> What stops the higher ed players from regulatory capture of the state agency in charge of those subsidies and milking that cow for all it's got?
Yes, you are correct that a corrupt state will deliver poor results. A key bulwark against in many places is effective oversight of public assets and administrations. But a corrupt state also could do much worse than $35k for undergraduate tuition. Which suggests priorities are being set to accomplish a different set of goals.
Also keep in mind that the primary mechanism here is not adding regulation. Rather, it's about things like ensuring universities have enough open slots for the children matriculating through their K-12 programs. Think about it more in the way states are generally capable of managing and subsidizing/funding student education at the K-12 level.
Bigger picture: consider why it should even be seen to be such a massive difference in capability for a state to run a public education program for the 4 years after high school vs the first 13 years.
Has this - “effective oversight of public assets and administrations” - happened in other systems with significant state involvement, like secondary ed, healthcare or infrastructure projects?
My view is skewed towards California, where admittedly examples of cost decreases through economies of scale are lacking.
Yes. Water systems, trash collection, fire departments, parks, etc. generally are cost-effective and well administered that they are typically excluded from these discussions.
K-12 is particular is an area where critics demean public systems, but where we have yet to see anyone scale an alternative at lower cost/higher quality targeting the same goals. (Apologies if someone has done it, I am not aware.)
Note: this means that systems that exclude classes of students do not count as they have different goals. Obviously, one could more cheaply build a private education system for rich kids who all have similar capabilities. But that is not the goal of public systems, who are tasked with educating the poor and rich, the deaf, the blind, those who speak other languages, etc. Generally, they are able to do this for less money per pupil than elite private schools that are not able to serve all students.
Anyway the point getting lost here is that states do subsidize public universities, but not as much as they did in prior decades. The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities, to which I would say that we should have more of them, and they should cost students less by having taxes cover a larger share of those institutions.
Edit: I want to come back to this for a moment. Water and sewers are really core functions of public governments, and in the US they basically work near 100% of the time. They involve tremendous ongoing logistical work at timescales ranging from emergency pipe burst to capacity planning for decades in the future.
The notion that government involvement means poor/expensive service delivery is a fiction constructed from the outliers of government work.
> The debate you seem to be aiming toward is whether we should have public universities
Apologies if my argument came out that way. I agree with a need for public universities, I just disagree with the need to have them at any cost. Ad absurdium, a public university that costs $1,000 / $10,000 / $100,000 / $1,000,000 per student are all a good deal to a purist because hey, a need is a need.
The current system, however, incentivizes extracting maximum value for the stakeholders (administration) while delivering minimum results to customers (students). With a single-payer there's even a stronger incentive to inflate the operating costs.
If you went through US higher education, you've probably witnessed a few tricks designed for maximum revenue extraction.
* credits from one [cheaper] accredited institution are not transferable to another [expensive one], ensuring that you'd be subjected to a higher tuition
* courses that can be delivered online are not
* courses that are delivered online are paywalled to ensure only those who have registered and paid can view the precious content (something Open Courseware stood up against)
* there's no system where one can test out of pre-requisites by taking similar courses cheaper (or free) elsewhere. E.g., if you self-studied through some MIT or Stanford courses online, you still have to pay full tuition at Fill In The Blank State University
Granted, it's not always about effort duplication and resource waste. California Community Colleges, for instance, is good at centralizing student registration, identity management, and financials, so that each community college doesn't have to run a fully staffed department doing all that.
Ideally, though, an eager high school student should be able to
* load up on as many courses as they can manage online on their own schedule
* have an ability to test out of the courses for a fee that's lower than the full price of the course
* arrive at the university and pay full tuition for the courses that do require in-person training (nursing, medical sciences, any course requiring labs)
You're right, end of the day a public university is an extension of secondary school, but with higher concentrations of students (and hence fewer locations required and all sorts of economies of scale at play). There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
> disagree with the need to have them at any cost.
I think we can all agree with that. I think a sane position is to return to the level of state support of e.g. the 1960s or 1970s. This worked in a substantially poorer US until we chose to stop doing it.
> There's no reason that grades 13-16 should cost more than grades K-12, so why do they?
This is the key point. Like most things, this is driven by policy choices. The choice is made to achieve certain aims, or to ensure other aims are not achieved. We have the object lesson that subsidized college broadly worked in the US until we collectively decided to stop doing it. We can choose differently when there is political will to do so.
FWIW I would suspect that most of the explicit revenue extraction is less about the types of things you indicated and more about the # of full-fare international students a college is able to recruit. There's a huge difference between a $35k in-state student on financial aid and a $55k student who will pay cash.
There's a bunch of newsletters and blogs advertising those changes, as credit card affiliate programs tend to be generous, especially for driving new sign-ups.
Not endorsing, but these are the ones my "newsletters" email account subscribes to:
ETFs are a relatively recent phenomenon, the criticism I remember from 2008 era is having paycheck + employee stock purchase plan + 401k concentrated in a single stock - employer's.
