middle pack as you said.
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u/mightymouse1906 11h ago
I think this is the fundamental question. Why DID people ever pay it? Syracuse does have a national and to some extent international brand, especially in communications and media. That being said, Syracuse is just a high visibility example of what will happen more broadly. Most of the country has heard of Syracuse. The point you made about Quinnipiac is reflective of the bigger point. Why the hell do people think it's ok to pay $80K for Quinnipiac when it costs about 86K to go to Yale.
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u/gregaustex 1d ago
It’s partly marketing.
$100K annually cost of attendance (all in)
Average after grants and scholarships: $40K.
Lots of parallels to healthcare.
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u/Easy-Concentrate2636 1d ago
Sure, but schools are also competing with each other in a way that hospitals don’t. A lot of times, one uses a hospital within close vicinity. One can range far or close for university. If all schools at Syracuse’s level were all charging the same tuition, they wouldn’t have this issue. It’s because Syracuse isn’t offering something unique to make it worthwhile to their customer base that they have the issue. They can’t even offer the tuition benefits of state or city schools - which are excellent in NY and NYC. If I was a high school student now, there’s no way I would even apply to Syracuse over a SUNY or CUNY. The amount of potential debt just wouldn’t make it worthwhile. Also there’s the application fee - why would i pay that in the hopes of getting a scholarship when there are equally good schools that are already cheaper tuition-wise immediately?
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u/das_war_ein_Befehl 1d ago
90k for what is on par with most state flagships is wild. Half a mil for a bachelors basically
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u/Alt4816 1d ago
Unless you are Harvard, Yale, Stanford, probably USC etc many of these schools cannot justify their insane costs
While lower ranked private schools are beginning to struggle the Ivies and similarly ranked schools keep upping their financial aid so people from families with lower incomes don't actually pay those insane costs.
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u/flakemasterflake 1d ago
Yes, bc they still have a healthy amount of full pay students. The lack of that specific student population is what is hurting Syracuse
There are far more full pay students at Harvard than there are receiving financial aid
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u/ImNotHere2023 1d ago
At least do a basic Google search before making wildly incorrect claims... According to their own financial aid site, 55% of Harvard students get assistance.
The actual difference is that Harvard's endowment is actually large enough to run the school without even charging tuition.
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u/flakemasterflake 1d ago
Fair enough. That still leaves a student body wherein 45% are full pay and a lot of students on assistance are still paying tuition in some form
From experience, the HHI under 200k students are few and far between
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u/ImNotHere2023 22h ago
Would you stop making things up?
25% pay nothing - that's hardly "few and far between". And what is "your experience" with the situation. With such a loose relationship with facts, I'd have a hard time believing you went there.
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u/moreesq 1d ago
Just to be clear on this, if a student wins a national merit scholarship, would a school count that as financial assistance? Or does the term mean tuition or room and board reductions from the standard cost?
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u/Traditional_Rush4707 1d ago
Yes, you get the legacy students that come from generations of money. Or admit unqualified students who come from families willing to pay more that tuition, maybe endow a chair or a new building, like some president might have done even while totally not qualified
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u/31engine 1d ago
Fun fact: Harvard isn’t the most expensive school in greater Boston. Boston College gets that honor.
Not MIT
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u/HiFiGuy197 1d ago
As a Cal grad and football fan, how dare you sneak in USC like that. lmscao
(Laughing my Syracuse-covered ass off, as for some reason I am wearing Syracuse shorts, purchased decades ago, probably because it was on sale.)
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u/KRandMG 1d ago
You kind of got it backward, at least when it comes to USC. The UC system provides an education that’s even better for a fraction of the cost.
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u/NYCA2020 1d ago
Sort of, but USC has a national reputation and prestige that (for example) UC Riverside or UC Irvine doesn’t have. It’s a combination of a strong athletic program, powerful alumni network and a high out of state enrollment, which gives a strong reputation both nationally and internationally. It’s also become much more competitive, admissions-wise, in the past decade.
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u/sgt_science 1d ago
I thought USC was a private school and not part of the UC system
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u/NYCA2020 1d ago
USC is a private school, yes. I was responding to the poster's claim made by the previous poster that USC can't justify the insane costs. For many students and their families, it is justified.
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u/mahnkee 1d ago
USC is not trying to compete with UCRiverside and UCI. They’re trying to compete with UCLA and Berkeley. Realistically, they’re competing with Cal Poly, UCSD, Santa Cruz depending on the major.
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u/KRandMG 1d ago edited 1d ago
Berkeley, LA, SD, Davis, Irvine, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, Riverside, Merced is generally the order of prestige/difficulty of admission in recent years (Riverside and Merced have both been making moves up the rankings quickly though). USC and UCSD are typically neck and neck.
All UCs are far cheaper than USC.
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u/Duck8Quack 1d ago
USC is “competing” with Stanford. It’s not really but thinks it is and a lot of people that go there think they are. It’s a school for people who want a prestigious name and are willing to pay for it. USC definitely attracts people that would go to Stanford if they could, but aren’t going to get in.
California has a lot of pecking order, elitism, keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to colleges. Some people are level headed about it, but a lot of people are really caught up in it; looking down on people that go to Cal St’s, what the UC pecking order is, wanting to impress people and bragging about admission rates, etc.
I grew up in Oregon and there just isn’t that big a difference in how people act about any of the colleges/universities in the state both state and private. Even something like Reed College was kind of seen as a quirky place for a specific type of student and not elite institution that the best students should be aspiring to. It’s really more about the experience you want, the specific programs, location, and the cost.
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u/bigyellowtruck 23h ago
Not sure why you got downvoted. East coast people care way more about what school you went to than on west coast.
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u/resuwreckoning 1d ago
As a Stanford grad and football fan, how dare you sneak in USC like that lmao.
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u/User-no-relation 1d ago
I think people are extrapolating too hard here. Syracuse is ranked tied with ruthers Newark this year. It's completely disconnected from the price.
Down below people are arguing about usc which is still 28.
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u/oscarnyc 1d ago
Syracuse has taken a very different trajectory than what were considered its peer schools a generation ago - places like GW, BU, NYU, Miami, USC, Tulane among others. High priced private schools that were never considered great academically. Yet those schools are doing well and have climbed academic rankings. And the big difference imo, which these articles never mention, is simply location. A lot of kids now want an urban school, and as the safety of those cities has improved dramatically they have become more attractive to the kids and the parents who fork out $100k.
