A Little More Data on Tuition Inflation

One of my previous posts speculated on the relationship between the availability of student loans and the rising cost of higher education.  Inflation of tuition is a complicated issue, but let me share two more pieces of data on the subject. Both are specific to the University of Colorado, but I feel are at least somewhat representative of the larger picture.

First, state support for higher education has dropped dramatically.  In effect, this transfers the actual cost of higher education from the taxpayers to the students.  You can see the fraction of the state budget devoted to higher ed in Colorado below (click to embiggen). 

In the same time period the average cost of a state-school increased by almost a factor of 4 and the state funding in Colorado dropped by about a factor of 4.

The second piece of data concerns another idea I've heard batted around which is that tuition inflation is being driven by excessive pay for administrators and/or faculty.  CU's provost (the head of the Boulder campus) was paid $389,000 last year, which is a lot of money, but it also comes out to 0.03% of the university's operating expenses for 2012.  You can argue that administrative pay is too high, but it's just not a big enough chunk of the budget to be the cause of tuition hikes.  As for faculty pay, a very unscientific study of the faculty in my department shows that they work on average 55 hours per week and make about 85% of what someone with a comparable level of education and experience makes in the private sector according to PayScale.com.

Again, I don't claim to have all the answers, but I do think it's important to get as much data into this debate as possible.  Thoughts?

Does the Availability of Student Loans Drive Up Tuition?

President Obama was here at CU recently taking some great pictures at a local hang-out and talking about student loans.  I'm not going to get into the political issues around student loan interest rates, but something from the discussion caught my interest - the idea that the availability of student loans has caused tuition to rise.  A survey released today shows that 47% of Americans believe that it has.  Clearly the idea behind making student loans more available is not to drive up the price of tuition but rather increase access to higher education, so if in fact easy access to student loans drives up prices then we have a serious problem.

I don't have an answer to this question, but here are a couple bits of data to mull over from the College Board's Trends in Higher Education reports. First, here is the average inflation-adjusted cost of college tuition relative to 1981. 

The fact that a college education today is somewhere near three times as expensive as it was 30 years ago even when adjusting for inflation is alarming, and the natural call is to find ways to make it more affordable, particularly for low-income families.  Student loans are often touted as ways to help many more students for less than it would cost to simply fund the university directly with state or federal funds.

The second graph shows the inflation-adjusted pool of money available for student grants (in blues) and loans (in reds and oranges) per student over the last decade.

From 2000 to the present, tuition has gone up by about 50% and the total financial aid per student has increased by almost exactly the same percentage from about $9,000 per student to a little over $14,000 per student.

Of course correlation does not imply causation and frankly it may be that the increase in tuition is driving the increased availability of financial aid, not the other way around, but I do find this idea intriguing.  As people that have spent a lot of time at colleges, I'm interested in your thoughts.  Does increased financial aid lead to higher tuition and if so how can the government help keep higher ed affordable?

Simple Math: You Fix the Deficit

Raise your hand if you like the idea of a balanced federal budget.  Now keep your hand up if you actually have some idea of what it would take to achieve a balanced federal budget.  When nearly 15% of what the federal government spends is coming from borrowing it's very hard to actually figure out where one might come up with half a trillion dollars or so to close the gap.

The New York Times has come out with an online deficit-reduction form which allows you to pick and choose among dozens of measures designed to increase tax revenue or slash spending in order to get the federal government to stop spending more than it brings in.  I suggest playing with it to see just what it's going to take to get budget balanced.

The funny thing to me is that this is really extremely simple math (TAXES - SPENDING = 0) however it seems to be somewhat more complicated in practice than in theory.  This is one reason why I am a theorist.

Your Tax Dollars at Work

Just so you know the government set up a web site that contains all information about government spending. To quote from the web site,

"The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 (Transparency Act) requires a single searchable website, accessible by the public for free that includes for each Federal award:

1. the name of the entity receiving the award;
2. the amount of the award;
3. information on the award including transaction type, funding agency, etc;
4. the location of the entity receiving the award;
5. a unique identifier of the entity receiving the award."

