Sat 29 Apr 2006
Why does tuition keep going up? There are many reasons. But stupid government mandates certainly don’t help.
On November 4, 2005, Governor Mitt Romney signed new legislation called “Nicole’s Law” to protect the public from the dangers of carbon monoxide, a potentially lethal odorless gas. This law and the resulting regulation require Williams College to install detectors in all of our residences with potential sources of carbon monoxide.
Although every death is a tragedy, there is no reasonable cost/benefit calculation which would mandate such devices at a place like Williams. Who pushes these laws through the legislator? Nanny-staters, attention-seeking politicians and the makers/installers of these devices. Full announcement below.
On November 4, 2005, Governor Mitt Romney signed new legislation called “Nicole’s Law” to protect the public from the dangers of carbon monoxide, a potentially lethal odorless gas. This law and the resulting regulation require Williams College to install detectors in all of our residences with potential sources of carbon monoxide.
The new regulations require carbon monoxide detectors on every level of our residence halls including habitable portions of basements and attics. On levels with sleeping areas the detectors must be placed within ten feet of the bedroom doors. We will start installing the battery-powered carbon monoxide detectors in every building this week.
The detector will emit an audible alarm when dangerous carbon monoxide concentrations are detected. All Nighthawk carbon monoxide detectors incorporate Time Weighted Averaging,” meaning the alarm is based on the amount of carbon monoxide as well as the total time the carbon monoxide has been present. The higher the carbon monoxide concentration, the quicker the alarm will sound.
The most common symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning are flu-like symptoms, slight headaches, nausea, vomiting and fatigue. With moderate exposure you might experience a throbbing headache, drowsiness, confusion, and a fast heart rate.
The carbon monoxide detectors are not connected to the fire alarm system so should the detector activate in your building, immediately call Campus Safety and Security at X4444 so they can check the carbon monoxide levels in the building. The carbon monoxide detectors are considered fire safety equipment and should not be tampered with.
Joe Moran
Manager of Environmental Health & Safety
Williams College
60 Latham Street
Williamstown, MA 01267
April 29th, 2006 at 9:18 am
I’m not sure if the tuition increase at Williams is a bad thing. Financial aid at Williams is based on need, and is not determined as a %age of total tuition (so someone paying 11k a year to go to Williams pays 11k a year whether the Williams tuition is 38k a year or 42k a year). In other words, a tuition increase only hurts those paying full sticker price. Undoubtedly, this means that 1-2 people who weren’t previously on finaid will (or should) now be on a very small amount on finaid. However, for the vast majority of students paying the full sticker price, the change in tuition is a very little deal. These are the students with families who can afford to pay an extra 2k a year…possibly this means they will have to vacation at the Jersey Shore rather than Bermuda this year (although the tuition increase is small enough that I doubt it really affects the lifestyle of any of the full tuition payers).
As all colleges are creasing their tuition more quickly than inflation, as long as the Williams’ increases stay level with increases from other universities, there is very little loss (to students or their families) with a notable gain (the college collects 2 million dollars– $2000x 1000 students on no finaid–more money each year). Probably the difference between this amount and inflation goes to pay for increases in staff salaries and oil bills and other costs that increase more quickly than tuition…but even if it goes straight into the endowment, I see this as a positive rather than a negative.
April 29th, 2006 at 10:43 am
I find it callous for anyone to assert that another can “afford” to pay a cost increase, irrespective of the financial condition of the other - especially when the person doing the asserting is not bearing in full the same cost increase.
April 29th, 2006 at 12:47 pm
If I remember correctly, there was a carbon monixide scare in Morgan Hall in the middle of the night in 2001. I remember as my girlfriend at the time freaked out and came rushing to my dorm, waking up everyone else in the dorm (because she left her swipe card in her room and my phone was in the common room so I didn’t hear her call so she started dialing numbers similar to mine in a panic) and had her JA sleep on the couch…ahh…memories…
April 29th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Wow, “current eph”, you’re welcome. As someone who paid full tuition all four years at Williams, I’m glad I could help pay for your education.
April 29th, 2006 at 2:40 pm
Current Eph,
I believe that your statements about what is and what isn’t possible for full tuition payers are unfounded and frankly rude. My parents planned and saved and not to mention the help my grandparents give and so even though our income means I don’t recieve financial aid, that doesn’t mean that it is easy or no big deal with tuition goes up. Plus my brother is now at Williams as well, and so the double increase needless to say it not “no big deal.”
