Because there are companies made up of plumbers who have formed unions for better wages and benefits. Just like electricians unionize, carpenters unionize and police unionize.
It is a pretty common event for some really good whatever (plumber, auto mechanic, painter etc) to start a company and then after a few years to go under because being a good whatever doesn’t make you a good businessman.
The guy who fixes the faucet at your house isn’t union, but the guys who plumb that 3 story building, they are probably union.
Yeah, I haven’t been exposed to that side of things, the commercial side. Interesting there is a barrier to entry there.
I wonder what the breakdown of residential to commercial plumbers is, both in numbers and income. Probably pretty hard to gauge because you’d have to aggregate a million independent sources.
The union requirement, apprenticeship piece might vary by state. For instance, in OR you can’t work on an elevator without being licensed. I’m told that group is trained via apprenticeship and are in a union. That might not be the case in other states.
I think you misread my position. I don’t disagree with you, in general; the cost of education is going up because people expect college to include experiences and things that aren’t related to actual education. This can be seen, indeed, as unneeded overhead. But the customers–the people who send their students to school at places like where I teach, four-year private colleges–expect these things It’s not overcharging, technically, as the money generally goes to exactly what the customer expects to get, and those things cost a lot. I agree that it’s wasteful as hell, though, and would love to see the system change dramatically.
Dramatic change would totally transform higher education in ways we probably haven’t really explored. Get rid of the outmoded and archaic four year model, and turn to competency based education where if you prove you know the stuff, you can get out when you;'ve done so. Get rid of the equally archaic model of butts in seats for X hours a week (the credit hour model that accrediting agencies and the feds insist on), and move to hybridized formats involving classrooms, on-line, and any number of other strategies. Most of all, change the idea in the minds of too many people that you need to go to a traditional four-year college with all the ivy and football teams and what not to have a "real"college degree.
Then, you can get by with far fewer administrators–but also, probably, fewer faculty. You’d need better faculty, though, and thus the carnage among the credentialed but in real terms grossly ineffective hordes of Ph.D.s would be immense, while institutions would need to turn to people with a broader range of degrees and experiences to successfully teach the students. Facilities would be a lot more in line with need, too, with the focus being on resources for teaching, learning, and student research and development, and less on running a very expensive year-round camp in many respects.
So, yeah, I hear you. Mind you, I don’t teach at a big state school, though I have, and certainly graduated from them. State schools have a whole raft of cultural baggage to get through before reform is even thinkable. My broader point though was simply that for small private schools, the current paradigm virtually requires them to spend the money they do on the things they do if they are to compete. It would take a phenomenally brave president and board of trustees to unilaterally try to change the paradigm without a huge endowment to back up the financial risk. And schools with big endowments tend to be entrenched as much in the culture of college as upper-class boot camp as they are in actually teaching anything.
Of course we don’t need that many administrators, any more than we need as many middle managers as most corporations have. Any institution or organization needs exactly the right amount of bureaucracy–not too much, not too little–necessary for it to function effectively. Academic institutions are terrible at this, by and large. But I do know and work with quite a few people who are damn good at their jobs. But yes, even at a well-run school the number of people doing administrivia is too high. I just think it’s a too-easy target to lob shells at without looking at the overall complexity of higher ed.
In general there is NOT a teacher shortage, which is a shame for the students.
By and large there are always a large number of young ladies (only 1 in 4 new teachers are male) graduating college with an interest in going into education. Moreover, the burn-out rate is fairly high – almost half of new teachers leave the profession within five years, and almost 10% leave before the end of their first year on the job. But even with this high turnover, the volume of new teachers and second-careerists is more than ample enough to feed the machine.
This high turnover is one of the reasons why the average teacher salary is so low. The average age for a teacher is 42, while the average age of a civil engineer is 53. Teachers with 20 year of experience can make a pretty good salary, even compared with other professions requiring a degree… but there are surprisingly few of them rattling around.
Someone upthread (Guap?) lamented that we don’t attract the smart people into the teaching profession. That’s true, mostly because of women’s liberation and the opening of other career paths to women.
