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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.
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)
There's a problem with that. Education begets better employment, and better employment is going to be necessary when the kinds of employment that served the United States from the 1950s through the 1980s becomes less and less an option as those kinds of jobs are simply priced-out and sent to other countries.
Unfortunately the only way to make this happen is to spend money somewhere in education. Right now we're seeing ballooning post-secondary tuition because far more people want to become students than there are places for them in classrooms. This desire for education has fuelled those for-profit "colleges" that have been so problematic like ITT and University of Phoenix, and states, where the burden for state-run colleges and universities is supposed to fall, have not committed the kind of money needed to establish enough state schools or to keep the tuition down to affordable levels. Many states are arguably in violation of their own constitutions as some require the state to provide affordable education so that even the poor can go to school. Many states are even railing against paying enough for K-12 education, and then wondering why their law enforcement budgets are constantly needing fresh cash.
If you want to fix the high costs of education, you've got to increase the supply.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How do you solve it on the demand side when the demand for college is based on an ever-decreasing number of reasonable wage jobs that don't require a college education?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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 ironic thing is that this is just a US problem. The German student has his education paid for by the Fatherland. The Chinese student, similar. It is only the US that forces student loans that can't be dumped in any way.
If the US were a farm, it would be out of business in a year... even the dumbest person in agriculture that if you want a crop harvest in the fall, you have to plant seeds in the spring.
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.
The German student needs to perform well academically to get their free ride college education. Those that do not do well at book learning or are just general fuckups are forcibly steered to the trades.
I'm ALL for standardized testing in America where it has true consequences for the student. But oddly enough, people like you who point out free education in Germany never mention that part...
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.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
"Better options". A university is a university; tuition rates have no correlation with quality.
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.
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.
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 number of students is not driving costs.
Just go to any university during the week during the day and witness all the empty class rooms. At my son's campus, the school is pretty much deserted after 3PM.
What's needed is a top to bottom audit of universities by an independent auditor. Odds are you will turn up all manner of activities and practices that would get people fired in the real world.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
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.
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.
The German student needs to perform well academically to get their free ride college education. Those that do not do well at book learning or are just general fuckups are forcibly steered to the trades.
And this is wrong how?
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?
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.
The German student needs to perform well academically to get their free ride college education.
What is your definition of "performing well academically"? Because unless I misunderstood the German tertiary education sector, if your statement is applicable at all, you need to set a very low bar for "performing well", basically to the extent of insufficient performance being equivalent to studying substantially longer than usual. I think it's more than one extra year of studies or something like that.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
At my son's campus, the school is pretty much deserted after 3PM.
That's fairly typically for most schools. If night classes are taught, classes are between 6PM and 10PM. The time between 3PM and 5PM is when most teachers and administrators are having meetings.
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.
Quite the opposite, if ANYONE can get in and your budget is not dependent on parents' willingness to continue paying you, what comes out of your uni is usually a lot better in quality. Because you have zero incentive to keep the duds in the game just 'cause their parents are pumping money into your diploma mill. On the other hand, you have all the incentive to get rid of as man of the (many, many) idiots as possible so you can spend your resources on the students that are actually worth it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I went back to school to learn computer programming on a $3,000 tax credit that George W. signed into law after 9/11. The cost of my A.S. degree was entirely FREE. I went from working 80 hours as a video game tester to making more money working 40 hours in IT support. Now I pay more in taxes than I ever did before.
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.
Germany tried education partially paid by the students and that student loan crap between 2000 and 2010 or so thanks to the overabundance of free market fundamentalists in the government. The result was a miserable failure and now they (the tutution fees and some of the free market fundamentalists) are gone. Good riddance.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
That's fairly typically for most schools. If night classes are taught, classes are between 6PM and 10PM. The time between 3PM and 5PM is when most teachers and administrators are having meetings.
Isn't that exactly the type of wasteful behavior which attributes to higher costs? If for instance classrooms were at 50% utilization for two hours between 8-5, just because everyone is doing meetings at the same time, you could reduce the number of classrooms by 10% if you simply spread meetings throughout the day.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Education begets better employment
Maybe in some cases, but you said that as an absolute, in which case it is a false statement of sentimentality.
True education adds value to life, not just employment. Not all education is suited for employment.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Still, it's WAY different than in the US. Over here in Europe, nobody is holding your hand. Find your courses, find out where you're supposed to be when or as much as anyone there cares, get run over by a bus.
