Why do American universities cost so much?

Question: Being from Russia, the idea of paying 5-6 digit sums for a university education sounds ludicrous. I understand that prices in the US are different but surely there have to be cheaper options. Besides, if your education operates like a free market, one would expect that at least some universities would choose to offer their educational services at a lower price. Do any? If so, why aren't they popular? Are there options for Americans to get your university education for free?
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Answer: Examining cost drivers in an industry is a complex economic task and making comparisons between countries is also quite complex, since there are many surrounding differences in other aspects of the economy.  There have been a number of studies examining the higher education sector with general equilibrium modelling (see e.g., Chatterjey and Ionescu 2012,
Jones and Yang 2016,
Abbott et al 2019
and Athreya and Eberly 2021).  There have also been several reports summarising cost drivers in higher eduction in the US (and elsewhere), with particular attention to the rising (real) costs of university since the 1980s.  Reports on this topic include Archibald and Feldman (2011), Archibald and Feldman (2016), Archibald and Feldman (2018) and Gordon and Hedlund (2021).
The US higher education sector is a mixed economy composed of public and private universities.  There are extensive public subsidies throughout the sector, including an extensive system of subsidised loans.  The sector operates in parallel with a number of large technological and industrial sectors in the US that have seen rapid growth in the last few decades.  I am not sufficiently familiar with international differences between the US and Russian higher education sectors to offer a point-by-point comparison, but here are a few of the main cost drivers for US higher education that are identified in the literature:

Cost disease: One of the drivers of increasing cost is cost disease (also known as the Baumol effect).  Due to labour competition between different sectors of the economy, the labour cost for higher education workers has tended to increase faster than increases in labour productivity in the sector.  For example, the rise of competing technology fields in STEM (e.g., "big tech") can drive competition for highly educated technical workers, which would drive cost disease within the higher education sector.  Since labour costs for higher education workers are high, ceteris paribus the resulting supply curve is pushed towards higher prices.

Less direct government funding (than other countries): In the US system there is direct funding of public universities by state governments, with a mixture of public and private universities.  However, governments fund a smaller proportion of the sector than in many other countries.  In some countries the cost of higher education is borne primarily or solely through taxation and so the service is "free" to the consumer.  Since direct government subsidies defray the "sticker price" of a service to consumers, ceteris paribus having less direct funding from government means a higher cost for the consumer.

Subsidised/govt-backed loans for education: Most students attend university using student loans.  These include loans from the Federal Government and private loans.  The US Government provide a range of direct loans up to a limit and then beyond this student can seek private loans.  As is the typically the case in economics, when the government subsidises or provides loans for a costly activity, ceteris paribus the demand for that activity increases and so does the price.  The "Bennett Hypothesis" (named after Secretary of Education William Bennett) is that increases in financial aid and government funded/subsidised loans caused the universities to raise their tuition and simultaneously increase capital spending on amenities to attract students, knowing that the loans would increase demand in the sector and defray costs onto the government.

Amenity competition and high capital spending: Because student loans are provided by the government this substantially increases demand for higher education and induces high levels of competition for students.  US universities are known to have responded to these changes by engaging in high capital spending to provide luxurious amenities (e.g., stadiums, sports facilities, pools, climbing walls, student lounges, cafes, etc.) to students to augment their education.  This has generally been considered to be a simple way to compete for students when faced with high inelasticity of education quality.  A number of critiques of the high cost of the higher education sector have noted the "gold plating" of US univerity campuses due to amenity competition.  This is largely a secondary effect of having a market with a high level of government loan-subsidisation to attract students.

Increase in administrative roles and associated labour costs: Higher eduction in the US has experienced a large increase in non-academic administrative staff since the 1980s.  Some commentators regard this as a development reflecting an increasing "standard of care" in universities while others see it as "administrative bloat" that does not increase the standard of care or even a broader aspect of an ideological capture of the universities that decreases the standard of care.  Regardless of how it is characterised, there has been a huge increase in labour costs in US universities due to proportionate increases in non-academic administrative workers who work in support roles in the university.
Comment: Most universities, especially the pricier ones, also offer extensive grants for merit or financial aid. I went to a nominally quite expensive school, but after scholarships and financial aid the tuition + housing was about an order of magnitude lower than advertised. That's not loans, it was grants *from the school*.
Comment: Your point about increased capital spending in response to student loans is great. It does make me wonder - are there universities that have taken the opposite path, allowing students to pay cheap tuition in cash in order to study in dark, drafty 100-year-old buildings, type up their projects on Commodore 64s that the faculty dug up from landfills, and where sports is kicking a patched-up ball around a muddy ditch?
Comment: @O.R.Mapper more relevantly, I visited my alma mater this past year and was shocked at the level of luxury that I didn't have 20 years ago. There was a glass-enclosed fitness center right there in the middle of campus (pure luxury), and even arguably essential services like the library had received luxury upgrades like wood paneling and glass staircases. I was disgusted. What about students who want to save money and study in the smelly, dirty brick buildings I did? Is luxury required to maintain accreditation? Is there really no market in discount education?
Comment: @RobertColumbia: Concerning the last point: Nothing keeps students from doing sports in one of the dozens of sports facilities/clubs unrelated to any university presumably found in most larger cities. (*If* the students in question have interest in sports to start with, that is.) In all, you're asking for whether the trick that worked for airlines (why compete by improved luxury service, if customers accept getting no (included) luxury service at all in exchange for paying a much lower price?) has been attempted in education, as well.
Comment: @O.R.Mapper yes, exactly. I know that some programs like physics and chemistry sometimes need expensive lab equipment, but I can't see any reason why there couldn't be barebones universities teaching humanities, social sciences, and mathematics in dank basements, drafty warehouses, and log benches in the middle of the woods. This wouldn't be for every student, but I know quite a few people who would love to do this if it would help them avoid student loans. So my question is really whether this is a thing, and if not, why not? Has it been tried and failed? Are there regulatory issues?
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Answer: There are many factors.
First, we should address the difference between price and cost.  Price is what the student pays.  Cost is what the university spends.  In most of Europe, the cost is much higher than the price.  In the US, the price is generally closer to (but still below) the cost.  This is because, in Europe, the government foots a much larger percentage (and - in some countries - all) of the cost.
There is still a difference in cost - the US spends between 1.5 to 2 times as much per student as Germany.  Why the difference?
One difference is that salaries in particular for knowledge workers are higher in the US.  Google is now paying its US software engineers with a few years of experience close to $200K.  As I understand it, Google does not pay its software engineers in Germany nearly that much.  The university salary is not going to be as high as Google's, but professors who could become software engineers (and most of them could learn to be, even if they aren't computer science professors) are, on average, only going to accept so much of a difference in salary to be a professor.
(For that matter, graduate students at the University of California (all campuses) are currently on strike, demanding to be paid at least $45K a year, because rent in California is expensive and it costs that much to live there!  This is going to basically ruin that university system, because there is no way this doesn't completely break the budget, but they're also not going to be able to attract graduate students with what they're paying now since, with the recent inflation, that will require being homeless.)
A second difference is that the average US student is more expensive to educate.  In Germany, roughly only the top 50% of students go to university, and only 50% of those who go graduate.  In contrast, in the US, students with all levels of high school achievement go on to a tertiary education system that attempts to teach them university-level material, and the system aims to graduate all of its students (though it doesn't come close).  Part of the difference comes from a difference in standards - a US university graduate is not expected to know as much or be as capable as a German university graduate.  On the other hand, the average US high school graduate knows much less and is less capable than the average German high school graduate, and the difference is even bigger when you consider the university-going cohort.  This means US universities are teaching more, to students who need are slower learners, than German universities.  It's not surprising US universities spend more.
Finally, the US has a fair number of elite universities that spend a lot of money on research and on various luxuries for the students (and staff).  (When I visited a Canadian university, I was shocked by how crowded the library was compared to even relatively frugal non-elite US universities.  More square feet in the library cost money!  Or go to a French university and realize that roofs that don't leak are a luxury.)  They are a small percentage of universities, but they do spend so much that they do drive up the average by a noticeable amount.
Comment: Do you have any sources for your statements: _" a US university graduate is not expected to know as much or be as capable as a German university graduate"_ and _"the average US high school graduate knows much less and is less capable than the average German high school graduate, and the difference is even bigger when you consider the university-going cohort. This means US universities are teaching more, to students who need are slower learners"_?
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Answer: As for the title of the question, why it costs so much: A fundamental difference between the US and other countries (or the US several decades ago) is that the rest of the world believes that education is a communal responsibility that should be paid for in large part by tax money. As a consequence, many countries have no tuition costs to students at all -- for example, during my college years in Germany, I never spent a single Deutschmark on paying for college: it was all tax-payer funded.
In contrast, contemporary American society has come to accept that taxes are bad and that many things are an individual responsibility. States no longer pay a substantial share of universities' operating costs, and so the majority of what it costs to provide students with an education needs to necessarily come from students themselves. That adds up to thousands of dollars per year per student. (A back-of-the-envelope calculation will show that that is not much more than it is in countries like Germany, for example; the difference is only who pays for it.)
Given this, it makes sense that you may be able to find opportunities to get a college education for more or less money, but you will not find much if you're looking for "essentially free" education. It simply costs $s to educate students, and someone has to pay for it whether that's at Harvard of Podunk Community College. The only approach you can take is to be good enough to get a scholarship: It that case, your education of course still costs money, but it's not you but some scholarship fund that will pay for it.
Comment: I was shocked to learn that (assuming you believe [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2019/09/22/america-spends-more-on-college-than-virtually-any-other-country/?sh=6431337e3348)), we pay almost twice as much per student in the US.
Comment: The article notes that, "the OECD adjusts its spending figures for cost-of-living differences across nations." I'm sure that's challenging though.
Comment: @Ian That's only part of it. Salaries are not proportional to cost of living.
Comment: I don't think that article takes into account endowments, many of which are earmarked for things like fancy buildings with the donor's name on them.  This probably accounts for a significant difference in costs.
Comment: I believe this is the answer, but needs citations. My experience is I went to an ivy league school in 1984 and the tuition was 10K. With financial aid my out of pocket cost was 1K. I then went and graduated from my home state flagship public University where I paid about 700 for those 3 years. So price was there, just that state govenment subsidized the public Universities. Somewhere around the 2000s it started changing a lot...
Comment: @Ian That where? The US has quite a high standard of living, with consequently high salaries compared to most countries in the world. It would make sense that the cost of education -- which is to a very large part dominated by labor costs -- is also high.
Answer: Many good answers here, so I'll just address one aspect that they haven't:
For the top-tier Ivy Leagues, being expensive is the point. They are, practically speaking, giant hedge-funds with a university attached to them.
Harvard's endowment is $50 Billion. Princeton's is $40 Billion That's more than the GDP of many small/poor countries. They don't need to charge fees:

