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College is extremely expensive but people keep paying the tuition.
Then they graduate and can't find a job in their field of study. Instead of suing the college/university for false advertising or breach of contract they sue the taxpayers (so to speak) and demand their student loans be cancelled.
It's like buying a Ferrari on credit, then finding you can't afford the insurance to drive it. You can't sell it so you stiff the bank (taxpayers) that gave you the loan. Meanwhile Ferrari keeps making millions by selling cars under the same business model. What's wrong with this picture?
While there are alternatives to getting a college education, if one wants to make it in management in the corporate world good luck without that degree.
I do hear many recent grads complain about their first job salaries without realizing they have to pay their dues and work their way up the ladder.
Yes, college is more expensive, and so is everything else. Prices go up because commodities and labor go up. It is very easy to think that colleges charge too much. OK, what those complainers done research on cost analysis to see if education price increase is valid?
elamigo
The point you are missing is that yes everything is more expensive today, but the cost of college has gone up literally about 3 to 4 times the rate of inflation. So, while everything is more expensive, the cost of a college education has literally skyrocketed. The link I am enclosing shows that college tuition has increased about 1300% since 1979. On the other hand, inflation has increased by about 300% during the same period.
I paid for my undergraduate college education because it was relatively easy to do so. There maybe a handful of young people who can somehow find a way to do that today in 2022, but the point is that they are the exceptions. Most young people will not be able to find a way to do it and will not end up going to college. Yet, many seniors want to give great lectures to young people about "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" or about how when they went to school forty years ago "they walked uphill to school both ways".
State colleges and universities frankly should face more scrutiny when they raise tuition. Increases should have to be justified the same way that public utilities have to justify rate increases or state government agencies justify property tax increases. We tend to let the Board of Regents skate when it comes to this process and turn a blind eye to huge increases.
Mixed. They can go to school cheaper for starters. They can also work while in school. My daughter just graduated last month with a 4 year degree in Graphics Design. Very little debt. In this supposed "no way out" scenario that kids claim to be in.
She knew what she wanted her degree in and knew what University she ultimately wanted to go to. So she signed up for Gen Ed's in a local community college. She knocked them out in two years while living at home. She was very careful on what Gen Ed's to picked and ensured they would transfer to the "University of her choice". After two quick years she got her Associates Degree.
She then transferred to University and they accepted all of her credits. Marched in as a Junior. Once in University she then leveraged the Associates degree to find work. It made no sense to take debt out for food, rent, utilities, ect (which most college kids do today).
In two more years she received her degree. Very little debt. None of her classmates (or their parents) even considered this path. It is so obvious yet the masses just pick a school and magically its paid for.
I think the complaints are legitimate for a number of reasons.
First, costs haven't just gone up, they have gone up far in excess of the general rate of inflation, the availability of financial aid, or the pay that any student can expect to earn while in school.
Second, it appears to me that family resources are stretched far more than they used to be. Whether it's the cost of housing, the cost of child care, or other factors (probably multiple factors) it is nearly impossible for a family to maintain a middle-class existence with only one earner, which was the norm when I was growing up. Consequently, when the kids in my family started to go to college my mother was ready to go out and get a job, and she made enough to put nine kids through college debt-free.
Third, an undergraduate degree doesn't buy what it used to buy. Many, many college graduates need a graduate or professional degree to get career employment that will support them. It is very daunting to consider graduate school when you already have tens of thousands in undergraduate debt.
I talk to younger lawyers where I work and the debt burden they are carrying is just frightening. I graduated from law school with $2400 in debt and I paid it off in seven years at $30.19 a month. Even at my very low Legal Services salary I was able to afford to pay that, although some months it was very tight. Nowadays it is much, much worse.
As a student I worked 12 hours a week during the school year and full time in the summer. 12 weeks x $15 X 40 hrs. a week = $7200 summer wages. Take 4 weeks off for finals and holidays. 36 weeks x $15 x 12 hrs. a week = $6480 school year wages. Total income from working = $13,680 per year. If a student lives at home and it costs $22K a year to attend a public university, he should have a balance due of $33,280 after 4 years of college. That would be a 10 year repayment student loan of $369 a month at 6%. Starting salaries for liberal arts majors average $40K per year, or take home of $2800 a month. So a $369 loan repayment seems doable on their own.
For those who rack up two hundred thousand in student debt, attending private or out of state schools, not working and living on campus, it would be much more difficult unless they were a two income family, married to someone without student debt, or living at their parent's house.
I missed the part where taxes (including SS and Medicare) are deducted from that take-home pay, and any other expenses the student may have outside of tuition (food, gas,...). Or were those assumptions baked in somewhere in these numbers?
When I graduated from high school in the 70's it wasn't expected we'd all go to college and I'd say most didn't, at least not right away. Of those who did many started at a community college or simply went to the local state university and lived at home. State schools in CA were cheap back then. I only remember a handful in my graduating class going away to college and they still stayed in state, and probably had scholarships to offset the costs. They were the serious students who has specific types of jobs in mind for themselves.
Back in our time, just having any respectable bachelor's degree gave you an advantage, probably precisely because not everyone was pressured to go to college. Then as now, professionally related degrees were usually better than history or literature, at least in terms of starting salaries, but the cost/benefit of a humanities degree was far better and the advantage was worth it. This was especially the case for those who didn't have the inclination or ability to go into, say, engineering. For instance, I was always fascinated about how things worked, especially aeronautically related things, and might have made a fine aero engineer-- except that math was a huge stumbling block for me. There was no way I was going to be able to pass the math required to be an engineer. So I thought, well here I am at a good brand name university; I might as well get some kind of degree so I can put it on my resume. And I might as well make it something I'm interested in. So I picked German Lit (taught almost entirely in German) and a minor in German. Later I went to grad school in a more practical field and I did all right after that. In hindsight, I made a bad career change early on, but that's not the fault of the universities I attended or the fact that, for me personally, college was the obvious next step after high school.
