Why falling demand hasn't brought down college sticker prices - <AUTHOR> http://hechingerreport.org/why-falling-demand-for-college-hasnt-brought-down-sticker-prices/ <comment><USER2> I only read the article (and not the podcast, if it's different) but I think their argument misrepresents how the economics of higher education work.

> "Economics 101 suggests that declining demand results in lower prices."

This isn't true for college sticker prices because colleges have perfect price discrimination. Most students don't pay the sticker price; they pay exactly what they "can".

In no other industry do we have such perfect incentives aligned on the provider side to increase prices--

\- People who can't afford the higher prices can pay less, through financial aid and scholarship programs.

\- To determine what is the "maximum" price you can pay, the student/parent voluntarily provides literally every data point possible. Every tax record, every loan, etc.

\- Because of this perfect price discrimination, an upward trend in college costs (that outpaces inflation) is not only reasonable but expected. It's in the interest of the institution to maximize its surplus/profit to the student's upper limit.

<comment><USER3> The point of the podcast, at least, is that despite all of your points, colleges are taking on enormous amounts of debt, _while enrollment is shrinking_. They are losing money.

<comment><USER4> For established non-profit schools? Or new, mostly for-profit schools?

I find it hard to believe any reputable, 20+ year-old, non-profit schools are losing money. They should own their assets outright, have extremely low interest rates on any outstanding debt, pay close to 0 taxes. Wages for non- executive staff are not keeping pace with inflation. How are they losing money?

<comment><USER5> In addition to large amounts of new construction, administrative staff has expanded massively [0].

Between 1975 and 2011, the number of full-time, tenured faculty at universities grew by 23%. The number of administrators grew by 369%. The trend seems to be to hire part-time and untenured faculty to keep salaries down, then hire more administrators.

[0]: See "Full-Time Nonfaculty Professional" at [https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/2014%20salary...](https://www.aaup.org/sites/default/files/files/2014%20salary%20report/Figure%201.pdf)

<comment><USER4> Wow, looks like the financialization of education is almost complete. That graph literally looks like a nightmare.

<comment><USER6> Can you expand on what you mean by that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The article doesn't mention that middle management exploded at colleges in the last few years, and those people are going to try to hold on to their jobs no matter how low enrollment gets. [http://blogs.wgbh.org/on- campus/2014/2/6/growth-nonacademic-...](http://blogs.wgbh.org/on- campus/2014/2/6/growth-nonacademic-deanlets-outpaces-faculty-hires/)

Also I think the part about half of tuition at one school going to "discounts and financial aid for freshmen" is misleading. That's not really costing the college money, they're just charging less to begin with.

<comment><USER8> It's costs the college revenue, just as tax cuts cost the government revenue.

<comment><USER9> That's like saying piracy costs $TICKET_PRICE * #viewings, or that the value of donated software is its sticker price, or that buying a department store shirt "on sale" costs the seller any money.

It completely ignores the possibility of non-purchase, which is the dominant alternative among options. "Would have paid" is a tiny fraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I wonder how this drop in demand is distributed between American students who are eligible for financial aid and federally-backed student loans and foreign students who almost always pay full price.

As an anecdote from my own engineering school experience, a staggeringly large proportion of my classes were populated by foreign, usually Chinese and Indian, students. My college has a pretty good brand, and I understand many of these students were willing to pay to have its cachet on their resume. Also, many of these students, especially the Chinese ones, seemed to be from very well-off families (at least if the number of Canada Goose coats and Supreme hoodies is any indication).

This _is_ an anecdote, so take it with a grain of salt, but it suggests a hypothesis: maybe the drop in demand is among American students who are mostly paying discounted prices anyway, while demand among foreign students who are willing and able to pay the staggering sticker price remains high.

<comment><USER9> > (at least if the number of Canada Goose coats and Supreme hoodies is any > indication).

Why crane your neck to check the outfits, when you can glance at their cars?