After that brilliant introduction this is the main graphic that is on the front page of the web site:
Thanks government bureaucracy! That makes it all better! (and clearer too!) Too bad they can't do math...

New Government Health Plan

This comes from the office of Kevin Brady in the House (original file here). This is intended to give a map to the new government bureaucracy that we will have if the Democratic Health Care bill passes. Sigh...government bureaucracy at its best.

My Response to Joe

I was going to write a comment in response to Joe's response to me but like Nick's response to my post my comment became to long so I decided to make it another post.

First, I disagree with the assertion that Nuclear energy and associated technology can't be exported. We can, do and will export nuclear technology. We have been exporting the technology for years to places like India and Brazil. Brazil even changed their constitution to allow for the construction of nuclear power plants a few years ago (about the same time Iran was doing the same thing. We all know about Iran but how many people know about Brazil getting nuclear power? There is a reason for that.). So if it comes to exporting technology, which ever one we go with will be the one we export.

I agree with Joe in that we need renewable sources of energy, but sometimes we need to use the non-renewable sources so that we can make the renewable sources.

I think the environmental impact of using fossil fuels will actually be less than the politicians make it out to be, and it may be possible that it will be beneficial to the planet (if they are allowed to make a worst-case scenario prediction I think I am allowed to make a best case scenario prediction and the truth will be somewhere in between).

I think that in the global climate change issue (and the related fossil fuel issue) there are two main problems. The first is the human cost. Fossil fuels have been cheep, plentiful, useful and relatively easy to use. The energy density of fossil fuels is phenomenal (though nowhere near that of nuclear fuel), and that is why they are so useful. They are also a very convenient form of energy to transport and to carry. But the problem with them actually has nothing to do with the fuel itself but rather the immense political and human cost of having the fuel. Like Nick pointed out with Iraq, that is the true cost of oil, and it is a cost that is too high. If oil was available without associated wars, contention and bloodshed, I would not object to using it so much. Nuclear power does not come with these political or human problems.

The second problem is the political cost of implementing the new "green" policies. The current push to "Go Green" is too much, too soon and at the wrong time. If it had been any other point in time our government, economy and society could have handled it, but right now the cost of pushing "green technologies" may be too great. If this economic recession starts hurting more and more people and the find out that they have to pay for developing green technology and to pay for being "green" on top of everything that is happening, then there will be a backlash and it will severely damage any prospect of building an infrastructure of renewable energy. Thus I think that the nuclear option is the best option at the moment.

New Scientific Dissent on Global Warming?

I just read an article in the Wall Street Journal that gives a very different picture of the scientific consensus on global warming. They do not deny global warming, the rise of global temperatures has been well documented, but they are contesting the cause of global warming. It appears that there is a growing opinion that humans (and human produced CO2, which is now the subject of legislation) do not contribute as much to global warming. The article implies that there are more scientists who have been discounting the doomsday scenarios that politicians have been using to pressure people into accepting the legislation.

This article should come with a few grains of salt:

1. It's from the Wall Street Journal.

2. It's published just a few days before a key vote on the cap and trade bill in Congress.

But there are a few reasons why we should pay attention to this article:

1. The cap and trade method that they are proposing in Congress is based on similar legislation in Europe, Australia and New Zealand, which is now being reversed or abandoned because it is "inefficient" and does not accomplish what it intends. In other words, now that the US is finally getting on the bandwagon everyone else is getting off.

2. The article claims "earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02." I wonder if this is true (the first part) because I have not seen good solid proof of how the earth's temperature has changed over the past 5-10 years.

3. Solar Cycles. Though not mentioned in the article, my understanding was that one key test of the theory that humans are the cause of global warming and not the sun, is to have accurate data on the sun for more than one solar cycle. So far we only have good reliable data for one cycle and we are now entering the second. The current solar minimum has been unprecedentedly low, but I have not heard in a few months what the sun is doing. Also what effect is this having on temperatures? This year I have heard rumblings in the news about "A Year Without Summer" in some parts of the world. I wonder if that is true.