If there's one thing you learn at uni over here it's organization. Either you know how to get shit done when you have a degree over here, or you know how to make others do your work. So you're perfect for tech or management positions. :)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
from all the stories i've heard of Europe there are a few national universities and one or two city universities in each city. doing well academically means you ace the junior or senior year exams that make the SAT look like a play date
my guess is something like the top 20% of the students go on to college and the rest you GTFO school, learn a trade and do whatever you can and unlike the USA you're forever locked out of the jobs that will require a degree from a good school.
in the USA you can go to an average city college, get straight A's, study your a$$ off for some graduate school entrance exam and get into a top law or medical school. or graduate from an average school and work your a$$ off at work and work into a high paying job that may usually need a degree from a top school
most CEO's in the USA today didn't go to the top schools for their bachelor's degrees but worked their way up
20 years ago, I went to a school that was ridiculously expensive for it's time ($25k a year- I had scholarships or I wouldn't have gone), I witnessed all kinds of waste. They did publish where they spent money though so it was obvious where there was waste, I bet they don't now. They keep asking for money donations, but I remember how they wasted it when I was there- no chance in hell I'm giving them more money now.
A simple 3ft brick sign that cost $50,000 (this in a school of only 2000 students- so that was $25 per student for a sign). Sports lost $10million a year. (we weren't a big state school that had leagues of zombies descend on our every game- but we spent big on sports- and no one who attended the school cared or watched. $5000 a year per student lost on sports. That's 20% of our tuition went straight to paying for a bunch of fat kids in helmets and padding to grab each other's bum 13 games a year. (OK, they had other sports besides the American Football, but I'm sure they got the lion's share).
Then we would have speakers like Pat Conroy (multiple a year) come speak to the school (at $20,000 each for a speaking gig). Sure, it was interesting, but worth the money when you would only have a couple hundred students show up to any given event? The school spent $100 for each kid that bothered to show up to each of those events.
When it comes down to it- from that $25k a year probably only half actually got spent on learning. I'm not sure what they waste the money on these days now that everything has skyrocketed in cost. I imagine Presidential manors are a lot more glitzy. There are probably more $50,000 brick signs up too.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
no, just like for a lot of kids in the USA now it's having parents with enough money to get you tutoring and make you do well in school
You know, that's actually not a bad idea!
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm ALL for standardized testing in America where it has true consequences for the student.
I am against standardized testing of student. But not for the reasons you might think.
1) Standardized testing isn't about students, it is about educators. ... big time
2) Standardized testing is a holdover to standardized education (Industrial). We are no longer in industrial society, and our ancient educational processes need updating
3) Standardized testing fails because it doesn't affect grades, so by the time kids reach Jr High, they stop caring and don't even bother trying
In short, Standardized testing looks good on paper, but fails in real life. Or, as my dad used to say ...
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
... 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.
Isn't that exactly the type of wasteful behavior which attributes to higher costs?
When do you expect the janitors to clean up the classrooms? From the campuses I've been on, 3PM to 5PM is when the janitors are cleaning up the classrooms.
[...] you could reduce the number of classrooms by 10% [...]
Classrooms or classes? I don't expect many administrators are eager to take a bulldozer to reduce classrooms. Classes are dependent on enrollments and each class requires a minimum of 20 students to qualify for state funding in California. When healthcare became the new money major after the dot com bust, I couldn't take some programming courses because I was the only one who showed up. The last three classes I needed for graduation were taken as independent studies classes (i.e., self-taught at home).
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
states cutting funding is leading to higher costs
If you want the free experience that you get in Germany then go to your local community college. Most offer degrees of multiple levels and are free or nearly free.
Also there are plenty of other methods to pay for the non-community college experience be ISAs, agreeing to work at some location for a period of time or public service. People enter into those loans because they of the financial benefits they gain from them.
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.
from all the stories i've heard of Europe there are a few national universities and one or two city universities in each city. doing well academically means you ace the junior or senior year exams that make the SAT look like a play date
If this is your definition of "doing well academically", then it doesn't apply for tuition-free studies in Germany. Or rather, it's obviously a sufficient but not a necessary requirement.
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Correct! Why do we think everyone has to have a college degree? Have higher entrance requirements, there will be fewer students, so government subsidies are more effective.
Of course, in the USA, they think that the Free Market will solve all problems - just privatize all education, and surely schools will compete for even the dumbest students, right? The students just have to find the cheapest one.
It is a bit complicated. After passing the 12th grade (that is only available at the most advanced types of schools) one can study at an university of applied science. Then there is a certain final exam (das Abitur). Used to be available only after passing the 13th grade and a lot of qualifications during the 11th-13th grade, but a few years ago the secondary school was capped ad the 12th grade. This final exam is the entrance exam to a German university (there is a lesser form of it that requires only one foreign language but it only allowes studying a limited set of fields and only at certain universities). Then at the university there can be entrance limits, so only these with a very good score at that exam will be able to enroll, others would be put on a waiting list for several years.
That exam is no joke and even though I have passed, I still occasionally have nightmares about it - almost 20 years later.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
" Education begets better employment,"
No. All it does is increase the minimum requirements for the same employment.