Please remember that money is money, and paying more is never “no big deal.”
April 29th, 2006 at 5:39 pm
“current eph”
Your ignorance is unbelievable and also very rude.
April 29th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
I always thought that Williams had the central heating plant meaning there weren’t furnaces in the dorms which is the main source of carbon monoxide. If I am correct in that view, that would make these detectors doubly useless.
Though I really don’t mind Massachusetts making these type of idiotic laws, states right and all. If you don’t like it vote with your feet to a place that doesn’t do this garbage or try to get rid of these idiot politicians who pass paternalistic laws.
Current Eph’s comments are so poor and show a basic misunderstanding of who actually has to pay full tuition that they have to be disregarded. Maybe he thinks only multi-millionares pay full tuition but he is sorely mistaken in that view.
April 29th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
I for one support every word a “current eph” has written. If it were up to me, the tuition would be app. $80,000, i.e. the real price of the educating a student from Williams (i.e. $40k sticker price + $40k endowment subsidy). Why should uber-wealthy students get a subsidy of $40k from the endowment?
April 29th, 2006 at 7:38 pm
I have to laugh at the backlash against “current eph”. He is careful to write “for the vast majority” of full-pay students, which perhaps should be written “for many” or “for most” or “for the majority” but his point is being warped and misinterpretted by a number of our writers who have missed, I think his main point, namely, that tuition increases are like an income tax increase on only the top tax brackets. Yes, there are people who are getting squeezed while paying full tuition, and yes, there is a perverse anti-saving logic to financial aid (if a family doesn’t save, the family gets more financial aid), but for a whole bunch of people paying full price, finding $2000 is relatively easy.
Current eph could have been more cautious and diplomatic in his terminology, but I don’t know that his/her point deserves the instance write-off of “you’re so ignorant, I won’t bother to address your point” that many of our anonymous respondents have used. Someone else’s mistakes, nor his/her ignorance, allows one to dismiss what is a relatively fair point.
Take it in the abstract: if Williams were to need an extra $2 million in income every year (or make $2 million in cuts to its budget), how would you get it for Williams? Personally, I’d look at full pay students (which includes my family) first as a source of income. Now, feel free to argue that Williams does not need $2 million in reality, but in the abstract, how would you do it?
Finally, Kane, considering that carbon monoxide detectors cost $30.00 roughly and that Williams could get a bulk discount (so let’s say 25 instead). Plus manhours to install them (15 minutes per detector? $20 per hour for labor, to throw out an easily divisble number). That means each monoxide detector costs $30 to install and lets just say 1 detector per person. That’s a one time fee of $60,000 (and I might be exaggerating its cost, if anything) with minimal upkeep costs.
Yeah, that’s clearly why tuition is increasing. Methinks you’ve found a pretty minor regulation and made it sound a whole lot worse than it is in not doing the simple math behind it.
And considering the Boston Globe claims there were 480 carbon monoxide poisionings that resulted in death (note: how many were suicides?), I’m not quite willing to say the regulation is a “stupid mandate” considering its ease of compliance, low cost, and potential positive effect.
April 29th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
I would like to begin by appologizing for phrasing my comments in a manner that may have been a bit overly callous. I understand that for many of the students paying full tuition, it’s a stretch and a 2k increase is substantial.
I would also like to say that I happen to be in the ~50% of Williams students who IS paying full sticker price…probably more because my family saved than because we make enough to avoid financial aid. With a sibling about to enter college, these 2k yearly increases aren’t nominal for my family.
I’m not sure what about my post led so many to immediately assume that I was a finaid student. However, regardless, I don’t see how my family’s financial status should be a reason to automatically dismiss my comments.
Now, I’m hoping someone can point out how my comments were “ignorant.” Callous, yes. A little rude, maybe. Ignorant, though?
Believe me, I understand that college tuition is a stretch for many–even those paying the full sticker price–but relatively, it’s far less of a stretch for full tuition payers (even those on the border like my own family) than it is for those on financial aid. I understand that the finaid formulas aren’t perfect and there are exceptions to this (maybe Bill is one of these exceptions). However, for the vast majority of cases my statements in my previous post holds; tuition increases largely affect those who can relatively afford to be affected (like my family).
April 29th, 2006 at 11:22 pm
To address the actual issue, I suggest you look to the work by Kip Viscusi at Harvard. He sat down and calculated the cost per life saved for various regulations.
