The fully-loaded gross aggregate cost to all of the students that I will be teaching this academic year is around $25 million.
It is true that most students do not pay the full cost; yet it is also true that the institutional cost of educating each student exceeds the full sticker price, and often by a substantial amount (e.g. last I checked, Amherst College spent something like $70,000 per year educating each student – about $50,000 on instructional and related expenses, and the remainder for infrastructure and amenity expenditures).
Though I earn well less than 1/2 of 1 percent of the aggregate expenditures of my students, I do not believe I am being exploited. However, I cannot help being convinced that there is a huge opportunity that remains unexploited. The crazy higher education cartelization accreditation system is partly to blame; but there remain other causes, in no particular order:
- We are really much richer and better off than conventional wisdom would have you believe
- Parents and students place an enormous value on the consumption aspect of higher education
- Consumer surplus in higher education is far higher than anyone previously thought, even controlling for 1 and 2
- Behavioral economics has something to say … are the masses simply irrational?
The title of the post comes from this interesting paper.