I just saw the article by Laura Meckler and Josh Mitchell about Clinton's approach to fixing higher education:
More details are available at:
Clinton follows the usual misguided governmental problem solving game plan, namely throwing money at the problem. In her case, it's throwing $350 billion of federal funding over 10 years at public institutions, with the requirement that universities control spending. I can't find any details on Clinton's website (https://www.hillaryclinton.com), which is much bigger on collecting emails & donations than describing her platform. Maybe it's on her home server. However, Inside Higher Ed has an article with a link to some documents describing the plan in more detail:
https://www.insidehighered.
In any case, Clinton's not the only candidate taking a crack at education. Sanders wants to spend on it, Rubio wants to allow federal funds to be spent outside of traditional colleges, and Paul wants to offer tax breaks.
But no one is seriously addressing bloated college costs. And yes, they're bloated. Take a look at the numbers:
http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-fees-room-board-time-1974-75-2014-15-selected-years
Why should tuition and fees have grown from $17,000 in 1990 to $22,000 in 2000, to $31,000 in 2015? And that's in inflation adjusted terms! Have energy costs sky-rocketed? Are professor's salaries through the roof? No, but administrative costs are:
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all
Here are some specific cases, such as UC management (http://ucbfa.org/2013/01/uc-management-bloat-updated/):
North Dakota university system bloat (http://watchdog.org/221936/north-dakota-university-2/):
Clinton talks about only giving these funds to colleges that reduce costs. Take a look of the details and see if you think the proposed federal regulations will effectively reduce costs. And this still is only for the most part for public institutions.
These institutions of higher learning are non-profit organizations, but they are not run for any sort of public good. Efficiency and cost control is ignored. Their operations are opaque and lack oversight. I challenge you to grab a university financial statement and figure out the exact percentage of the operating budget that actually goes to paying instructors. I dug for hours and I couldn't find enough information to distinguish between costs and income from profit centers like food services and university run hospitals, and direct educational costs such as instructor salaries.
But what I could find, after much digging, were academic vs non-academic head counts. In the top 10 schools, the percentage of non-academic positions ranges from 63% to 91%. In other words, only 9%-37% of the employees are actually teaching. If we assume the extremely low percentages are due to employment at teaching hospitals that I haven't been able to break out separately, it still means that at best, only about 1/3 of the employees actually teach, and 2/3 are doing other things - administration, facilities, student services, ... How can it take 2 support staff for each professor? Only through obscenely bloated operations.
Fix the bloat and you'll fix educational costs. A step forward might just be full and effective financial disclosures.