ETFs are mostly irrelevant from a 401(k) perspective because no one is trading on a daily basis. Some 401(k) plans do now offer ETFs among the investment options but for the most part they have always focused on regular mutual funds. Average expense ratios have come down a bit since 2008.
You seem to be confused about finance. There is no particular connection between a fund's risk and tax exposure, and whether it is exchange tradable or not. Some regular mutual funds are very low risk. Some ETFs are very high risk. Tax exposure is largely irrelevant for 401(k), IRA, and other tax-free retirement accounts.
> no particular connection between a fund's risk and tax exposure
They seem to be posting a lot of word-salad comments, but assuming good faith, they're saying these are separate downsides of mutual funds over ETFs.
Mutual funds trade on your behalf, like an ETF, but they pass through the gains and losses. That can be painful if they realise those gains when you'd rather not have them, or crystallise losses when you don't have offsets. In this, they're correct. On risk, they're wrong--you can stuff nonsense into ETFs as comfortably as mutual funds. What they're indirectly criticising here is active versus passive management, which is its own can of worms.
The only advantage of a mutual fund over an ETF is it provides friction to trading. Otherwise, they're a vestige from the cusp of computerised portfolio management. (If you have more than ~$1 to 10mm, you should be rolling your own portfolio in most cases.)
This account posts a lot of off-topic straw-man arguments, and wild context guesses like regular bot slop.
My issue with bank-fool recommend mutual funds is primarily they are often a self-serving structured product. i.e. the odds a sucker never sees a consistent behavior is far greater than random chance, and a unconstrained arbitrary guess of a chicken would likely perform better in the markets.
> bank-fool recommend mutual funds…the odds a sucker never sees a consistent behavior is far greater than random chance
Again, you’re criticising active management in general. (And seem to be mixing up alpha and tracking error. Passively-managed funds aren’t aiming to outperform the market.)
There is no evidence actively-managed ETFs (or hedge funds, for that matter) outperform actively-managed mutual funds. There is also not a material difference in tracking error between their passive products.
ETFs are a retail product. Like mutual funds. Make financial decisions based on the product, not the wrapper. (Also, where in the fuck does one go to get mutual funds in 2025 anyway?!)
> This account posts a lot of off-topic straw-man arguments, and wild context guesses like regular bot slop.
"This account" -- Do you mean account "JumpCrisscross"? No, I disagree. This person posts lots of intelligent things about securities markets and trading. You can review their history. I assume they work in securities trading on Wall Street (or something nearly adjacent).
> Regular mutual funds usually have higher risk ... than the ETFs.
Can you provide some specific examples? If anything, the transaction friction around mutual funds prevents most regular investors from unnecessary trading that exchange-listed ETFs allow. TL;DR: For most people, more trading means more losses or worse returns.
There are several potential mutual fund problems, but the ones most consumers are exposed to arise from institutional and private "investment advisors". There is no legal protection from banks externalizing toxic assets acquired though risky decisions onto customers, and or ridiculous ballooning management fees siphoning off actual profit. The other issues are mostly from various end-runs around acceptable market rules and practices.
In general, most amateur holds permute well below 3 to 4 months on average. Note the old joke: "Bulls make money, bears make money, pigs get slaughtered"... was never funny for those providing cash capital to gamblers.
Most people assume they are luckier than average... and most of Las Vegas was also built on losers money.
You’re mixing up adviser fees (ETFs have lower fees than mutual funds; neither is directly related to adviser fees), toxic assets, CMOs, balloon mortgages and possibly management fees and carried interest. These are related concepts inasmuch as they’re all financial terms.
> I prefer retaining the option to sue people that pull stunts
If that's an option for you, sure. I work in finance and retain FINRA arbitration as a customer. When I'm signing with clients, I do not like to include it--I have a strong advantage in court and don't want a venue that's biased against me as a professional.
All of this is totally irrelevant to ETFs, mutual funds and CMOs because those are distributed funds whose terms aren't negotiable after offering. (If you're worrying about suing the guy selling you ETFs, you're doing something wrong. Probably overtrading.)
I'd believe this in very specific contexts but I can't find any reliable explanation of what those might be. Can you point me to anything worthwhile to read on the topic?
I am fairly certain that consumer and employment pre-dispute arbitration agreements are strongly negative but I haven't learned enough about FINRA/securities arbitration to have a strong opinion.
In general, forced arbitration is not an effective legal posture for investors, and a common instrument applied to suckers.
Sociopath structured parasitism always poses a liability around treasure. Handle or hire your own due diligence solutions... Seriously, don't assume either of our nonsense applies in your country. =3
Do 401k plans allow people to buy single stocks? I never saw it in my experience. I cannot believe that would be considered "prudent" by financial regulators. However, when you leave a company you can "roll-over" your 401k into an IRA, then you can go wild and buy anything that you want (IBRK allows it).
i401k’s which you have to manage yourself if you are a contractor allow you to purchase whatever you want depending on where your account is. I was with Vanguard and they do not allow it - I moved my account to etrade and now my 401k account is basically like my brokerage account, I can buy whatever I want.
