Slashdot Mirror
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.
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)
Get a degree in Robotics & Automation and in 25 years you'll be the only person with a job :D
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
For that price, Each student could literally have a professor simply teach them at home full time and get a better education.
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
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.
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.
And in the US, many people would be better off steered toward the trades. A journeyman plumber or electrician will be making good money during what would have been the college years and will continue to make even better money afterward.
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.
Just get rid of student loans. Scholarships and so on are fine - they work in numerous countries that don't have such expensive education costs since they tend to limited in scope and not unbounded.
Student loans on the other hand, seem to be designed to increase the price of education. Remember US banks were just fine with loaning out millions of dollars to people with no income and no job to buy overprices houses, what do you think they are going to do when the government makes loans they make to students almost impossible to discharge. And the banks know the government will bail them out just like every other time if the shit really hits the fan.
Of course colleges are going to be jacking up prices. As long as the banks keep loaning enough to the students to pay them. Why would they leave that money on the table - the student is the one who gets screwed not the college after all.
Perhaps because working in "the trades" isn't perceived as a problem in Germany and in fact is seen as a very good way to earn a living?
This is what subsidized guaranteed loans get you! It does not get you "access for all" it gets you steadily rising costs divorced from the rest of the market and inflation until even the state can't afford to "make college affordable." We are seeing the same crap going on in health care.
The simple fact there is high percentage of people who if at 18 years of age with no assets are allowed to borrow 1/2 a million even at 2 or 3 percent APR, will never be able to return the principle let alone settle the debt. This uncontrolled cost structure will simply bankrupt our state and federal student loan programs.
Quite honestly if someone at 18 could borrow a 1/2 million I would probably be better advice to lever in on capital investing in the form of stock portfolio than for education.
The ONLY answer is to eliminate loan subsidies and force colleges to deliver an suitable education product at a price people can afford.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
So in Germany the deciding factor whether you have a college education is your brain.
In the US your (or rather, your parents') wallet.
I can't help it, the German model still sounds more sensible and viable.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the US your (or rather, your parents') wallet.
No, the real problem is that the government backs student loans in the US and has essentially no criteria for denying anyone a loan. You're a D student and want a $50,000 loan to study Underwater Basket Weaving? No problem! And the university will absolutely let you in because you're bringing that $50,000 check.
And since you're not really equipped to tell the difference between a quality education and a mediocre education, and it's all pretty well fine anyway (an undergraduate education is pretty much the same reasonable quality at any given state university), you're making your decision about where to go based on the amenities. When I went to college 20 years ago the dorms were little better than minimum security prison cells and the parking authority was run out of a double wide trailer. Today at my alma mater there's a shiny new glass and steel building for the parking administration and the dorms look like condos and there are two "wellness centers" whatever the fuck those are, and the rec facilities are top notch, etc. They've turned the schools into luxury education resorts.
The education isn't any different, but it costs 4 times as much. The only way to end the cycle is for the government to stop giving students so much "free" money, but that will never happen because the University Industrial Complex will nuke any politician who tries as being "against education," and since I'm sure "low income and minority students will be hit hardest" they'll call you racist to boot.
I think the way the education bubble will actually pop is this. "Everybody knows" a diploma is next to meaningless because if you show up with enough money and stick around long enough you get one, and it doesn't mean you actually know the subject. Young people are especially aware of this, and that you can educate yourself just about as well on the internet these days. Someone from the generation that understands this is going to finally get a hiring position at a major company and is going to say "no, we don't want people with college degrees. I want someone who's educated themselves because they knew the college system was a scam. We're going to implement a system to find and hire these self-starters because they will be better employees." This will become all the rage and while that won't do anything about some professions where you MUST have the sheepskin (medicine, law) it will absolutely lay waste to the diploma mills.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Bingo. The education establishment alongside the Department of Education in this country since at least the 80's has pushed college as the be all panacea with those unable to make it into college as some sort of fuck up. Trade schools have been consistently sneered at.
I went to a large private university, and know for a FACT (I worked for one of the deans as a student assistant & screened his email for him) that they intentionally admitted students whom they knew were dumb as rocks, but had wealthy parents. Why? They were profitable. They paid full tuition, never went to class (making class sizes appear smaller for all but the first week and final exam), and added very little to the workload of professors (because they never did their assignments).
In the real world, there are basically three scenarios in American Universities:
1. University admits dumb students with wealthy parents: smart kids get small classes with real professors.
2. University only admits smart students: smart students pay a lot more, and classes are either small and taught by grad students, or large and taught by real professors.
3. University only admits smart students while holding down tuition (ie, state schools): classes with 200-300 students taught by grad students showing pre-recorded video lectures.