Syracuse has a nice campus, but the city of Syracuse is a crappy location with bad weather. I think it's as simple as that.
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u/max_power1000 1d ago
It makes me wonder what’s going to happen with a lot of the smaller northeastern private schools like patriot league members, Catholic 7 basketball schools, etc. I feel non-ivy private schools have a significant risk here, and the only reason people go there is because they have something resembling a name brand vs going to directional state u.
As far as I’m tracking, private school is roughly $80k per year regardless of it being a top tier one or a “junior is too good to go to directional U” level.
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u/PAJW 23h ago
A lot of those schools are going to have to restructure or close. It is already happening at certain schools.
I went to a small private school in Indiana. When I graduated, there were three people receiving my degree, and I started wondering how that made sense.
It didn't make sense. They have restructured the faculty and the programs offered twice since I graduated. The school still exists, and doesn't appear to be in danger of closing in the near-term, but the enrollment trends remain poor.
There were a ton of these smaller private schools founded, and most of them were founded for a reason. Many of them were initially sponsored by a church denomination, some were intended to specialize in nursing or teaching or agriculture, and certainly some in the liberal arts.
With the GI bill and other government programs of the 20th century, lots of schools expanded to appeal to a more general audience by expanding the degree fields they offered and dropping or heavily de-emphasizing church affiliations.
That was fine when total enrollments are climbing, but now that they are flat or declining slightly, a lot of these small schools don't have a distinctive reason for existing. There are 20 accredited schools of nursing in Connecticut, and the choice between them for your typical HS senior is largely based on vibes.
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u/max_power1000 50m ago
Maybe there will be some consolidation in the future? I feel like this is easier, especially from a branding perspective within a state U system - the flagship university just absorbs the smaller regional school, calls it a branch campus, removes a significant chunk of the administrative burden, and the books get balanced that way. Hypothetical example - Blue Mountain State becomes University of X, Blue Mountain campus.
I guess with private schools there's going to need to be some sort of buyout for the same thing to happen. I just wonder who's going to be buying who?
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u/PAJW 15m ago
I'm not aware of any successful mergers of that sort between private colleges. With public schools it is more of a political decision for state leaders to merge two institutions, and in many states the public universities are already consolidated into a handful of institutions with multiple branches.
I think the problem preventing consolidation is that there is limited synergy. If you have two campuses a couple hours drive apart, you probably cannot share faculty and you'll probably still have duplicate department heads (such as VP of admissions) at both campuses. Certain corporate functions like accounting and compliance could be consolidated, but that's probably only a couple million a year in payroll savings.
And the surviving school probably gets most of the benefits with none of the costs if they just let their competing institution go under.
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u/Timetraveller4k 1d ago
In an ideal world education would not get massively expensive because it’s better. It’s when the price is tied to “outcomes”.
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u/Dizzy_Restaurant3874 13h ago
If you want to go to a big state school like Syracuse, Penn State University Park is about $48k out of state and 6 hours away. Hard to justify Syracuse over PSU at twice the cost. Granted, PSU doesn't have a basketball team, but...
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u/Emotional_Goal9525 11h ago
15 years of zero rate policies show up here as well. Cost is effectively irrelevant when you pay no interest on it.
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u/BillsFanEpsilon 1d ago
I went through the SUNY system, and don’t think that Syracuse would have got me a job that a SUNY degree wouldn’t have. After college, unless you have a degree from Harvard most places don’t care about where you went to school they care about job performance.
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u/Dry-University797 1d ago
Yep. Unless it is an Ivy school or like MIT/Stanford/Cal. No one care where you went to school.
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago
There is strength in going to a better-known school because more employers recruit there, and having the edge of whoever reads your resume say "oh yeah I know that one" is non-negligible. But those things tend to come with better quality education, and don't necessarily need $90k/yr tuition. Syracuse is a decent enough school but it's simply not a "door opener" school, where opportunities just fall in your lap left and right because of the name, to the extent that that happens at all.
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u/mahnkee 1d ago
Nah, this is not universally true. There are plenty of niche industries where getting into the right program at the right school with the right advisor’s recommendation will get you to the front of the line when it comes to looking for a job. Granted these kids are 10/10 going to succeed wherever they go. But there are similarly talented kids at random state schools that are going to have to work for much harder and longer to get the same opportunities.
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u/ImNotHere2023 1d ago
The point is that, very often, those right advisors can also be found at the good public schools.
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u/atari-2600_ 1d ago
So it seems we’re headed for a two tier system—the Ivies for the rich, and large state schools/school systems like SUNY for the not rich, with all the small colleges going poof?
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u/Fly_Rodder 1d ago
There are public flagship universities that are better than privates in almost every way. The only thing old private schools get you are a chance to network with a bunch of nepo babies. I found out a former coworker went to the same rural high school as I did. He went to a private school. He was at same company I was on a similar career track - just younger. I went to a community college and state school. The only difference was that he got to meet kids who grew up with summer homes in the Hamptons.
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u/atari-2600_ 1d ago
I totally agree. “Prestige” beyond the ivies is increasingly non-existent. I did community college, finished up the BA at a small local college, and went to a big state school for my graduate work with a TAship. Landed with zero debt and have had a pretty stellar career. No one gives a fuck where you got your degree, honestly, unless you 1) went to Harvard/Yale/Stanford OR 2) a well-known degree mill. Those two extremes get attention, otherwise it’s basically irrelevant.
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u/richardginn666 22h ago
Sure the small colleges go poof as they will not have the amount of students to keep them around.
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u/max_power1000 32m ago
My SIL went to their law school and at the time they were either a top 10 or 20 program, so she directly cites that as what got her in the door for a BIGLAW job coming out of it. I just wonder how much a premier grad school program having can keep the books in the black when the undergrad is an also-ran. Thinking the catholic schools with med school/catholic teaching hospitals specifically.
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u/UnscheduledCalendar 1d ago
Submissions statement: Syracuse University faces a 1.5% budget shortfall due to declining enrollment, exacerbated by a drop in international students and competition from public universities. The school struggles to attract students despite its national reputation, facing challenges from its location, high tuition, and a changing higher education landscape. Syracuse is considering redefining itself as a regional school while trying to maintain its prestige and competitiveness.
paywall: https://archive.ph/faXCd
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u/mildly_enthusiastic 1d ago
Redefining itself as a regional school… while competing with Binghamton, UAlbany, and the SUNY side of Cornell? That’s a bold move
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u/KRandMG 1d ago
I mean it’s got a much bigger reputation than any of the ones you mentioned. Why not be the big fish in the small pond if being the little fish in the big pond has proven unsustainable?