After a stellar year in 2021, Princeton University has an endowment of
$37.7 billion. Over the past 20 years, the average annual return for
the  endowment has been 11.2 percent. Let us give Princeton the
benefit of the  doubt and assume that at least some of that was luck
and maybe  unsustainable, and that a more reasonable prediction going
forward would be  that Princeton can average a return on its
investments of an even 10  percent a year. That puts Princeton's
endowment return next year at roughly  $3.77 billion.
Now—what is Princeton's annual operating budget? $1.86 billion. The
arithmetic here is not hard. $3.77 billion in investment income minus
$1.86  billion in operating expenses leaves you with $1.91 billion.
Princeton could let in every student for free.

The fact that Princeton charges $80K/y for undergrad, is not because they need the money, but because it signals prestige and exclusivity and there are more than enough takers. In fact, its peanuts, since wealthy people make multi-million dollar "donations" to ensure their children get in. This applies to all the Ivys.
(P.S. that rate of return is really high, but Ivy League Endowment rates of return have always been significantly higher than normal. There's no hard proof, but it's widely suspected that in addition to the donations, big-shots in the business community pay with knowledge that is used for insider trading by endowments.)
Comment: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/03/it-costs-73450-to-go-to-princetonheres-how-much-students-pay.html reports that when Princeton's tuition was $73k a year, 60% of students qualified for financial aid and those students paid an average of $13600 for tuition, room, and board. "Princeton covers full tuition and some of room and board costs for students from families earning up to $140,000, and covers all of tuition for students from families making between $140,000 and $160,000." So, the sticker price and what wealthier students pay is not necessarily representative.
Comment: @Chan-HoSuh the figure is the average for the last 20 years, not a few years of over performance.
Comment: They were down 1.5% last fiscal year.  Malcolm Gladwell is making very strong conclusions from just a few years of outperformance, and your conclusion from his arguments is a tad strange.
Comment: Hmm, you don't seem to get my point.  Yes, if everything plays out the way Gladwell imagines, then things are good.  If they don't, then his perpetual motion machine doesn't.  Like I pointed out, they're negative so far this year.
Comment: "The point is that they could charge zero tuition and still be AOK." -- only in Gladwell's imaginary scenario, but sure.  Point taken, I guess.  "My point is that the high fees at the Ivy's are for status more than real need." -- I don't think you have any evidence for that.
Comment: "And Princeton still gets grants, donations and royalties." -- the endowment is actually a conglomeration of funds, many with different strings attached.
Comment: @Chan-HoSuh it doesn't matter how well the fund is doing in a particular year, the point was about the multi-year average. Also, are you trying to say that the donations, grants and royalties are part of the fund(s) somehow?
Comment: @Eugene yes, I understand.  But until just recently, their performance was not sufficient (by Gladwell's standard) to entirely fund operating expenses: "Until this year, the endowment return was a healthy cushion—ALMOST big enough each year to fund the entire university's operations for the following year—but not quite"
Comment: Basically after a phenomenal year (2021), the endowment was large enough so that by Gladwell's own very subject investment criterion for sufficiency and a very suspect 10% projection, Princeton "could let in every student for free".  It only takes one bad year to flip that around as any investment professional (which Gladwell is not) can tell you.
Comment: @Chan-HoSuh Literally the next paragraph: "But, man—look at that triumphant spike in 2021! Even if Princeton were now to fall way back down to the average investment return it's raked in over the past 20 years, we'd still be high above the blue line." Note that he uses 10% instead of the actual 11.5% avg for margin. And Princeton still gets grants, donations and royalties. The point is that they could charge zero tuition and still be AOK. My point is that the high fees at the Ivy's are for status more than real need.
Answer: There are several factors, but in my opinion the biggest one is federally subsidized student loans which break the "expected"/"free market" behavior.
When my parents went to college in the US, it was seen as a privilege, for the highly intelligent, and not something everyone did (perhaps closer to how PhDs are viewed today).  Many people could simply graduate from high school and make a fine living. College was also much more affordable, many people were able to pay for a large portion of their tuition by saving wages from working over the summers in high school.
As demand for more skilled labor grew, however, a college degree became increasingly required for many jobs and more people began to attend college.  Eventually, college became seen as something "everyone" should attend.  In response to this sentiment, the Federal government created a liberal student loan program to help enable anyone attend college who wanted to.  Note that unlike most loans, student loans are not based strongly on credit-worthiness or the likelihood that you will be able to pay them back, nor can you default on them.
While a potentially laudable goal, some argue that this loan system had the opposite effect.  Instead of universities keeping prices relatively constant, they quickly realized that since almost anyone can get a loan they could charge exorbitant prices and people would simply take out the "guaranteed" loan to pay for it.  I don't know of a good data source off-hand, but I suspect there is a high correlation between the rapid increase in the cost of undergraduate education and the amount of federal funds put toward student loans (with federal funding leading rather than lagging the cost increase).
At least from the perspective of my parents, you are essentially now damed if you do (save carefully, don't qualify for student loans, then drain your savings to pay) and damed if you don't (don't save, qualify for student loans, then be stuck with crippling debt).
It's also worth mentioning that many of the top universities in the world reside in the US and there has been an increasing amount of foreign competition for admittance to US colleges. Not only does this exert upward pressure on the price, but many colleges charge a large additional fee to foreign students which acts as a further incentive to raise domestic prices.
Comment: @IamCleaver Look up "FAFSA" (free application for federal student aid) to learn more.  It's honestly a bit crazy imho.  Imagine how high car prices would be if the government gave anyone who wanted to lease a car (that wasn't extremely wealthy) $25,000/year, no questions asked.  And they only reduce your yearly loan if you get into crashes regularly...
Comment: @IamCleaver Yep *exactly*.  A prospective CS major gets as much money as someone who wants to major in underwater basket weaving.   I'm not sure exactly how much is given (it tends to be a pretty high percentage) but you are right that it is based on how much the *university is asking for tuition*.  Now it becomes fairly obvious why they a) ask for exorbitant sums and b) admit as many students as possible.  Now a third trend c) is emerging: universities heavily pander to students and drop academic standards to keep as many attending (and thus paying) as possible. (bad grades also mean >>fed $)
Comment: @IamCleaver There is a government cap on how much is given, and it has been increasing over the years. This acts as the university's base target (max govt. $ + $ you spend on top of that).  The money given is based on a sliding scale that includes your PARENTS' wealth (ie if you and your parents are poor you get max $, if your parents have a large savings account or have high enough income you get no $).  If you ask and are poor enough you get one. No they don't look at your grades, but if your grades once you are in college drop too much (>2.0) they can reduce how much they give you.
Comment: Can the loans be as large as a university demands? Why doesn't the government put a cap on the loans? Also, are loans given to anyone who asks? Does the government at least look at your grades?
Comment: Let us [continue this discussion in chat](https://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/141203/discussion-between-iam-cleaver-and-cole).
Comment: So, if I understand you correctly, ANY student, regardless of their prior academic achievements, who found ANY accredited university willing to take them in would be given a loan to pay the university (almost) as much as they ask to study ANY major, be it aerospace engineering or african american studies?
Comment: As much as I believe that the government should provide free scholarships - not loans, this difference starts to seem trivial. The loans are far from ideal imo, but a far greater problem seems to be not in the idea of loans themselves, but in the fact that ANYBODY can receive a loan regardless of their academic abilities or the demand for their major. Also, the cap is the same regardless of whether you are applying to MIT or some backwater liberal arts college, right?
Comment: @IamCleaver The idea that the government could start deciding to only fund people to study X subjects, but not Y is pretty unpalatable to many.
Comment: @AzorAhai-him- Why? Its the government's money. Isn't it their job to distribute resources according to the nation's needs?
Comment: @IamCleaver That could easily turn into programs collapsing because the government decides we don't need English or Middle East studies anymore. Or turn into "only the rich can study CS/medicine/etc."
Comment: @AzorAhai-him- I still don't see it as a problem. If the government believes that there are enough majors for that profession already without government financing then so be it.
Comment: It's probably too complex to discuss further in comments and I don't participate in chat.
Answer: I'm rather surprised I didn't see any other answers addressing the premise that

education operates like a free market

because education is not a free market.
In a free market, by definition, there are low barriers to entry. This is not the case in the education market. There are a large number of very high hurdles a new educational institutional must pass in the United States to even gain access to the market, including:

