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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.
...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.
$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.
Bingo. These are the kind of things where people are incredibly short sighted.
"Omg, college is too expensive. We must help EVERYONE afford it!!".
Except that like anything else, if you give 100% of the population X amount of money for a specific resource, the price of that resource now goes up by X.
Then afterward we get the "omg, people are in do much debt, we should bail them out!". It's like, you caused this.
I refuse to think politicians did not know it would go that way. This was just a result of the US political system. Since "free college" was not going to swing (because lol US), they just did "college via loans", followed by "think of our indebted graduates!", which is essentially the same thing, but more underhanded (and expensive).
I think you misunderstand education.
Putting a bunch of people in VR-space with all the resources in the world generally teaches them nothing. Otherwise we wouldn't need universities, you'd just rent the books from the library and then pay the exam boards to sit your degree.
Aside from the lectures, which are just by-rote education that could be replaced, you have to assess, understand, inspire, assist and generally be useful to the students. That's why the biggest expensive of education is generally staffing. Those Dr's, PhD's, Professors, etc. don't come cheap, and their time in teaching is limited (you buy them off by making them teach in exchange for being provided facilities and funding for their research).
Given that, it's a human-hungry industry, resources are secondary. Almost all universities today publish their entire courses online, with all the materials and all the coursework. They were doing it when I did a degree almost 20 years ago (back then it was all on the FTP server, which everyone had a login to and quite a lot was available publicly).
And you can't just assign twice as many students to the same staff, you would need to hire more staff, who all need to be educated too.
If you think that any part of education is about providing reading material and then letting kids and/or adults just get on with it, you severely misunderstand how the world works.
In fact, if anything, all those dorms, teams and frats are the anti-thesis of education and likely the first thing to go. No other country does the last two with any seriousness, for instance. You don't get to Oxford just because you're a decent rower.
If anything, education's future is firmly in being available offline. Sure, you can do online degrees, but they are held in contempt for the most part. The online parts are secondary to the whole purpose and who's going to pay more than the bare minimum for them to reprint last year's PDF just to sit an online degree that's worthless?
You can modernise it - providing video streams to an lecturer or assistant for one-to-one sessions, but you don't need less people, actually you need more to do that.
"These are the sorts of subjects that allow the students to, in the future, provide real value to society."
I started as a philosophy major. I believe that major would bring real value to society. However, it wouldn't bring real value to *ME* which became an issue when I started to consider marriage and a family one day. I therefore switched my major to mathematics and moved in to a CS degree by the time I finished.
Guess what? I continued studying philosophy and moved to history on my own. I actually managed to acquire a narrow expertise in 18th century North America which has brought me some work as well. Personally rewarding but not financially rewarding. It also didn't cost me anything I couldn't afford to pay for my self.
Fun fact: You can get out of college debt free or with very limited debt by WORKING while you go to college, get your undergrad done at community college and spread your 4-year degree over about 8 years. You then get to start your life maybe 4 years later but without a decade or two of crushing debt.
The US already de-facto has this, the better you do in K-12, the better the options presented to you for post-secondary school choices. Class rank and standardized-test scores are weighed.
Not necessarily. I was misdiagnosed as being mentally retarded and spent eight years in special ed classes. I graduated the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension and fifth grade skills in everything else. I never went to high school. After two years in the construction trades, I enrolled in the community college as an adult and took four years to get my A.A. degree in General Education. Although I transferred to the university, I got kicked out the following year because I was tired of school and played too much Magic: The Gathering card game.
A decade later I went back to community college to learn computer programming, taking two classes per semester and working 80 hours a week as a video game tester. Five years later I got my A.S. degree and made the president's list for maintaining a 4.0 GPA in my major.
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.
I have a cousin who went to one of those schools (Brandeis) a few years back for his degree in economics. His parents (a teacher and a physical therapist) didn't pay a dime. I didn't know about theses schools' policies towards qualified but middle class people until I asked his parents how they could afford it as ~$50k per year is a huge chunk of their post tax income. This cousin is 18 years younger than I am so I was curious because I have young kids and wanted to know what school cost so I knew how screwed I was going to be. That said it looks like the 4 options for getting a college education are:
1. Be rich so money doesn't matter
2. Join the US military and potentially get shot at
3. Get accepted to an elite school and be subsidized by #1
4. Milk community colleges and high school post secondary programs for as much as you can and work your ass off to pay for a state school
5. Go into hock for the rest of your life
For #2 there are some really good ways to manipulate that system that I have found out from some of my military (current and former) friends and their hate of the young double butters. For the biggest benefit become an Eagle Scout first (gets you promoted higher right out of basic ahead of the others who joined with you), join the guard/reserves at age 17, then get into college and go ROTC. When you start ROTC you will likely get promoted again in the reserves/guard at this point as well putting you ahead of your peers. You then get your commission at age 22 but you already have ~5 years of military experience but with all that other stuff you won't be an O1 so would be an O2 (first lieutenant) or more likely an O3 (captain). You then have to put in I believe 6 years as an officer if a commission is available, because you already have 5 years experience you will move way a head in the line. By the time you finish you commission you will now have about 11 years into the military so why not go the extra 9 and get a full officer's pension at age 37. Also the military will pay for college while you are in so you can continue to work on more advanced degrees for free. Toss in the tuition and stipend that you are paid for school as well as your military pay for that time and it is a pretty good deal if you don't have to go get shot at the first few years.
Time to offend someone