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In 18 Years, A College Degree Could Cost About $500,000 (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: People worried about college affordability today can at least take this to heart: it could get much, much worse. Tuition has been rising by about 6% annually, according to investment management company Vanguard. At this rate, when babies born today are turning 18, a year of higher education at a private school -- including tuition, fees, and room and board -- will cost more than $120,000, Vanguard said. Public colleges could average out to $54,000 a year. That means without financial aid, the sticker price of a four-year college degree for children born today could reach half a million dollars at private schools, and a quarter million at public ones. That's for a family with one kid; those with more could be facing a bill that reaches seven figures.
Unless of course, states keep subsidizing this bullshit. It's time to end scholarships and let prices fall where they may.
...If you go to college for the right reason (knowledge).
If you're going there for a job, you're in the wrong place. If you're going there for money, you're REALLY in the wrong place.
Guess what institution has the highest publicly paid individuals in every single state? Keep using college for something other than education, and they'll keep using YOU.
even at those prices, it's still a good investment for many degree programs
for many other degree programs, it's never been a good investment
this needs to be solved on the demand side, not the supply side
$500,000 invested wisely into a moderately aggressive portfolio at age 18 would make you extremely wealthy at retirement age. Why waste it on a college education that may or may not get you a job, and even if it does it will likely never earn you as much money as the original cost invested wisely?
This is a ridiculous extrapolation; doing the same to health care costs means that health care and education will each be several hundred percent of our GDP in 18 years.
The cost of education is driven by the federal student loan program, the expansion of middle management, and the development of luxury dorms and gyms. I think it's transparent that such costs cannot continue to expand at the same rate for the next 18 years.
That's insane.
Mi kids will be sent to the best college in India then....
If you're going to spend the rest of your life paying off college debt... how much of the money you earn in your career (assuming you get hired) is actually yours to keep?
That means without financial aid, the sticker price of a four-year college degree for children born today could reach half a million dollars at private schools, and a quarter million at public ones. That's for a family with one kid; those with more could be facing a bill that reaches seven figures.
This writer comes to the wrong conclusion. the rise in costs is related to the financial aid given.
the more money the state guarantees that colleges will get paid (regardless on if its students are successful or drop out) is what causes the costs to rise.
the solution is not even more money from the state (and the people via taxes) but to get the government out of it completely and allow the market to self correct
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Everyone seems to want to tackle this from the wrong end, with some nebulous plan to pay for peoples tuition. That doesn't solve anything, it just shifts the cost burden. I'd love to see an in depth study done on WHY universities continue to increase costs.
I suspect (and my bias is obvious here) that a significant part of the increase comes from spending on athletic programs (a local university here just spent close to $10m on a new athletics complex, which was only half funded by donations and alumni - so $5m from the general fund to benefit a football team that's never been to a playoff game) and the funding of an ever increasing number of "scholarly" programs for those children who are expected to go to college but likely shouldn't (looking at you humanities and "business" departments)
A few skills, such as software engineering, can be already acquired 100% online. In two decades, VR will make majority of high education possible to acquire without human labor, or with help of professors from parts of the world with low cost of living. At this point, we will probably just fund the remaining costs like we do for K-12 schools.
Oh sure, ultra rich will keep their private colleges with dorms, football teams and fraternities. These things will just be understood to have nothing to do with education.
The cost increases come down to a few things:
1. An explosion in admin staff.
2. A resort-like building and activity culture.
3. A guaranteed flow of a lot of income via student loans.
People leaving college with $100k in debt is already becoming a serious problem and the prospects are dismal for many majors. Political support is already turning slowly against universities and their culture for these reasons. If it gets to the point where $100k in debt is normal, you can expect a few things...
1. The states will order state universities to aggressively address #1 through lay offs and requiring them to prioritize the academic mission over everything else.
2. The federal government will simply stop supporting federally-backed loan requests for universities that charge an arm and a leg.
3. At least some states, and possibly the feds, will start adopting anti-discrimination laws that punish employers who require degrees for reasons other than it being absolutely necessary to demonstrate knowledge and qualification.
