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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.
$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
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 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...
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
Tip: Do not let your political beliefs filter reality.
But we've seen the opposite happen since this flood of subsidy money into education.
There is no flood. There is actually an anti-flood.
Tuition at University of California schools used to be free for in-state students. Then UCs started charging "fees" that could easily be paid for by working over the summer. Then UCs started charging tuition....in the 1970s.
That is the timeframe you claim a lack of subsidies caused people to get "good" degrees.
Currently, UCs charge a pretty hefty tuition. So there are actually far lower subsidies today.
Also, your claim about "useless" degrees is utterly false.
First, all college/university graduates earn more during their lifetime. Including people with "Gender Studies" and "Art History" degrees.
Second, we produce 70,000 more STEM graduates every year than STEM jobs are created, even after accounting for retiring of older workers. So that "good" degree you cite is frequently just as useful as a "Gender Studies" degree when it comes to economic and productivity increases. Because those people with a CS degree that can't find work will be working at Starbucks just like the Gender Studies students.
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
The 1960s existed. You might wanna take off the rose-colored glasses long enough to notice the riots.
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.
The people committing that violence are not hired by the government to perform that violence. In addition, they are overwhelmingly likely to be convicted, unlike police officers who kill unarmed people who are not threatening the officer.
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.
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.........
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