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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.
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)
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.
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.
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
I think you misunderstand education.
Putting a bunch of people in VR-space with all the resources in the world generally teaches them nothing. Otherwise we wouldn't need universities, you'd just rent the books from the library and then pay the exam boards to sit your degree.
Aside from the lectures, which are just by-rote education that could be replaced, you have to assess, understand, inspire, assist and generally be useful to the students. That's why the biggest expensive of education is generally staffing. Those Dr's, PhD's, Professors, etc. don't come cheap, and their time in teaching is limited (you buy them off by making them teach in exchange for being provided facilities and funding for their research).
Given that, it's a human-hungry industry, resources are secondary. Almost all universities today publish their entire courses online, with all the materials and all the coursework. They were doing it when I did a degree almost 20 years ago (back then it was all on the FTP server, which everyone had a login to and quite a lot was available publicly).
And you can't just assign twice as many students to the same staff, you would need to hire more staff, who all need to be educated too.
If you think that any part of education is about providing reading material and then letting kids and/or adults just get on with it, you severely misunderstand how the world works.
In fact, if anything, all those dorms, teams and frats are the anti-thesis of education and likely the first thing to go. No other country does the last two with any seriousness, for instance. You don't get to Oxford just because you're a decent rower.
If anything, education's future is firmly in being available offline. Sure, you can do online degrees, but they are held in contempt for the most part. The online parts are secondary to the whole purpose and who's going to pay more than the bare minimum for them to reprint last year's PDF just to sit an online degree that's worthless?
You can modernise it - providing video streams to an lecturer or assistant for one-to-one sessions, but you don't need less people, actually you need more to do that.
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.
Just get rid of student loans. Scholarships and so on are fine - they work in numerous countries that don't have such expensive education costs since they tend to limited in scope and not unbounded.
Student loans on the other hand, seem to be designed to increase the price of education. Remember US banks were just fine with loaning out millions of dollars to people with no income and no job to buy overprices houses, what do you think they are going to do when the government makes loans they make to students almost impossible to discharge. And the banks know the government will bail them out just like every other time if the shit really hits the fan.
Of course colleges are going to be jacking up prices. As long as the banks keep loaning enough to the students to pay them. Why would they leave that money on the table - the student is the one who gets screwed not the college after all.
Perhaps because working in "the trades" isn't perceived as a problem in Germany and in fact is seen as a very good way to earn a living?
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 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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
In the US your (or rather, your parents') wallet.
No, the real problem is that the government backs student loans in the US and has essentially no criteria for denying anyone a loan. You're a D student and want a $50,000 loan to study Underwater Basket Weaving? No problem! And the university will absolutely let you in because you're bringing that $50,000 check.
And since you're not really equipped to tell the difference between a quality education and a mediocre education, and it's all pretty well fine anyway (an undergraduate education is pretty much the same reasonable quality at any given state university), you're making your decision about where to go based on the amenities. When I went to college 20 years ago the dorms were little better than minimum security prison cells and the parking authority was run out of a double wide trailer. Today at my alma mater there's a shiny new glass and steel building for the parking administration and the dorms look like condos and there are two "wellness centers" whatever the fuck those are, and the rec facilities are top notch, etc. They've turned the schools into luxury education resorts.
The education isn't any different, but it costs 4 times as much. The only way to end the cycle is for the government to stop giving students so much "free" money, but that will never happen because the University Industrial Complex will nuke any politician who tries as being "against education," and since I'm sure "low income and minority students will be hit hardest" they'll call you racist to boot.
I think the way the education bubble will actually pop is this. "Everybody knows" a diploma is next to meaningless because if you show up with enough money and stick around long enough you get one, and it doesn't mean you actually know the subject. Young people are especially aware of this, and that you can educate yourself just about as well on the internet these days. Someone from the generation that understands this is going to finally get a hiring position at a major company and is going to say "no, we don't want people with college degrees. I want someone who's educated themselves because they knew the college system was a scam. We're going to implement a system to find and hire these self-starters because they will be better employees." This will become all the rage and while that won't do anything about some professions where you MUST have the sheepskin (medicine, law) it will absolutely lay waste to the diploma mills.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Bingo. The education establishment alongside the Department of Education in this country since at least the 80's has pushed college as the be all panacea with those unable to make it into college as some sort of fuck up. Trade schools have been consistently sneered at.
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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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.........
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.
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.
I have a cousin who went to one of those schools (Brandeis) a few years back for his degree in economics. His parents (a teacher and a physical therapist) didn't pay a dime. I didn't know about theses schools' policies towards qualified but middle class people until I asked his parents how they could afford it as ~$50k per year is a huge chunk of their post tax income. This cousin is 18 years younger than I am so I was curious because I have young kids and wanted to know what school cost so I knew how screwed I was going to be. That said it looks like the 4 options for getting a college education are:
1. Be rich so money doesn't matter
2. Join the US military and potentially get shot at
3. Get accepted to an elite school and be subsidized by #1
4. Milk community colleges and high school post secondary programs for as much as you can and work your ass off to pay for a state school
5. Go into hock for the rest of your life
For #2 there are some really good ways to manipulate that system that I have found out from some of my military (current and former) friends and their hate of the young double butters. For the biggest benefit become an Eagle Scout first (gets you promoted higher right out of basic ahead of the others who joined with you), join the guard/reserves at age 17, then get into college and go ROTC. When you start ROTC you will likely get promoted again in the reserves/guard at this point as well putting you ahead of your peers. You then get your commission at age 22 but you already have ~5 years of military experience but with all that other stuff you won't be an O1 so would be an O2 (first lieutenant) or more likely an O3 (captain). You then have to put in I believe 6 years as an officer if a commission is available, because you already have 5 years experience you will move way a head in the line. By the time you finish you commission you will now have about 11 years into the military so why not go the extra 9 and get a full officer's pension at age 37. Also the military will pay for college while you are in so you can continue to work on more advanced degrees for free. Toss in the tuition and stipend that you are paid for school as well as your military pay for that time and it is a pretty good deal if you don't have to go get shot at the first few years.
Time to offend someone
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.
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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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.
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.........