[http://www.mlive.com/lansing- news/index.ssf/2014/04/michigan...](http://www.mlive.com/lansing- news/index.ssf/2014/04/michigan_state_chinese_student.html)

"People who haven't visited Michigan State University's campus lately may be surprised to find Maseratis, Lamborghinis and Bentleys driving around. ...:

<comment><USER11> In most class environments it's a lot easier to look at someone's clothing than to follow them out to the parking lot and check their car.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> A few observations about this "will the traditional college survive" situation, which I've been following for a long time.

The higher education market feels a bit like the healthcare market in that it's somewhat difficult for the consumer to tell what the actual cost will be prior to purchasing the product. Published tuition rates and other costs of attending school feel like they're abstracted until a long-term commitment has been made and it's too late to get a refund.

It may seem strange that, with the increasing debt being amassed by universities, record-breaking new salaries are being offered by many of these schools to football and basketball coaches. The 25 salaries for college football coaches range from $3.5M to over $11M per year. I'd assume that in each of those cases, the value received from the coaching hire contributes overall to the school's bottom line.

As much of the same information that is taught in college becomes more accessible for free on the internet, it's hard to see how colleges can compete with smaller, more agile competitors who don't have nearly the overhead that universities do. It feels a bit like retail stores trying to compete with Amazon.

<comment><USER13> Except that the raw "information" taught in colleges doesn't represent enough value to even show up as a line item in a cost breakdown. Anyone can read a book, or even watch a lecture; the value add is access to research, access to professors, and perhaps most importantly, access to a community of motivated(to a degree) students all in plus/minus the same point in their lives.

MOOCs on the internet can't compete on any of these metrics.

<comment><USER14> The only "value add" for colleges is the signaling provided by getting the degree, i.e. going through the application process and committing to finishing a 4 year degree.

This is most easily measured in the income data for college-grads vs non- college-grads. This data is so easy to measure that you can measure the "value" of a college degree, currently something like $17K per year more for the graduates.

<comment><USER15> Don't underestimate the value of circulating amongst the children of the wealthy. These are the connections that will get you work and investors, especially if you manage to marry one of them, which has always historically been the most common mode of class mobility.

Your wealth is directly related to the people who you associate with. If you're any lower than upper-middle class, college will be your last opportunity to associate with the rich through simple elbow grease and charm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The first university I went to was probably suffering from all of the following:

> the number of students is actually down by 2.6 million

> they have struggled to reduce their costs

> they've borrowed billions of dollars to build amenities they think will > attract students

After two years (2/3 of a degree in South Africa) I had been challenged by precisely one subject - all the while I was hemorrhaging money. The amenities were fantastic and _I never once used them._ Not realizing how the importance of a degree and anger from learning sweet nothing resulted in me leaving. It was an expensive degree printing press and nothing more.

Ten years later I need a degree to help with my visa. The experience is night and day. In a course that I just completed, I had to submit an assignment, and the feedback my lecturer provided was incredible: I honestly don't know how she finds the time of day if she's working that hard for all of her students. I walked away feeling as though I had learned something valuable, even though it is one of those general courses that you usually question why you have to take. These people seem to really care about furthering and imparting knowledge. It shows. The entire experience is streamlined around learning. You can't send your kids there (as they require a professional background), but I hope this catches on by the time my kids have to go to college.

If these behemoths want to reduce costs while attracting more students, it's all too easy; do less and focus on the product: learning. That approach saved IT/CS from ballooning costs and deadlines, and I have first-hand experience suggesting that it can also work in education.

<comment><USER17> I'm not sure I understood your comment correctly - did you return to the same institution 10 years later, or did you go to a new one?

<comment><USER16> I should have clarified that: a new one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Many institutions boasted, in the admission season just ended, that they had received record numbers of applications. What most very carefully didn't say was that record numbers of applicants are lining up to be accepted."

I read this like 3 times, then the article, then again, but I can't parse it. What is it _really_ saying here?

<comment><USER19> I am guessing that total applications are up while total numbers of applicants are down (and thus there are more applications submitted per person)?

<comment><USER20> Yes. One of the things that's different is that there's now [https://www.commonapp.org/](https://www.commonapp.org/) which says "you can apply to more than 700 colleges" using it.