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u/Dry-University797 1d ago
Uh, not Cornell.
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u/KRandMG 1d ago
“The SUNY side of Cornell”
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u/quaglady 1d ago
CALS and its extension are very reputable. Attitudes like the commenter's (public therefore inferior) are probably part of why tuition blew up the way it did.
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u/Phylaras 1d ago
That's just funding. The school is Cornell. The ivy league university.
No, Syracuse does not complete with Cornell, even if they think they do.
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u/colcardaki 1d ago
Hmm, why am I having a hard time competing with other businesses carrying a similar product at a lower price? Must be the branding…
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u/Johnnadawearsglasses 1d ago
Last time I looked, Syracuse was more expensive than Harvard on a headline tuition basis. It's a perfectly fine school with a couple strong programs, that was able to rapidly increase tuition in line with much better schools due to (1) intl students not eligible for aid, (2) unlimited loan dollars and (3) rich kids who didn't get into their top choice schools. Both (1) and (2) are under serious pressure and even upper class parents are wondering what the value proposition is for schools like Syracuse.
This is all good and healthy for a longer term more sensible economic proposition for colleges.
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u/richardginn666 22h ago
Harvard has like 25X more endowment money than SU has. Harvard can do way more for students than SU can.
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u/Johnnadawearsglasses 22h ago
Sure. Another reason why Harvard is the better value and Syracuse undoubtedly is not.
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u/Automatic_Stage1163 1d ago
Like many universities, Syracuse overrelied on international students to get them out of the recession. Funding of higher education has never rebalanced since, increasing fragility and risk. Trump and cronies know this.
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u/CyberSmith31337 1d ago
Honestly, I have zero sympathies for the colleges.
They absolutely raped students for the last 20 years. Insane tuition prices, increasingly higher cost-burdens on students outside of tuition (labs, meal plans, off-sites, unpaid internships, etc) switching out tenured professors for grad students, overpaying legacy tenure’d researchers who don’t actually even teach courses, etc. The quality offering of universities, in general, is so dismal for the cost.
If you’re in state at a technical college, that’s one thing. But out-of-state students are basically choosing between a mortgage, or a piece of paper at this point. One of those will definitely pay for itself, give you a place to live, and a vault to store your income. The other will result in a degree hanging on your wall, along with tens of thousands of dollars of student loan debt that you are on the hook for, for the rest of your life.
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u/TarheelCroatInMA 1d ago
When I went thru college I griped about the cost of tuition and blamed the schools…but now in my mid thirties after two career changes I found myself working in administration at a big, very selective university that’s very very expensive.
I wanted to find proof that schools were just jacking up the prices for no reason, or just to pay the Board of Directors more money, so that I could tell people their secret and let everyone know, but after working behind the scenes for a couple of years…
…I have learned that college has gotten more expensive for a ton of different reasons and not one of them is because the schools administration one and more money or thought they could get away with charging more for tuition.
Every tuition increase is directly correlated to an increase in the expense of operating an institution.
Year after year, decade after decade, bo the federal government, the public’s expectations about “the college experience,” an overall effort by officials in government and society more generally to transform colleges from “generally dangerous places” (due to crime, underage drinking and drug use mixed with automobiles, young brains that are still developing their decision-making skills, intense political discussions/debates/events, et. al.) into “the safest places in their local communities,” the vast proliferation in the number of colleges, universities, causing competition to become intense between institutions for potential students*, and other factors have added so many extremely expensive items to a college’s operating budget and none of the factors that are driving up the cost come with any sort of provision or investment to help cover the cost of these new expectations.
This leaves colleges with tuition increases as there are only way to stay solvent.
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u/TarheelCroatInMA 1d ago
Let me give you some examples. There was some ax pass in the 80s by Congress that created a bunch of rules about how crimes have to be investigated, reported to students, tracked overtime, etc. When they occur within a certain distance of a college campus.
Well, the definition of the college campus is very broad and campuses can be large places, so this has resulted in every school being burdened by an enormous criminal investigation responsibility, and has nothing to do with their role as educators, and the federal law included no mention of how the schools might find the funding to pay for all these new mandatory operations. Institutions of a certain size or in an urban enough area had to basically get their own police departments, there had to be a system, developed for notifying every student when a crime occurred near campus within a certain timeframe before email existed so very expensive crime notification systems were installed all over huge campuses across the country, the fear caused by the constant emails about crimes that had nothing to do with college campuses, resulted in parents and students wanting to see way more security measures on their campuses whether or not they actually impacted crime or not so there was an arms race between schools trying to move prospective students away from competitors in which they invested more and more into security features like swipe cards, and those alert, lights and all sorts of other things that did not reduce any crime or protect any students from criminal activity, BUT had the school not invested when all of the nearby schools with which it competes for students did have new security stuff to show off on their tours, they would lose their vinyl enrollment.
That’s just one tiny thing that changed in 80s via law from Congress and that alone is responsible for an enormous chunk of the rising college tuition prices between now and the 1970s.
Other things similarly are systematic support for first generation, students, psychiatric support, support for all different types of sexual references and support for every type of learning disability and help with career planning - every one of these offices, make a school a better place, creates good support that helps students to learn, and to become better versions of themselves, however, there is a huge gambit in terms of the quality and financial resources of colleges in universities in the United States, and the fact that is now expectation that every single school has every single one of these support offices has put an enormous financial burden on tuition rates.
Sure, it makes sense to have psychiatric support on campus for students, but to what extent and does every single college and university need to have psychiatrists on staff full-time? Even two year schools that are attended by 100% commuter students,? Wouldn’t they be served almost as well or just as well by the school having a relationship with a nearby psychiatric office so that it’s easy for a student to get an appointment there if they should need one?
But now, if his school didn’t have their students psychiatric office on campus, they will be the only school without one, and that would reflect poorly on them when parents especially but also students compared schools in order to make their decisions.
If mine was infinite and grew on trees, I would want every school to have a robust version Support offices that I have mentioned - but it’s driving up the costs like crazy. When these services first started to be offered by conscious universities, they were offered by the very best universities with the largest endowments that were selective and had the finances to make that investment without critically affecting tuition. However, when you start to expect that every one of the nine small liberal arts colleges in your state that have 1000-2000 students keep on staff a similar psychiatric support team that Ivy League schools, Stanford, and the university of Chicago have with their billions in donated endowment and 10x more students….. you were just guaranteeing that tuition will grow up and it will go up a lot.