It used to be that a woman who wanted to work in a “professional” field (as opposed to a service job like secretary, laundry worker, maid, etc.) only had two main pathways: education and nursing. Because of that lack of options and because of the limited jobs available, employers in those fields could afford to be highly selective. So we got these spectacularly smart, talented and ambitious women in teaching positions educating our children. We don’t have numbers of course, but I’d wager that the average IQ of a female teacher back in, say, 1890, was waaaay higher than whatever today’s number is.
Nowadays, with virtually any job open to women (except President I guess), teaching no longer gets the lion’s share of the female talent pool… they go into engineering, biochem, law, construction, finance, commercial business, whatever.
Part of the problem is that these things are not always at the behest of the customer, i.e. the student. Often these kinds of things may be vanity projects for some booster, or some donor with a hard on for the athletic program demanding money be spent to make the facilities do X. I’m not going to sugar coat it, I think NCAA big money sports are proving quite corrosive to the college and university system in the US.
Because they demand so much money, money that very schools make back. This is most pronounced at the Division 1 level. How many donors tie their donations to some athletic benchmark? Cry for the heads of the coaches if they dare place emphasis on classrooms over training fields? The money funneled into some of these programs is in direct competition in some cases with money for classes.
And this filters down. Michigan spends $100 million on an athletic complex? Well even if your school isn’t making money like them, you have to up your spend to try and compete for donors, for athletes, for recognition. Often this is money that is improperly spent. So the arms race goes from the big dogs who make the money, to the mid tier schools who have to cut elsewhere to buy the $25 million complex to wow boosters, to the small schools who realistically shouldn’t spend that money, but due to those big money schools, need to because this is now part of the normalized and expected package of school facilities.
It is insane. It is irrational. And it sure as hell doesn’t really reflect the wants and needs of the students at large, but rather a smaller subset who wield money and influence. And you see it elsewhere. Dorm room amenities for one.
I mean see the trend here
It all ties in. It is an arms race. And I assure you if sanity reigned and you could point to student loans and show the true cost of things? Well I’m sure most people would content themselves with slightly more spartan arrangements.
But that doesn’t show as well on the glossies they send out to high school students, or to the phone calls to boosters. So we all ignore this collective insanity.
Basically cut the cruft. If costs were more controlled and not allowed to rise at their prodigious rates, we would see less of this ballooning in vanity garbage. Because if you could save 1,000 a year by trimming out the spas and climbing walls, another 600 by not having an NFL caliber weight room, and 300 for buildings designed for utility and not some Frank Lloyd Wright wannabe? I’m sure there would be plenty of takers.
And I think my reply to you came off as more testy than intended @TheWombat.
You bring up good and important points as well. And I am not trying to say this is exclusively due to those things I talk about. There is a litany of complex issues interwoven here. It is not ‘this is the problem’ to the exclusion of other factors, but really more of an ‘all of the above’ type deal. So just as important as not trying to turn colleges into 4 star resorts is the type of curriculum reform you talk about.
Because focusing on one angle alone does not solve it. This is a multi axis problem.
I mentioned room and board higher up. That cost far exceeded my tuition in every financial aid package i received, for a state school. You have to eat too.
Right. It’s a whole bunch of interconnected systems. And to be able to tackle the cost, we need to understand why. I believe I was highlighting part of the underlying systemic reasons for the excessive growth in room and board costs. Which, as you point out, are not well covered by aid packages.
Indeed. I do think a lot of people look at a Financial Aid package as if it’s the cost of school, like the cost of attending. The reality, just look at one of our state schools today:
Very different. As a student from a family that took one look at the contribution from the family (aka the money your parents are supposed to send you in cash) and laughed, I could almost never get my books used. I had to wait for my aid to clear and by then the books were gone. (It’s easier now though since things are online). For business and economic courses, those books were very expensive but not as much as my Biology books.
Transportation is low here because Eugene has a great public tran system and every student contributes to it whether they use or not. Other places, no so much. They also have a lot of dorms available. What you don’t see on here though are the technology fees, the green fees, the cost for anyone who has to buy health coverage because your parents can’t or won’t cover you… it adds up
Getting tuition down is only part of the challenge. I had a scholarship that literally covered by last year of tuition in it’s entirety, but there are not enough scholarships and RA positions to cover every students.
I still think a study abroad was one of the best things I could have done. That had a manageable cost, but I would be a pretty strong critic of anyone suggest we cut those programs out to save costs.