Just get rid of student loans.
This would do the exact opposite of improving access to higher education, which is the primary reason these higher costs are a problem in the first place.
The rising cost of education is little different than the rising cost of health care, and one problem they both share is a lack of transparent information. The federal government has the ability to track the ROI for every college degree from every university. They could give a salary histogram for each university for each major. They could allow prospective students to see how A student do in the workplace vs C students. They could see how students from a $200k+ household perform vs students from a poorer household. Armed with a true ROI, students could actually price shop for colleges.
Potentially more importantly, banks armed with this information could set interests rates more appropriately. Interest rates for engineering majors would likely be different than for philosophy majors. The government could subsidize certain majors if they felt it was in the public's best interests, but once again it would be transparent.
The idea that the market can be efficient without a decent level of public information is just silly.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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,
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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.
There's a problem with that. Education begets better employment
That's always true. It's true sometimes. It's true when the education is needed to fill a void in the current workforce. This is constantly changing.
When Education is sought for something that doesn't get better employment it could possibly hurt the person if they can't afford it. And if this is done in high enough numbers then it could hurt the entire society. In 2013 only 27% of US graduates had job related to their major. That seems like it could be a lot of wasted money, doesn't it?
If there are 3.7M students that graduate every year and the average college cost is $15k/yr (based on public college costs, private is more than double). That's $55.5B/yr. Think of all that student debt that is created that bogs down the economy. Students are essentially graduating with a home mortgage. If they don't get a decent job soon after graduating they can be financially devastated.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Where's all the money going from all the patents collages have? And all the money their sports teams make?
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.
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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Having uniformly high academic standards across all institutions is probably illegal in the US under disparate impact jurisprudence.
And yet numerous countries don't use private bank loans to fund tuition and somehow have just as good access to higher education.
And the topic is lowering costs, right? Not improving access?
While that data would be great to have it won't actually do anything. People already take out loans to do college degrees that are obviously not worth it in terms of ROI (they may well be worth it by other metrics of course). Since the loans are almost impossible to discharge banks are still going to make those loans for degrees that won't have a positive ROI for the student - they still get their paid after all and get a bailout if somehow they don't.
The idea that the market can be efficient when risk is artificially removed or reduced is just silly.
When do you expect the janitors to clean up the classrooms? From the campuses I've been on, 3PM to 5PM is when the janitors are cleaning up the classrooms.
Time for janitors to clean was not part of the original argument, so it wasn't part of my comment. Having every classroom empty for cleaning for one hour between 7am-9pm would not be very difficult or wasteful.
Classrooms or classes? I don't expect many administrators are eager to take a bulldozer to reduce classrooms.
Of course they aren't eager to reduce classrooms, and without any price controls they don't have to do anything uncomfortable now. That is what needs to change. Classrooms may not be demolished, but construction of new classrooms could be reduced.
Classes are dependent on enrollments and each class requires a minimum of 20 students to qualify for state funding in California. When healthcare became the new money major after the dot com bust, I couldn't take some programming courses because I was the only one who showed up. The last three classes I needed for graduation were taken as independent studies classes
When this happens there are too many colleges with too many majors. Another sign of waste which could be addressed. There will be exceptional circumstances from time to time, such as suddenly reduced enrollment in majors during an upheaval in that industry, but improvements can still be made.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
If you want the free experience that you get in Germany then go to your local community college.
While that use to be the case it no longer is. Over the past year and a half I took 3 courses at one of the local technical colleges that is part of the MNSCU system. The system has 2 tuition tiers, the 4 year university plus advanced degrees schools tier, and the community and technical college tier. The community/technical college tier is substantially cheaper (about half) per credit than the university tier but it is by no means cheap like it use to be. For example 17 years ago I paid just under $100/credit at a state university in that system. Last fall I paid about $180 per credit at a technical school in that same system. While that may not seem like much of a difference it actually is consider that 17 years ago I would have paid $40-$50 per credit at that same technical school. So over the last 17 years tuition has risen by close to 4x the cost but even in inflation adjusted dollars it would still be around 3x the cost. To make matters worse most of the people who would benefit from the additional education have only seen a ~40% wage increase ($5 something an hour to now $7 something an hour) and that doesn't take into account inflation. The American higher education system is broken when it comes to costs.
Time to offend someone
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.
At that price it would likely be more than the professor would be making at a university as well. Typically when I was in college you typically spent 16 hours in class/lab a week for 8 months of the year. Here one would expect 40 hours of education a week for 12 months of the year (well maybe 11) so it seems like it would be substantially more beneficial.
Time to offend someone
When this happens there are too many colleges with too many majors.
Then closed all the law schools, as this country has a glut of attorneys who can't find jobs.