To some degree, application fees (paid per college) are still a deterrent but some people qualify for free application fees. There was an article about a young woman who was accepted at more than 100 colleges. [http://www.ibtimes.com/teen-gets-accepted- more-100-colleges-...](http://www.ibtimes.com/teen-gets-accepted- more-100-colleges-2677734)

Applying to X more colleges at $50 or $75 each where one of them may offer 10% or 20% more in aid makes for an interesting decision.

<comment><USER9> Common App is at least 20 years old.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Perhaps student loans should be co-signed by the universities they get their degree from?

At least this way, there may be a reasonable alignment of incentives for the university to provide valuable, cost-effective education.

</comment><comment><USER22> Obviously they need larger football stadiums to bring in that TV money.

</comment><comment><USER23> Federal Student Loan bubble sets a price floor screwing all the poor students with debt they otherwise could avoid in a free market.

<comment><USER15> Sadly, they would also avoid college in a free market. The problem is that the state should be setting a price floor of $0, which would limit the motivation to compete on debt to private schools.</comment></comment>


OpenID Usability: Two Solutions That Could Take OpenID Mainstream - <AUTHOR> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/openid_usability_problems.php <comment><USER2> This sentence is priceless:

 _Already the home of the inventor of the wiki (Ward Cunningham), the initiator of the Linux kernel (Linus Torvalds), a boatload of RSS and OpenSource-heads, Portland Oregon is also becoming a hotbed of OpenID work._

OpenID will succeed because the awesome presence of Linus Torvalds is filling the air over Portland with tiny molecules of Smart!

Seriously, has Torvalds ever uttered a word about OpenID in his life? If so, could we have a link? If not, what the heck is he doing in this article?

</comment><comment><USER3> Ach, it seems like the obvious answer is that the browser autofills your OpenID url and, if the site is set up all Ajax-like, it then goes off and logs you in on arrival.

Very simple. As transparent as Basic Authentication with HTACCESS in fact!

(oh yeah, this is progress! progress I tell you!)

</comment><comment><USER4> The problem I have with OpenID is that I enjoy having separate accounts on various sites... it keeps my activities compartmentalized and I value that sense security over a universal ID. Furthermore, I'm not always interested in having a known identity on some sites... Get my drift?! :)

</comment><comment><USER5> It'll catch on when articles don't include so many if/but/maybes. My eyes tend to just glaze over whenever I read about OpenID, so many fuzzy caveats.</comment>


YC Hacks Recap - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-hacks-recap <comment><USER2> This was by far the best hackathon I've ever attended. It was awesome seeing the people you admire like sama and Justin Kan hacking away with you into the early morning.

The event itself was well-managed as well. Big ups to Kat and Dave for their hard work. Looking forward to next year!

</comment><comment><USER3> As a YC Hacks participant, the most striking part of being there was just how genuinely friendly and helpful everyone was. Really a great experience.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, such a breath of fresh air from the feeling you get on the internets. It felt like my school's ACM office during finals week!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I understand that it's done with good intentions, I don't think that the presence of a Bounce House and T-Shirt Cannon at the hackathon helps dispel the perception that Silicon Valley hackers simply behave like teenagers all the time.

<comment><USER6> I think that kind of thing demonstrates less that Valley hackers act like teenagers, and more that hacker culture is more open/informal than the typical rigid tech corporation.

<comment><USER7> So the best way to distinguish between "open" companies that are hip to "hacker culture" (whatever that means) and "rigid" corporations is to look for a bounce house or t-shirt cannon?

I guess you can't fool anyone with a foosball table these days?

<comment><USER6> It's not necessarily the best/only way, but it adds a sense of fun and informality that a larger corporation wouldn't want/need to have in order to attract employees.

<comment><USER7> I think I'm starting to understand. To attract desirable employees, startups don't need to be working on challenging problems or serving interesting markets, they just need to incorporate objects that you might find at a birthday party for children.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great hackathon. Really didn't like the expo style presentations though.

<comment><USER9> I totally disagree; I absolutely loved the elementary school science fair approach. You could actually engage with the teams behind every interesting project, and skip past all the usual 2-3 minute bland, boring on-stage pitches from bleary-eyed and brain-drained builders.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> More women to men ratio that expected ;-)

<comment><USER10> Too many downvotes. Please be tolerant with other cultures.

