Alma and Rocky if you want fully free or have a lot of machines. RHEL if you are okay with registering with them; they give ten machines free access to their updates for each Registered account in their system.
RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
I know this is a common argument, but I would love to see some hard data about expenditures on administrative staff in Universities. Every time I look for this, I find that the expenditures on administrators has mostly gone up in the Health Care sectors of Higher Education. Instructional, student affairs and research administrators are up modestly.
Do you have any sources or citations to support the broad claims about increases in administrators or broad surplus revenue? As non-profits, if tuition is going up and all other fund sources are flat, then expenditures have to go up as well, there is no owner's profit to absorb excess revenue.
The best data I has is from the Education department, see the last part of this chart (Expenditure per full-time-equivalent student in constant 2022-23 dollars):
One-time taxes are dumb. The organizers of this tax should have the confidence of their arguments to make them permanent, or they shouldn't do it at all.
I guess that by the time a tax had been applied once, the targets would have worked out a way to avoid it anyway.
Apparently, in old Athens, not only were taxes one off, but they were explicitly targeted too, like "It's about time the Alcmaeonids pay for a festival again."
This remains a matter of active debate, and there is no law that requires or enshrines it. It's a legitimate opinion to hold, that a company should maximize shareholder returns, but it is not in any way a requirement to do so.
GLP-1s are the gateway drug to this whole world. It's not hard to rationalize that they are safe, and approved, but too expensive. If your insurance stops paying, or will never authorize it in the first place, going gray market may be the only choice to stay on a drug that works for you.
Of course, once you are placing an order, it's only one more add-to-cart click to add something completely untested to your order.
Probably just the iPad, unless you are not at all price sensitive. $350 ($299 refurbished) vs $600 is a big uplift; you can almost buy two iPads for the price of an iPad Air. For just PDF viewing, any Apple CPU is performant enough.
If you do this, you will destroy half of the top 20 hospital systems in the US, as they are run by Universities. Now maybe separating medical systems from universities is a good idea, but it's not simple by any means.
Government data on university expenditures show that at a broad level the increases in instructional and student-related expenditures are modest. Much of the increase is in the aforementioned medical systems, and in the Graduate and Faculty research enterprises:
I wouldn't think so. Hospitals do some teaching and research, but they also administer huge amounts of prescription drugs, physician salaries (both teaching and non-teaching), durable medical equipment, supplies, marketing, home health services, etc.
College Board data shows that Tuition and Fees net of financial aid has fallen by significant amounts over the past 20 years (see page 18). Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities:
My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.
CPI component calculations done by the BLS shows "College tuition and fees", including adjustments for scholarships and grants, had a 63% increase from 2009 (to match the CB data baseline) to now, which outpaces overall inflation of 56% over the same timeframe. I'm not sure what methodology CB uses to show falling inflation-adjusted prices.
Granted, it's not a massive difference in those percentages[0], but because college is a large single-ticket item, that difference is probably felt more acutely.
> Room and board has gone up, but that is broadly true in college towns generally, and is not in the control of the Universities
In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
[0]: As an aside, it's incredible that everyone half of their purchasing power in ~15 years, and a quarter in just the past 5 years alone.
> My comment was on the price of higher ed, not its cost, which is what your ed.gov source shows.
That's true, but as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
I think we largely agree overall, the CPI numbers are close enough that I wouldn't dispute them; they align with my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices.
> In many places the local university is the largest landowner in town, and is tax-exempt to boot. They might hold some of the blame in those costs.
This is probably true, and campuses could run housing at less-than-market rates. Whether that would be a better model than just giving students more financial aid that then gets paid back to the University as rent is something we'd have to model. Either way, my point is that we've seen a significant increase in the cost of rent across the entire country in the post-COVID era. That makes the Cost of College seem higher, but is something that Universities are subject to as much as a cause of.
> as non-profits, the revenues and expenditures of higher ed have to balance; they can't take out surplus revenue as profit.
Just pointing out that nonprofits do not have to balance revenues and expenditures at all. This is not a mere technical detail. Profit cannot inure to owners with nonprofits as it can with for-profits, but this does not prevent the organization from building up a surplus over time, nor does it prevent them from paying employees very handsomely. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have almost one hundred universities with endowments over a billion dollars.
> my argument that the rhetoric and public discussion of massive tuition increases is not supported by the data when using actual tuition paid rather than nameplate/MSRP prices
That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.
> Just pointing out that nonprofits do not have to balance revenues and expenditures at all. This is not a mere technical detail. Profit cannot inure to owners with nonprofits as it can with for-profits, but this does not prevent the organization from building up a surplus over time, nor does it prevent them from paying employees very handsomely. Otherwise it wouldn't be possible to have almost one hundred universities with endowments over a billion dollars.
I'm not an expert in non-profit accounting, but my general understanding is that it's not generally allowed to divert non-profit revenue into reserves at scale. The billions of endowments all come from non-budgeted and one-time gifts to the university.
> That's fair, but I suppose there's more to it than that. Any number of datasets point to the cost of admin rising far above the cost of faculty or maintenance; and a lot of them actually show on an inflation-adjusted basis that schools are spending less now on instruction than they did a decade or two ago. So perhaps there's enough truth to the idea that you're getting substantially less education per dollar than you used to.
All the above statements are true, but they all rely on the same error. Money spent by a university on research administration, or healthcare administration has zero relevance to the amount of money spent on Instructional administration. In order to make the argument that the cost of admin has gone up to the detriment of instruction, you'd want to exclude the administrative staff dedicated to non-instructional tasks.
As an example, if UCLA opens a new hospital in SoCal (not near any current UCLA undergraduates), they must staff that hospital with thousands of medical professionals. Sure, you can say the doctors are faculty, but you are still hiring thousands of nurses, technicians, janitors, cafeteria workers, etc. That makes the administrative cost of the University go up, but the Instruction is exactly the same.
Similarly, if UCLA gets a $100 million dollar grant for graduate-level AI research, they're going to have to hire quite a few staff members to administer that grant, to pay the researchers and grad students who are funded by that grant, to purchase and manage the computers full of GPUs, to build the building for the people and the datacenters for the servers, and to file the mountains of audit paperwork that the federal government requires in order to get the money and show that there wasn't any Waste, Fraud, or Abuse. All of the staff (AKA administrators) that make that happen now show up as an administrative cost of the University, and end up in a naive calculation of "increases in administration at UCLA", despite the fact that all of their salaries are paid (legitimately) by the $100 million grant that UCLA received, and instruction is completely unaffected by this.
This is why I like the expense data from the Education Department. It at least tries to break out the expenses related to non-Instructional things (Research, Hospitals, etc.) There may be an interesting discussion to be had as to whether Universities are spending more on Instruction or Student Services per-head in real dollars, but I pretty much never see intelligent discussion rooted in those numbers; instead it's the common, "Harvard has 4x the administrative staff today that it did in 1980. Outrageous!"
The cost of a nationwide grid is significant. Depending on the terrain and population density, it usually nets out at somewhere between 30%-50% the overall cost of electricity. Sure, if you run a microgrid among a few houses, you won't pay those costs, but someone has to pay the cost to maintain the km of lines to reach deep into the mountains of Bavaria.
Microgrids also have some black swan events that can result in outage; if you are reliant on solar and storage but then experience a 7-day long period of stormy weather and no production. As you note, off-grid is always an option, and when you seriously look into it, you quickly find that costs to have that 24/7/365 service are many times more than just paying to connect to the grid.
RHEL is definitely the most stable major distribution. Alma and Rocky are essentially downstream clones of RHEL.
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