I left home after high school with no savings or family support and worked to put myself through college. Earned 3 degrees largely due to research grants. Couldn’t afford the dorms so shared houses with other students. STEM degrees.
Almost no state colleges offered frou-frou degrees. By that I mean degrees with no clear need or broad value to humanity. This was before the pseudo dictum of “just do what you love”. Our paths were set by do what society needs plus do what you are better at than most people plus keep an eye on whether there will be jobs for that.
Community colleges for the first two years was another cost saving option kids used.
For those whose parents helped pay, planned parenthood had a role in that kids born 4 yrs apart were easier to fund.
Frou-frou always existed.
This was back when college/universities were the exclusive domain of the rich and wealthy. You went to college to enhance your knowledge of Greek, Latin, the Classics, Philosophy etc. Outside of studying medicine or law, college was almost entirely about learning "stuff" and not really about using it to get a specific job or into a specific career. They went into college already knowing what their career path was because well-to-do daddy was going to bring them into the lucrative family business. College was so that you could fit in with the elites.
Nowadays, college is more vocational in nature. STEM degrees can obviously pay huge dividends, but that's the realm of the working class and middle class: get a degree so I can get a job that pays well with great benefits.
I want to point out one other thing about the costs now.. I can tell you that previously I worked for a cabling company that would do all network cabling at Clemson.. The sheer amount of new construction there since.. ~2000 is astounding.
So, certainly can say that the money they're taking in is being reinvested into the campus. For the past 20 years, there's constantly been some form of construction happening at the campus.
they've rebuilt just about every dorm, built a new library, just.. Everything. Hell, they built new football facilities that were massively expensive.
You got half the answer right. You can live at home and get a 2 year community college degree for about $15K in tuition or less. But you can also live at home, transfer to a city or state university in your third year and get your bachelors for another $30k TO $40k in tuition, so total is $45K to $55K.
You can also work full time each summer and 12 hours a week during the school year and earn $12K a year, which brings your total out of pocket cost to about $10K with books, tuition and fees for a bachelor's degree. If your parents are willing to feed and house you, maybe help you get a used car to commute with, you don't have to be rich. Just willing to work, study and reach your goal. I did it in the 60's. My children did it in the 90's. And now my grandson is doing it in the 2020's. It has always been doable and it still is. Never easy, but always doable.
It's always been expensive to go to a private or out of state public college, and live on campus. You always needed to be rich or have parents with a big nest egg, or rack up an enormous student debt to afford that. That was never even a remote consideration for me, my kids or my grandson.
As far as getting started in the work world, getting your foot in the door without contacts, that was also hard, but doable as well, and still is. But like getting a degree, it took work and patience and perseverance to achieve. I was a liberal arts major, and I'd say the most valuable thing I learned in college was to stick it out despite the ups and downs, the absurdities and BS and unfairness at times. This is pretty much just what was required from me in the world of work.
To be perfectly realistic, for middle and working class students, college won't give them much more than a passport to apply for work, which is where all the work related learning will take place for the rest of their lives. But the diploma has been and still is used by potential employers as proof of an applicant's ability to stick it out and earn a degree.
College for Silent Generation and Baby Boomers was MUCH more subsidized by the government than today. For Gen Xers, costs were starting to rise but financial aid offerings were generally a little better and tuition was still lower than today.
Now, some people can just make pretty stupid choices in where to go to college and what for that set them up for failure, but there is more than a little truth that those whining about college costs today have legitimate grievance. If we just restored the subsidies the Baby Boomers had, we'd take a huge step to making things better, but people today equate that level of subsidy with Bernie Sanders leftness and think it is extreme, not realizing that they themselves had that level of benefit.
In the 70s, one could work a summer job and pay tuition for the year from it. Now, working full time with over-time year-round job at entry level pay is not enough to pay tuition in many cases. Housing costs have also skyrocketed, as has food, etc., so even if someone wanted to try to work full time and use that money to pay for school, they are very unlikely to also be able to pay for a roof over their heads and food to eat - let alone anything else like gas/car/travel, healthcare, etc.
Realistically, to pay for college these days students need a rich family who invested early and often to build up savings for it, or to take a lot longer than 4 years to work through along with family or other assistance with housing, etc., while getting through, or get lucky with financial aid and scholarships, or the ability to bear massive debt after graduation with a starting salary, high rents and food costs, etc. Admissions and financial aid at universities often do not go to the most needy, because a majority of the colleges play a game of trying to award deserving students while also trying to figure out who will actually accept and go to their school and be able to give them the most money possible to pay their bills. So in reality, awardees tend to be most likely to be upper middle class, not the poorest students.
That is not to say one can't stay at home and go to a community college and get an associate's degree without going broke. But to go to a standard state school or four-year institution with a good reputation is realistically out of reach these days for a significant portion of our youth moreso than it has been for several generations - when jobs for those folks were also much less likely to need a degree or even a diploma for the middle standard of living than today.
Seriously as an older GenX we didn't have half what the kids today have to choose from classes. The sheer volume of electives available on some of the most redonkulas topics... Each one of those classes need a teacher, classroom time, $$$$. I question whether they actually make a person better equipped for the skills needed for a successful career and make better civilians. Personally, I doubt it. They could cut the number of offerings, lower the cost of the school and they likely still have the same number of success stories. So many resources costing so much money., At some point you have to say that just because the university has a 50' rock climbing wall, doesn't mean you need a 75'. This has become silly and expensive.
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