<comment><USER11> It was the winky face.

<comment><USER12> Definitely was the creepy winky face.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is over SF bay? - <AUTHOR> If you are in SF what is the really huge plane over the bay right now? <comment><USER2> The huge plane is the Solar Impulse solar-powered airplane. It just flew in from Hawaii, completing the last leg of its flight across the pacific.

[http://www.bbc.com/news/science- environment-36122618](http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36122618)

For future reference, you can check flightradar24.com to see what planes are around you, no need to ask here. Click on the planes for more info, e.g. [http://i.imgur.com/nfPHqLC.png](http://i.imgur.com/nfPHqLC.png)</comment>


Show HN: A React drag-and-drop library - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/kutlugsahin/react-smooth-dnd <comment><USER2> Some related experience:

At Blackboard we developed yet another DnD library only because existing react solutions were not accessible - [https://github.com/blackboard/react-dnd- ax](https://github.com/blackboard/react-dnd-ax) . But unfortunately it is not quite "performant".

Since then I found another promising library which while not fully accessible, provides great deal of keyboard interaction (last time I checked it in February - library is under very active development) - [https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful- dnd](https://github.com/atlassian/react-beautiful-dnd)

We are still on a lookout for well performing solution for react, yet fully accessible..

<comment><AUTHOR> Before I implemented this one the closest candidate for my app was react- beautiful-dnd but currently is does not support "copy" behavior which I need. react-beautiful-dnd relies on react-motion for animations and beside a bigger bundle size, to my experience css hardware accelerated transformations provides more performance. Try them under chrome 6x slowdown performance

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Right on. Can you briefly explain differences between this and the popular DnD projects, and in what scenarios someone would use this over those?

[https://github.com/react-dnd/react-dnd](https://github.com/react-dnd/react- dnd)

[https://github.com/clauderic/react-sortable- hoc](https://github.com/clauderic/react-sortable-hoc)

<comment><AUTHOR> Basically I checked both and many others before implementing this one. react- dnd provides and high level API(i.e no animations). react-sortable-hoc has some missing features that I needed. Especially moving things between containers. cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I only went through the demo but it worked really nicely from the user perspective in Chrome. I've only gone as far as to test other react dnd libraries in the same manner but I've never been as excited about them as this. I'll try to work it into something soon. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER5> Just tried it on mobile, and must say it works well. Moving stuff including scrolling feels fluent and natural. Nice work, will consider this if I need dnd in react in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Demo page for mobile devices needs some improvement though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for sharing! Just plugged it in for a feature I've been sitting on for a while.

It worked right off the bat for me while react-sortable-hoc did not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad that it helped you! Thanks for sharing your experience. And what was the thing that did't work out with react-sortable-hoc?

<comment><USER6> I had a list of horizontal pills/badges that wrapped and couldn't get it to look / drop right with react-sortable-hoc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Looks very cool and API is very simple. I'm going to replace my DIY solution in clojurescript with your component. Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Let me know if you have any problem

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Woah! This is a really sweet library. Seriously, the best one I've seen.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it :) cheers!

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm a neophyte at JS, what is the reason for all the code in /dist/index.js to be compacted into one line?

<comment><USER10> It's minified to decrease its file size for faster load times

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What is wrong with react-dnd?

<comment><USER12> May be better to ask what this does better?

<comment><USER13> s/he just did ask that question.

<comment><USER12> My request was for the positive reasons to use this library, rather than the negative reasons for not using the other.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Hazel: A live functional programming environment featuring typed holes - <AUTHOR> http://hazel.org/ <comment><USER3> Great! I'm convinced designing a functional language and IDE side-by-side will result in greatly improved ergonomics. The Hazel playground breaks for me (Safari), but the direction looks promising.

One of my own (nearly abandoned) toy projects is something similar. It's not easy — at least to me it wasn't — to design a language that is forgiving on as many aspects as possible. Both syntactically and semantically. Turning every error into a warning during development time and keep the impact as local as possible. Type errors turn into implicit holes of type bottom, just make sure the IDE is explicit about it.

