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Obama Seeks New System For Rating Colleges
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Targeting the soaring cost of higher education, President Barack Obama on Thursday unveiled a broad new government rating system for colleges that would judge schools on their affordability and perhaps be used to allocate federal financial aid. But the proposed overhaul faced immediate skepticism from college leaders who worry the rankings could cost their institutions millions of dollars, as well as from congressional Republicans wary of deepening the government's role in higher education. The new rating system does not require congressional approval, and the White House is aiming to have it set up before the 2015 school year. But Obama does need support from Congress in order to use the ratings as a basis for parceling out federal financial aid. In addition to tuition, schools will also be rated on average student loan debt, graduation rates and the average earnings of graduates. Under Obama's proposal, students attending highly rated schools could receive larger grants and more affordable loans."
What is the median salary, divided by total cost of education, one year and five years after graduation? That is really the main thing a prospective student needs to know. Everything else is window dressing.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
afterwards I couldn't afford a car or a home and it took me 10 years to recover from the damage!
captcha:thriving
Another system that our leaders can use to punish their enemies and reward their friends!
Where is the actually written bill?
He loves going place to place and telling that audience what they want to hear and then passing the actual work to Congress who he knows won't/can't do it.
I'm neither a Congressman nor a Republican, but you can put me in the 'wary of deepening the government's role in higher education' column. So far their meddling in the marketplace has led to an inflation rate for higher education not only several times higher than the general inflation rate - but even higher than the 'skyrocketing healthcare cost' inflation rate we are alway hearing about.
The abandoned color-coded terrorism threat advisory scale will now become the 'colleges you want advisory scale'.
green: $
blue: $$
yellow: $$$
orange: $$$$
red: $$$$$
Try losing students to skyrocketing tuition and fees. Dur.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Measure it in watermelons
That measures how well politicians uphold the amendments of the constitution, where low-rated politicians are automatically recalled from office.
Forget a "best value" rating. How about getting rid of student loans? They're a self-perpetuating cycle of debt on the young; the loans make college more accessible, which increases the demand for colleges, which increases the tuition cost, which increases the amount of loans people have to take out to go to college.
Besides, not everyone who goes to college should. I went to college right out of high school; if I had to do it again I would have gotten a job first, learned a few things, then gone to college when I was more mature enough to handle it and gotten something out of 4 years instead of next to nothing out of 5+. Or instead of pushing everyone to college, why not encourage more trade schools? Not everyone is an academic or has the aptitude, but while I'm a college graduate I may as well be a child when it comes to fixing a car or welding two plates together. Besides, here in California I know a few companies that would take a kid right out of high school with a C average, train him in a trade like electrician or welding or pipe fitting, and get him to a journeyman status in 2 years. By 20 he'd be making $20/hour with full benefits with a high school diploma and no student loans; I know tons of college graduates who would kill for a job like that.
The way it's written will negatively impact a lot of the higher ranked colleges from the past with the financial incentives that are mentioned. For the large private schools they're not going to care so much, but I have to imagine this will be dead in the water from the get go. Too much alumni power in the legislature for this to be something that will ever make its way through!
Pretty much anything is an improvement on our current system where we hand naive eighteen year olds six digits worth of grants and loans and say, "Here, spend this as you please."
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
for most job an 2 year Community College and or tech / trade school is all that is needed. To much push for the old 4 year system.
Then governments have no choice but to make it free and widely available to anyone on demand.
I think that a delay in congress approving this scheme as a factor in funding would be a good thing. I doubt that US News and World Report had their ranking system perfected in just a year; even if the executive branch hired the most brilliant minds (for which they have neither the budget nor the appeal) it would be impossible to come up with a system reliable enough to guide billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidy. By all means, come up with a system, publish the results each year, and see how it works. Refine it over time, and maybe 10 or 15 years in the future, if it is respected by students and employers as a metric of educational quality, start to apply it to funding decisions.