I expect #3 to happen earlier and hit the universities very hard. There are so many jobs where a degree is objectively not required or is at best only a loose correlation with being qualified that many employers will quickly drop that in favor of a demonstration of expertise. In the long run, that'd benefit society in general and ironically, I expect it would do 10x more to make our industry "diverse" than all of the diversity initiatives combined. Why? Because it would let a candidate for a HBC compete more easily with the graduates of the schools that big companies favor because they'd be scared shitless of being seen as favoring degrees over demonstration of knowledge.
It's all Supply and Demand (and free money).
When it comes to "Free Money", either have the federal government get out of higher education tuition as it artificially inflates the costs. Or make it where any university accepts public funding, they can not spend ~any~ funding on 'entertainment','athletics', or 'student life' BS. Maybe even get rid of federal funding of certain majors...
As for supply, lower the barriers for accreditation. How strict some of the regulations are creates monopolies. Why do I need to go on campus to get a computer science degree? Please note, I'm not saying remove the accreditation system, but to modernize it and make it easier for new methods of learning to be applied. We should have low cost online degrees in practically every major that doesn't need hands on training. In Florida for instance, 10 years ago zero schools offered Computer Science Degree online. Now there is only 1. In the 5th most populous state in the country...
Finally demand, not everyone needs to go to college. I went for a couple years, it was a complete waste of time, so I dropped out and started my own business. Sure not everyone has the drive or skills to do that, but the world (and the US) still needs trade school jobs. A good plumber makes as much as a mid level programmer in most of the US.
$500,000 degree might come as a shock. ~If~ it goes that high (and inflation is not comparable) demand will decrease. Universities will feel the pain and start cutting back. Both in terms of budget and tuition. Sadly though, the neither political parties believe in free markets, so they'll keep signing away low interest loans to you sheeple that continue to go.
I have no doubt students loan defaults will increase to critical levels sooner rather than later. As the old saying goes "The ends do not justify the means". The more graduates who do not see their incomes justify the large expenditure in student education. The more we will see them struggle with debt. I know some graduates struggling with upwards of 500 thousand in loan debt working at a job that required non of it. Talk about wasting away your potential lifetime income on student debt.
Yet not enough is done to educate college students on weighing the investment in a degree vs to potential earnings they can achieve.
And everyone can get degrees from MIT. You know, the Mumbai Institute of Technology. It they are good enough for H1Bs, they should be good enough for home-grown employees.
The financial bubble that has been created is bad enough. But what I think is even worse are the social problems that it has caused.
In the past, before these subsidies that distorted the pricing so horrendously, most students had to study something that brought real value. While a few dicked around in an abstract, rather useless subject like philosophy, most students studied science, engineering, mathematics, law, and medicine. These are the sorts of subjects that allow the students to, in the future, provide real value to society.
But we've seen the opposite happen since this flood of subsidy money into education. We've seen entire degree programs built upon what would have once just been a course or two within a general history degree. We're talking about things like "Gender Studies", "Indigenous Peoples Studies", "Art History", and "Social Justice Philosophy".
Those sorts of subjects provide no real value to society at large. They don't allow our economic productivity to be increased. They don't allow us to improve our health. They don't allow us to understand our world better. All they do is foment a sense of undeserved entitlement and a false sense of victimhood. The only "skill" that the students end up with after years of study is the ability to whine and bitch about irrelevant non-issues.
For example, now society needs to deal with "protesters" who riot and loot any time that the police need to reasonably defend themselves with force when faced with violent attacks by criminal elements. Yet there's silence from these same "protesters" when black-on-black violence kills more people in a single weekend in Chicago alone than have been killed by the police over the past decade.
So not only do people who want to study practical, useful and valuable studies end up having to pay egregiously high tuition, but society as a whole now needs to deal with a huge number of other students who have chosen to study pointless subjects that only turn them into angry little tyrants.
While there is, I think some merit to studying in groups of colleagues and live interactions, the content of all college course taught by the best instructirs using a range of teach styles will all be online in 20 years. This will be the last generation to pay for college.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's almost like a flood of infinite money causes prices to rise!
I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing that number isn't inflation adjusted. I remember back when I was in high school (roughly 18 years ago) you could get 2 liter pops for about $0.60 pretty regularly, today it is more like $1.20 (roughly double). That's an inflation rate of about 4% per year, not too far from the summaries 6%. Welcome to a Fiat money based economy.....