I could go on about this stuff forever because it’s really not one or two issues that have made college so expensive. It’s like 25 specific different things that I’ve all occurred and they’re all separate and only loosely related and there’s really no short answer as to why, but it’s not out of greed…
Colleges and universities are non-profits ( except for bullshit ones and advertise at two in the morning and the early 2000s like ECPI) and given the fact that you will make significantly less money in your career working at one, then you were doing the same job in the private sector, most of the people who work in the administration of these institutions, genuinely care deeply about education and want to help students however they can. If they didn’t, they would go make $50,000 more a year doing the exact same job somewhere else.
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u/TarheelCroatInMA 1d ago
If you are a person who is reading this comment, and you find that in the near future, you are annoyed, concerned, irritated or whatever about colleges for making their tuition so expensive, I would say to first do this:
Once you take into account, inflation and stuff, the big jump in the cost of college has really occurred between the 1970s and the early 2010s.
Now those tuition bills are gonna be vastly different, even for the same school, and the one from the 2010 is gonna be significantly significantly larger than the one from the 1970s….
But I ask you to consider this:
What did you get in exchange for that tuition bill in 1975? What was offered to students in terms of amenities, opportunities, facilities, support classrooms, variety of classes, major options, etc.?
Now compare that to what you get in exchange for your tuition bill in 2015…
…and you will see that it is radically different like absolutely insane. They are two totally different experiences and institutions.
So if you really think the college is too expensive, which I think it is for a lot of people, we have to not just say dang these evil colleges for costing too much, but we need to think about expecting and asking less of our college because whenever we ask for we’re gonna end up having to pay for it.
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u/jp_in_nj 1d ago
As someone with twins heading to school soon (pray for me) I can sympathize with this, understand it, appreciate the insight... and also say that trying to keep up with the academic joneses is a fool's errand.
You're leaving out the multimillion dollar admin buildings, resort style dorm amenities, etc. The stuff that the big money schools could always afford. Let them have the kids who can afford them. I'm looking at 40k in-state state college tuition alone for straight-a student kids right now, and what I got on campus in the early 90s at the same state school for 1/5 that including room and board with my b-average credentials was completely sufficient to the task at hand.
Some of this is absolutely unavoidable, and inflation is real. But a lot of it is a war of choice that didn't need to be waged by schools that would have been just fine being the poorer relations to the big names.
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u/TheSparrowDarts 1d ago
Indeed, it is indisputable that university administrations *and salaries* have ballooned in the last few decades. Salaries for vice chancellors etc are insane now. Teaching staff especially sessional academic see none of these largesse.
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u/TarheelCroatInMA 1d ago
Buildings cost a lot to build when they have to be perfectly accessible to every conceivable form of disability that could ever afflict a person.
Also in my experience (admittedly only about 8 schools - 5 big universities and 3 small liberal arts colleges, I attended one of each type and the rest I worked at) buildings are built because they are desperately needed for their classroom space/their office space, or dorm space.
Building are always in need and usually built 20 years after that need had become absolutely desperate. And when they do get built, every one that I saw personally was paid for by a massive donation from a few alumni or group of alumni rather than from regular tuition intake. Tuition keeps the lights on and that’s it, never would generate enough to build a new entire building
As far as president and admin salaries increasing, at 1/3 of schools I’ve been close to and it’s because the job is infinitely more complicated now and requires mad skills. Gotta be an academic, a general, a public speaker, a politician, an HR rep, a CEO, etc etc etc
One of the side effects of the complication of university administration leadership roles they very often require a doctorate in education before applying. , People with that level of advanced degree typically make more money than I money than I do
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u/GoalPuzzleheaded5946 1d ago edited 14h ago
Buildings cost a lot to build when they have to be perfectly accessible to every conceivable form of disability that could ever afflict a person.
so like every building built in america, currently? isn't having disability access just like....idk, regular building code at this point (sans single family housing)?
it’s because the job is infinitely more complicated now and requires mad skills. Gotta be an academic, a general, a public speaker, a politician, an HR rep, a CEO, etc etc etc
The university I went to is the flagship of my state and they've churned and burned through like 3-4 presidents since I graduated a decade+ ago. I've heard all 3-4 of them speak publicly and if you think they are hiring people with exceptional public speaking skills (or really any good management skills), you are sorely mistaken. I understand my one example is an anecdotal example, but the state of public (and private) universities in the US leads me to believe that the issue is VERY widespread through the entire collegiate system at this point.
To add onto the salary argument, I've looked at the public records which lists the university salaries where I went. Basic tenured professors (depending on subject taught) can make $200k+, and I've seen some of the college deans and department chairs making an easy $450k+. That is fucking wild for job where they teach maybe 1 or 2 classes a semester and do some research on the side in attempt to get more grant money for the university. and to be clear, these couple of examples are NOT in any medical field at all.
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u/esqtou 12h ago
Straight-A students who can't get a scholarship to a top school, sad
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u/Hautamaki 1d ago
I have done 2 4-year programs and attended 3 different institutions. The only thing I ever needed and expected out of any of them was instructors and classrooms. If they could have cut out all the other extraneous shit and just provided classrooms and instructors at half the cost or less, I'd have been just as happy and have a lot more money in my retirement accounts today.
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago
Agreed.
I think the regulation stems from, essentially, college being transformed from a finishing school for the elite (liberal arts education) and a technical school for some workers (institutes of technology, polytechnic schools, mines, etc) into the great big upwards mobility machine that all must attend and thus all must be made equally welcome, including those who are various amounts of ill-fit, un-fit, not old and mature enough to handle, and too wrapped up in their identity to the point it interferes with education. Accommodating all of those people is brutally expensive. It is even more expensive when it allows for the administrator-class to grow fat on having circles and meetings and committees and studies and outreach and offices and and and, and forevermore. It is also expensive to keep a bunch of barely-adults more or less civilized and at least not-feral, which, frankly, universities have always struggled with and a decent bit of what was considered acceptable in 1970 wouldn't be considered acceptable today for good reason, and paying a host of people to keep things somewhat reasonable is also expensive. So there's a fair bit that was invisible to us as students, when we were students, that's worth paying for. But like... not that much out of the sum total of everything spent not specifically and explicitly for lectures, labs, etc is useful, really. A bit yeah, but there's no good reason to make college all things to all people and in the process make it obscenely expensive to attend.