If you do that, you will automatically be branded a racist for daring such heritical talk.
Doing anything in the US these days, based solely on merit of ones abilities, especially with regards to upper education...is racist and/or sexist in nature.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
and some schools make you retake classes so you pay them more.
That's always true.
I didn't type that correctly. I meant to say "That's not always true."
Ugh. Need an edit function...
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
"This would do the exact opposite of improving access to higher education, which is the primary reason these higher costs are a problem in the first place."
So you're saying that universities would rather go bankrupt than reduce prices to a level people can afford without loans?
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.
And the topic is lowering costs, right? Not improving access?
You lower costs to improve access. They are a linked problem. If rising costs weren't limiting access to college, it wouldn't be much of an emergency.
And yet numerous countries don't use private bank loans to fund tuition and somehow have just as good access to higher education.
Only if they have more publicly funded education. I agree that if college was as subsidized as the rest of the industrialized world then student loans would not be necessary.
While that data would be great to have it won't actually do anything. People already take out loans to do college degrees that are obviously not worth it in terms of ROI (they may well be worth it by other metrics of course). Since the loans are almost impossible to discharge banks are still going to make those loans for degrees that won't have a positive ROI for the student - they still get their paid after all and get a bailout if somehow they don't.
Insinuating there is no incentive to pick a good major because your loans may be eventually discharged is disingenuous. In most cases you need to be having financial hardship for decades to discharge your loans. That certainly isn't a great situation to be in.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
So you're saying that universities would rather go bankrupt than reduce prices to a level people can afford without loans?
It isn't like they would have a choice. The number of universities we have now was first dependent on large government subsidies, and as they slowly deteriorated the schools became dependent on government backed loans. Without either of these there wouldn't be enough students who could afford a Bachelor's level of education. You may see more community college and trade school level schools prop up, but I could easily see at least half of all universities failing with the overall level of education lowering.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
but in America the special snowflakes can't possibly be judged academically
Because systemic "Racism", "Sexism", "Genderism", "Homophobia", "Transphobia" ... basically anyone that is not a white male has "societal discrimination" in their favor, so we must accommodate.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
It's certainly true that the bottom-of-the-ladder universities would probably go bust. But the others would find ways to cut costs so more people could afford degrees. Because otherwise, they'd be joining them.
Sure, for "good" schools. There are a number of schools in the US you can get into where the only requirement is that you can find a way to get the money. They'll pay lip service to very basic "qualifications" like HS diploma or GED, but in reality they are not competitive.
> Insinuating there is no incentive to pick a good major because your loans may be eventually discharged is disingenuous. In most cases you need to be having financial hardship for decades to discharge your loans. That certainly isn't a great situation to be in.
I didn't insinuate that. In fact, I said the exact opposite of that.
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.
other 40 year old are already planning retirement.
I'm 47 and still have 30 years before I retire.
you are too old to be a video game tester.
The last time I worked as a video game tester was in 2004. I'm currently a senior system administrator doing InfoSec for government IT.
Because with jobs requiring more skill, and the cost of education rises to match said time to teach skills, the cost will continue to rise.
What are these jobs that require more skill? Tech sector jobs, sure, but the bulk of jobs are not in tech. The reason you need a degree to get hired for a call center job is not because call center work has gotten so complex these days.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
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.
Your comments about what dorm rooms were like when we were in college really shows a lot of parallel with the healthcare cost issue.
I really feel that hospitals have become a race to the top. There isn't any option round me where you can stay in anything other than a private room. Some places might not have a mountain view, but even those are hard to find.
Education is generally paid by parents or your future self and healthcare is usually paid by insurance. In either sense you aren't really paying for it in a way that you can make a rational decision about.
I feel like the government could deflate the bubble if they wanted to. Simply keeping limits on the amount of money you can borrow at a federal level and making private loans discharge during bankruptcy and they could probably reverse the growth in tuition rates.
But oddly enough, people like you who point out free education in Germany never mention that part...
Because it's completely irrelevant. The dumbest of the dumb shits still get their education paid for up to the level of their understanding. This idea that everyone should go to college is the second most absurd thing in the world behind the idea that only the rich should go to college.
I feel like the government could deflate the bubble if they wanted to. Simply keeping limits on the amount of money you can borrow at a federal level and making private loans discharge during bankruptcy and they could probably reverse the growth in tuition rates.
I agree, they could do it, because it's really just a problem with policy and perverse incentives. But the instant a politican proposed changing these rules the media would start hunting around for poor brown people to shove in front of a camera. "If these evil new anti-education rules go into effect then poor Jaquarius here will be shoved out of school and onto the streets to be raped and murdered by klansmen or whatever." You're talking about trillions of dollars worth of debt slaves here. Nobody's going to just let that go.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
The only way to end the cycle is for the government to stop giving students so much "free" money
I think gifted students should get however much "free" money they need. We should means test the money. College shouldn't be for people who can pay but people who can think.
