Visión de un economista conservador de los EEUU, en Chile dirían ‘neoliberal’, sobre el aumento de costos de las universidades de dicho país. Interesantes dos columnas de opinión para un debate que en nuestro país apenas comienza.
Why does college cost so much?
By Richard Vedder and Matthew Denhart, Special to CNN
December 2, 2011 — Updated 1422 GMT (2222 HKT)
Editor’s note: Richard Vedder is distinguished professor of economics at Ohio University, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “Going Broke by Degree: Why College Costs Too Much.” Matthew Denhart is administrative director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity.
(CNN) — College costs too much, both for students and for society as a whole.
This year, according to the College Board, average published in-state tuition and fee plus room/board charges exceed $17,000 at four-year public institutions, a 6% increase from only one year earlier.
In 2009, spending by Americans for post-secondary education totaled $461 billion, an amount 42% greater than in 2000, after accounting for inflation. This $461 billion is the equivalent of 3.3% of total U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) and an amount greater than the total GDP of countries such as Sweden, Norway and Portugal.
Richard Vedder
Richard Vedder
The public is taking notice. The Occupy Wall Street protesters have featured student debt forgiveness as one of their demands, and students in California have demonstrated several times in the past year after their tuition was raised twice.
Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan addressed some of these concerns in a speech where he urged colleges to get serious about their cost problem. But there’s only so much the federal government can (and should) do. The underlying structure of American higher education needs dramatic reform before there will be any relief in sight.
Whereas private businesses cut prices for consumers and costs to themselves through efficiencies that increase profits and incomes, universities lack those incentives.
Indeed, the typical successful university president views his or her key constituencies not to be the customer (students and their parents who pay tuition charges or the granters of research funds), but rather others — the faculty, important alumni, key administrators, trustees and occasionally politicians. They please these constituencies by raising, and then spending, lots of money.
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They effectively bribe powerful faculty with low teaching loads, high salaries and good parking. They give the alumni successful intercollegiate athletic programs that are expensive and usually financed off the backs of students. They give trustees whatever they want, no matter how costly or eccentric.
Universities do a second thing unheard of in the private sector — they often deliberately turn customers away.
A fast food chain or discount store succeeds by selling more hamburgers or television sets; no customer was ever kept from spending money at McDonald’s by an “admissions office.” Yet for American universities, the “bottom line” is measured by college rankings that often reward schools for turning people away, becoming more “selective.” Many believe the Ivy League offers the best education in the world, so why do we encourage those elite institutions to deny access to thousands of highly qualified students every year?
Like health care, prices are rising rapidly for higher education because of the predominant role of third-party payments — federal student loans and grants, state government support for institutions and students, private philanthropic gifts and endowment income. College seniors who borrow to finance their education now graduate with an average of $24,000 in debt, and student loan debt now tops credit card debt among Americans. When some else is paying a lot of the bills, students are less sensitive to the price, thus allowing the colleges to care less about keeping prices under control. And the nonprofit nature of institutions reduces incentives for colleges and universities to be efficient.
The key to getting costs under control is contained in three words that begin with the letter “I”– information, incentives and innovation.
Customers are ignorant of college outcomes because we do not measure in any coherent and consistent manner what students actually learn, how well they do after graduation or whether they think better in a critical manner as a result of the college experience. Even basic financial information on how colleges spend money is often not fully shared with trustees or key politicians who help fund or oversee college operations.
As mentioned above, incentives to conserve resources are few. Once, as a department chairman, I successfully battled for more faculty members to do the same amount of work, thus lowering productivity. The result? My faculty evaluated me highly so I got a nice raise. Where else do the employees get to decide who their bosses will be or how much they will be paid?
If information and incentives are provided, innovation will come. Already, we know several online and other innovations can work to deliver high-quality education services at potentially lower prices. Duncan highlighted Western Governor’s University, a nonprofit online institution, as one such example.