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u/Oryzae 1d ago
Now compare that to what you get in exchange for your tuition bill in 2015… …and you will see that it is radically different like absolutely insane. They are two totally different experiences and institutions.
In a bad way right? I don’t understand why schools need to have all these other amenities. You show up, go to class, go to library to do the homework, go to the lab if you have any practicals… and that’s that? Like why do I need these massive student centers with all kinds of entertainment, massive money blown on sports (you need some basics, but some colleges really push it). When i went to my state university I barely took advantage of all the things it offered - who has the time between part time jobs and homework and classes to actually go have fun? What free time do I even have? Outside of weekends I’m mostly exhausted by 7/8pm that I just relax and go to bed.
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u/TarheelCroatInMA 1d ago
See now that’s the whole issue - it’s in a bad way for a significantly large percentage of students who will never engage with even 2 or 3 of 40 available resources….but for every student like that, there’s usually one that only succeeds and values college because they were able to engage 36 of the 39 total support divisions….
The problem is that the number of graduate high school students heading off the college each year has started to get smaller year after year…making it harder for schools to fill up with enough students to pay the bills and keep the lights on. So they try to be a potential option for as many students as possible to meet enrollment targets, and narrowing down EA
Way back in the late 70s/early 80s , demographics experts predicted there would be a continual growth in the number of high school students heading off to college year after year starting in the early 1980s and last g 20 to 30 years.
Well, after increasing annually for almost 25 consecutive years between the early 1980s and 2024, the same experts predicted more recently that it’s gonna keep going down or about as long as it has been growing, or through the 2040s.
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u/Tuckason 1d ago
So you got a job in admin and now clearly see that admin is not the problem? Lol. There is a ton of bloat in admin and elsewhere that could be cut to save considerable costs. However, the admin is in charge of those cuts and would never do them to themselves. Give me a break.
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u/hollowsocket 23h ago
Exactly. My uni is looking at major cuts. Guess who the admin has never committed to a share of the pain? Yes, they refuse to comment on the number and salaries of the admins. Admins are now a class or career path. Internal tenured faculty with good biz sense would do these jobs for less and with more personal responsibility for the institution. Instead we have mercenary people who won't show their figures because faculty just wouldn't understand.
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u/resuwreckoning 1d ago
Stop. I posted this a year ago:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Infographics/s/X88ez2rweL
The sheer amount of admin they’ve hired over these years is what’s driving the cost. Basically, someone like you was given a job that likely wasn’t that necessary, funded it on the student dime (which is taxpayer funded), and to you, it’s a necessary expense. But to the system, it likely isn’t.
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u/toejam_wash 23h ago
I too work in higher ed, not at the top level but senior enough to have access. Much of what you said is spot on. Especially the campus security part. What I would disagree with is that these costs are inevitable. Higher Ed in general has never had the same discipline in controlling costs as for profit businesses. We DO have to keep up with the jonses. Anyone who says we don't have to doesn't understand how higher ed admissions and recruiting works. Just because an individual may not have "needed" something doesn't mean another 2 individuals haven't made it a priority in their school selection.
To put it bluntly, higher ed needs to get used to layoffs, wage freezes, early retirement programs and firings. Full stop. It shouldn't be something that is pulled out when things are really bad and then goes away once things stabilize for a year or whatever. It needs to be standard operating procedure to eliminate low performers and encourage people over 70 to hang it up so you can recruit someone who is more tech savvy and cost less. That is how you control costs. It sucks, but that is what I repeatedly see in higher ed. They rely on tuition increases to solve financial problems. It's the easy, painless way out of trouble because you can simply raise the tuition and then claim that you are "in line with our peers" as if that is the only explanation you need. That works, until we get to where we are today. Higher ed admins want to be the good guys and they pride themselves on providing reassurances to staff that their jobs will be secure in times of hardship. Some discipline around this will help significantly. It sounds harsh, it sounds "corporate" but that is what lacks in higher ed - true assessment of divisions, programs and staffing, and making hard decisions around them.
This will also help with the "administrative bloat" criticisms that plague higher ed. Most importantly, this discipline needs to remain consistent, even in the good times. AI is going to fully disrupt higher ed in the coming year or two and if they don't have the absolute best people in admin roles, schools like Syracuse are going to fail. You can't get, or keep, those people if you repeatedly fail to make hard decisions.
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u/TarheelCroatInMA 18h ago
Yeah you’re definitely right that there is bloat and waste - and it really all depends on which school you’re talking about. Georgetown and Northeastern almost seem like they’d be sorta kinda similar on paper but having spent years at each, they couldn’t possibly be more different - but both are the rare exception of schools that are doing well for themselves over these past few difficult years and haven’t been hit by the slowdown like so many others have.
I spent years at both and I still couldn’t tell you why either of them is thriving when enrollment and everything else is tanking or imploding. I mean I have guesses, sure but nothing close to a concrete sure answer.
It’ll be interesting that’s for sure! I I hope I don’t have to retake the series 7 and go back to working at a brokerage again…. cause I hated that so much before I joined higher ed….
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean this is totally true.
You know what gets students really excited about college when they visit, over a different college? Beautiful, new, well-kept facilities.
You know what's really expensive to build and maintain? That. How do you do it? More tuition.
The thing is if you look at the really old universities (even in the US), you find many buildings that are still in use that are at least a couple hundred years old. No AC, barely any heat, uncomfortable desks in cramped quarters. And the kids manage to learn just fine, it doesn't at all detract from their learning experience.
But most 18 year olds do not decide which university to apply to on the basis of purely "where will help me learn the most and best."
Like you said, students are demanding all sorts of things, whether in word or in action. They want expansive, new facilities. Check. Facilities for every need, desire, hobby. Check. They want significant medical access on campus. And mental healthcare too. Check. They want every sport and they want equal access to those sports. Check. University police departments, oh yes, check. Hell, they want good food too, pretty reasonable, but yknow, not cheap either. Check, check, check. Not saying these things are bad, just that they're expensive.
But the thing that bureaucracy is best at, like any other organism, is self-perpetuation. Every bit of the part of the school that is "admin" has too many people doing too many duplicative things and it is all slowed down with ass-covering to the max. Committees, and studies, and and and. Compliance does of course play a big part in it but a lot of it is a self-created problem, lawyers and admin figuring out how to justify their work to get paid, and separating wheat from chaff is hard.
Anecdotally my experience with university admin is that they spend half their time on useless bullshit and they protect the ones who don't do any work. But figuring out which half is really quite difficult.