I recently had a discussion with a contractor doing some work in our offices. I basically had to escort the guy all day. He was lamenting how difficult it is to get apprentices. He says he tries to make people understand that once you make journeyman you can make a decent living as an electrician and once you make master you can earn six figures. You learn a lucrative trade without incurring one cent in educational debt and they pay you from day one. According to him, they typically have something like half the number of apprentices they'd like to have. Which is causing the average age of their employees to get older and older. At his shop, he says most of the staff is 50+ now. Assuming the reality is anything like what he is describing it seems to me that there is a real need for better vocational training. It also occurs to me that the guys who are apprentices today are going to make a fortune when all these older guys retire and there are half as many skilled electricians around.
We should means test the money. College shouldn't be for people who can pay but people who can think.
Then you're going to wind up with far less money for blacks and hispanics than whites, asians and Jews. The media will never mention the asians and Jews, but if you try to implement your plan get ready to be called literally double mega Hitler.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
and Statistics. What a stupid report.
I know, but in many ways it's so much *more* fixable than housing bubbles or healthcare costs. This could be righted relatively easily and even in a true free market model. Just letting student loans be discharged in bankruptcy would be popular with the general public and would set enough market forces in motion to drive down the cost of tuition.
As a european living here it's astounding to me how badly people are failed by the government while at the same time having some weird irrational fear of what a "government of the people" is able to do.
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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It might be worth considering getting a degree from a European University, maybe spend 3 years there and then come back and enroll for a masters back home.
Nullius in verba
This man is doing good work - http://profoundlydisconnected....
Instead of finanzing Mord military the US could actually make colleges and universities tuiton free and support students directly so they can pay for rent and food. Yeah I know a crazy idea. It would make all this stipeniums meaningless and poor/black/other minorities could study, but that would be socialism and does not work. Never. Expect in Europe but hey they suck big time. They do not even pay the US /sarcasm
A doctorate, which to get a job in 20 years, already costs students about $240-400 a year in the U.S.
Golly, Miss Molly! You mean I can get a doctorate for the same price as an IT certification?!
If you intervene educationally at a Pre-K level and during K-12, you do a lot to equalize the playing-field across lines that historically have seen a lot of variation across different groups.
Trouble is, it's expensive to start early Pre-K at three where the kids are actually subject to a real curriculum, and it's expensive to run after-school programs for those kids in all-day school once they hit kindergarten or first grade. Unfortunately it's also expensive to not educate children in these age groups, as reflected by our jail and prison populations.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
How long does it take to go from apprentice to journeyman though?
One big problem in a lot of places, including the trades and also in some kind of academia, is that those who are already in the trade or discipline are competing with those entering it, so those already in may have little incentive to promote apprentices. It's even worse in music in a lot of places, I've known musicians that were very talented and graduated with degree who couldn't find work because the professors themselves already filled the orchestras and had connections to the orchestra management. Student graduates and can't find work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
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.
There are many more highly competent classical musicians than paying jobs in classical music. Many end up working conventional jobs, playing other sorts of (more popular) music weekends and at special events.
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I did this. Before I understood reality, I thought a college educated person could "downgrade" to a trade. There was a man who came to my high school and tried to tell us what a person who excelled at a trade could do versus someone who was ill equipped to attempt a college degree. He tried to tell us that somebody practiced and educated with a trade could be more successful than someone who attempted something diverging from their talent. I didn't understand then. I'm a little more mature now.
If you're good at something, do that. Don't let society tell you it's not the right choice; do what you love and excel at it.
Money won't solve that, it has to somehow be a group mind think change.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Brick and mortar colleges are pricing themselves out of the market. Computer aided instruction can be delivered as an individualised program to students in their homes. A lot of testing can be done through multiple answer questionnaires, and computers could grade those. It would cost a tiny fraction of the current product.
It doesn't work that way. The reality is that students are used to being in school from about 8 to 3. They tend to resist taking classes much past that time, and by college, they tend to resist taking classes before 10 as well. Realistically, you get about five good hours during which you can teach classes, and the more classes you schedule outside those core hours, the more students will cram into the classes within those hours, so you just end up with very imbalanced sections that make it harder to teach.
And it isn't just momentum, either. Lots of students commute to their university, which means early and late classes don't work. Parents (both college students and faculty) have to pick their kids up from school. Students have part-time jobs to pay the bills. And so on.
