San Diego Housing Market News and Analysis

It will probably be worse in 10 years, and flu it will be here so fast you won't believe it. My daughter graduated last Saturday so I am finished. We bit the bullet and sent our kids to private schools in Texas. I finished 8 years of private HS and 8 years of private College for my two kids. I got lucky on a couple of houses that made it easier to pay for but holy S I do not even want to know what we actually paid. I cannot imagine what people will do in the future paying for college. These colleges are like f- ing country clubs and just keep raising the green fees. In my mind I kept saying "thank you sir may I have another".

My kid hopefully will probably be going to a private school. I recall when I had a choice between any UC or private, I chose private, because back then they were having budget cuts and some people said it was taking them 5-6 years to finish. I ended up finishing my b.s.ee in 3.5 years and started on my m.eng last semester of senior year...But then again, I ended up getting an offer from qcom so I never finished my m.eng..

I was looking at the tuition of my alta mater...And while it is considerably more, percentage increase was slightly less than UC...

But I can hope that CA files for BK, and undo's a lot of these costs, like pensions...I mean, I got 10 years for them to straighten out this mess and 10 years to acquire more property/assets...

BTW: Great call on ARNA. You the man.

I see it taking 6+ years to get a four-year degree at CA public universities in the near future, with CSU taking longer than UC to finish. This will get ridiculously expensive as CSU is ALREADY $1731 for <6 credit hours (which may be all an undergraduate student can actually obtain in ONE semester when they begin working on their major). This doesn't include parking, health/student center fees or books/materials.

http://www.calstate.edu/budget/student-f...

I am also concerned about the ongoing massive defense drawdown which is and will cut loose thousands of military "careerists" who have 10-20 years service. They will get educational benefits in lieu of retiring with 20 years of service and may even be offered a partial pension. I believe these affected 27-37 yo soldiers and sailors who remain are CA after discharge from the service are going to get first priority in CA university admissions over and above our current HS kids who are trying mightily to get accepted. They will be considered a "resident student" for fee purposes regardless of their home state of residency. This will force most CA HS grads into CC for their two years of college, IMO.

If my kid ends up locked out of CSU/UC, I will find a way for them to "establish residency" in another state where public university admissions are not so limited/impacted, even if they are an entering junior (CA CC grad) at the time and still cannot get in. If we have to wait out a year and work in the new locale to establish residency, so be it. This will take LESS time and be LESS expensive than playing this game with trying to get the classes to graduate at CSU/UC.

Good for YOU, Desmond. TX is one of the states I have in mind to establish residency for my last kid. Unlike you, I didn't "make a killing" on two houses and can't pay for private HS, private college or out-of-state tuition.

I have relatives in three other states which could assist my kid with assimilation and getting a job to establish residency, if need be.

You seem to have sacrificed a lot for your kids (I take it you are renting now?) and I'm SURE you're VERY glad to be done with it :=]

....but hey, at least if you're undocumented resident in CA you still qualify for fee-reduced tuition..Because after all, CA can afford this. Really we can... (snicker snicker)..

See, it's great..People always love to talk about the greater good, and how others should make sacrifices..But they don't get it unless it hits home.....

Feel the pain people...Ooooooooooooo..It hurts so much it feels gooooooooooood.... Oooooooooooooooooooooooo...

There our kids so I would not call it a sacrifice more like what we wanted to. My wife and I are not high profile, we shared one car for 3 years and hung out without going on any big vacations, etc. College is very stressful now for parents with the high costs, you worry your kid will flunk a course and then have to go another semester and all sorts of crap runs through your mind. The schools never take into consideration what you are paying and really don't care. Get that residency and just do the best that you can without going BK or crazy!

Completely agree, desmond. I think CSU actually PREFERS the student take 1-2 classes at a time and/or has to repeat a class (for whatever reason) so they will have to attend their campuses for 10 years or so to graduate because it is SO MUCH MORE $$ for them! Meanwhile, in trying to get all the classes for their major, the student is stuck living near campus for years and working jobs AROUND their class schedule. They can't progress in life by getting FT work with benefits, like an on-time graduate can.

It should be the other way around, as it was in the past. That is, the student took classes AROUND their work schedule. Beginning the junior year, this is not doable anymore at CSU as the classes needed to satisfy major programs of study are only given sporadically (and not even every semester) and the student has to take them whenever they are offered, (even traveling to another campus, if necessary) to get these necessary credits.

I won't go BK and my kid will NOT take out student loans. We have some benefits available (currently abt $4K per semester) and will just pay the difference, get done ASAP and move on.

Congratulations on both your kids' successful graduation from college!