Any amount of development time might not be enough though: like any channel for federal funding, this thing is going to get turned into a political tool. What starts as a system to determine if an education will give you a good start in your chosen field will rapidly devolve into a contest for which colleges have the most puritanical health centers or are located in the home state of a ranking member of the controlling committee.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
College costs are due to the easy borrowing as a perverse consequence of trying to make college easier for people to afford. As with a car loan, nobody wants to pay $2000 for a fancy radio, but an extra $35/month, sign me up!
8% a year? No problem...on my loan! Sign me up!
The way to reign this in is to deny government backing for cheap loans to any college that increases costs more than 2% this year. And keep that up for 10 years to drag relative costs back down vs. inflation.
All these loudmouths in charge of colleges who throw up their hands and say hey don't know why, the liars will sort things out quickly.
Perverse incentives are perverse.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
is to do away with grants and to make loans more difficult to obtain.
Yeah just don't go.Financially, it makes absolutely no sense. You're in wage competition with people who have zero debt from other nations. Guess who wins? Your ,student loans are 100% unbankruptable and the price for college is set by the amount of money lenders will lend, which is basically everything you'll earn over your lifetime, since, as I said, the debt is unbankruptable.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815
Universities take that money and hire another level of administrators, give them all raises, build golden palaces for them to work in, build 5 star shopping malls / food courts, erect modernist pieces of architecture to house privately run research facilities and of course spend lavishly on their athletic programs , including more state of the art construction , high six digit salaries for everyone etc. etc.
This is what your student loans pay for. This is what the lifetime of debt you pay for goes to fund. This is the system the US has lying in wait for people who are, as Matthew Tabbi put it, people who are barely not children. An amount of debt that will push you into a life of literal indentured servitude before you even start of f in life.
http://www.freep.com/article/20130822/BLOG25/308220135/student-loans-debt-rolling-stone
This is purely predatory and the fact that the predation is by seasoned adults who understand the system and upon naive children who have been told since birth by the people they trust the most, most recently by Obama himself , that "college is the best investment you can make." , the fact that that is the predator -prey relationship says everything you need to know about higher education in America and America itself. From the housing crisis to the student loan bubble to the credit default swap to the savings and loans bailouts, it's a series of traps into which the naive are lured and pushed for the benefit of the sophisticated, the rule writers, the rich.
Don't go. You'll have incredible freedom. There is nothing at university you'll learn that you can't learn for free online. You and your friends can make your own way in the world if you don't have crushing debt waiting to seize everything every time you get ahead even a little. If you're not forcibly chained to an slave oar of a job that takes everything you have to give and leaves you with nothing to put into your own life at the end of the day.
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/20/matt_taibbi_us_student_loan_bubble
There are a million ways for young people to arrange themselves in this world , a million ways waiting to be invented discovered, tried and iterated upon in order to gain knowledge, have access to resources, advance themselves and establish their market value that don't involve college and the unbankruptable crushing debt. Just do it. Everyone. Just invent it. Just try it. No opportunity is passing you by by trying until you get it right. You have nothing to lose. Nothing at all.
Who the fuck cares?!?
That depends on what you are teaching. College has changed from 'The halls of higher learning' to the thing that every American HS school does because that is what you do to get ahead in life. For the majority of college students (who are kinda just idiots, and don't really need 4 years of college), the GP post is really the number that matters.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
When you can't change the conditions, just change the definitions.
Have the NSA count the number of misspelled words in their e-mails.