Finally, it isn't practical to just say, "We're going to spread classes evenly throughout the day", because students need time to actually work on their homework. And that time needs to be during the day so that they can use campus facilities such as computer labs, tutoring centers, etc. It simply isn't practical for the entire day to be used for instruction, because it costs money to operate those other facilities, too, and you'd end up having to cover the cost of extending their hours dramatically if you extend the core hours for classes, which means significantly increased staffing, which ends up costing more over the long run than adding one or two extra rooms to a building.
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Employers need some way of distinguishing between applicants (besides interviews, which are incredibly unreliable).
Employers used to use IQ tests for this. But this is now illegal, since minorities tend to score lower on IQ tests, so it was seen as discriminatory. So employers started using college degrees as an indirect measure of intelligence.
So the question is: what system are you going to use that's at least as predictive as a college degree?
Again, I can't complain about ours. Understaffed and underfunded as they sometimes are, they are also the epitome of "university". Think Harry Potter, just with less magic. But same old walls and creaking wooden stairs.
"Wellness resort" isn't quite what I'd think of when I think of our universities. We don't have dorms in the US sense (there also isn't really that much of a "campus", that idea is still quite new around here), but when I think of the student halls that exist throughout the university towns... let's say you're lucky if the windows keep the rain out.
No, they won't keep the wind out, what do you think this is, the Hilton? Get another sweater if you're cold, the heating gets fixed in Summer. Didn't say which Summer, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Wow. Well, healthcare here is nearly certainly paid for by your insurance, and that's exactly the reason why you're stuffed into a room that might have a window (usually pointing at some other building) and fed grub that makes you WANT to get well soon to replace it with real food as soon as you can.
Then again, we have one mandatory health insurance, if you don't like it, sucks to be you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So ... Europe is still Nutsy-Land? Because that's basically the reality over here.
Your money is meaningless here. Your brains count.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A Magic 8 ball?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We need to accept that not everyone benefits from college, not everyone needs college, and not everyone should go. College used to be for the smarter students who could make use of it. Now it's been reduced to high school+, dumbed down for students who shouldn't be wasting their time there and probably won't make it to a second year.
I'm more concerned with artificially inflated demand than I am with supply.
Germany has vocational training and apprenticeships for students who don't belong in college. They don't waste their time and financial future studying things that won't get them work, they're making money.
Out of curiosity, are you asking poorly formed questions or are you just copying Donald Trump and randomly making shit up with no real knowledge of what you're talking about assuming someone will fact check and correct what you said for you?
P.S. I recommend doing some research to find out what the job position CEO actually means and also looking up what Europe is.
You're going to become a project for me.
In the US, you have resources like Khan Academy, you have chat channels, you have endless resources available to find assistance with your academic needs without resorting to paying anyone. I haven't heard of any school systems in relatively populated areas that don't have free and generally good quality assistance programs to help kids who ask for it.
Talking with school teachers in the US, there seems to be a fundamental difference between Europe and the US. In Europe, if a child does poorly in school, it's the burden of the parent to ensure that the student does better. In the US, if a teacher gives a bad grade to a student, the teacher knows that the parents of the child will be sending mails, making calls, etc... to argue with the teacher regarding the grade.
This is a shortcoming in the US system which says that if you don't get perfect grades throughout your entire primary and secondary schooling, you should expect to ask "Would you like fries with that?" for most of your professional career. This is because you will not have access to good financial assistance via grants, loans and scholarships if you don't have a totally flawless childhood.
Here in Norway, kids don't even get grades until they start in middle school and then, the first two years of getting grades doesn't really count other than placement in later grades. If you spend most of high school drunk and delinquent, when you're done, you can do a year in the military or two years in civil service, get assistance from the government with college prep and then move onto other careers.
It is actually far more difficult to get into programs for trades following a misspent youth here than to get into the university. A few tests is all it takes to get into the university here. If you pass those with sufficient grades, they'll give more or less anyone a shot. Trades however tend to start education in the 10th or 11th grade and if you miss your chance when you're that age, getting into a program that can assist with an apprenticeship can be difficult.
As for universities in the US, anyone with enough money that can pass an entry exam can go to a junior college. Of course, most of Europe (so far as I am aware) don't have junior colleges. It's university or bust. And while you're not likely to be admitted to study to become a doctor after a certain age, most other options are in fact available to you.
This is simply because the government (at least in Norway) will do pretty much absolutely anything to help you into higher tax brackets.
Agreed.... honestly, for that price, why not hire a tutor and get 30 hours a week of personal training and assistance to become a master at a topic?
Best part is that as jobs dry up, it will create more jobs.
Of course, there's the issue that often times, different educational tracks require expensive equipment.
Also, it would seriously impact the student's ability to work as part of a project.
So ... Europe is still Nutsy-Land? Because that's basically the reality over here.
You don't have nearly the minority grievance industry there that we do here. There are people who whose entire career is "find anything in which black people don't have a success rate proportional to their representation in society and make it a literal federal case."