Obtaining quality faculty
Putting together a curriculum
Physical buildings, not just for teaching, but also for dorms and extracurriculars. These are not strictly necessary, lack of physical presence has a large impact on perception of quality.
Permission from the state's department of education (This alone will take 2+ years)
Obtaining accreditation (Regionally or nationally, by a private nongovernmental organization like ABET)
Certification from USCIS (to take foreign students)
Specific program accreditation for things like law or medicine

Snuck into these hurdles is a rather nasty catch-22 where accreditation is usually denied to institutions that don't already have students. However, students are obviously wary of institutions lacking accreditation.
Comment: If that is the case then why are there many reports of universities (that are already accredited) going bankrupt? If the bar to entry is that high, and you are already on the other side of the fence, then surely cutting expenses would be a better option...
Comment: @IamCleaver You might be better off asking these sorts of questions somewhere else; might be on-topic at Money.SE, but please don't use this site as a discussion forum and keep asking numerous additional questions under each answer to yours.
Comment: @IamCleaver You can only cut expenses so far, though.  There's a certain critical level of money that you need to bring in each year to cover your minimum operating costs.  If you're (for example) sitting on a lot of building-related debt and your enrollment drops below a certain point, you can't pay your bills anymore. It's hard to recruit students when your school might not last long enough for them to graduate. The downward spiral can be swift and hard to escape from.
Comment: @IamCleaver I don't have good sources for this, but it might because of the shift to more technical majors. These require infrastructure: labs, computers, technicians and possibly more expensive staff than just that required for a liberal arts college. Just because the price is high doesn't mean the margins are good. (I suspect that last point isn't true nationwide, but it might be possible for small colleges)
Comment: @code11 Regarding your answer, yeah, I think the reason is mostly because of regulation that requires it to be expensive. The regulation isn't entirely in the education industry, however. Some extra rules are tagged on in order to get government funding. Some rules exist to prevent malpactice. Lots of stuff. If there were no regulation, there would be no minimum cost, in theory.
Answer: Unlike Russia, there is a more clear perception of a more prestigious university = higher station in life. This does not always work out as expected (see the current outrage about student loans). The education model is fundamentally different because of reasons having little to do with academia and a lot with economy.
In Russia, taking a bank loan (mortgages and unforeseen urgencies aside) is typically a pretty bad idea. In the US, the credit score is important, and borrowing money one way or another is viewed as one of the pillars of capitalism: $100 now is better than $100 a few years later. The idea of taking a loan from the government to invest in yourself to pay it back many years later makes more sense in that financial system. Actively managing their finances is just not something most Russians do (surely not to an extent Americans seem to do that). And yes, there are scholarships, but they are pretty rare (on the flip side, purely academic careers able to sustain a small family are also exceedingly rare in Russia).
Both have their pros and cons. One of the notable deficiencies of the current Russian system is the perverse incentive to get a coveted diploma no matter the actual education provided, sometimes viewed as 5-6 years of largely wasted time. Soviet-era tekhnikums are now proudly calling themselves "institutes" or even "universities" because that is what moves the most tax money through them. Again, reasons for that are economical - the alignment between the education system and the industry is poor, unlike some European countries. The same is true about the US, but in a different way, and you have people complaining about massive debt they are never able to pay off.
And yes, there are cheaper options, but you graduate from Harvard and are easily on your road for six figures annual; you graduate from Podunk and are barely making the ends meet. So "free market" dictates how much one could fleece each social class and market to them accordingly. There is little incentive to facilitate social mobility for universities - this is something a government should be handling, and it is rather hands-off in the case of the US.
Comment: Yeah I think the culture or "prestige" of how the system works in America cannot be overstated. We drive up the costs ourselves because *of course* we want to go to a famous old school. The "invisible hand" of the free market can't work if everyone insists are a very particular source of the product.
Comment: @JamieB "free market" Higher education is heavily subsidized in the US.
Comment: @JamieB US government spending on tertiary education, as a fraction of GDP, is higher than the G20 average and close to the OECD average. I agree that reputation is important.
Comment: @user76284 It's less subsidized than a number of other countries, and unsubsidized private colleges remain popular (and "the most prestigious"). I think if you could start a new school, hire literally the entire faculty of Harvard to run it, no one would want to attend, because "it's some school no one has heard of".
Answer: There are many reasons. The basic one is that higher education isn't fully funded by the government through taxes. Some universities get substantial funding from individual states (funded by income taxes), but not enough to cover all costs. In those universities, tuition isn't completely covered, but it is lower for residents of that state (taxpayers) than for others.
Many (actually most) universities are private and receive only limited governmental funding so much of the tuition is borne by the students. Many universities (private and state) give out some scholarship aid to a minority of students. This can reduce the cost considerably, even to zero. Some states give (or gave, in the past) scholarships to residents even for study at private universities.
Free higher education comes for only a few. Some athletes and some financially disadvantaged students primarily.
Most universities have many revenue streams, but a lot of that is to support research, not teaching, specifically. But even with the high cost of tuition, the student pays only a fraction of the total cost in all but a few "for profit" colleges and universities that tend to have special missions and, possibly, lower standards.
Funding in the US for education generally is very poor and it comes from some crazy sources. Property taxes, in particular, ensure that if you are poor and live in a poor area then your primary and secondary education will be poorly funded since most of it is local funding. We don't seem to be able to break that habit. That isn't quite the same as for higher education, but, some states fund higher education poorly.

For completeness, I'll note that all universities cost a lot - everywhere. The difference, really, is who bears the cost. In the US, students bear a lot of it. If faculty are poorly paid and exploited somewhere then they do. A sensible (IMO) system recognizes that an educated citizenry is a benefit now and for the future and finds a way to spread that cost accordingly and appropriately.
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Answer: Among many other reasons:
In the US, employers pay for employee health care.  In many other countries, this is not the case.  In the US, the health care system is exceptionally inefficient and prices are rising fast.  Universities are hit particularly hard by health care costs because they employ many older staff.  Those costs are passed on to students.
Health care costs are particularly significant to students because, while universities can cut staff pay and defer capital expenses, it is quite hard to cut health care costs.
Comment: Actually, the cost is split with the employee in many places, but that doesn't change the bottom line. The employee, in paying part of the health insurance also subsidizes the education. The costs of insurance are still there, no matter who pays.
Comment: The employee contribution is limited. https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/employers/questions-and-answers-on-employer-shared-responsibility-provisions-under-the-affordable-care-act#Affordability
Answer: Some people answering the question before me have the incorrect impression that U.S. students have no choice but to pay high tuition for private universities.
Let us start with some U.S. government statistics.

In fall 2020, nearly all undergraduate students (95 percent) attending degree-granting institutions enrolled in either public 4-year (48 percent), public 2-year (30 percent), or private nonprofit 4-year (17 percent) institutions... The remaining 5 percent of undergraduate students were distributed across private for-profit 2- and 4-year institutions and private nonprofit 2-year institutions in fall 2020.

"Public" in the U.S. means educational institutions run by a government - not what it means in the U.K. and some other English-speaking countries.
Some random examples of public 4-year institutions are

Hunter College of the City University of New York

University of California, Berkeley

The Ohio State University

Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

The Pennsylvania State University

Some examples of public two-year institutions (almost synonymous with community colleges) are:

12 2-year colleges in Connecticut State system

116 California Community Colleges

Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York

(For non-U.S. readers - many undergraduates attend a community college with the intention to transfer later to a 4-year school and get a 4-year degree. Not all succeed, but at a typical U.S. community college, young people intending to transfer often form the majority of the students.)
Some diverse examples of private universities are:

Columbia University in the City of New York

New York University

Georgetown University

Liberty University

Indeed, the sticker prices of the tuition at most private schools seem like a lot. But, according to the government statistics above, nearly 4 out of 5  U.S. undergraduates choose to attend a public 4-year or a 2-year program, rather than a private one. Public institutions tend to be free or very low cost for the students, with the taxpayers covering most of the cost. For example, in the City University of New York or State University of New York systems, tution is free for students who reside in New York State and earn less than $125,000 a year (details). Tuition is not free, but is still very cheap for students who each more than $125,000 a year, or come in another state or country.
We should note that in addition to paying (or not) for tuition, a student needs to eat something, and sleep somewhere, which in the U.S. can cost about $1-2,000 / month for 4 years. Many public and private institutions offer their students subsidized housing and meal plans - typically, not free, but cheaper than market price. Also many undergraduates are able to live on the cheap at home with their families while getting their bachelor's degree.
Nor, in general, are these free and low-cost public institutions difficult to get into, which is how free universities in other countries usually operate. For exmple, CUNY and SUNY have practically open admisisons. The statistics on the percentage of students who apply and are not accepted are not useful for these schools because (almost) any student who graduated high school in New York with a grade of B or better has to be admitted, and can usually get free tuition.
Most U.S. students are well aware that it is not necessary to pay for a private school in order to earn a bachelors degree. Only a little over 1 in 5 do choose to attend a private school, rather than a public one.
EDIT: I will adress some points raised in the question and in the comments.
Let us compare the above facts (widely availability of free and low-cost public institutions) with the picture painted by the Russian government's Internet Research Agency:
https://almavest.ru/ru/node/1379
English translation:

The United States, in the field of education, lacks many concepts familiar to us in the post-Soviet space...