Obama has proof (in the form of his election and subsequent reelection) that young voters are stupid enough to support his policies because they lack the maturity to consider the second- and third-order effects of said policies. His poll numbers are low, he has borrowed and spent FAR more money in his time in office than any previous president, his signature policy (Obamacare) is such a mess he is having to delay implementation of major parts until after next year's congressional elections (so voters don't feel the full pain in time to inform their votes) and his party is worried about the looming congressional elections. His answer? Get back on the campaign trail! Get the college kids all worked-up about college costs and debts! (they're too dumb to notice that federal interference in college loans is what CAUSES the tuition inflation AND that his failed economic policies have created an economy where those degrees are less likely to result in a job)
Federal student loans have made it so huge numbers of kids (who, being young, lack the life experience to fully understand the impact of loan payments) think they can "afford" to pay high prices to pursue ANY degree and expensive school which, in-turn, allows colleges to raise their prices to whatever the market will bear. College tuition inflation has become completely disconnected from the rest of the economy. Unfortunately for these young students, student loans are some of the only debts that CANNOT be discharged through bankruptcy (probably NOT emphasized in all the glossy brochures). The sad truth is that the actual costs of college have not risen significantly at most schools (most have owned the same land and buildings for decades and have essentially the same staff costs) and many are sitting on such enormous piles of cash (like Harvard and Yale) that they do not even need to charge tuition to stay profitable... but there's free federal student aid money to be harvested! Time to recruit more students and raise tuition!
Stories like these sicken me when it comes to how they are effectively ignored and swept under the rug. This case was criminally prosecuted only because there was a lot of money involved and it was students and not the staff.
If people are going to spend ridiculously high costs for schooling, they need to know that it's not going to support criminals like those at Winston-Salem.
Since a degree is primarily a qualification, its importance lies in its scarcity. It used to be since many people didn't finish high school, a high school diploma had meaning, it was a qualification. Well, then it was decided that -everyone- should have a high school diploma and curriculum gets dumbed down to the point that any person not in a vegetative state can easily obtain a high school diploma, it stops being a qualification. So naturally people looked for the next higher qualification, a college degree, when this idea that everyone should have a college degree (which, believe me is certainly taking hold) the classes start to get dumber and dumber and suddenly a college degree stops being a qualification. Soon employers are looking for your master's degree...
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Schools have been milking students via government loans for decades now.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
The proposotion sounds like a mask for lowering the standards. Sweden is already in this path. Results droop and they cannot admit the real reason because of politics. So the culprit must be the system. Everyone suffers and the esteem of educational institutions drop when they MUST take and pass students of ... let's say, lesser capabilities, in name of multiculturalism.
USA is fast becoming a social democratic european style hellhole.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
And a whole generation of unpaid bloggers for Huffington Post and Salon rise up........and take the bus to the Temp Agency.
I go to a local community college. Every semester the cost per semester hour has risen for the past two years. The only thing I see improved for the school is just the eye candy. The eye candy being upgrades to campus buildings and grounds. The same teachers are there and the curriculum continues to be watered down spoon-fed academics. The quality of education needs to be fixed. Not some kind of rating system.
...as silly as subsidizing successful businesses. How is a start-up supposed to displace the incumbents if the incumbents have access to government funds that can make them more affordable for students? In this case, maybe it's not a start-up, so much as a school that has simply turned things around. They'd face the same issue.
I wonder if Obama will team up with the NSA on this? Maybe use the private emails of college professors to help develop the rankings...
Option 1 leaves out students who are plenty smart, but just goofed around in high school. Option 2 makes university degrees worthless.
Small government repubtards: government is bad always. Hmm, if the government is already paying towards peoples education shouldn't they at least be able to base their loans on affordability or results (percentage of grads employed in their field, percentage making larger than median wage etc)? Somehow it is better to keep things the way they are then to risk actually considering whether or not to subsidize an expensive basket weaving program.
First of all, you're comparing an Australian government propaganda site--excuse me--an Australian government site that's sole purpose is to show off what a good idea it is to come to Australia to study to a list of "topuniversities." There's a difference.
Secondly, an Australian bachelors degree is only three years versus four for the US. From my admittedly limited experience, Australian degrees tend to be more trade-oriented than most traditional US universities, so again, the difference is probably not as bleak as you make it out to be.
Finally, correct me if I'm wrong, but the majority of Australian universities are public and heavily subsidized (so again, compare apples to apples, publics to publics). Australian professor salaries are also lower, and Australian professorships are more akin to civilian servant positions. Professors in the US--august representatives of the academy--are basically their own social/political/economic class.