His results are startling. The most cost-effective regulations are those by the TSA like seat belt laws. I believe smoke and carbon monoxide detectors would fall in the same category. The next most effective were by the EPA. And the least effective, something on the order of 1.2 billion per life saved, if not more, were OSHA regulations. CATO uses his work all the time arguing for regulation reform.
If you want to save lives, enact and enforce seatbelt and speedlimit regulations. And why do we create such laws? Because people under calculate subjective probabilities even when they have objective probabilities to work from. Yes, on average, the average person will be in 1 major car accident in their life. But the catch is, no one believes they are average.
They would agree to restrictive laws on everyone but themselves. And that is the great thing. People will sometimes grudgingly accept rules that they do not believe apply to them for the sake of others. The resulting equilibrium may thus be efficient even if people are griping, a la Kane.
Additionally, many phenomena that are difficult to explain with traditional models become tractable if we change the way people discount (in econ jargon: people hyperbolically discount instead of geometrically discount). The gist is that I want to lose weight, so will diet. But I prefer to start the diet tomorrow instead of today. But when tomorrow comes, I get to make my decision again, and will again put off dieting. This time inconsistency doesn’t arise under geometric discounting.
Think of cocaine. I have never tried cocaine. From all the folks in Hollywood who use the stuff, I imagine the effect has to be pretty damn good. If you could use cocaine without addiction, we might all do it. But because it is addictive, we know our preferences today, use cocaine once is better than never using cocaine, will change once we have tried cocaine. Thus, we agree to make cocaine use illegal. It is not an unwarrented intrusion into our rights and we don’t need to make a social welfare argument either. Instead, we do it because it prevents a perversion of preferences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_discounting
All these results are documented in the psychology of economics literature. I can’t substantiate this, but my intution points to the possibility that the cost of installing CO dectectors in everyone’s home would be a far more cost effective way to save lives than many of our counter-terrorism measures.
April 30th, 2006 at 9:10 am
Rory: you’re right, there was a CO scare in Morgan hall in 2001. B&G was using some sort of pump to get water out of Lasell (something like that) and it generated CO which leaked into Morgan. No one was hurt but apparently some students had to be bodily dragged out of the building because they were too disoriented to leave under their own power. That’s what I remember at least. I actually happened to be walking by at the time (yes, at 4am) and it was a scary sight with an ambulance, a couple fire trucks, lots of security, etc.
April 30th, 2006 at 1:58 pm
A quick Google check shows recent CO incidents in student housing at UVM and Wesleyan. UVM has apparently started installing CO detectors, even though this is not currently required by Vermont law, after one student died and others were sickened in an off-campus housing incident. In the Wesleyan incident, students were evacuated after the smoke detectors went off. However, elevated CO was also detected in the building, and so Wesleyan may add CO detectors in the future.
Haven’t seen the cost/benefit calculations, but I would like to do so before making up my mind, rather than simply accepting Kane’s assurances that “no reasonable cost/benefit analysis would mandate such devices”. OK then, how about giving us the numbers? Granted, a quantitative analysis is harder than bitching about “nanny-states”, but it might be more convincing.
I note that the Alaska State Legislature, which is often regarded as the most libertarian-minded such body in the US, passed a CO detector law before Massachusetts did.
April 30th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
“I note that the Alaska State Legislature, which is often regarded as the most libertarian-minded such body in the US, passed a CO detector law before Massachusetts did.”
How’s that for a ‘nanny state.’ Funny, isn’t AK represented in congress by… Republicans?
April 30th, 2006 at 6:30 pm
Well, lessee.
A NightHawk CO detector seems to be about $39.95 retail. Assuming we need about 3,000 of these, and assuming both some discount for quantity and the loaded cost of installation and maintenance, let’s call the cost of installation $300,000 and the active life of the device 10 years.
Now the question is, what is the health benefit of that $300,000 over 10 years? Well that depends on a lot of things, not only on how often there is a C0-related death, but on our understanding of the effects of CO at relatively low rates, such as 15ppm levels over time. While the NightHawk does not seem to sound an alarm at such levels, it does have a digital readout.
Myself, I believe that houses should be self-operated by the students, and that paterfamilias should stop much of this state micromanagement at the front door. The calculation I present above may be right in some sense, but it is also ridiculous on a house-by-house basis. If you don’t have a furnace or similar potential source of CO in your home, buying a CO detector is a rather silly expense, no? B&G gaffes aside.