College costs are soaring for the same reason that health care costs are soaring: because the system is neither capitalist or socialist, but a combination of the two. When you combine the two, you don't get the best of both worlds as people assume; in reality, you get the worst of both worlds. Without even stating which system I personally favor, I propose that the two systems are incompatible.
That a gallon of milk will run you about $20 and a tank of gas is $500...
BTW, College tuition is only really going wacko because the government stepped in and made student loans so easy to get. I know of folks a decade ago who were borrowing money to go to school taking the maximum allowed while living at home. They blew all the extra money on lavish vacations and other junk and are now, faced with a mountain of unnecessary debt for college degrees of minimal value. Criminal justice and business administration just doesn't pay that well. Making college money easy to get makes tuition go up, but it doesn't always make people better educated.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I think that something far more likely is a collapse of the college education system in the US.
All of my kids will be/are going to community college or state schools. Unless you are rich, a private school is laughably out of the question these days.
- Necron69
Best decision I ever made. Saved me a lot of debt and afforded me a lot more freedom to actually get situated in life and find a career through more natural means, a lot of the jobs you can get they don't even cover any of the technical parts in school anyway and you need the actual experience on real hardware/equipment regardless, and to practice in an actual production environment
If they just raise minimum wage to $15K/hour that should cover a good education for everyone.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Where's the referenced Onion article link?
I tend to rant.
right? wages will come up too, right?
Anybody?
In the meantime, in the rest of the civilized world, higher education is free or essentially free (and we have single-payer healthcare).
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
This makes sense if you adjust for inflation using the PCI index instead of the CPI. Using the PCI, the average household income in today's dollars of a family from the mid 1950s is close to $250k a year. This means that if you are making $50k a year today, you are only actually making about 1/5th of what your forebears did. This is why you can't afford college, this is why you have no retirment savings, this is why you and your spouse have to work, and this is why you live pay check to pay check.
We're basically getting paid slave wages, and the masters in charge have created a system of laws to prevent us from ever taking up arms to rise up... we're fucked. Watch the movie "In Time" if you want to get a glimpse into the world you've been born into, when watching the movie just replace their plot concept of "Time credits" with money and it all makes sense.
At this rate, a college degree will only be for those who have parents in that top 1%. Even if financial aid is willing to cover such costly amounts, then these students would be in debt for the rest of their lives. Also, if only the top 1% could afford college degrees, could a company that only hires people with at least a four-year degree be classified as discrimination of the middle and lower class? If someone wants to be a network admin for a large corporation, then pursuing Cisco certifications would be the logical path. CCIE certification is very powerful, but there are those companies that will never listen to you. You could have a four year degree in something as futile as basket weaving. They will at least listen to you that way. A degree in computer science is unlikely to cover Cisco. Plus computer science is easily outsourceable. Do the coding in India and then send the compiled products back to the company in the US.
Do you also have to buy the DLCs for your degree?
I have two real, in-person college degrees, and I've taken a number of online courses through a variety of MOOCs and other delivery platforms. The main thing I've learned since taking the online courses is that they aren't a replacement for a real, in-person courses.
The course material was actually pretty good. But the community aspect is utter nonsense. Probably 80% to 90% of the discussion in the forums was from people in places like India, China, and the Middle East pestering the professors about special religious-based exemptions for assignments/quizzes/exams, or asking for all bad grades they received to be discarded, or worse, to get the certificate of completion before the course had even started!
I couldn't believe it. There were people asking if they could get the completion certificate PDF without watching any of the lectures, without doing any of the assignments, without taking any quizzes/tests/exams, and without learning any of the material.
It was even worse when these fools barged into the rare relevant discussions between students who actually were trying to learn the material. Soon the relevant discussion would be disrupted and thrown off track by these students begging for special accommodations or undeserved course credit.
There's value in the course material, but that's it. The fellow students weren't worth dealing with, and in fact, the ones from third-world places ended up ruining the experience for everybody due to their begging for undeserved credentials. It was nowhere near this bad when I took real, in-person courses.
The economics of universities is horribly broken. The federal government has been providing easy money to Universities via student loans. Universities are bureaucracies and like any bureaucracy will simply grow to spend the money available. The University of Texas' bureaucracy has grown to be 1 administrator for every 7 students. The faculty:student ratio is 18:1! So there are more than twice as many administrators as faculty. The square footage of the university has also doubled in the last 30 years and the facilities are very nice, but the student body size has changed little in 30 years. The bulk of a student's tuition is clearly going to big beautiful buildings and a bulging bureaucracy. At $500,000 for four years, you are looking at one staff person (faculty or administration) per student. At some point before campuses have just as many employees as students I would hope that just how obviously wrong this is would become apparent.