There are no federal "state universities" in the United States, because historically it turned out that education is not mentioned in the US Constitution - in 1787, the Founding Fathers of the United States, apparently, were not interested...

All universities in the USA are paid, there is no free post-secondary education in the USA at all.

https://legalizuem.ru/blog/vysshee-obrazovanie-v-ssha
English translation:

It is also worth considering that American education is considered one of the most expensive in the world; unfortunately, there is no free education in America...

The minimum cost of studying at an American university is from $ 5,000 per year. On average, this is about 30,000 dollars a year.

Besides, if your education operates like a free market, one would expect that at least some universities would choose to offer their educational services at a lower price. Do any? If so, why aren't they popular?

There are some for-profit universities. As you can see from the statistics I cited, the vast majority of U.S. undergraduates attend public of private non-profit institutions. Here are a couple of examples of for-profit universities:

De Vry

University of Phoenix

For-profit universities can't compete with public universities by offering lower tuition, because public universities are heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Generalizing very broadly, most Americans don't view for-profit universities as a good option for earning a bachelor's degree. Some people view for-profit universities as sometimes a good option for taking some non-degree courses, e.g. learning a foreign language or a particular skill. Some for-profit universities are outright scams.

Are there options for Americans to get your university education for free?

Yes, many. For example, as I explained above, most New York State residents can get into SUNY or CUNY (the admissions are almost open), and the tuition is free for most residents, and very low for others. Almost 4 out of 5 U.S. students choose this option.
At universities that do charge high tuition, many students receive some kind of grants or scholarships. I'd venture to say that it's more common nowI'! than paying the full sticker price tuition. For example, the beatnik author Jean-Louis Lebris "Jac" de Kérouac attended Columbia University on a football scholarship (go Lions!!)
A recent New York Times article says that some private universities are lowering their tuition sticker price to better reflect what students actually pay.
One common way to earn free tuition at expensive private universities is to volunteer to serve in the U.S. military. Then (with some restrictions), U.S. taxpayers will pay college tuition for you, your spouse, and dependends.
Some (not all) states have programs where the state pays some or all university tuition for people receiving public assistance (welfare, dole). Sometimes they pay for a very expensive private university.

why is there a student debt crisis?

The truth is more complex than what your government's propaganda paints. For example, I know one young woman who borrowed over $100,000 as student loans, and spent it mostly on things like travel and clothes. She states that her plan was to marry a rich man who would pay off her student loans. As far as I know, her marriage plans have not materialized yet, but rather I and other U.S. taxpayers will end up paying for her student loans.
According to CUNY's Hunter College,

The median federal loan graduate indebtedness for Hunter students was just $12,500. (Hunter is proud that 75% of its students graduate debt-free.)

Is there a reason why more people don't go there?

I'm sure that the over 1 out of 5 students who attend private universities believe that there are valid reasons for their choices. For many students, the tuition cost is not a big consideration because someone else pays. Some students believe that the campus environment is more pleasant in a private university, than in a public one (example), or that they would get better education in some way, or that they would be more likely to find a good job or be admitted to a competitive graduate school after graduation.
But the claim that Americans wanting a bachelors degree have no choice other than to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for private university tuiton is demonstrably false.

Do these universities offer all majors?

That's definitely a consideration for some students. For example, some religious students attend a religious university (many Roman Catholic universities; Liberty - evangelicals, etc) because they want to study theology, and they don't want to do it at a public university.
For certain majors, such as cinema studies or forensic studies, some undergraduate programs are very well regarded, while most others are not.
Comment: I've edited the answer to address your comments and additional questions.
Comment: Ok, so how much os tuition for someone at these public universities?
Comment: As I explained, the tuition is _free_ for most NY students at CUNY or SUNY. According to https://www.cuny.edu/financial-aid/tuition-and-college-costs/tuition-fees/ , undergraduate NYS residents, not eligible for free tuition pay $3,465 / semester  for CUNY 4-year institutions or $2,400 for 2-year institutions,  while undergraduate non-residents, including foreign students, pay \$620 / credit at 4-year institutions , which, asuming 15 credits / semester would come out to \$9,300 / semester, or \$320 / credit at 2-year institutions, which, would be \$4,800 / semester. Other schools differ.
Comment: This makes the prices sound very reasonable. If the situation is as you describe it to be, why is there a student debt crisis?
Comment: Is there a reason why more people don't go there? Do these universities offer all majors?
Comment: Also, most Catholic (especially Jesuit) colleges offer a full program. Theology is a very small part. Once can study math, science, the humanities, literature and all the rest. People go there not for theology but because of some measure of association with the church. And not all students are even Catholic, nor are all faculty members. There isn't much proselytizing in my experience.
Comment: Public four year institutions are seldom free. The current in-state undergraduate tuition and required fees at UCBerkeley is over $18,000 per year. Add in books, housing, living expenses and the four year total exceeds $100,000.
Comment: @Buffy A very long time ago, I used to adjunct at a Jesuit university. It was great, no complaints, but I observed that: most (not all) of the people around were very catholic, not prozeitizing, but talking about their catholicism _a lot_. But non-catholics students and instructors were welcome and not excluded in any way. Many students told me on many occasions that they went there because they went to Catholic HS before, and wanted to continue their studies in a Catholic university, taking some undergraduate religion classes.
Comment: @Buffy I don't have the stats for what  fraction of public institutions are free. I was surprised by what you wrote about UCBerkeley, so I found a UC pages https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/tuition-financial-aid/  and https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/tuition-financial-aid/tuition-cost-of-attendance/ and confirmed that the tuition is _free_ for families earning less than \$80,000 / year, and is . The same page says that 55% of CA undergraduates pay no tuition.
Comment: This is very helpful. I'd take a stab at "The truth is more complex than what your government's propaganda paints it", however - I'm far more exposed to the US left-wing commentary than my own state media. If anything, the notion of student debt is hardly confined to the anti-US propaganda. Total tuition cost is about $20k on average, but loans cover living expenses and such as well, so the total bill is at tens of thousands of dollars: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/tub/graduate-student-loan-debt (other relevant country-wide stats can be found at NCES website as well).
Comment: Thanks for pointing out the typo. I edited the answer, fixed some typos, and added a couple of quotes from the Russian government's "Internet Research Agency" about the alleged absense of free university education in the U.S. The page you cite is titled "Trends in Student Loan Debt for **Graduate** School Completers". We've been discussing the cost of **undergraduate** education here. The cost of **graduate** education is yet another interesting discussion topic.
Answer: Put simply.. the US government provides government guaranteed loans..
Since a potential student can get a $60,000 loan for education purposes only the colleges can feel free to charge them pretty much as much as they can afford to borrow.
If the potential student could not borrow $60,000 for a college loan the university would have no choice to lower the admission price (as few people could afford to pay $60,000)
Think about it. Without the current loan system.. could the universities charge this much money for college? How would students come up with the money to afford these high prices?
Comment: I think its worth mentioning that America has a culture that encourages or at least normalizes going into debt. There was probably nothing wrong with going into debt in the 1920s to start a profitable business but today that translates to "its acceptable to go into serious debt to take a college degree which has slim to no chance of paying back" and unfortunately a lot of people get caught up in that. In other cultures simply offering lots of loans would probably not result in such a drastic rise in college tuition. You need a culture of taking loans to your own detriment as well.
Comment: You seem to be equating higher education with profit making enterprises. They are anything but. I agree that the current system is flawed and the loan system especially. But "charge as much as you can" isn't the underlying cause. Think harder. The loan system is the result, not the cause of the problem which is that the costs are fundamentally high and government (politicians) refuse to cover those costs adequately. And taxpayers would punish them if they tried. Sad.
Comment: @Buffy answer this question. without the current loan system.. could the universities charge this much money for college? How would students come up with the money to afford these high prices?
Comment: A better question, is how could they run at all with no revenue. Enslave the faculty and staff? Sell off all the buildings and land? For your question, with no loans there wouldn't be any students under the current system. Well, maybe Elon's kids but not so many others.
Comment: @Buffy exactly so they would either "go bankrupt" or lower the price of admission.. Which do you think they would do?
Comment: @Buffy they would probably cut costs as well.. as any normal business operates under changing market conditions.. ? sell land cut staff.. do away with amenities.. without the loans and therefore the students ability to pay the high admission they couldn't afford all the extra stuff..
Comment: @Buffy The loans are *absolutely* a contributing factor to the prices. You should take a basic economics course before making such unfounded claims.
Comment: You are ignoring costs. Lowering the "price" without lowering the cost is not a winning strategy. If they let everyone in for free they cease to exist in less then a year. The costs don't just go away. Think harder.
Comment: @Nij In Australia increased government loans and increased costs to students were at least correlated.
Comment: This does not match the experience of a number of countries, and therefore cannot be enough to be the answer on its own. Without accounting for the other factors, such as mentioned in comments, this is just incorrect.
Comment: @Nij Which countries do you have in mind? And what other factors are you referring to?
Comment: University domestic students are 100% government-funded in much of Europe, but costs are nowhere near $60000 per student. Government-backing is therefore not the sole cause, other factors must be involved.
Comment: @Nij US government spending on tertiary education, as a fraction of GDP, is higher than the G20 average and close to the OECD average.
Comment: Your answer tries to claim it's the government backing which is responsible for the high tuition costs, while other countries either have government backing and lower cost, or government backing and higher cost, or no government backing and either higher or lower or similar costs. So, "government backs the loans" is just not relevant to the level of cost, which is why this answer is incorrect and needs to account for other factors that are relevant.
Comment: "If the potential student could not borrow $60,000 for a college loan the university would have no choice to lower the admission price"  This is not usually correct.  In practice universities usually enroll fewer students and cut costs, or simply close.  Sometimes a lower price is announced, however this is a lower price *before the discount* and may be unrelated to the discounted price.  Lowering the price is not a good strategy if production cost is greater than the price.
Comment: @AnonymousPhysicist I think the assumption here is that production costs (after making adjustments, e.g., cutting unnecessary costs) are well below the price.
Comment: @user76284 Yes, that is the wrong assumption here, at least based on the university's opinion of "necessary."
Comment: @AnonymousPhysicist "based on the university's opinion" Which is not necessarily that of others, including the author of this answer.