The best--or most expensive, depending on your take!--universities in the US probably cost in toto about 60k a year right. There are a LOT of families that can afford that without dipping into savings and without blinking an eye. The last figures I saw are that around 20% of all American families make 100k or more a year. The most expensive colleges are still really expensive, but there is a HUGE diversity of colleges in the US from junior colleges and community colleges, to small liberals arts, to big state publics, to privates research institutions, etc. Given the tremendous wealth in the US and the availability of cheap, easy to get government money, why NOT raise tuition? With very few exceptions (see Antioch), colleges and universities hardly ever go out of business or have trouble filling seats.
Before grants and guaranteed college loans, colleges could only charge what the students could afford. I myself graduated from a big 4-year state college in the 80's for a total cost of $21k, and I was an on-campus student.
Now we have grants and the ability to take out tens of thousands of dollars... per year... for tuition. All an adult student has to do is sign his or her name, and it is like free unlimited money for all the education you can eat.
How can anyone be confused by the idea that colleges will adjust their cost by the amount their customers can afford to pay? This is econ 101, here. When these stupid adult children can afford $50k to get their art history degree, why do you think a college won't increase their price to accommodate the sucker windfall?
Want to watch the price of college plummet? Remove all loans. We'll return to the days of "only the rich can afford college/not fair!", but at least the stupid will not be graduating under a mountain of debt from which they will never be free. The truly academically gifted and motivated will get scholarships no matter how poor they are.
I'd agree, except that you can now easily get a better education by trying online than most kids get in college. Given that the higher education industry is all about raping the kids through federal loans, well, yeah, it's only about ROI.
Troll?! Seriously, wtf is going on with moderation here... I thought this was one of the least trollish things I've ever posted! :p
Here's a simple and proven plan to follow until this gets implemented.
1) Find out what state you live in. This should be easy.
2) Apply to all the state schools with the programs you need and pick one with the best facilities.
3) Graduate with little or no college debt.
4) Get the same and better jobs than your heavily indebted "ivy league" educated colleagues.
5) Profit!!
Kriston
He is creating a school rating list of affordability so he can close them. No more student debt, since only those who already have the money will be able to pay it. Its called a different approach.
And all those new buildings and stadiums going up at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars (each!) has nothing to do with rising costs. Nope, not at all.
cut down some of filler classes and get rid of old forced classes that are just there to keep departments in place.
Does this include the electoral college?
Probably it will be something like this:
College has more than 50% black students -> good and progresive, has fair entry exams
It has more whiteys than niggas -> bad and full of hate and discrimination
Or at least his "research" will lead to such conclusions being later reported by media over and over again until you believe this.
Yeah, support idiots for whom "college just didn't wwork out". Punish those who succeeded. Socialism ftw.
Finland having success by eliminating political micromanagement from education http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html
Universities and Colleges spend insane amounts of money on real estate because they are often in "prime areas". They spend a lot on salaries for their boards, usually those people get way better payment than the teachers and professors get. They spend a lot of money on the sports teams and their accommodations, trainers and such. Also, they spend a lot of money on maintaining that name aka "promotion". There are exceptions to that, but in general, those colleges and universities are considered "second grade" and people tend to want to spend more money on a degree from a highly rated college/university. If a potential employer has a choice of four candidates and three of them come from MIT, Carnegy-Mellon and Princeton while the 4th one comes from Tulane (Louisiana), guess which one won't get invited for an interview? Once you are on the short list for "good universities" you can charge more, spend the money on publicity and your own salary and keep the mechanism working. Thats how the mechanism works.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Step 1) Compare the number of students entering the school vs. the number of students graduating school. The higher the percentage, the lower the academic requirements of the school. To suggest that the academics of the school are so damn good that they can overcome the overwhelming odds that students will go nuts the second they are free from control by their parents is nonsense. If too many students are dropping out, the students are passing even though they're generally drunk.
