Recent comments in /f/dataisbeautiful

bubba-yo t1_j8hbf0e wrote

Reply to comment by cooldaniel6 in College Tuition Has Outpaced Inflation by More Than 3x Over the Last 40 Years by ThePinkHulk

That's not the reason.

Higher education is the classic example of Baumol's Cost Disease. There's very little productivity gain in higher ed - you have the same x students in a classroom being taught by an instructors as you had 50 years ago. But other parts of the economy have seen substantial productivity gains, meaning that other industries pay a lot more for the skills/education that a university professor has, which means universities need to pay way above normal costs to get professors.

Apple brings in nearly $3M in revenue per employee - including retail workers. They can afford to pay hundreds of thousands per year for a PhD engineer, which means a university needs to pay hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the productivity of that engineering professor hasn't changed at all, so tuition goes up faster than inflation because everyone else gets more from that worker relative to inflation.

The availability of college loans isn't a factor at all from the university side. What is a factor in public education is the degree to which states have cut off funding.

There's another challenging dynamic to understand. A public university is only subsidized for a specific number of in-state students. The university can't add more students than that number because the state won't pay for them. But the university can add more out-of-state students because they pay their full tuition, and the state pays none of it. This is actually good for state residents over a longer scale because out-of-state (usually foreign) students end up paying for the growth - new buildings, etc. which the state can then make available to in-state students by increasing their enrollment limit. But residents in the state feel like the out-of-state students are stealing seats from the in-state ones. They aren't, the university has no ability to change that (the legislature does, though). But it also means that if you have a scholarship and don't care if you are in the in-state or out-of-state tuition pools, the university can't take you in an out-of-state seat if you are in-state. If you leave the state, the school can take you.

Federal college for all legislation would *dramatically* reshuffle the playing field for in-state students for the better. But out of state students getting into prestigious public schools would get a LOT harder.

Retired uni administrator.

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Dangerous_Doughnut14 t1_j8h5x9j wrote

Reply to [OC] Fast food restaurant chains ranked by average number of visitors per location in 2022 by EvergreenGates

Seems as though "short visits excluded" raises a lot of questions -- does that mean that a place that does mostly drive thru business (say, Jack in the box) might still be serving more customers than a primarily sit-down place (Panera, chick-fil-A)? Also, at least where I live, In n Out has horrendously long wait times in their drive thru, where as others are much faster, sonmaybe their sit down and their drive through visits count as "long"?

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