With more debt the government needs to extend more credit, getting itself into more debt and preventing the youth from getting on the consumer regimen, a loss all around
Unlike charitable trusts, colleges and universities can hoard cash. If you are a charitable trust the tax code essentially forces you to spend a certain percentage of you endowment each year, colleges and universities don't have to do this.
If you were to force colleges and universities to spend down their trust funds at a sustainable level (a few percent a year) FOR THE PURPOSE OF EDUCATING THEIR STUDENTS, the cost of college would likely become zero for the top 200 institutions.
Admittedly, this would cause some problems for the colleges and universities with huge endowments.
Of course the consequences of any such changes in the tax code would depend on the details, I would guess that consolidation (i.e. the top schools essentially take over other schools) would be a likely outcome.
Even the author must recognize that a 4% real increases in college costs (after 2% inflation) cannot continue indefinitely. If that were the case, a state school that currently costs $10,000 annually would cost $500,000 annually by 2117 in today's dollars, while a private school would be a cool 2.5 million in today's dollars! Clearly, the market would correct before such a scenario ever came to pass. Even debt-funded bubbles hit a breaking point.
So the question is, how close are we to that breaking point where consumers lose their willingness to pay? I think for some less-regarded private schools, that breaking point has already been hit. Some second-tier private schools with very high tuitions have started to suffer declining enrollments. However, I think we are a long way from it with most public schools. It's also worth noting that a big driver of public school tuition inflation has been declining state support. Public support for public institutions probably won't go below zero, so there is a limit to how long those increases can be driven by declining public support.
It could be free...
Around here, you can do two years in a community college and transfer all the credits to a bunch of decent 4 year state schools.
In the end, you get the same 4 year degree as everyone else - while saving a boat load of money.
Sure, mom and dad don't get to put an Ivy League sticker on their car, and Mary and Johnny may have to live at home and commute to the college - but that's what the smart money does.
Stop paying for country clubs for your little crotch fruit.
... won't.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
This is going to self regulate. This generation of parents still has the belief that a college educations guarantees a job, so they push their children to get one. But as we have seen in recent articles, education no longer automatically translates to getting hired. So over time there will be less interest in spending large amount of money on 'worthless' education. The cost will have to match the gain.
The banks and schools have no skin in the game if they did then.
No more rip off text books that change all the time to kill resale.
No more Professors ripping pages out of text books to force you buy new ones or you fail as they wrote it and they get $ per sale.
No more dorms that cost way more to live with a roommate then RENTING on you own year round.
Less filler and fluff classes.
No more swim tests that you have to pay for!
No more forced gym classes for all students that cost more for 1 class then getting a 2 year membership at place like LA fitness
more competition to private colleges. Make state and community colleges free and expanded them. Lower cost by having them provide online classes.
states cutting funding is leading to higher costs
German student also has an trades track that is not 2-4+ years pure class room. In the same time frame they get both on the job skills and class room
"...according to investment management company Vanguard [who apparently has never studied the concept of a market 'bubble]..." *corrected.
We turned it into yet another social contract. It's free/cheap to study over here. My whole university career has cost less than 5 grand. Including books and all. Well, I'm paying for it now. A sizable portion of my tax actually goes towards our schools and universities. Not only my tax, anyone's actually.
And that's just fine if you ask me.
What this entails is a lot. First, there is no risk involved in studying. There is no problem if you can't finish for some reason. If you make it, great, you'll earn more money and pay more tax that way. If you don't, well, so be it. No potential college debt looming overhead that you could only dream of repaying if you don't make it. Which in turn means that more students are starting and our universities can (and do) eliminate brutally anyone who isn't among the best. Those degrees actually mean something.
It's also much easier for me now to pay the price of my degree. Yes, a sizable portion of my paycheck goes to education. But I can easily afford it. Now that I have a pretty good job, in part certainly due to my degree. I couldn't even think of paying anything close to that as a student, and if I thought that I would have to pay that, I very likely would not have risked it altogether.