Step 2) Evaluate the sports program. If the sports program is really good, it's less likely the academic program will be as good. It means the administration is less focused on academics and more focused on what they "Think Really Counts"
***** Most important ******
Step 3) Evaluate the number of students graduating the school during hard economic times and manage to get jobs that actually can cover the cost of their student debt. If a school knowingly admits a student who needs to borrow 50% or more of the money required to gain a degree in a career that DOES NOT offer a pay scale following graduation to cover the cost of the loan, the school should be declared predatory.
As an example, if only 10-20% of university graduates from a law school are likely to gain employment as lawyers, it means that the chances of defaulting on a student loan is high. It is then necessary to evaluate the most likely career path for a law school graduate that can't work as a lawyer and identify the amount of money that career is likely to pay. Then identify the amount the student can afford to repay.
Another example is giving a kid from a lower-middle-class home a loan to pay $150,000 for 4 years to become a pianist from Julliard. The student has about 0.5% chance of gaining a career playing piano in a concert hall. The student has a 10% chance of gaining employment as a music teacher in an elementary school. This loan should be denied.
Another example would be a student studying to become a school teacher. School teachers will earn an average of $75K a year after earning tenure. They are almost 100% guaranteed to be stable and responsible regarding loan payments. Loan then up to $125,000 for their education to be paid over a period of 25 years at national mortgage rates.
It would be interesting to see what each candidate spends on getting elected vs the increase in wealth for them and friends/family 5 and 10 years after election.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
At this point, he's got such a huge back log of other things and such a huge investment in other things that reforming higher education is really not something anyone is going to cooperate on. As in anything, there are entrenched interests.
The president should spend what time he has left finishing the things he's started. Very little new he attempts at his point will be accepted or catch on.
The first term is where you push these things. And the second term is where you cement them. Well.... finish what you've started and stop creating new programs and ideas for entirely unrelated issues that in most cases are no great matter.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Bureaucracy has exploded at universities. The professors, assistant professors, and assistants aren't getting high salaries, but the administrators certainly do. This is just supposition on my part, and I don't have hard data
I wonder what we'd find if we look at the administrative structure of the same universities 20 years ago and today, accounting for any growth in student population.
That's the golden word in all of your support. Tenure.
That is why they do those long hours, to secure tenure. You know, the ability to lay back and not have to worry about the future - or actually work.
We all know people in IT who worked just as hard and even longer than the proto-profs and do not have tenure.
My heart does not bleed. The salaries the profs draw are anything but terrible. Hyperbole for teachers salaries is like the race card; old and unimpressive anymore.
quality is inversely proportional to the number of black students...
So if a college doesn't toe the party line? Their ratings mysteriously drop and they lose their cut of the government cheese.
While there are certainly places where savings could be made on college campuses to offset tuition increases we're talking about some pretty small numbers. Most public universities run a pretty lean ship and budgets are tight. What is the main reason college costs have gone up? Reduced funding from states. When I got hired at my midwest midsize public university just over a decade ago 2/3 of our funding came from the state and 1/3 from tuition. It has now flipped, with 1/3 coming from the state and 2/3 coming from students. Overall tuition has barely budged, but the amount paid is coming out of student pockets instead of from state taxes. And faculty and staff are not getting rich off of this. We have had little to no raises over the past decade. In fact, factor in inflation and we are paid less. And those beautiful campuses and new buildings and recreational centers? Often, like ours, these are student fee funded. Students voted to approve the bonds to build these facilities by approving a small student fee similar to a low cost gym membership. Not a penny of tuition goes towards any of this. Full time faculty positions have held steady or dropped, with more and more cheaper paid adjuncts taking up additional classes to compensate for increased enrollments. Department budgets have not increased a penny in the past decade. Everyone is holding to flat or reduced spending. Academia is not making it big off of students. It's all down to how you want to pay for higher education, through taxes or your own pocket book. Public universities are slowly being privatized because of reduced funding from the states. The republican mantra of lower and lower taxes only means that you will pay more and more for what were once public services.
Tired of this bullshit.
So students going to lesser schools will be fucked with less affordable loans? WTF?
How about the government just STOP guaranteeing student loans (which can't even be discharged in bankruptcy). Get the fuck out of the system, it's the loan program that has driven up tuition rates for 25 years. When I went there were several students who worked to pay their own way. As hard as that seems to do back then, it must be nearly impossible today, so they get loans and then get fucked for life. Same thing happened with subsidized housing, all that did is drive up home prices to the point of a bubble that crippled the economy for years. Just fucking stop meddling.
This idea is upside down, inside out and down right perverted. The very notion that the percentage that graduate indicates quality is absurd. I really hate to say it but the best educations come from schools with huge drop out rates and lots of suicides. When an academic environment is so demanding that even some high quality students can not make it you have a school that will produce great geniuses. They may come out a bit odd but they will be brilliant and exactly the type of people that history books admire.
Compounding this error is the false notion that employment should be a goal of education. Lord Byron, Leonardo, Mozart or Newton were not trained to make a living. Poe starved. Money is not a concern in education. For parents who want their kids to make a living just send them to trade schools or teach them how to repair plumbing. Keep these folks out of college as they do not belong there.
Make note that schools with unusual academic demands as well as strict honor codes produce wonderful scholars.
This guy has nothing better to worry about?
After causing the problem, (by making education money very easy to get) then government takes credit in fixing it.
This is a very dangerous direction and is another tool that Obama can use to punish his political enemies as he has wielded throughout his time in office. A likely scenario is if a college publishes studies that establishes facts that conflict with political agendas, they could find their federal aid withheld like the IRS has been doing with conservative groups. The potential for abuse is too great and the consequences too disastrous. Obama needs to stop his campaign attack mode since taking office, start governing with all branches, and start staffing his cabinet with qualified candidates who listen to all sides and not political rewardees who contributed to his campaign.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
The new ratings system, which the president wants implemented before the 2015 school year, would evaluate colleges on a series of measures, including average tuition and student loan debt, graduation rates, and the average earnings of graduates. Obama is also seeking legislation to link the new ratings system to the way federal financial aid is awarded, with students attending highly-rated schools receiving larger grants and more affordable student loans.
Sounds great, right? Except Satan is in the details. The whole purpose of this program is to bring colleges and universities even closer to the bosom of Uncle Sam, while the educated idiots think they are getting a great deal.
First step in their master plan was to raise tuition rates through the roof, which was easily achieved by spreading the "everyone MUST go to college meme", then giving away "free" government money to anyone and everyone who wants to go, to study 18th century Russian poetry or whatever bullshit fairy tale dream they want to pursue. This has been successful, as most ordinary people can no longer afford to go to college without this government "aid." Now the next stage of their plan is to make sure this government "aid" only goes to the "right" people. Those institutions which "toe the line" and do what the government tells them to do, and preach whatever lies that the government demands they preach, and are successful in raising their kids up to be good little obedient Nazis and willing corporate slaves, will be the ones which receive higher ratings and more money. On the other hand any educational institution which has the nerve to speak out against the government will find themselves with poor ratings, no money, and thus no students.
So OUR tax dollars go to support the government-friendly ass kissing institutions, and to help those kids who are picked and chosen by the elites to be accepted there, while little to none of it goes to those who teach kids to be independent, critical thinkers, to kids who are not part of the elite, or to those whose families are political enemies of the corrupt fascists in D.C. The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer....by design.
Yet another SCAM from the great Liar In Chief....and leagues of 20 year old useful idiots scream in ecstasy about how wonderful it all is and what a great visionary Obomber is. They begged for slavery, and slavery is exactly what they will get. Good for them.