Origin of the usage of "late" to mean deceased

Question: I guess I can somewhat see the connection, but it seems tenuous at best. How did this phrase originate and become so widely used?
Comment: [From Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/3e5931/why_do_we_say_a_dead_person_is_late/): "It's a colloquialism that stuck around from a 15th century definition of "late" that meant "recently, but not anymore." Started being used to describe the deceased."
Comment: Deceased?  Try dead if you want everyone to know what you mean.
Answer: So the word late itself has an interesting etymology. Old English læt, meaning "occurring after the customary or expected time," originally meant "slow, sluggish, slack, lax, negligent," which came from Proto-Germanic lata (source also of Old Norse latr "sluggish, lazy," Middle Dutch, Old Saxon lat, Dutch laat, German laß "idle, weary," Gothic lats "weary, sluggish, lazy," latjan "to hinder"), from Proto-Indo-European (the hypothetical reconstructed ancestral language of the Indo-European family) led "slow, weary" (source also of Latin lassus "faint, weary, languid, exhausted," Greek ledein "to be weary"), from root le "to let go, slacken".
As to the source of its meaning as "deceased", around mid-13c. it was used meaning "occurring in the latter part of a period of time." From c. 1400, "late" was seen as meaning "being or occurring in the near, or not too distant, past; recent" (of late). From this comes the early 15c. sense "recently dead, not many years dead" (as in the late Mrs. Smith).
The OED does weigh in, actually. As Stephanie Kaye Turner points out, late meaning deceased (which has been used since at least 1490) seems to have come from using late as an adverb (where now we might use lately) to mean "not long since (but not now); recently (but no longer)."
We see this adverbial use in Hamlet: "A clout about that head, Where late the Diadem stood."
The OED's earliest use of it referring to a deceased person is found in Caxton's Eneydos  (1490): "Her swete and late amyable husbonde."
I can imagine its widespread use is due to its formality in comparison with the word dead. It seems much more appropriate as well as respectful to reference the late Mr.Smith than the dead Mr.Smith. The grave nature of the word dead is avoided especially in the context of sensitive situations. This is where terms like "deceased", "passed away", or "late" are more preferred, leading to their widespread use today.
Comment: @ Maddie S, am I going too far to speculate that a branching point came from using late as an adverb (where now we might use lately)

Is it that around then '… late of this parish' came to mean 'no longer of this parish, due to death…' while '… lately of this parish' came to mean 'no longer of this parish, due to having decamped with the milk-maid…' and  '… late…' then shrank itself for clarity?
Answer: According to this, the usage of the word 'late' as to mean 'deceased' started in the early 15th century.
In the 13th century, the word bears the meaning: "occurring in the latter part of a period of time.", which then was derived to "being or occurring in the near, or not too distant, past; recent" (of late) in the 14th century.
Then in the 15th century, the meaning of the word 'late' was derived further to be an adjective that indicates that a particular person was alive in the past recently, but not anymore.


What are some arguments for judging historical figures by contemporary standards?

Question: I've seen quite a lot of arguments against judging historical figures by modern standards, most representatively by the principle of moral relativism. Is there any argument for it though? The only example I've got so far is the notion of moral obligation, in which the impact of a historical being's action is evaluated, and resorted to a contemporary being that is believed to have inherited the obligation(e.g. the contemporary Australian government apologising to Aboriginal Australians on behalf of the Australian government in the 20th century).
Comment: Grattan-Guinness distinguished [history and heritage](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00029890.2004.11920041), its reinterpretation for modern uses. If the latter is the goal then judging historical figures by modern standards, i.e. judging their modern relevance, is a natural approach. Tosh explicitly defends present-centered approaches to history in [Anachronism and retrospective explanation](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368103000529), which aim "*to target, for further investigation, those past activities ancestral to modern science*".
Comment: Hermeneutics deliver the argument that it is, in fact, *impossible not to* read texts from the perspective and understanding of the present socio-cultural background. Even as we try to read a text and argument as neutral as possible and in relation to the then-current understandings and ideas, this historical standpoint necessarily eludes us as it really was, and is only reconstrued within the contemporary framework at hand. Thus, truly judging arguments impartially is an illusion. Nevertheless, it is prudent to read all authors as charitable as possible, historical or contemporary.
Comment: No man should be judged by his defects. The great virtues a man has are his especially, his errors are the common weaknesses of humanity and should never be counted in estimating his character. Being an old man over 70, I have lived in different times. Be careful who you condemn, time always changes beliefs and attitudes. Those who judge the past harshly now will face the same to themselves in the future. All arguments on the righteousness or 'reason' or 'logic' of moral relativism are mere sophistry.
Comment: Intellectual integrity is the process whereby a reader essentially dissociates from their contemporary mindset in order to attempt to understand the context, perspective and intended meaning of a document from the past. Try it, it will open up your mindset!
Comment: It's a good question. But my immediate response is to wonder if "moral judgment" is relevant to history in the first place. To "explain" historical figures and actions will require a reconstruction of the contemporary society, always an incomplete endeavor. Such work may be distorted by the anachronistic appeal to present moral standards. But to explain is not to judge.  To judge what one "ought" to do is to appeal to a state of freedom in the present. Hence a kind of compatibilism. We need a Dantesque Purgatory to categorize all the good "Pagans" by the creed of the "Church."
Answer: Standards are never universal or consistent enough to be anachronistic as such. In America, we have records of prominent founders acknowledging the wrong of slavery, even guilt and dread over this, and indeed abolitionism was part of the ethical milieu thereafter through the Civil War.
Kant later, and las Casas earlier (and much more intensively), are examples of critics and condemnation of European imperialism/colonialism vs. native Americans.
Theories of just wars stretch back well over a millennium.
And on top of all this, what do you think the victims thought? Were they generally like, "According to the dominant moral theories of my day, my murder or enslavement or rape is acceptable, so tally-ho!" No, even if damaged to the point of submission, there is no need for us to assume that the victims really agreed with the atrocities inflicted on them, at least not due to mentally healthful reasoning and attitudes.
Answer: Present apologies for previous generations' misdeeds
A present-day Australian apologising for the treatment of Aborigines by his forbears? You probe the moral position that supports or explains this practice.
A historical person - a forbear in this case - can only have acted on the moral beliefs they had. Only such beliefs can have provided their motivation for action. In terms of moral responsibility and conscience, such a person cannot be judged with any point or justification by later standards since they cannot have been motivated by such standards. We cannot blame them for failing to act towards Aborigines on moral standards to which they had no access.
This is perfectly consistent with putting blame aside and judging that none the less by our own standards a historical person - the forbear - acted wrongly. They did an action or carried out a policy, motivated as they were by their own moral beliefs, which by our standards is wrong even though they did what they thought was right or permissible.
This seems to me a coherent position: the forbear (or more realistically a group of forbears, most likely spread across generations) acted wrongly by our standards, and so we apologise, or express moral regret, because we have benefited by what the forbear - or group of forbears - did and because we enjoy advantages which still disbenefit the Aborigines.
Relativism
On a theoretical note, since you mention 'moral relativism'...
This viewpoint, supporting the appropriateness of apology or the expression of moral regret, has no particular connection with relativism. An objective or cognitive morality is not static - or at least our knowledge of it may not be so. It may be understood differently at different times; a historical person may have a less perfect, a less developed, understanding of its requirements than someone living at a later period. All that is relative is, in respect of moral responsibility and conscience, the relation of a historical person's motivation to their moral beliefs. 'Relative' here has no connexion with 'relativism' if this protean term signifies that no action is right, obligatory, neutral or wrong  except relative to the non-truth apt and contingent norms of a community, society or culture.