All in all I will most likely have paid about those 500k for my degree by the time I retire. That's ok, though, in a US model I probably would not have had the chance to study at all.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Tuition costs have been rising faster than inflation as State budgets look to shore up unbalanced budgets and slash education funding. This moves the cost of education from the State to the student. In the '80's (ad before) States covered 80% of tuition costs leaving 20% on students. Those ratios have flipped today and students now shoulder 80% of the cost of education increasing the cost to the student. The OVERALL cost to educate a student has decreased due to efficiency, automation and technology. This trend will likely continue as the current conservative thinking is counter any subsidy.
Now, to extrapolate this trend over the next 18 years and say that a 4 year degree will cost 1/2 million fails to understand the process. There is a limit to cost increases. Once the State's contribution to education hits ZERO, costs will only rise slightly, and may stagnate. We're over 80% there already, so costs can't possibly hit that number.
That is a civilization ending number. Economists say that things that can't continue don't. You have the numbers wrong.
"PCE", "Personal consumption expenditures"
I'm sure I can print one up for less than that.
1) When ever talking about numbers you need several points of comparison.
For example, let's say a college education really does end up costing $500,000 in 18 years - but the average salary for a high school teacher is $400,000. It's called inflation, and you need to account for it.
2) The rate fo growth is currently high in part because of the attempt to raise stated prices in order to pay for discounted admissions for more students. The basic idea is to charge the wealthier people as much as the market will bear and still allow poorer people to attend. It will not continue to rise at the same rate,
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Where's all the money going from all the patents collages have? And all the money their sports teams make?
...a civilized society. In a civilized society, healthcare and educate is free, like police and fire department and EMS. And a civilized society would never select a batshit-crazy billionaire orangutan star of "reality" TV as their leader.
there will be a limit to the expansion of the %of GDP. Instead, people will just die without health care. They will live in poverty and misery without education. You're completely (and convienently) ignoring option #2, which is abandoning the poor and working class to abject poverty and misery and a thousand years of dark ages.
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because 538 says you're wrong, and they have sources. College started going up massively in the 90s when Clinton started cutting federal funds and shoot up like crazy when the Bush cuts hit.
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538 says you're wrong.
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When I graduated in 1997, it was still possible to get some sort of non-Starbucks job with a degree in _anything._ A degree in a high demand field got you an even better job, but the compact was there -- if you get into school, study and pay the tuition, you will have steady work you can use to pay for it later. Today, it seems like that's broken for a significant portion of the student population. Entry level jobs are either offshored or automated now, and employers are expecting people to come into jobs 100% trained instead of identifying people with potential and putting in a little finishing work to round off the college education. One example I like to cite a lot is the thousands of "Business" graduates who basically screwed around for 4 years, graduated with 2.x GPAs and still wound up in the belly of some huge corporation doing a middle class job shuffling reports around or being some random "coordinator" or staffing the trade show booth circuit. That still happens -- Accenture and the like depend on a constant stream of 23 year old cannon fodder to shove in front of suckers^Wclients. It just happens way less, and you have to go to an expensive school to get jobs like that.
People just aren't going to pay $500K for a degree that will no longer help them. This figure also doesn't account for the fact that at least some of that price tag will be inflation. The price will adjust to the point where the average person can afford it either through reasonable loans or savings. And many people will still continue to go if that becomes the only way to get any sort of non gig-economy work. I still think college is very good for some people. I know I learned a lot about how to navigate a bureaucracy and get what I needed without complaining incessantly. 18 year old kids also do need an environment to "grow up" in -- you could argue the military would be a good option, but it's not for everyone. People that age need an environment where screw-ups aren't permanent and there's a little bit in the way of support on the way to being an independent adult.
ITT, DeVry and uofp had night school and hands on skills.
They got more and more roped into the 2-4+ year degree system and then HR people where like if you did not go to a real U then you are a loser so they get passed over.
There are skills gaps and profs who have been in the iry tower for to log so people going there can come out clueless.
To some extent yes, but when there has been a 4x increase in cost and the state use to cover about 1/2 of the cost before even accounting for inflation the numbers don't work. For tuition to have gone up as much as it has the school would not have to be paying the state money now. Instead of retyping out that example I will just link to it. The time span was about 17 years and tuition use to be in the $40-$50 per credit range now it is about $180/credit and the state of Minnesota is still subsidizing higher education at the state colleges and universities so it really doesn't add up.