So around 20% of American families make $92k or more a year (2005 statistics from Census Bureau via Wikipedia). That's before taxes. AFTER taxes (assume earnings of $100k, assume $75k is taxable, total of about $16k in federal taxes, be generous and assume no state taxes, balance it out by assuming no tax credits) you're probably looking at $84k actual income for the year. Subtract $60k in tuition for one child. You're telling me that this hypothetical couple (since the kid is off at school most of the time) with $100k a year salary on paper will be able to live off $26k a year "without dipping into savings and without blinking an eye"? Seriously? That's just over $2000 a month to cover two people's worth of rent/mortage, food, utilities, insurance, health care, transportation, clothing, and supporting the child while school is not in session, not even considering emergencies and entertainment like internet access and smart phones. There would be some serious eye blinking and probably savings dipping in MY house.
Linked is the average tuition rise over the last five years for all 50 states. In most cases, the rise is 20-30%. In the extreme upper end, the rise is nearly 80% (I'm looking at you Arizona...). http://www.cbpp.org/images/cms/3-19-13sfp-f3.jpg This clearly outpaces cost of living growth over the last five years.
The next link is the growth in administrative costs for one example, the University of California system, which has massively ballooned over the last several decades. http://californiareview.net/2011/08/24/graph-of-uc-administrative-growth/ This is not an isolated phenomenon. While professor salaries and direct education expenses have stayed relatively flat over the last few decades (or tracked inflation in some cases), the number of, and salaries provided to, administrative positions have dramatically increased across the board at most institutions (public or private).
For further example, look at total compensation for the top university executives across the US from 2011-2012. We are compensating many university execs in excess of $500,000 a year (some over $2 mil). http://old.post-gazette.com/images5/20130513presidential_pay691.png At many state schools, with limited external funding, and tuition rise limited by law, we're still paying execs $3-400,000. What value do these people add that is worth $300,000 - $2 million?
2005 is quite out of date now, so I would take those numbers with some caution. The 2010/2011 numbers are a bit different.
Since you either didn't read or misparsed the rest of my post, let me quote myself:
There are a LOT of families that can afford that without dipping into savings and without blinking an eye. The last figures I saw are that around 20% of all American families make 100k or more a year. The most expensive colleges are still really expensive, but there is a HUGE diversity of colleges in the US from junior colleges and community colleges, to small liberals arts, to big state publics, to privates research institutions, etc.
To summarize:
1) There are a lot of families that can pay out 60k a year without blinking. This is true, and the number is certainly in the millions.
2) Over 20% of Americans make more than 100k a year. As far as I can tell from the 2010/11 data, this looks true to me.
3) You'll note I never said that a family making 100k a year could easily pay 60k a year (those are two discrete statements). Most families making 100k+ can easily afford some level of college.
Though I would add, as a minor nit, that in many, many parts of the country, $2000 take home cash a month is enough to live on and be comfortable.
To some degree, the horrifying student loan figures that are frequently bandied about are like the "average credit card balance" figures. After all, 1/3 of all students who go to college end with no debt at all! Only 10% end with 40k of debt, and fewer than 1% of all students end with 100k of debt. Source.
I'm not going to argue that college isn't expensive nor that 100k debt isn't absolutely crushing. I will argue, however, about the causes and reasons, and to a lesser degree the magnitude. To repeat:
Given the tremendous wealth in the US and the availability of cheap, easy to get government money, why NOT raise tuition? With very few exceptions (see Antioch), colleges and universities hardly ever go out of business or have trouble filling seats.
We should start teaching at least the basic fundamentals of algebra by first or second grade. Those of us who grew up learning programming at a young age know that this is doable.
Your sentiment is in the right place, but your suggestion is really bad. There is a lot of evidence suggestion that math isn't really great for younger kids. The ability of a first grader to work with abstract concepts limits their capacity to really comprehend what is going on. I have read articles by educators that suggest that math be pushed back several years until about 3rd grade. If you hit a young kid with a lot of boring abstract problems they will become bored and frustrated very quickly, and young kids don't have a long attention span.
Ultimately, the best systems would be one where kids proceed at their own pace.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!