Calculate confidence levels of a stratified sample with missing units

Question: I'm conducting a stratified survey among health institutions; 700 units were allocated into one of the 30 strata designed to reflect the proportionality of the population. However, it's been difficult to obtain even 450 questionnaires, even after having extending the period of the project, and that I need to end it ASAP.
A professor asked me whether the survey will remain valid, i.e., statistically valid if we end the survey with 450 interviews. The survey was planned to have 3% of margin of error with a 90% level of confidence, and $\hat{p}=0.5$ for unknown proportion split. The overall returning rate is 72%, with most of strata returning about 80%, but we've 6 strata with a returning rate just above 40%.
At this stage, we wonder what would be the confidence level for each stratum, is it possible to compute? Is there a procedure that we can use for assessing the confidence level of a stratified survey to help in the decision how far can we go with this? Also, is it right to reweight/calibrate the actual sample, so to reflect the data, or should we keep the full sample (700) with all the missing units (250)?
Comment: 1. What do you mean precisely by "confidence level" of a stratum? Do you mean "confidence interval"? 2. Do you want a separate estimate of the proportion for each stratum? If so, what is the range of the stratum-specific numbers of responders? 3. Do you have any other information about the non-responding units besides the stratum to which they belong? 4. A standard approach is to do a more personalized followup of a random sample of non-responders, and this is ordinarily built into the sampling time line. Have tried this? Have you time for this?
Comment: 1) Yes, a professor mentioned to compute the confidence level for each stratum I would have if I ended the survey now, but maybe he meant  confidence interval. 2) I'll add detailed data about the population, sample and response rate in my question.  3) I don't have any other information for units that didn't answer other than names, telephone, and address. For a small part, I could have extra information as they receive public funding for their service.
Comment: 4) A personalized followup approach was adopted for those strata with very low response rates, which made some progress (from 40% to 72%), but I feel the participation is now very stationary, and I don't have much more time to continue on this because of the deadlines and other resources. My fear is that with only 70% of the planned surveys, It may not lead to confident results.
Comment: What software do you have available for analyzing the results?
Comment: Just to check on assumptions: 1) Were the 700 institutions in the study a stratified sample of a larger population of units?   2) when you stated that institutions were allocated in proportion to the "population", did you mean by "population", the numbers of  institutions in the strata or numbers of patients served served by the institutions?
Answer: It looks like you've done all you could. The strata with the high non-response rates apparently do not constitute a large portion of the population. In retrospect, I would have suggested a smaller sample, with pilot tests, and more time devoted to follow-up of a random sample of non-responders.
Here are my thoughts on what you should do:

Reweighted analysis

You should reweight to correct for non-response. Define
$$N_h = \text{number of institutions in stratum }h $$
and
$$
m_h = \text{number of responding institutions in stratum }h
$$
Then you can remove non-response bias related to stratum membership by running a survey program with weight defined for each institution in stratum $h$ as
$$
w_h = \dfrac{N_h}{m_h}$$
This will not remove non-response biases related to other, within-stratum, factors, but it's better than doing nothing.

Do a stratified analysis with a survey program

The original sample size calculation apparently was the one appropriate for a simple random sample, not for a stratified random sample; i.e. it assumed that the estimated proportion would be the overall sample proportion.
Instead, you should use a survey analysis program that accepts stratum and weight information. Stata and SAS contain such programs.  They will compute a stratified proportion, with an estimated standard error that will be smaller than that of the ordinary sample proprtion. You won't know exactly what the bound on error will be until you do the calculation.

You can estimate a confidence interval for every stratum, but be aware that the relevant sample size is the number of responding observations ($m_h$) in the stratum. The average of these is 450/30 = 15, so some intervals will be very wide.

You can, of course, consider subsets of the population, including groups of strata or subsets defined by characteristics measured during the survey. Such subpopulation standard errors require a special formula, but every package with survey capabilities (e.g. Stata, SAS, Survey Package in R) will use it.
Added To answer your question about the sample to keep. The analysis will be based on the 450 responding institutions in the sample, but you will need to add information about the numbers of institutions in the population. You should keep the 250 non-responding institutions in the data set.  They won't affect the analysis because the values of all measured variables will be missing You can also set the weight variable to zero or missing), but you need them to make a table describing response rates by stratum.
Comment: +1 fyi the corresponding R package is [survey](http://r-survey.r-forge.r-project.org/survey/)
Answer: I am also working on a stratified random sample, with non-response. It seems reasonable to do the following:

Complete-case analysis, assuming missing completely at random within each sampling stratum.
Use multiple imputation to impute missing data, and apply sampling weights in the imputed datasets.
If one is also interested in estimating a parameter in a subpopulation defined by variables that are not used in forming sampling strata, multilevel regression and post-stratification could be a nice way to achieve this.


Could polar areas be habitable?

Question: What could make polar areas of an earth-like planet habitable (non desert) and what side effect would it cause (i.e. how such planet would differ to contemporary earth)?
Comment: The Arctic is quite habitable today: just ask the people whose ancestors have lived there for thousands of years.
Answer: Climate changes.
It is expected that the precipitations will rise significantly in the high latitudes regions. Also, it is the area (the Arctic but not Antarctica so far) with the fastest warming on the planet.
Source (page 859): https://www.ipcc-wg1.unibe.ch/publications/wg1-ar4/ar4-wg1-chapter11.pdf
I think you already know what the impacts would be on the whole planet.

Increase in overall precipitations but spread differently (more
concentrated),Because hotter air can carry more moisture. At most places, the increase in precipitation will not cover the increase of evaporation due to temperature.
The deserts are pushed closer to the poles (meaning areas between 30
and 40 degrees of latitude tend to become drier
More deserts and semi-arid climates
Larger tropical forests but with more seasonal variability

and so on: http://koeppen-geiger.vu-wien.ac.at/shifts.htm
Answer: A lot depends on what you mean by habitable. Various people's have inhabited the arctic regions over the millennia (the latest being the Inuit, or Eskimos), and Human species like the Neanderthals and Denisovans were known to live in Europe and Asia during the last Ice Age, with nothing more than neolithic technology.
All that seems to be required is the technology to make warm clothing (to retain heat), and enough ability to analyze the landscape for food and shelter, as well as being able to pass these observations down to your and your tribe's children. With enough time, various traits to maximize survival will become dominant (Inuit are short and "round" to minimize surface area and limit heat loss, while the Neanderthals had impressive nasal architecture to allow cold, dry air to be "pre warmed" before entering the lungs).
If you want the high arctic to become warm enough for unprotected agriculture, then a lot of high technology would be needed to raise the average temperature (In the European Warm Period, Vikings were able to do croft farming in Greenland; it is still too cold to do that in Modern Greenland even centuries after the Little Ice Age). For simplicity, I will envision a system of orbiting mirrors to increase the amount of insolation the poles receive.
The warmer weather will cause the permafrost to melt, making the ground cover much like a swamp of bog across much of the Asian and North American far north. Antarctica has been covered with glaciers for millennia, so the surface will be mostly exposed rock and gravel. Transportation and infrastructure will be tremendous undertakings in either place, and agriculture in the far north of the Northern Hemisphere will depend on a lot of drainage for the soil's moisture content to be low enough for the sorts of agriculture we practice.
The vast release of moisture will cause the water levels to rise and have strange effects on the overall global climate as the masses of cold water sink into the depths of the ocean and disrupt the deep currents. Interrupting the Gulf Stream would make Europe much colder, for example. Since the currents are very long term parts of the heat engine, effects might not be revealed for hundreds or even thousands of years.
More moisture in the atmosphere will make rain and precipitation more common, with both positive and negative effects (more agriculture, more flooding). Ironically, the weather will become much milder, since much weather is driven by temperature differentials between the warmer and colder parts of the Earth.
Some migratory species will no longer need to migrate, since their food sources do not disappear in winter, while others might continue to migrate based on the seasonable light (the six months of darkness will be illuminated by the mirrors, but the six months of light will be even brighter for the same reason). There will be other unpredictable changes in animal populations, as creatures migrate to take advantage of the newly opened ecological habitat, while other habitats (especially in the oceans) are disrupted due to the changing oceanic currents and long term climate changes (such as a colder Europe).
Overall, if you are going to inhabit the arctic or antarctic land masses with current people and technology, it might be better to treat it as "outer space" and make self contained habitations with minimal interaction with the outside environment.
Comment: You are quite wrong about farming in Greenland, and the Arctic in general.  See e.g. http://www.reuters.com/news/picture/tomatoes-peppers-strawberries-in-greenla?articleId=USBRE92P0EX20130326&slideId=716430988 or http://modernfarmer.com/2013/10/arctic-farming/
Answer: The simple answer is that the planet needs to be closer to the sun, have a stronger greenhouse effect, or have a warmer sun. Any of these effects will warm up the entire planet compared to our own. By habitable I assume you mean similar to temperate areas of Earth, rather than people managing to live on the ice through hunting and fishing.
Warming up the entire planet by approximately 20 degrees through any combinations of these methods would turn the equator fairly uninhabitable (although life is adaptable, I expect it would find a way) whereas the poles would be much like our temperate areas are today.
That would give a temperature ranging over the year from -30 degrees to +30 degrees, which is enough to allow crops to be grown and agriculture to occur. This would especially be so if like our arctic there was enough ocean water around to moderate the temperature differences.
The extra heat would tend to make weather systems more powerful, the equator and middle latitudes would have massive violent storms and wide weather fluctuations. There would be more water in the air, hotter air, and tropical storms and hurricanes would be frequent.
Humidity and heat would both be very high, and adaptations in technology, physiology, or both would be required to survive.

Could polar areas be habitable?


Why would a site completely drop out of Google Webmaster Tools Search Analytics chart?

Question:
Do you guys have any idea why the main site for eg, say xyz.com would completely drop out of Google Webmaster Tools charts like this? I have never seen anything like this. It just looks like the site doesn't exist anymore on these charts but I know we're still getting hits. This is starting to make us a bit nervous.
Comment: One word. Panda. Panda 4.2 is out. However, there have been other updates recently too and there seems to be confusion abound. You are not alone. This sort of thing is happening all over. There is very little info specific to 4.2 except to point to 4.1. You can Bing these... (that's a joke).
Answer:
Search site:xyz.com in Google.

Check if the your index links are
   still the same in numbers or not. Probably your index links are
   removed by Goolge.

If not make sure your page rankings and backlinks are not ceased.