Time to offend someone
As much as I would love to see my sons grow up with a PhD or just a BS in some science, going into a TRADE instead would make me very happy if they don't go that route. (In actuality, I could care less WHAT they do as long as it's legal and they are happy!) AC repair, plumbers, electricians, Robot repair (yea...that's going to be big). These are examples of jobs you might be able to do without a 4 year degree costing that kinda $$$$ but instead can get into going into a trade. Had I known what I knew now back when I was in HS (80's) I would of supplemented my career in IT with that of a good skilled blue collar skill. If it's mechanical in any way it's going to break. Somebody has to fix it.
If this were the primary cause, we should see tuition decrease when state funding increases. Many states saw a boom of funding in the 1990s and tuition shot up just as bad then as now.
and some schools make you retake classes so you pay them more.
They do a sales-job on the poorly informed. It's hard to get accurate info on how graduates of a given school actually do because the school spends a lot to taint that. Whenever the consumer can't get good information about the product, scams and snow-jobs take over. The Federal Gov't has been trying to clean that up by enforcing accurate placement info in ads, but it hasn't been easy.
One way to manipulate customers is to start out with a quality school, build up a good reputation, and then slack off to improve profits but screw the new-coming students. They milk their prior reputation. Eventually their reputation sinks, they file bankruptcy, and the same investors reshuffle themselves into a different company and start again somewhere else using their experience in education slimebaggery. (The original investors sell off most the ownership later in the cycle so that the bankruptcy doesn't hit them hard.)
Further, because of the scams and slime, many instead opt for established "big name" universities knowing that at least they have a degree with a big name on it. But this drives up the prices on the big-names. You can't manufacture history.
If we "just let the market correct itself", many millions could be screwed out of many trillions, perhaps even creating a nasty bubble. Capitalism does poorly when consumers can't or don't get good and timely info about the product. Thus, I don't trust a pure-market solution. The solution is probably a combination of market forces and oversight to ensure schools are building better mouse-traps instead of building better customer-traps.
Table-ized A.I.
Private schools are already $30-50k per year. A doctorate, which to get a job in 20 years, already costs students about $240-400 a year in the U.S. If there's no scholarships or grants. State schools are much cheaper. Those may take 20 years to catch up, but maybe not.
ditch diggers and not college material needs to come back.
As we have really made it so that in HS you are viewed as a loser if you are thinning about trades and the HR people have really made the tech schools look bad as well.
Cost: What the university must pay to provide an education service to the students.
Price: What the students are charged for the service.
It is certainly not "cost" increases that have driven the ridiculous rate of "price" increases. Professors aren't getting rich. Costs for building & maintaining classroom space haven't skyrocketed. Nor has anything else that's critical to providing education.
Colleges & Universities, even the supposedly "non profit" institutions are providing a service for a price. Like any other business, they crank up the price as high as they can without losing customers. The availability of "guaranteed" student loans is the only reason that these ridiculous price increases have not caused a sharp decline in enrollment. The schools keep charging more because they know that the students have access to tens of thousands of dollars in debt and can thus pay the price.
Time to get the federal government out of higher education completely. Get rid of this guaranteed access to credit and eliminate loans that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Tuition prices would have to come way down because the overwhelming majority of people could not afford the price.
You will a POST PDH to get an basic office job for 45K-55K a year with about half of that going to pay off your loan.
and Statistics. What a stupid report.
nobody gives a rat's behind about ITT tech & the "University" of Phoenix. You're using them as a Straw Man to ignore skyrocketing costs at PUBLIC schools.
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Whenever I see one of "If these trends continue"- style prediction, I think of Disco Stu saying it.
(Disco Stu is doing a sales ptich to Homer)
Disco Stu: Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue.... A-y-y-y!
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
With college grads paying a half a million for education, we've just got to raise the minimum wage so that they can pay their loans back after they graduate.
If student loans (government types) were to be capped, then parents/students/private-sources would have to cover the remaining cost of colleges themselves.
As a result of the line directly above this, many students will not be able to afford to go to the more expensive colleges.
As a result of the line directly above this, the more expensive college enrollments will decrease.
As a result of the line directly above this, the more expensive colleges will be forced to lower their prices.
As a result of the line directly above this, colleges will be come affordable.