I hear you. This is, as you note, mostly an issue for the Division I schools, where alumni pressures, state and local culture (I grew up in Georgia, and in the SEC area college football loyalties and devotions are like religions), and what not tend to have undue influence. Hell, I taught at Georgia for a couple of years, and it was pretty disgusting how the priorities were skewed towards athletics vice academics–and how ok everyone was with that. When I was a student at UGA eons ago, tuition was dirt cheap at least, but it kept skyrocketing, and I’m pretty sure the education you get now is not materially better than what I got.
For small schools like mine, the biggest pressures we have really are from potential students and their families–or, rather, from what our marketing and recruitment people feel are pressures from this group. We have few big donors, and those in our case have given money for actual academic buildings or resources (we have no sports teams any more, not since we ditched out Div III basketball program twenty years ago). It is tough to compete on curriculum alone; I’ve been involved in curriculum development for a long time, and while you can do stuff that gets noticed in academic circles, it’s much harder to translate that into something that will compel a family to shell out $53k a year with room and board when they can spend the same or less somewhere else with, say, a much more visible draw like a kick-ass student center. Shallow? Yeah. But real, all too real.
Man I do not doubt it. But I think this highlights the failure of the academic system. We do a piss poor job as a country focusing on, and emphasizing, those things that are really important. That kick ass student center? Looks great in those mailing and online. It shows well to wow prospective students and parents.
But it is orders of magnitude less important than the education and the cost thereof. But the schools, high school guidance counselors, politicians, parents? They mess up badly on really driving home that point. But the costs are unsustainable. Finding ways to curb and reverse the trend are critical in the coming years, and so we, as a nation, need to stand up and demand that these luxury cost drivers need to be curtailed. Severely.
All other things being equal, we would be better for those millions spent on luxury amenities on campus were instead simply not there, therefore reducing the costs and the amount of student loan debt held by the nation.
Agree 100%. It’s a vicious cycle. Schools that want to transition to what I call 21st century higher education face a daunting task. Do what’s right, and risk financial ruin, or perpetuate an unjust, ineffective, and unsustainable system while you try to figure out a better way forward that doesn’t tank admissions?
I suspect there needs to be some powerful outside force, whether a donor with deep pockets who is willing to underwrite the school in the transition period, or more likely, some form of government support/pressure to change things. But the latter is fraught with its own sorts of problems, as anyone who has to do deal with federal mandates knows.
I’m of the mind that the government’s role is to come in when the public is unable to manage it with their own forces; such a change is an impossible sell to any board, because it would hamstring any university which didn’t have an consistent gazillion-dollar endowment . So instead, something governmental would have to be passed to make it the only way forward.
In general I’d agree. The issue for me is that in education, the history of government involvement has been spotty at best. Educational issues get hijacked by everything from creationists complaining about evolution in science books to unbalanced curriculum initiatives that think making everyone a programmer is somehow good.
That’s why coalescing in my mind I have this idea of just ruthless, merciless enforcement of standards on a nationwide level. I don’t really see an “easy” way out otherwise to disentangle all the various actors and tangled web of interested forces. Applied at every level if the education system, primary, “secondary” (what a joke name) and higher education.
Wait, your high school spent millions on football but 1/4 of your students failed basic standards. Sorry. No, you don’t get to reduce standards statewide to graduate them out, you’ve got to keep teaching them again next year. Maybe try harder. Wait, 1/4 of your English majors can’t spell their vs they’re? Sorry lower tier college, you’ve got to flunk them. Yea, that sucks for you and them, maybe you shouldn’t have admitted them in the first place. Try harder.
There should probably be tiers of course, but only a few. Not every student should be held to the same level as the brightest in the country. But maybe high school students could take something basic or advanced ‘degrees’, and you could have four or so ‘tiers’ of university, so that if you graduate a student from a tier IV level college you can be sure they meet a certain caliber of attainment no matter which college they go to.
Not sure this would work perfectly - lots of ‘teaching the test’ problems - but the key is not to punish students but punish schools and school districts for lowering standards in lieu of spending more on students and getting better outcomes for them and then forcing those institutions to deal with the problems they either made or inherited.
Man I never thought of that. The brain drain that came from the women’s lib movement. An unintended negative side effect of an otherwise great movement.