At this rate there will be no difference between in-state and out-state tuition for UC/CSU and thus making undocumented students eligible for in-state tuition via California DREAM act will mean ... well nothing!

Although I am retired from teaching at SDSU, I stay in touch with some of the faculty there. The fact is that there is enormous waste and inefficiency at all the CA universities, which, if attacked could radically lower costs. Items:
l. Faculty workload as measured by classes taught per year are down roughly one-third over recent decades. (meanwhile, class sizes have expanded--so much for quality education and interaction with students).
2. Campus amenities and buildings are turning into resorts, with pools, entertainment, gyms, hotel-style dorms, etc. This all bedazzles the prospective students--starry-eyed HS seniors, juniors, and their parents, but most students, once in, just want to get their coursework done and get out to start their life. Stop building TajMahals.
3. Above buildings are used about three-fourths of the year, a remnant of our agricultural past when we had to get the crops in. Instead, go to trimesters and run the universities year around. Some students could graduate in three years, skip the often wasted summer vacation. Get variety and enrichment instead by taking a year or two off to work, save up, travel, etc. after HS and before college. My best students were always older and had some life experience. Of course the faculty will scream if they lose their current 8 months of work out of 12.
4. Cut administration in half, then cut the pay of the remainder. That would put the ratio of their numbers relative to faculty and students at about 1970 levels.
Do all this and we could lower tuition radically. The student protesters, egged on by their Professors, need to ask them some tough questions.

Just curious whether you were vocal in this position while still teaching at SDSU or whether it came after you retired? If so, did you find any support among your peers or is it more of a I know things are a mess but at least I'm getting mine too?

Www.mayafrost.com

another way to skin a cat

The main point to take away from this article, is that the public employee unions and their cronies are very shrewd, do not underestimate their ability to ram new taxes down the throat of an already over burdened California populace.

On top of that excessive burden, a recession is on the way, if not already here.

And remember, there are many many people in California who depend on the welfare of the state ranging from gov't workers to lazy bums.

And these people are all to happy to take all the money they can get from guys like me who toil along in the productive private sector (who btw have already taken substantial reductions in benefits and salaries).

This is as much about wealth distribution than anything else. The governor is a socialist.

Good question. I was adjunct faculty for 18 years, not full time or tenured. I quickly learned not to get too vocal, since hiring was "at will", semester by semester. So yes, I made some noise, but stayed within the unwritten boundaries.
Incidentally, there is often tension between the tenured mandarins and the adjuncts, since the latter perform in a meritocracy, and the former includes the time-servers who could never make it in the private sector (along with many fine teachers too). The problem with our educational system at all levels is that there is too little correlation between teaching performance and pay.

I can't think of any profession where there is a correlation. I figured out a lot of times I get paid more just running my mouth and poking how everything else "should" be done versus sitting quiet and actually doing it... I picked this up from folks that I kept getting promoted into senior management positions at other companies...Said it before, I'll say it again.
People who say 4 things for every 1 thing they do often get rewarded more than people that do 4 things and say 1 thing. Just how it works.

There are some.

Sales work has a reasonably close correlation between performance and pay.

In other types of white-collar work, it gets sketchy and subjective really quickly.

It's all a question of measurement. It's fairly straightforward to measure a sales person's performance, even if there are other factors (like the quality of the product they are trying to sell.)

It's often trivial to measure a factory worker's performance.

You can sorta measure an R&D worker's performance by looking at deadlines met, work output, etc. But in general, measuring the performance of many "knowledge workers" tends to rely on subjective inputs.

Teaching is probably the hardest profession to actually measure performance. What makes a "good" teacher? How do you quantify it?

The answer certainly isn't "test scores" - they are way too easy to game, and certainly don't tell the whole story.

Like sales of mortgage securities?

Oftentimes the salespeople are long gone by the time there are chargebacks.

flu, think about what you just wrote. There is NO correlation between performance and pay.
C'mon, you are smarter than that.
It may be that there is too little correlation, it may vary by company, profession, etc. But companies that pay and promote by performance tend to do better than their competitors who don't and thus trounce them in the marketplace. Not always, of course. But that is the general tendency. That's also what makes capitalism so annoyingly productive to its detractors.

A lot of jobs (I would say most jobs, with the exception of sales as harvey pointed out) works like more like communism than capitalism..

For example, let's take engineering.
If you're a star performer versus not a star performer, what are you looking at in terms of pay raises and bonsues really? I think a lot of people would say.. "My pay raise was 4% and I was a star performer. The non-star performer was 2.5%"...So...what you're saying is that performance pay comes down to between a 1.5% difference, and then after taxes more like 1% difference??? And let's just assume that every enginerd makes $150k a year...(not realistic, because that's on the high side).. So we're talking about a $1500 difference...per year.... Each, month that's $125 extra for being a "star"...Gee, I can get a tank and half of gas extra per month in my SUV that takes 91 octane...

