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Please, tell me where University still costs only $60,000...

I got a degree for $20k in the early y2k at the local state college.

Got it.

The first hit on google: "According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2017–2018 school year was... $9,970 for state residents at public colleges."
https://www.collegedata.com/cs...

Do you believe the numbers? Only £39,000 a year average for programmers with college degrees? That's about 54K US. It only took me 4 years out of college, in the 80s, to make 54K, and it only went up from there. These days, you can make 54K immediately upon graduating.

Despite the hype, AVERAGE US college tuition is still only about $9,000 per year. I suspect that the real ROI is greater than purported by the article.

In 1977, the median income for a 30-year-old man was about $10,000, or $41,500 adjusted for inflation [1]. Today, the median income for a 30-year-old man is about $35,000 [1]. The median home sale price in 1977 was about $49,000, or $203,000 inflation-adjusted [2]. The median home sale price today is about $325,000 [2]. In 1977, a 4-year college degree at an in-state, public institution cost less than $4,000, or about $16,000 inflation-adjusted for tuition and fees [3]. Today, that's $38,600.

These are only a few rough indicators, but the point is this: a millennial or gen-xer today makes 84% in real terms of what his counterpart did in 1977; his education costs more than twice as much and has gone from something he could pay for completely with a summer job to more than a full year's salary; the house he's looking at has gone from 4 years' salary to nearly 10 years', and a 20% down payment has gone from about 3 months' salary to about two years'.

These, for example, are reasons that millennials have it tougher than previous generations.

[1] https://cps.ipums.org/cps/
[2] https://www.census.gov/const/u...
[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/d...
[4] http://www.collegedata.com/cs/...

First, I made an error in my math (I amortized over 9 months, not 12). $19,500 / 12 is actually $1,625 gross.

Second, the cost of college. $10,000 for tuition and fees, plus another $10,000 room and board are the US average for in-state public schools. Voila, the $19,500 is gone, and without considering incidental expenses (or taxes... they'll net more like $18,500). It's gone even faster if you're out-of-state or attending a private school. Maybe they have scholarships, or maybe their parents are paying, but most are not in that situation.

What's the Price Tag for a College Education?

They are unable to comprehend that by drinking water instead of three sodas a day, and putting the savings into a tax deferred education savings account, they can easily afford in-state tuition at a good university.

Or perhaps they comprehend it just fine, but they make a choice you disagree with: Like after working a 10 hour shift for $7.25 an hour, they would like to have at least a small creature comfort, so they buy a six pack of beer (or soda), instead of going home and enjoying tasteless and bland tap-water. The thing about being poor that everyone forgets is that everything that might relieve the boredom and stress of long hours for little reward costs something. It's easy to say "I'll save a few dollars a day" when you've got a fat paycheck -- but when you have nothing and you're looking to those couple of dollars leftover in your wallet, it's hard to say "You don't exist, go away". But psychology aside, there's still the troubling issue of your really, really bad math skills.

Let's analyze your example of "three sodas a day". For the 2012-2013 year, tuition costs for state residents at a community college averaged $8,655 across the country. We're going to ignore cost of living adjustments, peripheral expenses like books, lost wages, and everything else. We're going to take just that tuition number and that will be the cost of "easily afford" at a "good university".

The cost of a 'soda', which to give you the best case scenario, will be for one of the plastic 16 oz variety, which averages about $1.50 right now. So we're going to go with $4.50 per day being blown on soda. In 1,923 days -- about 5.25 years worth of not drinking soda per year of tuition.

Now, given the rate of inflation combined with the rate that tuition has been rising, it's safe to say that number will be higher. And when you consider that tuition is only perhaps 2/3rds of the fees you'll be paying... that number goes up even more.

Bottom line here is that your assertion that saving the equivalent of three sodas a day ($4.50) can buy someone a college education is possible, but absurd. You would spend half your working life waiting. In reality, you're going to have to save more to make it happen. Working a minimum wage job, you're only going to be pulling in about $36 a day (at best). Odds are good you'll be clearing even less.

You're asking someone for whom three sodas a day accounts for about 1/8th of their total personal income to save even more to make this do-able. You'd have to at least double, and probably triple, the savings rate, to get into college within a reasonable timeframe.

Frankly, when you take rent, utilities, and everything else into consideration... a minimum wage job simply cannot sustain that level of investment. Not unless you want to starve, rack up debt elsewhere (like late fees, bank overdraft fees, etc.) -- which will happen anyway when you're living paycheck by paycheck.

The bottom line here is that what these scientists is saying has nothing to do with the conclusions you and many others are reaching: Which is that you can "think" your way out of poverty, or that the problem can be resolved by simple mathematical ability. It is much bigger than that. All this study does is show that when financial resources become severely constrained, people are poor judges of how to best utilize those limited resources.

It provides no guidance on a viable strategy for emerging from that environment, and your flippant advice about simply not drinking soda is symptomatic of another, perhaps larger problem, that poor people face: Prejudice.

I read about this all the time and wonder to myself, "Who is their right mind goes 100k in debt for school?".

From Collegedata.com:

In its most recent survey of college pricing, the College Board reports that a "moderate" college budget for an in-state public college for the 2012–2013 academic year averaged $22,261. A moderate budget at a private college averaged $43,289.

OK. A little math here: A "moderate" cost for 4 years at a state school (not counting inflation, which makes this a joke really): $89,000. "Moderate" cost for 4 years at a private college: $173,000. So who goes into 100K kind of debt for school? It looks like pretty much everyone who doesn't have family resources to fall back on.

30 second google search FTW!
In-state, public: $22k/year
Private: $43k/year
and yes, that includes room-and board because that's part of the cost of anything you do in life once you decide to leave the nest.