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
See, that sounds great. That's what we need here. And we kind of used to have it, but then the runaway free money cycle.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Then you're going to wind up with far less money for blacks and hispanics than whites, asians and Jews.
And why do you suppose that is? Treat the underlying cause rather than fucking the system up for everyone. Everyone deserves an education, regardless of colour, and their education should only be limited by themselves.
Oh, the people exist here, too. We just didn't gave in to guilt tripping.
You see, we eventually got sick of the whole "we know what you did last world war" guilt tripping. It's kinda hard to pull that stunt again with us now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And why do you suppose that is?
The proposition was "gifted students should get however much 'free' money they need." Average IQs in the US by racial group are:
Blacks: 85
Latinos: 92
Whites: 100
Asians: 106
Ashkenazi Jews: 115
Standard deviation is 15 for everybody. If you're going to call "gifted," say, 130 IQ, then you've only got to be 1 standard deviation above the mean for your race if you're a Jew to count, but 3 standard deviations above the mean if you're black. That's really rare. So if you're giving free money to the gifted, that's going to go disproportionately towards Jews, whites and asians, not blacks and latinos. If you attempt to enact such a program you will immediately be called out as a racist and your political career likely ruined. So it's unlikely such a program will be implemented.
Treat the underlying cause rather than fucking the system up for everyone.
The underlying system is called "biology." It's nobody's fault. Except maybe our ancestors. If 50,000 years ago your ancestors left Africa and moved to colder/harsher climates, then you lost an awful lot of great^n uncles and aunts or ith cousins jth removed because they weren't smart enough not to eat their seed corn in winter. But your ancestors that survived were smarter on average. If your ancestors stayed in Africa, though, then no real selection pressure against the less intelligent combined with regression to the mean resulted in little change in group IQ.
How do you fix this underlying system? If you can figure out a way to raise people's biological intelligence you'll win a nobel prize and save the world, so, have at it.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
You see, we eventually got sick of the whole "we know what you did last world war" guilt tripping. It's kinda hard to pull that stunt again with us now.
I don't know about that. Have you seen the state of Germany?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
The state, maybe. The people, less so.
Don't confuse anything Merkel says with the general opinion in the country. They have very little in common...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's part why the after-school programs. If the parents are actually working and stuck in crappy jobs with hours that make it hard to be together as a family, the after-school program makes it a lot easier to influence the kids after the school day has ended.
There's no perfect fix, no magic bullet. Doing nothing is worse than doing something even if not every kid can be influenced.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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 know I'm being contrary, but what is wrong with the trades? Even here in the US, a plumber, HVAC tech, electrician, mortician, and other "humdrum" jobs are still ways to eke out a decent living. Even in recession times, people need their pipes fixed, their dead embalmed and buried, and so on. Germany teaching trades is still a lot better than what we have here in the US, where once out of high school, that is pretty much it for subsidized education.
According to the sources I could find online it typically takes 4 years to go from a fresh off the street apprentice to a fully-licensed journeyman. At least in the area I am, in there is already a shortage so finding work shouldn't be an issue. I don't know about the other trades as I haven't talked to anybody but an electrician about it.
I said Asians in the US. The smart asians came to the US. Asians in Asian aren't that smart. I also specified Ashkenazi Jews. They're the far north tribe that was in Poland, Russia etc.
The data would fit closer to a curve of how devoted that demographic is to Christianity.?
What is correlation, and how is it related to causation.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
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.
So if you're giving free money to the gifted, that's going to go disproportionately towards Jews, whites and asians, not blacks and latinos.
No I'm giving free money to the gifted. There's no point in putting someone who fails through university. All that does is result in crap graduates, a devalued degree, and create a general demand for even more education or in the worst case create a general demand for a degree that is not needed. This forces people to get degrees for basic jobs that don't need them.
The underlying system is called "biology."
Wow I thought you were having a go at me for being racist. But okay, let's ignore you calling people of other races dumb, that doesn't mean you need to "fix" the problem at university. Fix the problem in the general school system before they get there. School is for everyone. High education is for the gifted (note: NOT the privileged)
No I'm giving free money to the gifted. There's no point in putting someone who fails through university. All that does is result in crap graduates, a devalued degree, and create a general demand for even more education or in the worst case create a general demand for a degree that is not needed. This forces people to get degrees for basic jobs that don't need them.