What is your take on this? Does this have some scientific merit or is this just political maneuvering?

Good News for Science Budgets?

President Bush has released his fiscal-year 2009 budget request and it contains good news for science funding. The President's budget request contains:

• A 13.7% increase in research funding for the NSF, which will primarily go to research grants and graduate fellowships.
• A modest 1.7% + inflation increase in the budget for NASA's science mission directorate.
• A 16.8% increasing in funding for the DOE's office of science. This includes a 17.9% increase in funding for nuclear physics and a 72% increase in funding for fusion research.

Overall, the request looks positive, however last year's request was similarly positive, as was the budget initially passed by Congress and we all know how that turned out (see my previous post here). In an election year with the threat of an economic recession on the horizen, nothing is certain, but at least the request looks good. Here's to hoping that the actual budget has half the increases in the request.

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On a side note, for the first time, the White House did not print copies of the budget request and instead issued a pdf file. The FY2008 budget request was over 2000 pages long and even my 74 year-old grandma has been using pdf's for the better part of a decade, so one has to wonder what took them so long?

I'd like to be the first to welcome our government documents to the year 1997. You're only a decade behind and with your continued hard work, someday you might just get to within a few years of the present. Keep it up!

Google, "Open Wireless" Internet, and Bob Dylan

The FCC has freed up a lot of airwaves/radiowaves by forcing TV broadcasters to transmit their signals digitally. The hot new slice of airwave is the 700 MHz which the FCC says must be used for data transmission. They are holding an auction to sell it.

Enter Google. Google wants there to be "Open Wireless" internet. They want people to have a common wireless link that could be used by anyone, anywhere to use all aspects of the internet. Specifically this is what they want: 1) let customers download and use any software on the network; 2) let customers use any device on the network; 3) sell wireless space to any third-party wireless provider at commercial rates; 4) allow the wireless network to interconnect with other Internet service providers.

Google will bid $4.6 Billion for the deal. Google first wants the FCC to promise they can use the 700 MHz band for the above purpose. $4.6 Billion is the negotiating money Google is willing to put up. It also happens to be the FCC fund raising goal for the auction.

Other companies like Verison and AT&T don't like the idea. This would hurt *their* business model. In my opinion I think they need to wake up and realize their business model is the past and Google's is the future. Google makes lots of money with their business model. So to help educate the world that business models are evolving and that the future is an open source business model I have a little song I would like to take credit for. (With a little help from Bob Dylan.)

Come gather 'round businesses
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come the Verisons and Microsofts
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
This open business model
Is beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

More about this here, here and here.

Fundimentalists Disrupt Hindu Prayer

The U.S. Senate made history yesterday when the opening prayer, given at the start of every day in the Senate chambers, was offered by Rajan Zed, a Hindu from Reno, Nevada. The sad news is that as Mr. Zed (pictured on the right) approached the podium dressed in traditional Hindu robes, three Christian fundamentalists in the gallery began yelling "This is an abomination". One of them offered a 'prayer', which contained the following: "Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight". The protesters were arrested and forcibly removed from the Senate chambers. While being dragged/carried out of the chambers, they yelled "We are Christians and patriots".

The intolerance of these protesters amazes me. These whack-o's seem to think that because most of America is monotheistic, there is something morally wrong with a polytheist offering a prayer in the Senate. Most Hindus, just like most Christians, most Jews, and most Muslims believe in a moral code that promotes peace, moral behavior, and kindness - all things we should want more of in this country. From a governmental standpoint, we shouldn't care what brand of religious philosophy (or lack thereof) leads people to do good so long as it leads them to do good. I personally feel that the government should encourage all moral religions (that excludes groups like Christian and Muslim extremists or cults) because in my experience all moral religions that I have experience with help people to become better. Sure there are extremists who make religion look bad, but for the most part, religion has improved the morals and lives of those it has touched.

I say let Hindus, Buddhists, Native American religious leaders, and any other moral religious figures pray in the Senate. If their belief in their God or Gods leads them to do good, our nation could use more of it.

More on this incident can be found in articles by the Washington Post and the Times of India.