Nondegree forms of education need more emphasis, since the number of college graduates exceeds the number of jobs available in occupations for which degrees historically have been desirable — jobs in the managerial, technical and professional areas. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2008 some 29.7% of flight attendants, 24.4% of retail salespersons and 17.4% of baggage porters had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
According to my analysis of the data, more than 17 million college graduates were “underemployed” in 2008. Surely these people needed some form of post high school training, but an expensive four-year degree may not have been the best approach. Rather, perhaps we should be encouraging some students to develop skills at lower costs by utilizing innovative free courses provided by groups such as the Saylor Foundation and Khan Academy.
College costs cannot rise faster than income forever — we cannot afford it. Necessity is the mother of invention. Like it or not, American higher education is in for big change in the next generation.

Will Higher-Education Costs Be a Major Election Issue?
By Richard Vedder, The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2011, 4:39 pm
Are we on a threshold of a level of public interest in college costs where that topic becomes a major issue in the 2012 presidential election, rather than some small side issue? Economists like myself think margins are important—and at some point if the marginal benefit of something rises while the marginal cost falls, people will want more of it. A threshold is reached that moves people from apathy to action. We have been creeping towards that threshold in higher education for years, as rising college costs and decreased perceived benefits have led to more and more discussion: Is higher education worth it? Nonetheless, compared with issues such as unemployment, health care, environmental concerns, international terrorism, etc., higher education has been a small issue—mainly because at any moment of time it impacts only a small portion of the people—maybe 5 or 10 percent.
Two things in the past week have led me to believe we are nearing the threshold of broader national debate. First, with the help of former sidekick Matt Denhart, I wrote an opinion piece on rising college costs for CNN.com that has received well over 2,000 comments—an extraordinary number even for a top-viewed Web site. Second, the Obama administration, which is obviously in full campaign mode, has started arguing that it is interested in doing something about college costs.
While it is nice that the president is willing to have a conversation in the White House on the issue, it was extremely disappointing in terms of whom he had invited to participate. First, it appears it was largely university presidents. Arguably that is a little like inviting Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to a conference on terrorism, or asking Charlie Manson to speak at a conclave on the protection of children from predators. While university presidents may be a part of any solution, the fact that they have fiercely ignored public concerns about higher-education costs in order to engage in cost-enhancing moves to appease internal constituencies suggests that true reform must come from outside the academy. And not from the likes of other attendees like Jane Wellman, an Establishment type who has a few interesting PowerPoint slides but rarely proposes anything substantive in the way of change. And certainly not Jamie Merisotis of the Luminia Foundation, who wants to divert ever more public funds to support expanded higher-education ventures of dubious value.
Another problem is that, I understand, no for-profit institutions were invited, nor even the politically more favored public comprehensive colleges (only one community-college leader was in attendance). Most incremental enrollments have come from these institutions. They are lower cost by many measures and have interesting things to say. To be sure, there were some schools represented with a good message to tell, notably Berea College, but where were those actively promoting substantive reform? As one who toiled for over a year on a national commission on these issues, it is extremely naive to believe that anything substantive could come out of a single meeting. In my opinion it had a lot more to do with presidential politics than anything substantive, although, again, I am glad that the issue has been raised in the public consciousness.
Speaking of politics, let me be an Equal Opportunity Offender: the Republican pronouncements on higher-education cost issues has been far from illuminating. In particular, the hearing that Representative Virginia Foxx recently held was, by all accounts I’ve heard, extremely disappointing, with some of the same individuals testifying as at the Obama heart-to-heart. Where were the real innovators—companies with intriguing low-cost instructional ideas like StraighterLine, or nonprofit organizations like Khan Academy or the Saylor Foundation? Where were those wanting to radically revise, or even eliminate, our flawed student-loan program? Maybe they were there (I was in Europe), but my sidekick Jonathan Robe who attended says it was a wishy-washy hearing, not raising truculently issues that need to be addressed or getting at the root causes of the problem—poor information, abysmal incentives, and, consequently, inadequate innovation.