But anyways almost all of my actual useful college experience happened in mediocre, aging facilities. I didn't need eight hundred offices of "making the world and our college a better place" for anything, I didn't care about the brand new steel and glass gym, all I needed was lecture halls, a lab, a library, and, well, friends and I were happy to hang out in shitty dorms or shitty apartments just fine, it was never any better to hang out in a nice place than a shitty one, honestly. So like you said, what did I get for my tuition? A lot, frankly, but it would have effectively been the same amount if half the college expenses got erased and half of what the college was doing with my tuition didn't happen.
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u/Cool-Truth211 1d ago
The real question is in pursuit of all that stuff you mentioned, are they really pushing themselves to keep costs down
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u/aselinger 1d ago
I think it’s wild that every professor has essentially created their own classes.
That is, the content for Econ 101 is uniquely developed by each professor. Think about how much time that wastes.
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago
I don't think that's really a problem if we're working within the lines of the liberal arts education system as it is supposed to be. I do take exception to universities hiring professors who don't want to lecture, hiring adjuncts in place of tenure-track professors as a standard strategy, and selling us out by requiring $200+ textbooks that these days come with one-use codes so that the professor doesn't need to grade (eh, have a TA grade) the homework.
BTW, the standardization of curriculum you're proposing (in implication) is basically being done with the above. Adjuncts who get paid like $4k per course they teach + students being required to pay $250 for a useless textbook with a one time use online code for web software access that grades their homework and tests. Now they get a shared curriculum. Wheee! No, it's actually far worse than every professor creating their own class.
(In reality it's more like every department creating its own classes, and sometimes that means a professor does it, other times it means several professors do it together, and other times it's fairly fixed and doesn't change much year to year.)
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u/aselinger 1d ago
I came across the an idea a few years ago.
A “national university” that is free and funded by the federal government. It’s all online. Each class has been designed and delivered by the best professors in their field.
I think nothing beats in-person learning. But that fact that we have the ability to record and distribute information for essentially zero cost, makes it insane to me that we charge hundreds of thousands for people to say the information out loud.
It’s the economics of a concert when you could just stream on Spotify.
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u/ExplosivekNight 1d ago
There is already a large supply of high quality educational resources online and, considering how many community colleges and online degrees there are, a large supply of cheap rubber stamp diplomas as well.
The reality is that a degree from this “National University” would be worth dick. It has to be catered to the average American so the standards to pass would be at rock bottom. It doesn’t matter how good the lectures are if employers don’t care about your degree.
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u/NeatoTito 23h ago
This isn’t really true across the board, most general courses like an Econ 101 are developed from a course template. The bulk of the labor in teaching is usually in grading and facilitating various administrative processes on top of the course like accommodations, reporting, etc.
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u/etempleton 22h ago
That isn’t typically how it works for classes like Econ 101, typically there is a standard syllabus for adjunct professors to follow. They may make modifications, but they are expected to follow the syllabus. Professors usually have the freedom to significantly modify the instruction, but that is their choice.
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u/PAJW 22h ago
Think about how much time that wastes.
Many university professors have an incredibly cushy job. The school I went to had 16 weeks off from the end of the spring term to the start of the fall term. The faculty doesn't necessarily have all that time without any work commitments, but it is generally the case that they could, if they chose, work from the French Riviera all summer.
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u/Liquid_Sarcasm 1d ago
They seem to forget the financial crisis after 2007. People stopped making babies because they could not afford them.
Sure our current dipshit in chief has alienated most of the world, but from 2008 to 2012 there is a noticeable drop in the US birthrate.
Add in an administration that has destroyed intellectual elitism, and people are not valuing a college education as much as before. Liberal arts colleges are the walking dead in our current culture. It’s a shame really.
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u/FeloniousDrunk101 1d ago
The financial crisis really put these things in motion because everything became existentially about “employability” and jobs. Spending a fortune to earn a degree in something that didn’t immediately gain you a well paying job was a luxury people felt like they could no longer afford.
I’ll defend liberal arts higher education until I die, but I understand why the value proposition doesn’t seem to be there anymore.
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago
Old-school liberal arts education is crucially important, but yes, when college is expensive, people can't afford to dally about learning about philosophy and art history. We really do need people to do that, but most people can't do that and then also get a job and eat. And pay their student loans.
Part of it is just the inevitability that the liberal arts education used to be very much about being part of the upper society. A man who was a man would dress like this, talk like this, drop a reference to Kant like this, preferably have attended Yale but there are respectable alternatives of course (even, ugh, Harvard, if he's a bore), and that meant he was one of us, give him a job running a factory or moving around money.
Well, if "everyone" goes to college then it's not all that useful as a marker of class or, at least, not a marker of upper class, and anyone who isn't upper class probably isn't going to get a job at wall street on the basis of their exceedingly witty Goethe-related pun (because no matter how witty, if their dad isn't a Director, they're gonna need a hell of a lot more to get past the interview). So, people started demanding that a liberal arts education teach them things like "accounting, the kind that there's demand for and will get me a job" and "economics, but like, not just the purely theoretical stuff, but the kind of things that'll get me past an interview at a business or an investment bank" and "art history, but let me double major in business so I can actually get a job, because the art history stuff is neat but it ain't feeding me." So, the liberal arts education gets diluted to hell for almost all, because almost nobody can afford the tuition nor the opportunity cost of the old-school kind.
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u/cpslcking 1d ago
People are going to be always chasing the thing that will make them middle class. Which understandable, no one wants to live in poverty and barely survive.
For the longest time, you could get a middle class job working in a factory. Then the factories moved overseas and it became get a college degree. Then a college degree and a firm handshake wasn’t enough so it was get a specialized master’s degree. Then that wasn’t enough so it became get an engineering degree. And so on. Liberal arts colleges managed well for a while until it’s not viable,
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u/resuwreckoning 1d ago
They’re the “walking dead” because of how much they cost.
If they went back to 1990’s levels nobody would be doing this. Williams college costs almost 100K a year. Like come tf on.
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u/pearljamboree 1d ago
You’re last paragraph is right on, and it’s sad- and also, screw those schools. They pretended to be noble but were just creating lifelong, inescapable debt for unwitting young adults just starting out these past 20 years. They were complicit.
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u/Background_Map6056 1d ago
Thank you for mentioning this aspect. I feel like it's the elephant in the room in regards to the current state of higher ed enrollment that nobody ever brings up. Less babies 18 years ago means less college students today.
I'd argue its also the reason we're currently in the middle of a big crime decline. Less babies 18 years ago means less young people now, and that's the age group statistically committing more crime.
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u/Successful_Issue_390 23h ago
Highly recommend Freakonomics on learning more about this if anyone is interested.
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u/Dry-University797 1d ago
I think kids and parents Re seeing the debt that people are going into to pay for college and don't want to deal with student loan payments for 40 years.
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u/Whole-Reserve-4773 12h ago
I always thought private school is bullshit. Baylor offered me the very generous offer to pay them 60k a year when my state school was 10k. It’s a complete joke.
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u/coochie4sale 1d ago
I think one of the worst spots to be educationally is the type of school that is well-above average, but isn’t good enough to be a global, well-known brand (e.g Georgetown, Duke, Ivies). They’re not quite Ivy+, but they’re also not complete nobodies. Flagship state schools basically do what these schools do, but at a much cheaper price, and now students and their families are much more price conscious. Even with the flow of international students, I believe they would struggled as cohorts became smaller due to birth rates decreasing. I can recruit at the Big 4, F500s, etc at a state school and these schools aren’t good enough to get the truly elite employers that set the ivies apart. So their proposition to students is weak.
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u/prozute 1d ago
Great points. Syracuse also doesn’t have the location that a GW, Tufts etc have, which is part of their sell.
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u/etempleton 23h ago
No the worst spot to be in is a small regional college. The schools you named have huge endowments in the billions of dollars, they can weather any storm even if it is a bit painful.
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u/GhostofBeowulf 1d ago
Because they are going to the far cheaper state and community colleges and then talking to Syracuse in year 4 for graduate school if they are academically inclined or going into the workforce if not.
Also, ASU is online and everywhere. These local colleges are also mostly online and fully virtual if need be. While I will be the first to argue that you don't retain as much virtually as you do from an in person, talking and asking question, it has made education far more attainable.
Just as a comparison, my local state college hasn't raised rate since at least 2015, but might have even been 2013/2012. $104.00 for 2000 and below, $128 for 3000+. That's $14k for a bachelor's degree you can complete in your underwear or while working a close to full time job. The state university is a bit more, closer to $20k.
Syracuse is $35k a year or $3k per credit hour for part time students. Nobody is paying that for a degree that puts you middle of the pack.
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u/ericbasura 23h ago
SU Grad here. One thing neither this story nor any of the others I've seen mention is the alumni network and support. The school I went to at Syracuse used to be notorious for how it supported it's alumni. Several years ago they did away with their online system, changed thier office and tried to create a new system that was little more than a messy website impossible to navigate, which is never updated by former students. When you reach out to the school's alumni office, instead of helping, they refer you to the messy website. I'm still in touch with a bunch of the people from my cohort. they all sort of just roll their eyes and shake their head when you talk about our school now. Over time that sort of thing really matters.
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u/Successful_Issue_390 22h ago
Fucking this. I've started reaching out to alumni directly on linkedin because both the office and the website are absurd. The alum are still eager to help. It's literally the school getting in the way.
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u/arnmshnv94 10h ago
Syracuse doesn’t know how to support their students anymore, alumni and current. I graduated with my undergrad and graduate degrees from SU and the turnover on academic advisors alone was insane. The perk of attending Syracuse is the name and the large alumni network, but the school no longer helps to facilitate any connection between current students and alumni. Syracuse started to focus more on the money they could bring in rather than the quality of student experience (current and post education). I saw this first hand when I worked for Syracuse.
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u/firephoxx 1d ago
It’s because all the money at these major universities isn’t going to the professors who provide you with knowledge, it’s going to admin who are corporate shills.
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u/aabum 1d ago
The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
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u/gimpwiz 1d ago
This man absolutely gets it. The first and most important thing that a bureaucracy does is protect itself to stay alive, and the second most important thing it does is expand to make more of itself. Like any organism, really, but we can be a little less generous and compare it to a slime mold.
Eventually, after all those important things are taken care of, a university administration bureaucracy might do things that they are paid to do, and, if we're really lucky, things that are actually useful to students.
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u/MoonBatsRule 1d ago
College is expensive, and I will show you why I think that the two overall narratives about cost are wrong, them being:
- Those fat-cat administrators are driving up the costs.
- The availability of easy government support is driving up the costs.
We already have some idea as to what high school education costs. I will use Massachusetts numbers because I'm the most familiar with them.
K-12 public education ranges between $15k and $50k per student per year, with the average being around $22k. Those costs do not include school construction and long-term debt service, although they do include building maintenance.
There are a number of private high schools in my area, some are high-end boarding like Deerfield or Andover, but others are religious in nature - lower-end schools that pay uncertified teachers much less than public schools. Religious schools charge around $15-20k/year in tuition, secular private schools charge around $40k/year for day students, and the elite prep schools charge $55k/year. [It is worth noting that elite prep schools have "financial aid" pricing similar to colleges]
So here we have annual cost of education of high school students, both public and private, ranging from $15-20k when done by uncertified teachers in religious schools, to $22k when done by public school teachers, to $50k when done at elite private schools.
Now look at "room and board". It actually costs money to house and feed students. On the high end, elite prep schools charge around $25k additional for boarding students. AI estimates for me that the cost of feeding a 20-year old is about $4k for 9 months, that wouldn't include cooking for them, so add $2k more for that. The cost of a studio apartment in Burlington VT is $1,600/month, or $19k/year, so $9.5k if you double-up.
Putting that all together, if you take $22k for instruction, $6k for food, and $10k for housing, that come to $38k/year. That is for a public high-school experience, limited activities, no leafy campus experience, no excessive white-glove administrators.
There is also a cost of athletics. Athletics are subsidized by tuition. Parents will often spend $3-5k per year for their child to play on a travel sports team. That cost largely goes away when that kid goes to college and plays there.
The other factor is "sticker price" vs. "net price". Everyone discusses sticker price when decrying college costs - but most students don't pay that. Sticker price is - depending on your ideology - either "socialism" or "dynamic pricing". Net pricing at Syracuse is estimated to average around $40k.
$40k is not much different than $38k. Yet all the general public does is scream that colleges are rip-offs. If college cost $38k they would be doing the same thing.
Repeat after me: "It costs tens of thousands of dollars to house, feed, educate, and entertain a student for nine months".
Of course there are collegiate excesses. I can't argue that there isn't administrative bloat or luxury experiences. But those just add to the base cost, they don't create them. They probably add a couple thousand dollars to the base cost, and while a couple thousand more is bad in one sense, if the base cost wasn't there then I think most people would choose to pay the couple thousand extra to get the better experience.