I were Williams, so to speak, I’d be looking for a grant of about $500K to build semi-autonomous detectors which roam and report their results wirelessly, building a real-time map of CO levels on campus. And then to productize the technology, starting with sales to those who need it most. (Factories with spot CO emissions which damage product quality, worker productivity and health come to mind).
Of course, doing the above with NH(3) on a region-wide basis seems a little more interesting to me at the moment, and a little more cost-effective in the long-term. But the larger point for me is that if we (as a culture) were used to doing these things for ourselves instead of purchasing “solutions” and being told what to do with our money by the state, perhaps we would be doing a lot better and not worrying so much about the rest of the world.
Differential economic development can be a real killer, can’t it?
April 30th, 2006 at 7:12 pm
If you want to save lives, enact and enforce… speedlimit regulations.
Back when I was running QuantumFind, I would boldly sit in our Florida St. offices and schedule appointments on Sand Hill Road in under an hour.
What I had discovered, was that if you drive a vehicle that has the rough profile of a police sedan, and you drive in the left land of I-280 with your lights on at 120mph, people just get out of your way. It’s a wonderful experience, in an area as congested as the Bay.
I told the tale about up at American Specialty Cars in Lexington, and got an immediate series of their founder’s exploits and attitudes. In the end, I believe we can creep towards marginal advantages, or we can rush towards true innovation, accepting the risks and the inevitably high setbacks and losses.
We can either squeeze 2-5% savings out of turning lights off at night– or we can swallow the very high up-front costs of adopting fundamentally different technologies, and reduce the US’s consumption of oil by 50% in the next half-decade.
Now, I use seatbelts, and I haven’t tried cocaine, and we can look at both of those choices at macro- or micro- levels. I believe seatbelts obviously save lives, though they are no substitute for other technologies, from airbags to traction correction. I was the flag boy throughout Middle School, and my self-identity does not quite fit with the use of most substances.
But cocaine use is common enough among mathematicians, stock traders, Deans, and people like Edison for one to wonder if the calculations above apply at the micro level. Drug use of various kinds is part of the culture of several professions– and, as in the case of caffeine, it’s hard to miss the argument that such drugs are enablers. The image of LA actors wasting their lives away is rhetorical and contains an inherent judgment; the image of scientist using a drug as a cognitive stimulant is somewhat more complex.
In the end, I have a little bit of preference for the current Germany, where it takes $1000US of real training to become a licensed driver, where the police place radar speed control at areas with known traffic hazards and publish those locations, and where 120mph is a common rate of surface transport. I prefer the state staying quite a bit further away from individual life, and I prefer allowing a population to educate itself on issues of safety and choice, to a paternalism that requires us to expend our resources on the purchase of CO detectors for buildings that don’t have CO sources.
After all, $300K may be pocket change in the budget of an institution such as Williams, but it is enough to get a group of Chem and Comp Sci students down the road to autonomous NH(3) detector systems, and to eliminating some of the billions of dollars we are going to spend on dealing with the consequences of methamphetamine production and consumption.
Now, if you want to talk about the effect of US cocaine consumption on the politics and culture of the Americans… go find Hank Art.
April 30th, 2006 at 8:07 pm
i’m still trying to figure out how you got to $300,000 for the cost…there are only 2000 students. assuming there is one detector for each student (a liberal claim, as every double would need only one and many spaces, such as mission, could have one for two or three rooms…) and assuming installing each detector doubles the price ($40), it’s still only $160,000. (2000 X 80).
nonetheless, david’s original statement about raising tuition being connected to this mandate is still spurious, and i find the idea that if only we didn’t have this mandate, we’d have the money for the great ideas ken thomas points out.
Further, the original article explicitly mentions only putting the detectors in residences with “potential sources of carbon monoxide”. Seems like David and Ken’s critiques of the mandate fail to hold on inspection to me.
April 30th, 2006 at 9:04 pm
Rory,
I’m rather conservative on projected cost, and would be very happy if Williams published actual numbers. From the project budgets I’ve seen out of Williams in the past, I may be underestimating on 10-year cost.
In throwing out a rough figure, I’m assuming that we need 50% more to cover basements and attics and anything within 10 feet of a sleeping space, and that the actual installation and maintenance costs will be above the cost of the device. That is a fairly standard assumption, though in actual budgeting, we’d have to spread those costs over the years, and look at the real consumption of resources…
If the actual legislation confines this to dormotories where there a furnace system, and that substantively and meaningfully lowers the cost, then I’m all for it. I’m always playing somewhat devil’s advocate, after all, so my point at this moment is that we should be looking at things like the choice to spend $300K in resources on an “off-the-shelf” solution to CO contamination, or in building our own solutions to specific problems. These are resources choices businesses face every day, in terms of outsourcing and partnering.