One of the tricks I applied is to use indentation style syntax (like Haskell/Python). Now syntax errors only break one level of code. Preventing the IDE from coloring the rest of your buffer red because you still need to type out your closing parenthesis.

Edit: I see Hazal takes the valid-by-construction approach, which is different from be-forgiving-but-explicit. Both are approaches worth of experimentation.

<comment><USER4> My take on designing a language and an IDE together (2015).

Repo: [https://github.com/xixixao/Shem](https://github.com/xixixao/Shem) Playground: [http://xixixao.github.io/Golem](http://xixixao.github.io/Golem) Talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZipJOan54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnZipJOan54)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I also experiment a lot with structural editing. My latest project is an editor for a lisp-like language for building small audio synth programs: [http://kevinmahoney.co.uk/ocellator/](http://kevinmahoney.co.uk/ocellator/)

Hazel looks fantastic - I don't think I've come across it before. I think an obstacle structural editors have to becoming more widely adopted is that they start out very general and don't immediately solve a problem that people have. You can usually build little toy programs but not much more. What I've tried to do is to focus on creating an editor for a small DSL that helps with a specific problem.

<comment><USER6> Phenomenal work, this is really fun to play around with

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> For folks interested in this sort of thing, Andrew Blinn gave a neat talk[1] pertaining to structured editing at Racketcon, which credits Cyrus' work with Hazel.

[1] [https://youtu.be/CnbVCNIh1NA](https://youtu.be/CnbVCNIh1NA)

<comment><USER8> Andrew is actually joining our group, FP Lab, as a PhD student this fall and will be contributing to Hazel amongst other things. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Cool things! Good solution is ACPUL maintains holes in your code, and programs never stop or crash Incomplete expression is reflected in only one node of the code and the whole system continues to work correctly (as architecture design)

Code demo:

[https://github.com/web3cryptowallet/Web3CryptoWallet](https://github.com/web3cryptowallet/Web3CryptoWallet)

More info about Animation CPU:

[https://animationcpu.com/](https://animationcpu.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> > Hazel is a live functional programming environment that is able to > typecheck, manipulate, and even run incomplete programs, i.e. programs with > holes. There are no meaningless editor states.

Suppose I have an assigned variable, which later I plan to use. When I'm about to use it, but not yet did, I have a hole. Suppose before filling the hole I've realized that the current type of the variable - and assigned value - <USER2> wrong, so I want to use the correct type.

Can hole-oriented programming help me with that change of mind? When we use a program, using a configuration file but also allowing command-line overrides of values, we assume last-time command-line overrides have precedence over values in the configuration file. Can we consider later-time use of variable with different type overriding the previous type, which now considered to be incorrect? Of should the language catch us making a type error here?

<comment><USER11> > should the language catch us making a type error here?

With a statically typed language, the choice is up to you. Every statically typed language is just a "dynamically typed" language with the ability to statically assign types. For example, you can type the variable as an "Int" or for more runtime flexibility, a "Variant" (if using C++).

<comment><USER10> The question here is that a type inference can assign type to a hole but may get confused if user insists on an incompatible type.

int q // q is considered a hole of int type

q <\- // but we're typing "hello" there

Practicalities ask for the situation to be considered a problem - not of incorrectly plugged hole (when into "int" place you're putting "string" value), but of incorrectly previously stated type (it's the original "int q" which is wrong, should have been "string q").

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >we hope that this will allow Hazel to function not only as a structured programming environment, but also as a structured document authoring environment!

This is the kind of thing I come to HN to discover! Cool ideas.

</comment><comment><USER13> Idris has typed holes, how is this an improvement on Idris?

<comment><USER14> Indeed many languages have holes. Hazel is different by bundling an IDE with the language that only allows for direct and valid manipulations on an AST.

You aren't writing code in a text file, but rather in a very constrained graphical environment.

The bet they're making is that in return for giving up this flexibility you hopefully get powerful refactoring and code analysis capabilities.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Trumptweets.fun - <AUTHOR> http://trumptweets.fun <comment><AUTHOR> I don't use Twitter, but I do sometimes want to see what Trump's tweeting about so I put this up to make it easier for me to that.

<comment><USER2> How is it different from [https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump](https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump) ?</comment></comment>