For a lot of people, what they end up thinking is ....Hmmm +1% to work my ass off to be a "star" performer or have 1% less to take it easy and let someone else do the heavy lifting...Yeah, I'll let the company/firm keep the 1%.

It goes back to the old analogy.. Hmm if I get $1 for working or $1 for not working, why should i work extra?

The exception would be if you do work that's "good enough" and you stand out by running your mouth off by how good you are...Then bammm!...Promoted...

Really? There will be times when things will sell for themselves (Good product, high demand, good economy, no competition etc.) and there will be times when nothing will sell (bad product, no demand, recession, competition etc.)

In general salesmen will be paid more in the first scenario than in the second no matter what they did ..

Maybe Economics prof. is falling too much in love with the idealized model of how an economy should work as described in the textbook? [ as opposed to how it really works :) ]

I believe in the maxim that 90% of success in life is just showing up at the right time at the right place ;)

Yes that's true but winners are looking to show up. They'd showing up all over the place checking if that's the place and time. Too many others are waiting for the time and place to find them.

Colleges have 10-20 years left. They've over played their hand and are graduating droves with high debt and really no productitive skills. They are the new military industrial complex

I don't think so... We are now in a global world. The colleges will recruit more foreign students who can pay cash for education.

American students who can't afford the tuition will be SOL.

Lol. American would again be an economic juggernaut if American students took the classes the foreign students come and take.

That's what they've overplayed.

is Dunder Mifflin the basic american corporation?

ap physics test just occurred a few days ago. kid may fail english but get a 5 in ap physics.

Something really annoying to me is UCSD's plans to simply stop admitting resident students in favor of non residents who will have to pay more tuition. Meanwhile still taking and wasting your tax dollars. I know there is waste at UCSD because I work alongside one employee who literally does NOTHING all day everyday, and I know there are several others who do very little.

Exactly, Mike. The depressing thing about all CA state spending is that even during this "crisis", little has been attempted to cut obvious waste at all levels. No one is challenging excessive pay, unnecessary positions, boards that meet monthly and pay $100k per year to political appointees, the fact that our teachers are the highest paid in the nation, etc. When a private sector company (or family) runs a deficit they attack expenses. Our government simply demands higher taxes from that private sector. The politicos OTOH, cut the most worthy and beneficial public services in order to scare the public.

I have to agree with you EconProf.

I agree with Econ...

Most of the schools are Taj Mahals. This is a huge contributor to cost. Expansion, of course, is understandable but the facilities that are being built these days are outrageous.

Also, the elephant in the room is sports. Of course there is the argument that this is money in the bank to colleges but I see it unnecessary and I believe does not do one thing for lowering schools cost. I believe WWRP do here is valid.

Just as a funny side note. I went to a Community College that at the time was ranked 5th in the nation for Math and Science. I attended school there for the same reason I went to ASU… It was “down the street” from my house but later I learned the history behind the school’s mascot and colors. Scottsdale Community College was founded as a academic CC. At some point the administration decided to have sports program against the initial philosophy of the school. When it came time to vote in a mascot and colors this is what the chose. The Mascot: The Artichoke… The Colors: Pink and “Puuky” Green.

Good points.
And there is another elephant in the room that will render all the extravagant new campus buildings obsolete: on-line courses. So many of the routine courses that have been taught in the same way for decades: a professor droning away, 50 to 100 (or 500) students faithfully taking notes, (or sleeping, or on their ipads, or absent). On-line education may offer the world's best lecturer on a subject, instant feedback to the teacher or assistant if material not being absorbed, ease of asking questions, easy review of tough concepts again by students so inclined, plus many other advantages. No parking problems, no frat parties, no sports, graduation in four years (or less). Just pure learning. Upper level small classes and seminars could still go on, but they make up the smaller part of the college experience. The vastly fewer teachers and lower cost of running colleges could be passed on in the form of lower tuition, although only competition between schools and a necessary winnowing out of some will force that in the long run. There will be howls of pain from the tenured elite in the faculty lounges.

+1,000,000

When the city of San Diego was trying to raise the sales tax, they trotted out the police chief to warn of the consequences of voting NO.

What they refuse to address is waste. My former neighbor works for the city of San Diego and from what I could tell hardly ever put in a full day (he was usually home by early afternoon on those rare occasions I was home during the work week.) Yet he still got every other Friday off from supposedly working a 9 hour schedule.

It's a big lie.