If you have recently added low quality external links to your sites
   remove it and crawl the pages again.
Comment: Yes index links are gone down from 400 to 130..wat can we do?
Comment: As I said check whether you have low quality backlinks of third-party sites or 404 errors or broken-links.
If everything is fine ask Google to re-index those pages manually using fetch as Google in Google Webmasters Tools.
`Dashboard > Crawl > Fetch as Google`
If my above answer helped you consider up-voting it.
Answer: I had this scenario not so long ago, when without me knowing, redirect from HTTPS to HTTP URLs that we had for long accidentally got removed and 2/3 of our URLs got indexed with HTTPS instead of HTTP. And we had a HTTP version of the site registered with Google Search Console.
So, naturally, data was dropping on our property on GSC until I figured what the problem was and registered a HTTPS version of the site with Google Search Console, and started seeing our traffic on there...


Motivation behind parameter sharding for Downpour SGD

Question: Why does the Downpour model shard the parameters into separate groups? Is there any advantage of making one cluster responsible for changing only certain parameters?
Answer: Why Asynchronous SGD Works Better than Its Synchronous Counterpart?
In the NIPS 2012 paper, Large Scale Distributed Deep Networks, researchers at Google presented their work on distributed learning of deep neural networks.
One of the most interesting points in this paper is the asynchronous SGD algorithm, which enables a parallel (distributed) software architecture that is scalable and can make use of thousands CPUs.
"To apply SGD to large data sets, we introduce Downpour SGD, a variant of asynchronous stochastic gradient descent that uses multiple replicas of a single DistBelief model. The basic approach is as follows: We divide the training data into a number of subsets and run a copy of the model on each of these subsets. The models communicate updates through a centralized parameter server, which keeps the current state of all parameters for the model, sharded across many machines (e.g., if we have 10 parameter server shards, each shard is responsible for storing and applying updates to 1/10th of the model parameters) (Figure 2). This approach is asynchronous in two distinct aspects: the model replicas run independently of each other, and the parameter server shards also run independently of one another."
Intuitively, the asynchronous algorithm looks like a hack, or a compromise between the effectiveness of the mathematical algorithm and the scalability of the distributed system. But to our surprise, the authors claimed that the asynchronous algorithm works more effective than synchronous SGD."
Why??
My understand is that traditional gradient-based optimization is like a bee flying along the direction defined by the current gradient. In batch learning, the direction is computed using the whole training data set. In SGD, the direction is computed using a randomly selected mini-batch of the data.
In contrast, the asynchronous parallel SGD works like a swamp of bees, each flies along a distinct direction. These directions vary because they are computed from the asynchronously updated parameters at the beginning of each mini-batch. For the same reason, these bees wouldn't be far away.
The swamp of bees optimize collaboratively and covers a region like region-based optimization, where the region is composed of a set of points. This, I think, is the reason that parallel asynchronous SGD works better than traditional gradient-base optimization algorithms.


What happens when your message is considered "foul"?

Question: When you create a message using the notebook, I noticed you can get it rated as either "fine" or "foul".  I know getting a "fine" rating restores health.  What happens though when you get a foul rating? Does it have any negative consequences?
Answer: As far as I can tell (so far) there's no negative consequences. I'm assuming it's purely just an indicator. Lot's of foul ratings = avoid the message, etc.
It's great when your message gets up-voted and you're in a boss fight: You get all that lovely health back!
Comment: Oh I didn't know you get you health back! may drop some more helpful notes ;)
Answer: Basically some people can lie and hurt other players; example:
I was playing the other day and I came across a deep hole and couldn't see the bottom properly, there was a note in front of the hole with the message "take a step forward". I got closer to look and actually saw the red "spirit" of another player walk and fall in and die when they hit the floor.
I gave that note a foul rating and also set a note before the foul one saying something along the line of "don't believe people"
So in a nutshell, the foul rating just acts as guidance to whether a note is good advice to follow or not, (usually).
Comment: So does the Appraisals #. you see before voting Fine/Foul, only show Fine votes?
Comment: But are there consequences to leaving a note like that which generates a lot of foul votes? That's the question...
Comment: @DannyBeckett No, I don't think so. I think it literally is a case of just letting players know how useful a note is.


Source for Kaddish

Question: I think this may be a very common question (but not for me). Can someone please tell me how did the text of Kaddish first compiled?
Comment: https://www.beureihatefila.com/files/Origin_Of_Kaddish_Handout.pdf
Comment: @Loewian, I would encourage you to parse through that PDF and post as an answer if/when you have time, it's really a great resource
Comment: @Loewian That's one of my favorite resources. But, you "asked for it". Since you suggested, you do the work. I'm off the hook on this one ;-)
Comment: Check out De Sola Pool's book: https://archive.org/details/kaddishk00poolrich/
Comment: I am sorry but it uses non jewish sources. https://archive.org/details/kaddishk00poolrich/page/12
Answer: The concept of Kaddish is mentioned in numerous places in the Gemara (See Berachos 3a, 57a, Shabbos 119b, Sukka 39a, Sotah 49a).
The exact authorship of Kaddish is unclear.
The Rokeach (Pirush Sidur HaTefilla) attributes it to the Anshei Knesses Hagedolah (Men of the Great Assembly) , who authored the first standardized text of Tefillah (see Berachos 33a). This is also the opinion of the Aruch Hashulchan (55-1)

הקדיש הוא שבח גדול ונורא שתקנו אנשי כנסת הגדולה אחרי חורבן בית ראשון,
  והיא תפלה על חילול שמו יתברך מחורבן בית המקדש וחורבן ארץ הקודש ופיזור
  ישראל בארבע כנפות הארץ, ואנו מתפללים שיתגדל ויתקדש שמו יתברך כמו שאמר
  הנביא 'והתגדלתי והתקדשתי ונודעתי לעיני גוים רבים'

However the Orchos Chaim (Laws of Kaddish, 1) writes that the Aramaic text of Kaddish that we have was composed during the times of the Tanaim. (Tosfos (Berachos 3a) may support this - Tosfos explains that the reason Kaddish is in Aramaic is because there were laymen whose main language was Aramaic, who didn't speak Hebrew. My history isn't great, but I don't think Jews during the time of the Ansei Knesses Hagedola spoke Aramaic as a primary language.)
Comment: The aruch hashulchan only says they enacted it, not that they wrote it.
Answer: This summary brings up the following on page 6

Concerning the origin of Kaddish that you asked, we can not trace the
practice to a clear and definitive source found among our ancestors'
writings. However, those who followed them based their recitation of
Kaddish upon this verse (Leviticus 22, 32) And I will be sanctified
within the people of Israel and upon what our Rabbinic leaders
extrapulated from the verse: that any prayer which results in the
sanctification of the name of G-d must be recited only in a group of
ten men.
From theses teachings we can conclude that when ten men
congregate to perform a mitzvah, whether it be for prayer or for the
study of Torah, they must recite a prayer in which they sanctify the
name of G-d. As a result, at the conclusion of the first section of
the morning prayer, Pseukei D'Zimra, after reciting the Bracha in
Yishtabach, those congregated should recite Kaddish because they have
the completed the mitzvah of reciting Pseukei D'Zimra and they are
about to perform an additional Mitzvah, the recital of Kriyat Shma and
its blessings before and after . . .
And they should recite Kaddish
after Shmona Esrei because it too is an independent Mitzvah and it is
not connected with that which is recited after it. And another Kaddish
should be recited after the Torah Reading because in order to read
from the Torah, ten men must congregate together. And another Kaddish
after reciting the Kedusha in OO"Vah L'Tzion because it too is a
Mitzvah unto itself and it is a Prayer of Sanctification of G-d's name
and requires the presence of ten men.

Source for Kaddish


Battle.net friend list

Question: I haven't played sc2 in like 4 years, and now when I logged in the battle.net app I see that the friend list shows 1 offline friend only. But when I visit my profile page on the battle.net website, the "Friends" page shows much more people. What's up with that?
Answer: Battle.net client shows your friends in only one region (the one you picked while logging in), but the website shows all regions.
To change your region:

Click on battle.net logo
Click on the log out button

On the login screen, click on the earth logo, and pick the region you used to play in.

Log back in, and you should be able to see all your friends.
Comment: I don't think it's that. If I log in with other region I see 0 friends
Comment: One thing I noticed is that on the web site profile page the one friend that I can see in the app friend list has another white nick name with a # number in it above the normal name
Comment: Hmm, all your friends should have it. Weird.
Comment: I installed the game, reached "playable" state and in the game I see the entire friend list, everybody is "Offline" but only that one friend I was talking about shows "Offline for x days"
Answer: There are two different types of friends.
The battle.net client displays battle.net friends.  These are people where you added their RealID (email address) or BattleTag (account name and 4 digit number) to your friends list.  You can see these friends across all games.
Before RealId, games each supported their own in-game friend lists.  These friends are Starcraft II friends only and will not show up on the battle.net client or when playing other games.  However, they will show up inside Starcraft II and on the Starcraft website.
So in your case, it sounds like you have one battle.net friend and a bunch of Starcraft friends.
Comment: I don't know if the older games still support adding new non-battle.net friends.  I think WoW does, but Diablo/Starcraft may not.  Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone default to battletag friends.

Battle.net friend list


Why aren't static methods considered good OO practice?

