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living in the dorms is also a lifestyle, but many dorm dwellers do not have a job to support that lifestyle, instead they rely on student loans to pay for that lifestyle
what kind of debt do you think a lifestyle based on relying on loans provide? this is why people cry about high student debt, they took the financial aid for learning and spent it on living instead of working for their living expenses
Not my monkey, not my circus. My kids are attending school on the savings my husband and I have accumulated for the purpose, along with a bit of merit aid in the form of scholarships for their fields of study. There are no loans involved. But let's be clear that one cannot separate living expenses, whether it's in a parent's home, in a shared off-campus apartment, or in a dorm, from the cost of education. Living expenses and tuition go hand-in-hand. One of my kids works and goes to school year-round, while the other takes 18 hours a semester, leaving no time for paid employment except during summer breaks. Both ways work.
Last edited by randomparent; 01-17-2018 at 12:22 PM..
Typical per-student spending in the U.S. is about $12-13k per year for K-12.
What colleges spend per student is a bit cheaper because college students are not there all day like K-12 kids are. However, that savings is offset by their research missions, which are very expensive. There are simply not many ways to get around those base costs. Canada is one of the most efficient in the world at delivering education, and there it costs about $9500 per student per year. That is simply what it costs to deliver first-world education.
Anything you pay below about $10k a year is because the costs are subsidized from somewhere else. Community colleges are cheaper because they have lower overhead than most universities, but also because they receive more direct subsidies from their state and typically also collect a share of local tax subsidy.
The only places where education is cheaper are developing countries where everything is cheaper because living costs are less and standard of living is lower. The U.S. legitimately has the best universities in the world, BY FAR. Quite literally - most other developed countries have 1-2 universities in their entire nation that are equivalents to Cal-Berkeley, and that is their BEST. While for us, Berkeley is something like our #20. We pay a premium for that quality. Even our lower tiered branch state universities are better by an order of magnitude than their European or Asian counterparts.
College was cheap in the glory days of the late 1940s to late 1970s because states heavily subsidized it and the federal government was also on a kick of subsidies to help increase brainpower to fight the Cold War. States began cutting those subsidies heavily starting in the early 1980s. In large part this was because a much greater proportion of the youth population started to go to college around that time, and states simply couldn't afford it. The federal government wished to cut taxes, not raise them, so it began focusing more of its college spending on loans to individual students that get paid back with interest, less on direct subsidy.
If you look at college costs BEFORE World War II, you find a similar cost situation as today, but without the loans (student loans as a concept did not exist). COLLEGE WAS NEVER CHEAP. It was artificially cheap when we as a nation prioritized it.
Last edited by redguard57; 01-17-2018 at 12:59 PM..
COLLEGE WAS NEVER CHEAP. It was artificially cheap when we as a nation prioritized it.
Dead on. The remaining questions being...
...should college be a privilege only for those who either qualify for their institutional largesse or can write an adequately-sized check?
...is it not in our best interest to keep college education accessible to as many candidates as possible?
...and the $64M question... do we keep throwing great big piles of greasy grimy greenbacks at a current system with too much indifferent, misdirected and ridiculously expensive content?
...should college be a privilege only for those who either qualify for their institutional largesse or can write an adequately-sized check?
...is it not in our best interest to keep college education accessible to as many candidates as possible?
...and the $64M question... do we keep throwing great big piles of greasy grimy greenbacks at a current system with too much indifferent, misdirected and ridiculously expensive content?
You know, I don't think the problem is all that dire. Even though I'm a liberal, I think we can just let the free market shake this out.
Taxpayers are making money off student loan repayments, so I don't see a crisis there. If the colleges aren't paying off for the students who take out loans for them, those colleges offering low value will eventually phase out.
However, for that to work, there needs to be an alternate low cost pathway so that student loans are only a problem for the students that voluntarily take them out with their eyes wide open. To facilitate that:
First, we should make community college tuition-free for in-district students. It's not in our interest to have students using up their financial aid on community colleges. They're already cheap enough that it won't cost that much.
I also think there should be some tuition-free transfer pathways to a bachelor's degree via state universities, especially through branch campuses since we want to incentivize talent in our local communities.
I don't want to subsidize the "experience," so in no way should living costs be any part of that and they should require reimbursement for dropped/failed classes, more than one change of major, etc... The GI Bill already works kind of like that so it shouldn't be that hard to implement.
That way there is a no-frills, low overhead option that we can point to having been available for free when people complain about their student loan bills. Student loans will become something students choose because they wanted something more than that basic education available at their local community college and local branch university.
We've seen a couple states implement something like this and New York is about to start.
Having been in higher education for 7 years, I can assure you that such a policy would NOT increase enrollment significantly, because we already throw more than enough money at the students who need it. If you are truly poor, then tuition is comped. Everywhere. The problem involves middle class students.
You know, I don't think the problem is all that dire. Even though I'm a liberal, I think we can just let the free market shake this out.
Maybe, if we narrow the discussion to the bare bones of affordability and access to college.
But the overall problem and its ramifications are... yeah, I'd say dire is a pretty good adjective.
The fundamental place and purpose of secondary education is broken, and we are in an increasing spiral of misdirected use of this resource to ends that have only qualified benefit to the population while encouraging (even enforcing) a life path that is onerous on individuals economically and probably subverting real fulfillment for many of them.
But hey, if we're all getting rich from loan costs and shadow tax revenues, it must be okay!
Quote:
The problem involves middle class students.
Again, only from that caught-between-forces notion of affordability and outcome.
The problem is a glut of mediocre students chasing job tickets and clogging up an education system for everyone else. You shouldn't have to go to a four-year institution for technical training - but that's how the system is structured. Faultily.
I still don't why people don't consider 2 years at a community college
One of my kids graduated from a 4 year college 45k in debt, the other went to Community College and is set to Graduate with 10K in Debt.
Who was smarter
I still don't why people don't consider 2 years at a community college
One of my kids graduated from a 4 year college 45k in debt, the other went to Community College and is set to Graduate with 10K in Debt.
Who was smarter
The one that got all the education and job training they needed at the best relative price.
The problem is that we don't have a good intermediate tier of job-skill-oriented education in this country. There used to be, and are, trade schools for specific fields... but by and large they are looked down on except in narrow, largely mechanical-service industries. So to get a "good job" in any skilled trade, the only route is to get a godz-honest degree from an admired college... even if the curriculum outside of liberal arts requirements is nothing more than trade-school training. At many times the cost, not only to the student but to... all of us, who have allowed, even cheered this cycle's expansion.
I still don't why people don't consider 2 years at a community college
One of my kids graduated from a 4 year college 45k in debt, the other went to Community College and is set to Graduate with 10K in Debt.
Who was smarter
Sometimes, that's a wise decision, and sometimes it ends up costing the student more. One of my kids is pursuing a degree that requires a sequence of eight courses over four years, and they cannot be taken concurrently. If my kid had started at a community college, the result would be two years of community college coursework plus the four years of courses at the university level for a total of six years of college. Not a good deal. So while it's an excellent suggestion for some degree seekers, it's not the answer for all.
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