Surely goverment should push and enable us in seeking such solutions– rather than obsucre the inherent choices.
Equally, I could claim that the use of mercury ballasts in early compact flourescents in the attic of Prospect, where they were placed at about 5′ 9″ above the surface and subsequently cracked by people’s heads running into them– probably had a worse enviromental impact than total CO emissions on campus. Hg is nasty, and I seem to remember a radioactive isotope in there, too. But every month, B&G would blithely come back and replace 10 bulbs, even though they cost $30 each, and even though after two years of that, the loose environmental mercury-with-radioisotope had do be in the tens of grams.
Now certainly you can challenge my figures, and whether those chemicals were getting stuck (”fixed”) anywhere else in the environment (other than in the heads that broke the ballasts, where they are likely to do the most damage). That’s the point. We need fine-toothed choices, and at least as configured in the 90s, B&G and the houses was not the kind of system likely to make such choices.
I’m also remembering Merideth Hoppin standing up in a faculty meeting, from the gallery in Griffin, and asking why, if no one had fallen off the gallery in two hundred years, we would tolerate the fire inspector telling us to close the gallery? Her point is that vesting such authority in a fire inspector is a loss of democracy, dismantling a system of governance where rule is fundamentally in the hands of the locality.
By itself, it is obvious that this kind of “nanny” legislation on a one-off basis has little impact. $300,000 divided by 20,000 student-years is not much. But if we try to take the sum of the cost of such legislation, I think our back-of-envelope calculation would be much higher, and it is reasonable to ask where those resources might otherwise be spent. When we look at the social effect of having authority exercised at the legislative level and not in local houses, I hope we will have at least similar questions about the course of our democracy, if not similar answers.
April 30th, 2006 at 11:17 pm
What a wide ranging discussion! Comments:
1) Richard is correct to sight Kip Viscusi on this topic, although Viscusi is now moving from Harvard to Vanderbilt. I do not know this literature as well as I should but, in general, regulation like this is ludicrously expensive in terms of lives saved.
2) Note that this is a very complex topic because it is very hard to know how many people would have died in the absence of the regulation. In other words, we will know over the next decade, how many people die in Massachusetts because of carbon monoxide poisoning. We will not know how many would have died in the absence of this law.
3) The classic example for supposing that regulations like this accomplish little concerns traffic fatalities per mile traveled in the US. Consider the data. The death rate has decreased significantly in the last 40 years. Now, it is tempting to attribute the lives saved to federal and state regulation. But the decrease was about the same in the previous decades (although I can’t find the data) even without any regulation.
4) I never suggested that this regulation plays a significant part in tuition rises. It doesn’t. But, in aggregate, state and federal regulations are very expensive for a place like Williams, indeed for any business. Any business owner is Massachusetts will tell you the same.
May 1st, 2006 at 3:40 pm
I want to narrow David’s remarks. Some regulations are ludicrously expensive. Other regulations, I go back to seatbelts and speed limits and smoke detectors, are very cost effective.
May 1st, 2006 at 4:50 pm
I am still gathering facts on this dispute, but I want to highlight some claims.
Around 600 people die accidentally per year from carbon monoxide poisoning. (cite) Someone with access to this article should tell us how many of these deaths occur in homes.
Many of these deaths are associated with cars. (cite)
The CDC page is not that useful.
Here is a background article on the law.
No estimates were available on the extra profits that Kiddie will generate because of the law or on its political donations and lobbying activities.
I predict that, in 20 years, there will be no evidence that this law reduced the death rate due to accidental carbon monoxide poisoning (ACMP) in Massachusetts. The rate is already low and has, almost certainly, been trending down for years. That trend will continue but would have continued even in the absence of this law.
What we need now is 1) an estimate of the total cost of this program in Massachusetts; 2) An estimate of the total deaths due to ACMP in Massachusetts over the last, say, 5 years. Does anyone have good estimates?
Then, we can argue about how many ACMP deaths will occur given that the law is past and how many would have occurred if the law had not passed. The death difference can be compared to the total cost to get a sense of the trade-offs involved.
I suspect that, as a state, we are mandating millions of dollars spent for a minimal number of lives saved.