Question: I'm reading Programming Scala. At the beginning of chapter 4, the author comments that Java supports static methods, which are "not-so-pure OO concepts." Why is this so?
Comment: I'm not sure "not-so-pure" should be instantly associated with bad practice.
Comment: Does the author give no reasoning?
Comment: Not bad practice. Just not good practice, according to the author.
Comment: None. It was baffling. But now it makes sense.
Comment: Core of the problem: static things can not be polymorphic.
Comment: You may find this relevant: [OOP Alternative to Utility Classes](https://www.yegor256.com/2014/05/05/oop-alternative-to-utility-classes.html)
Answer: Object-orientation is about three things:

messaging,
local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and
extreme late-binding of all things.

Of those three, the most important one is messaging.
Static methods violate at least messaging and late-binding.
The idea of messaging means that in OO, computation is performed by networks of self-contained objects which send messages to each other. Sending a message is the only way of communication/computation.
Static methods don't do that. They aren't associated with any object. They really aren't methods at all, according to the usual definition. They are really just procedures. There's pretty much no difference between a Java static method Foo.bar and a BASIC subroutine FOO_BAR.
As for late-binding: a more modern name for that is dynamic dispatch. Static methods violate that, too, in fact, it's even in their very name: static methods.
Static methods break some very nice properties of object-orientation. For example, object-oriented systems are automatically capability-safe with objects acting as capabilities. Static methods (or really any statics, be that static state or static methods) break that property.
You can also execute every object in parallel in its own process, since they only communicate via messaging, thus providing some trivial concurrency. (Like Actors, basically, which shouldn't be too surprising, since Carl Hewitt created the Actor Model based on Smalltalk-71, and Alan Kay created Smalltalk-71 partially based on PLANNER, which in turn was created by Carl Hewitt. The close relationship between actors and objects is far from coincidental, in fact, they are essentially one and the same.) Again, statics (both static methods, and especially static state) break that nice property.
Comment: What is "capability-safe"?
Comment: Thank you for your very insightful response.
Comment: About concurrent code, static methods don't mutate the objects state so I tend to see them as safer than normal methods for concurrent use.
Answer: Don't confuse "not-so-pure OO concepts" with "bad practice". Being "pure OO" is not some panacea that you should attempt to achieve. Just because static methods don't take an instance variable as a parameter does not mean that they are not useful. Some things just don't lend themselves to objects, and they should not be forced into that mold just for the sake of "purity".
Some people think that things should be "pure", and thus anything "impure" is bad practice. In reality, bad practice is just doing things that are confusing, hard to maintain, difficult to use, etc. Creating static methods that take an instance is bad practice because any method that takes an instance should probably be an instance method. On the other hand, things like utility and factory functions generally don't take an instance, so they should be static.
If you're wondering why they're not "pure OO", it's because they are not instance methods. A "pure" OO language would have everything being an object and all functions be instance methods. Of course, that's not terribly useful all the time. For example, consider the Math.atan2 method. It takes two numbers and doesn't require any state. What object could you even make it a method of? In a "pure" OO language, Math might itself be an object (a singleton, probably), and atan2 would be an instance method, but since the function doesn't actually use any state in the Math object, it is also not a "pure OO" concept.
Comment: True.  On the other hand, I've seen too much code where everything is a singleton and everything is static.  This kind of code is usually more difficult to modify, more difficult to extend, more difficult to remold to do something it wasn't originally intended to do.  That said, too many people are way too dogmatic about this.
Comment: Actually, the `atan2` function measures the radians of the angle of a *single point* to the positive x-axis. In other words, it shouldn't take two number arguments in the first place, it should take a single point argument. Which, in OO terms, could be modeled as a method on a point object.
Comment: I fully agree.  An awful lot of utility functions simply have no OO in their nature.  You can shoehorn them into an OO language but all you're doing is adding inefficiency.
Comment: Jorg: What about the `stdev` and `average` functions? Should those be methods of `Array`? Or should they be instance methods of their own class (`Stats`) that holds all the numbers such that you have to convert your `Array` to a `Stats` so you can average them? Or should they be static methods that you simply pass an array of numbers to?
Comment: Bear in mind that I never said it was a bad practice, so my question wasn't really answered. ;)
Answer: One reason that static methods aren't very OO that hasn't been mentioned so far is that interfaces and abstract classes only define non-static methods.  Static methods thus don't fit very well into inheritance.
Note also that static methods do not have access to "super", which means that static methods cannot be overridden in any real sense.  Actually, they can't be overridden at all, only hidden.  Try this:
public class Test {
    public static int returnValue() {
        return 0;
    }

    public static void main(String[] arg) {
        System.out.println(Test.returnValue());
        System.out.println(Test2.returnValue());
        Test x = new Test2();
        System.out.println(x.returnValue());
    }
}

public class Test2 extends Test {
    public static int returnValue() {
        return 1;
    }
}

When you run this, you won't get what you expect.  Test.returnValue() gives what you expect.  Test2.returnValue() hides the method of the same name in the superclass (it does not override it), and it gives what you would expect.
One might naively expect "non-statically" calling a static method to use polymorphism.  It doesn't.  Whatever class the variable is declared as is the one used to look up the method.  This is bad form because someone might expect the code to do something different from what it actually does.
This doesn't mean, "Don't use static methods!"  It does mean that you should reserve use of static methods for those instances where you really want the Class object to own the method, and not just as a lazy way of making a singleton.
Comment: This answer probably tends to make the most sense out of what I have seen so far. Breaking one of the trinity concepts certainly goes against the grain.
Comment: @Jeff: C++ and Python both allow it.  It's not as nonsensical you might think, though it is, of course, confusing sometimes (like any feature).
Comment: Not that I'm disputing this but the example you show only applies to Java right?  IIRC, Java is the only OO language (that I have encountered) that allows calling static functions via an instance of the class.
Comment: @Jeff: VB.NET also allows this nonsensical behavior.
Answer: Static methods cause tight coupling, which is a violation of good Object Oriented Design. The tight coupling of the calling code and the code within the static method cannot be avoided through Dependency Inversion because static methods inherently don't support object-oriented design techniques such as Inheritance and Polymorphism.
Besides static methods are difficult to test because of these tightly-coupled dependencies, which oftentimes lead to third-party infrastructure that the code depends upon - like a database, and it makes it very difficult to change the behavior without actually going in and changing the code.
Comment: in short - static methods are OOP tool for procedural programing
Answer: Static methods aren't considered good OO practice due to below reasons:
1) Prevents from Re-usability:
Static methods can't be overriden. It can't be used to in interface.
2) Object Lifetime is very long:
Static methods remain in the memory for a log time and its garbage collection takes long time. Developer's don't have control on destroying or creating of Static variables.
Excessive usage of static variables can result in the memory overflow.
3) Also, some other points:
It doesn't respect the encapsulation because object does't remain in the complete control of its state. It doesn't follow concepts like Inversion of control, loose coupling, dependency injection, etc.
Answer: Static methods are not so pure OO concepts because they can be invoked without an object actually being associated with them. You use the class itself. You invoke them like this Classname.method(...);
Comment: What if I am using something like Ruby, which supports classes-as-objects and static invocation? An object would in fact be associated with the static call.
Comment: Well I'm not sure how associated to Java the author was when he said what he did, but thing is that even in Java there are objects that are created and managed to represent the classes themselves too, so this is all a bit discussable, to some extent. However, the simple idea that you have a static main method, and static methods you can invoke without having any objects makes it be a bit against the OOP paradigm.
Answer: Concept of OO is talks about controlling/accessing data from an object, but static methods need not to be called using an object and they belong to class rather than object.
--Cheers


What should I avoid to maintain sati?

Question: To develop sati, we should meditate. So, what should I avoid to maintain sati?
Comment: It's a good thing to phrase the question in terms of refraining, like you did. Please see previous answers regarding the five hindrances: https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/search?q=five+hindrances
Answer: the condition for sati is proper attention

I say that mindfulness and situational awareness is fueled by
  something, it's not unfueled. And what is the fuel for mindfulness and
  situational awareness? You should say: 'Proper attention.'

https://suttacentral.net/an10.62/en/sujato
Answer: The Buddha is a bit circular on this point:

SN46.51:18.1: And what starves the arising of the awakening factor of mindfulness, or, when it has arisen, starves its full development?  There are things that are grounds for the awakening factor of mindfulness.  Not frequently focusing on them  starves the arising of the awakening factor of mindfulness, or, when it has arisen, starves its full development.

Simply put, if we are distracted, we are not mindful.
Consider that right mindfulness is preceded by Right View, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, Right Livelihood and Right Effort. We need these prerequisites to engage in right mindfulness.

MN119:3.1: "And how, mendicants, is mindfulness of the body developed and cultivated to be very fruitful and beneficial? It's when a mendicant has gone to a wilderness, or to the root of a tree, or to an empty hut. They sit down cross-legged, with their body straight, and establish mindfulness right there. Just mindful, they breathe in. Mindful, they breathe out.

Let go of distractions and make an effort. Consider the whole path, not just one step in it. In particular, take care of the following:

MN128:30.1: When I understood that doubt, of focus, dullness and drowsiness, terror, excitement, discomfort, excessive energy, overly lax energy, longing, perception of diversity,  and excessive concentration on forms are corruptions of the mind, I gave them up.
Comment: Hi OyaMist! Maybe, the problem of circular definitions happens here because how we used to understand and translate 'sati'. Perhaps if we use another concept to translate it, we may see the nuances and differences between the words attention and 'sati'. Kind regards!
Comment: Yes. It gets subtle when we start bringing in foreground/background attention. I looked more and found something more directly useful in MN128. Thanks!

What should I avoid to maintain sati?