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I don't feel entitled to anything. I find it completely ridiculous that the the biggest controversy is that people want college affordable and/or provided as a service AND NOT that college prices are completely outrageous. College is continually out of reach for young people. I hear the same tired argument, "Pull yourself by your bootstraps! I did it!". Yeah, when you did it you could pay easily pay for college off a minimum wage paycheck. I wonder who had it easier? I wonder who really feels the most entitled?
There is something very wrong with a system when the only way to go to college debt free, if you're not rich, is to go risk yourself in a pointless overseas conflict. And this is coming from a Middle East veteran. The system needs to change.
The cost of a college education is without question outrageous. The cost has far outpaced inflation for decades. Yet few complain. It would seem to me that online courses should be far less expensive but for whatever reason this doesn't appear to be the case. Once developed, an online course could be offered to the general populace at very little cost.
By the way, I can never remember being able to pay for college on a minimum wage paycheck. I had to work 2 above minimum wage jobs while going to school.
The only way to reduce the cost of education is to eliminate subsidized student loans. It's simple economics- the availability of cheap, easy money to the masses has allowed colleges to increase the cost of education to a level that would not be affordable if not for the borrowing.
The first couple years after the loans are eliminated would be chaos, but after that colleges would have to learn to survive on the amount of money that people can borrow without government subsidies.
Plot the cost of college vs the availability of subsidized student loans and you'll see that it was the GOVERNMENT that made college so expensive.
The cost of a college education is without question outrageous. The cost has far outpaced inflation for decades. Yet few complain. It would seem to me that online courses should be far less expensive but for whatever reason this doesn't appear to be the case. Once developed, an online course could be offered to the general populace at very little cost.
By the way, I can never remember being able to pay for college on a minimum wage paycheck. I had to work 2 above minimum wage jobs while going to school.
It really took off when tuition got deregulated and Uncle Sam starting handing out money like it was candy to pay for college.
All those Guaranteed tuition plans run by states shut their doors pretty quick after the deregulation.
College costs should go down. They can start by putting an end to majors that aren't marketable.
Ha.
where I went to school, we had HUGE departments for "Sports and Entertainment Management", "Hospitality and Hotel Management." These were well-known to be a joke, and along with a half-dozen others would just crank out graduates by the thousands.
Sometime around my senior year, I read a faculty paper that explained the intradepartmental finances, which opened my eyes to the bigger system at work ..
Basically, these big, useless deparments were tuition generators. A student majoring in marketing might pay $10k/yr, but only cost the university $3k/yr to educate.
All those extra funds were handed over to deparments teaching mechanical engineering, computer science, etc., where students needed expensive equipment. These students were paying the same $10k, but cost the university $30k+ apiece. The redistributive effects were enormous.
So in reality, cutting down unmarketable majors would actually raise college costs, since many of the more-marketable fields are also more expensive to teach.
I'm not a millenial, but it's silly to lump millenials together as feeling "entitled" for free college or anything else. And don't forget the flip side of this: Millenials who have already started working and contributing to Social Security, and who are going to be doing so for years to come, only to be told "Sorry, Social Security isn't going to be there for you like it was for previous generations (or at least is going to be drastically reduced), because it's been depleted by the "entitled" people in generations before you who have drawn out much more than they ever put into it (including many who are very well off).
I think public universities should be cheaper and I'm willing to pay a little more in taxes to do it...it's an investment. We also need to make sure the universities aren't wasting too much money and students need to be taught about student loan debt....less is better.
Paying more in taxes will do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to make college cheaper. What incentive would they possibly have to reduce costs when the taxpayers are going to foot the bill? All increasing taxes to pay for it will do is guarantee that costs will continue to spiral out of control.
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