When you enact this system, the result will be little money (proportionally) for blacks and latinos, and more money (proportionally) for Jews, asians, and whites. Al Sharpton and Van Jones and Maxine Waters will be calling you a Nazi so fast your head will spin. Your solution is politically impossible while the race baiting left exists.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Precisely. Policy wonks here in the USA would do well to study the Mittelstand phenomenon in Germany and adopt an American equivalent.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
But that's before entering the university system, right? I though the claim I was responding to was about maintaining grades while already at university, or the financial repercussions of it. That even in Germany you need to pass entrance exams seems not unusual (although my gymnasium's Abitur, or rather Abitur's Czech version, was definitely a joke - or I just didn't have to do a lot of work for it, and my uni entrance exams were waived because of my math and physics olympiad results).
Ezekiel 23:20
That's interesting. What is the difference between Realschule and Gymnasium these days in Germany? Here in Bohemia, "Realschule" is simply a Gymnasium that starts earlier (around the sixth grade of the elementary school). There's theoretically supposed to be no difference in quality of education but since it starts several years earlier with the same, presumably higher-quality teachers than you get in last years of an ordinary elementary school, it seems to rank slightly higher and talented people get into a university preparation school earlier this way.
Ezekiel 23:20
Maybe, but only because politicians pushing inflation has reduced the value of the money, so that a hamburger costs $500.00 ! ;-)
The schools realized that they could charge more. People were having fewer kids and paid off mortgages to plunder. So kick up pay to the President/Chancellor, heads of departments... and so on. Some College presidents make more than a million - for what? Nobody is there to stop them. They just do as they please and people coming in pay it.
The other consequence is we have too many educated people. Some fields you have to have more than a 4.0 coming from HS. If you transfer with say a 3.8, forgetaboutit. You're already screwed. I remember the joke back in the 1980s. Lost your engineering job, go to McDonalds to flip burgers. The manager laughs at your BS in EE. He has Masters cleaning the tables and PhDs flipping the burgers.
Nobody seems interested in holding colleges accountable for the money. They spend whatever they want. Money grows on trees.
Your solution is politically impossible while the race baiting left exists.
My solution is employed by most of the western world and much of the eastern as well.
Your problem is solved by raising the education standards for the disadvantaged at a lower level.
But I'm sick of writing the same thing over and over again so in liew of me replying again let me just reply to your next comment in advance:
My solution is employed by most of the western world and much of the eastern as well.
Your problem is solved by raising the education standards for the disadvantaged at a lower level.
My solution is employed by most of the western world and much of the eastern as well.
Your problem is solved by raising the education standards for the disadvantaged at a lower level.
My solution is employed by most of the western world and much of the eastern as well.
Your problem is solved by raising the education standards for the disadvantaged at a lower level.
My solution is employed by most of the western world and much of the eastern as well.
Your problem is solved by raising the education standards for the disadvantaged at a lower level.
My solution is employed by most of the western world and much of the eastern as well.
Your problem is solved by raising the education standards for the disadvantaged at a lower level.
Those "places in the western world" don't have a permanent racial grievance industry.
The idea works in theory. It does not work in practice because the demographics of the USA are not the demographics of Norway.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
I'm not sure where "here" is for you.
Having lived in the US and the UK, I can tell you that there's a startling difference between the comforts of hospital care. I've never once seen a hospital ward in the US, every hospital i've been in here had a private room for every patient. The food, while not great, seems significantly better in the US hospitals that i've visited and the buildings themselves seem light, modern and generally well maintained.
There are plenty of hospital buildings in the UK that still date to the victorian era, they've certainly amortized their costs over a long period of time but i can imagine they are fairly bleak places to spend your day You can of course pay for a individual room or even for an entirely private hospital in the UK, but the government doesn't pay for that kind of nicety.
Well, if the student gets Bafoeg - a kind of a half loan half basic income for poor students - then all exams at the university have to be passed on time, otherwise the money flow will stop. ;-)
And Czech is difficult enough as it is, no need to make the exams difficult as well
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It doesn't work that way. The reality is that students are used to being in school from about 8 to 3. They tend to resist taking classes much past that time, and by college, they tend to resist taking classes before 10 as well.
The tendency to not treat college students like adults and accommodate for this behavior with more wasteful behavior by the schools is yet another factor which attributes to higher costs. If that same student started working instead of going to college, their boss would not care that they are used to working 8-3. Colleges shouldn't care either.
And it isn't just momentum, either. Lots of students commute to their university, which means early and late classes don't work. Parents (both college students and faculty) have to pick their kids up from school. Students have part-time jobs to pay the bills. And so on.
Everything you said here is the same for a working adult, so no extra accommodation is necessary for an adult student.
Finally, it isn't practical to just say, "We're going to spread classes evenly throughout the day", because students need time to actually work on their homework. And that time needs to be during the day so that they can use campus facilities such as computer labs, tutoring centers, etc.
Spreading classes evenly throughout the day is not the same as saying every student has classes from 8-5. Students with 15 credit hours will still only spend about 15 hours per week in class, leaving plenty of time to hit the library or computer labs.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke