We all hear that the rate of “tuition inflation” is higher than the rate of “normal” inflation. This is very true:

Tuition inflation appears to roughly track the national rate of inflation but it’s almost always higher. so college tuition increases in cost just like everything else, but faster. Here’s exactly how much faster:

(Ideally, the average ratio should be 1 or lower)

As we can see, in the 1950s, and early 1960s, college tuition costs were increasing as much as seven times faster than the national average! In the last 40 years, though, the rate of tuition inflation has been brought down to only about twice the national average (!!!), but that’s where it’s stubbornly stayed.

Let that sink in a bit: for at the last 50 years, the price of college has been increasing more than twice as fast as the price of everything else, and sometimes faster! Even that last graph doesn’t really do a very good job of expressing just how wildly college prices have diverged from the price of everything else because of this higher rate of inflation:

_{(This graph was created by starting with average 2007 tuition and going backwards to compute the rest of the prices through the value of previous years’ tuition inflation. Figures are not inflation adjusted, as inflation is shown as its own line)}

If college tuition had been increasing at the “normal” rate of inflation, then four years in a private college should cost a little under 30 grand. But instead it costs four times that amount.

I’ve included the median family income for the years that it’s available from the U.S. Census Bureau. In 1994, the total price of 4-year college exceeded the average family’s entire yearly pre-tax income. That’s before 7% for Social security, 3% for medicare, federal income taxes, state income taxes, state sales taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes…

Does graph look familiar? It very closely resembles graphs of the effects of compound interest at different levels. Just like how 40 years later, a financial account at 10% interest will be worth far and away more than twice an account with only 5%, college tuition today costs far more than twice that other products do, despite only having an inflation rate that’s about twice as high.

It’s the miracle of compound interest, and not only does it work in reverse for your debts, but it apparently affects college tuition as well. These things increase faster and faster over time, raising prices to unbelievable levels if left unchecked.

But it gets worse. Here’s how the average family sees it:

Glup. Today, an average family would have to spend almost twice its entire pre-tax income to be able to afford four years in a private college for one child. That’s about 45% of the average household income for each year. Compare that to 1967 when it took less than 4% of the average household income per year. That’s a tenfold increase in 40 years, with not even a doubling of income. Yowzers.

So there’s no sinister plot to destroy American education. There’s no marxist takeover, no corporate collusion that explains the skyrocketing price over the last 40 years; it’s just the ordinary effect of inflation compounded year after year, writ large due to a much higher rate than that of most products and services. So the real question is then why is the rate of inflation for college tuition so much higher than the national average?

That’s the subject for another post. Expect more soon.

There’s a big hangup people have over the word freedom. In these big debates about the role of platform vendors and who can block whose products, the word “freedom” gets thrown around in the context of platform vendors destroying it.

But freedom is something only governments can destroy, because only governments have the power to compel by force actions that people would not choose for themselves. If your choice is not forced and you have an alternative, then your freedom is intact.

In a free society, people are able to associate with whom they please. This includes the freedom not to associate as well. And this extends to companies and products. I am free not to buy a Maytag washer. Shop owners are free not to stock products that they don’t like. Microsoft is free to reject games from its Xbox platform that don’t meet its standards. Black people are free not to hang out with Asians.

Any individual consumer can opt not to purchase an Apple device and thus bypass the app store restrictions entirely, in the same way that consumers can buy a PS3 or a Wii if they don’t agree with the games Microsoft has let onto their platform. In the smartphone market, people can buy a device with Android on it. They can get a Microsoft Kin. They’ll be able to buy Windows Phone 7 devices soon. Choice exists.

This is freedom: the ability to choose between several options with no entity able to compel you by force to choose their own offering. If you find Apple’s app store rules stifling and controlling, then don’t buy an iPhone! It’s that simple.

So Apple is not “destroying freedom” by failing to include Adobe’s Flash in their products because it owns and controls the platform and there’s nothing wrong with that. If Apple doesn’t have the right to determine what happens on its platform, then a gay bar doesn’t have the right to keep out straight hecklers and you don’t have the right to keep out of your own house people that scare or repulse you.

Why? Because this is about property rights. Apple’s platform is their property; should they have the right to do with it as they please, including keeping out those they don’t want in it? I argue that they have as much right to this as we all have to our own property. If Apple can be compelled by force to “open up” their App store, what does that say about the sanctity of your domain should people decide they don’t like the color you’ve chosen for your veranda or appreciate that you didn’t let those hungry bikers in at 3 AM?

Choosing what one wants with one’s own property is not evil, and we should stop acting like it is. Free societies endure precisely because people can make their own decisions about their bodies, their minds, their property, their wealth, and their lives. Let’s stop being busybodies and criticizing others for their choices, and instead work on making better choices ourselves.

I think law is something that comes rather easily to engineers, since it’s basically just [a] boolean logic system, but written in plain English. If (A || B || C) && !D && !E is true, you’re violating the statute. There is a system to it, and legal structures are less complicated than even simple microprocessors. Law also has obscure exceptions to generally given rules, which is something you also come across a lot in computer engineering. Computer engineers deal with bugs, just as judges must deal with poorly drafted legislation that yields absurd, clearly unintended results.

To a thought process that’s heavily oriented towards systems and logical structure, law provides, in many ways, much more interesting puzzles and conundrums. Unlike with circuits, where there’s just a right way and a wrong way to do things, law provides much more opportunity for philosophical exploration.

It’s certainly been true for me. I also think that one of the reasons that logical engineery people get frustrated with politicians easily is that unlike engineers, they often seem to have no interest in fixing the “bugs” in laws, and flawed laws often remain on the books for years or decades despite widespread knowledge of their existence. It’s the job of a good engineer to fix the bugs in his code or his spec, but the job of a politician entails so much wheeling-and-dealing and the need to please diverse constituencies that a lot of the kinks will never get ironed out. Imagine if corporate engineers were also their own managers — just think of how shoddy most products would be! That’s basically how politics works.

Interestingly enough, this is why early 20th-century social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen believed that the ideal society would be run by engineers, creating what would be known as the the Technocracy movement. Veblen was sort of a crackpot, and despised athletes, priests, soldiers, and others who he viewed as merely predatorily looting what the creative engineers had produced. His ideas never made it very far because, as you can imagine, priests, athletes, and soldiers remain some of the most popular kinds of people.