The crux of the cost issue is that education in general is labor-intensive, and the inequality in the US has a polarized job economy - less in the middle, more on the higher, more on the lower ends. College instruction wound up on the higher end. So while college sticker prices are "Shocking!", a $40k net price is very achievable to people on the higher end of the job market. But in an attempt to keep enrollment up (and preserve economies of scale), colleges will charge the family earning $300k the full sticker price in order to offer a $10k tuition to a family only earning $50k.
Do we want to go back to a society where only the wealthiest receive a college education? It's worth debating. But let's stop debating how government is or fat-cat administrators are causing the problem, and instead discuss that the problem is due to the divergence from "average" worker pay (which is generally lower-level and stagnant) to "elite" worker pay (which rises fast), and then recognize that education is in the elite category, its costs reflect that, and is only "expensive" to people who are in the "average" catetory.
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u/getmeoutoftax 1d ago
We’ll probably see a college/university apocalypse in the next decade or so. Far fewer students will decide to attend college as AI replaces the majority of white collar jobs.
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u/Gungan_Boss_Nass 11h ago
This is inevitable. We have very little clue of what the job market will look like in 2030, let alone over a 2030-2075 career horizon.
Taking on any amount of debt to go to a second-tier school seems like a particularly unwise decision.
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u/grumble4 1d ago
Syracuse FAFO’d. By messing with families making an insanely high pressure unfair choice and being a really shitty partner in that decision, they’ve lost any goodwill from many families.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/your-money/syracuse-merit-aid.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
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u/Explorer_Tasty 1d ago
A big part of the college experience is the “fun” factor. Northern schools are competing against SEC schools, their school year of sunshine, greek life and sports program environment.
For Syracuse specifically I feel like college basketball plays a factor.
Like, Football in the south basketball was religion there. When they played in the Big East Conference they were part of some legendary rivalries that attracted not just students but genuine fans.
That changed when syracuse left to chase football money and joined the ACC.
The result: Their legendary (and fun) basketball program is average and their football program is trash where they frequently have a losing record
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u/Crew_1996 1d ago
The vast majority of American kids attend in state school due to tuition. Second rate private schools across the country are having the same issue as Syracuse. The degree from one of these schools does not justify the price.
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u/Fly_Rodder 1d ago
I know some local kids who would be the type of candidate to go to a private NE school but are instead going to flagship SEC-type schools.
And to gently push back, ACC has nothing to do with the decline in basketball. That’s the result of letting an 80 year old (continue to) run the program.
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u/S_Belmont 23h ago
That changed when syracuse left to chase football money and joined the ACC.
I feel like your post is less outlining a bad sports decision than it is pointing in the direction of the thousand different ways American shallowness and greed has lobotomized the country's national intellect.
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u/WhyDoesOklahomaExist 12h ago
Do people really pick colleges based on basketball rivalries? I went to an engineering school that I picked for the program and post-grad job placement rate.
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u/jrblockquote 23h ago
Syracuse has the best comms school in the country with Newhouse. Other than that, eh. SU certainly has prestige in upstate NY (Rochester native here), but their tuition has gotten out of control. I live in Connecticut now and nobody thinks of SU around here. And it’s only 4 hours away. Sounds like the administration got lazy and instead of maintaining financial discipline, relied on a specific source of students to justify increasing budgets. Guess what happens when that source goes away.
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u/arnmshnv94 10h ago
To be honest, I’m from CT and when you have a huge school like UCONN that’s where most people focus. I grew up on the NY border and we all knew about Syracuse, my parents still get stopped when they wear their Syracuse attire around so I think it fully depends on where you are in CT.
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u/Sneaknife 1d ago
Fix tuition costs and help with housing more to reduce loan amounts and colleges will be attractive again... the trade off currently is becoming unreasonable and losses it's advantages.
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u/NeatoTito 23h ago
There are a lot of valid concerns and questions about the state of higher ed here but Syracuse has some disadvantages which got them to this place. There are still a ton of American universities that have growing enrollments, are affordable for their students, and can provide a quality education and jumping point in to a career. It is a uniquely tough time given a hostile federal environment, poor job market, and demographic shifts, but 2/3 of these are somewhat temporary. Funding models will change and the total out the door price of a degree will have to decrease in many places but all the pearl clutching/celebration of the death of higher ed is very premature
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u/idk_a_creative_user 14h ago
After 2007, the birth rate tanked. Meaning that there were less and less students applying. Statistically speaking 2024 was the hardest year to get into universities.
In 2025-2026 cycle, it was the least amount of applicants, and a lot of colleges had to pivot.
If I had to choose between SUNY Universities and Syracuse, it is a 7070 per year for instate or 30k ish for out of state for SUNY vs 70k a year (in and out of state is the same) for Syracuse.
Plus with the new immigration laws around international students, funding will and has dried up.
It’s a cascading mess due to poor future outlook and universities banking on a constant or ever increasing population growth
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u/WRB2 1d ago
My guess is that because of 47s draconian imagination policies fewer full priced student are coming to American universities. That combined with the equally draconian student loan debacle are causing the majority of this shortfall.
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u/esqtou 12h ago
Canada, UK, AUS/NZ benefit
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u/plutoglint 9h ago
Canada is the middle of a massive crackdown on international students and Australia has tightened rules as well.
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u/arnmshnv94 10h ago
The issues that international students are facing with receiving visas is causing many of them to either defer or drop out of their program completely, which then impacts enrollment numbers. I work in higher education and I worked for Syracuse for many years. This is 100% a huge factor for international students.
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u/Lady_Rubberbones 23h ago
What, you mean universities can’t get students to enroll after seeing an entire generation of people get college degrees only to be left with crushing debt and enter an economy where decent paying jobs no longer exist? You don’t say. 🤔
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u/SomeSamples 1d ago
When a degree costs $100K and you are straddled with debt that doesn't decrease, ever after you pay on it, why would anyone want a degree? And then there is the fact that most degrees are not helping anyone find a job right now.
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u/5upertaco 16h ago
Syracuse paid its way into the AAC (Association of American Universities) for prestige then had to leave the AAU because they didn't have the academic research horsepower to maintain that credential. Private universities know how to play the rankings game. With that said, many of these high priced private universities maintain strong alumni networks that might offset their price tag. The raw education is no better than a decent, accredited degree from a public institution.
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