Wow - decreased government involvement causes college costs to decrease! Please mail me my Nobel Prize.
...in 50 years a a ham sandwich will cost $ 37,000.
The first thing to do is to find out where the money is going, and publicize the numbers. One thing we should know is how much money colleges spend on things that don't have anything to do with education. For example, apparently at the University of Arizona,
Jesus Trevino, the university’s Vice Provost for Inclusive Excellence, is paid $214,000 per year to develop diversity and inclusion themed programming for the community and instructional material for the faculty.
See James P. Hogan: Two Faces of Tomorrow scifi novel: https://books.google.com/books...
Otherwise, I agree with your insightful comment. Good luck to you and your family!
About 50 other ideas I collected together: http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It is only the US that forces student loans that can't be dumped in any way.
There's a simple reason it can't be dumped except for things like getting crippled very badly. There's nothing to repossess. I mean in theory you could take the person's degree away from them but they'd still come out with whatever they learned and whatever network connections they made in college. On the other hand if you don't pay for your car loan the bank takes away the car and sells it to somebody else. The deal is if you could just get out of it like that no bank would make student loans. (Since people would and have declare bankruptcy to avoid paying for things like med school.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Already happened, years ago.
Griggs v Duke Power Co, 401 US 424 (1971), was a court case argued before the Supreme Court of the United States on December 14, 1970. It concerned employment discrimination and the adverse impact theory, and was decided on March 8, 1971. It is generally considered the first case of its type.
Basically, a black man was unable to apply for a job because he did not have a HS diploma, and the diploma was not a "bona fide occupational qualification" (BFOQ in the discrimination literature), and since black men did not have equal opportunity to earn such diplomas, the diploma requirement had a "disparate impact" on a protected class.
"On the record before us, neither the high school completion requirement nor the general intelligence test is shown to bear a demonstrable relationship to successful performance of the jobs for which it was used. Both were adopted, as the Court of Appeals noted, without meaningful study of their relationship to job performance ability. Rather, a vice-president of the Company testified, the requirements were instituted on the Company's judgment that they generally would improve the overall quality of the workforce"
Similar cases over the years have come up - a college degree requirement for a legal receptionist, for instance, the caption of which eludes me now.
There is only one REAL solution. ...
Treat education as a basic human right, offer it or make it accessible to everyone for FREE or at least affordable for EVERYONE, like the rest of the ENTIRE f*ing developed world.... Same with healthcare BTW
I am still amazed how Americans seem to think their system is the best, if not the only way... You do realize that in most other countries, we have universal education and healthcare for everyone and we are still rather well of?
Maybe we have a less billionaires, but we also have exponentially fewer people in poverty...
In the US the problem is that all education is subsidized and in higher ed it is very easy for them to fill a seat with a non-citizen so there is really no impetus for education to reduce costs. Oddly the closest competition for them seems to be online learning but unless it is remote learning in a degree program online courses seem to lack the cachet of a degree.
I forget the Doc I watched, but it was all about the for profit university scams in the US. Basically the next big housing crisis. There is a whole industry of "education" gaming the student loan system in the US for fun and profit. It is so overt one has to wonder why nothing has been done, then you consider how many Billions (indeed Trillions) are at stake to understand how in the broken US political system the status quo is just fine. The loans are guaranteed by government, and are not even disposed of through bankruptcy. It is a ticket to generate free money off the backs of the poor and uneducated (literally). Heck even the ads for these school are borderline profiling to the point they are hard to watch. It is just another debt for profit scheme where a wealthy few destroy the lives of many. The reason the cost keeps going up is the whole whatever the market will take, which being artificially inflated just keeps going up.
Eventually the bottom will fall out of it all, it is just a matter of when, and what the impacts will be. Sooner or later folks with fake degrees and no job will just default on loans (regardless of them not going away or not). Folks won't be able to afford the costs even with loans. Folks will figure out that getting that piece of paper doesn't necessarily translate into any type of good employment. Once all that kicks in, some serious economic stuff is going to happen nationally. About the only thing slowing it down is the fact that the loans don't go away, so continued payment even a bit, keeps it rolling along. However as the saying goes you can't get blood from a stone.
Maybe, but only because politicians pushing inflation has reduced the value of the money, so that a hamburger costs $500.00 ! ;-)