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Why Is College So Expensive?
A college education is supposed to be the gateway to opportunity. These days, however, it often seems like higher education means lots of debt with little upside. How did we let college get so expensive?
For the past decade, around 3/4 of Americans have said college is too expensive. At both public and private colleges, inflation-adjusted tuition rates have quintupled over the course of about 50 years.
Part of the problem is that it’s hard to tell how much college actually costs. At 91 percent of American colleges, students still don’t have a clear idea of how much they’ll have to pay even to go to college in the first place. There are millions of job listings in America where employers ask for a college degree — even though most people already working in those kinds of jobs don’t have one. And that increase in demand for college degrees also helps to keep prices up.
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”why is college so expensive”
Because the easy student loan terms allowed students and or their parents to contract for an education often far, far beyond their means enticed by an exorbitant almost criminal sales con job that getting this overly priced degree from this overly hyped University this was the key to their child getting a good job and thus having a good life.
Thus so these overly hyped Universities that so many parents were often desperate that their kids get into were able to charge what the market could bear and because of the easy student loan terms it turns out the market could bear a lot.
I think we made a terrible mistake telling high school students that the university was the ticket to success. What a joke. Instead, we need to walk that back somehow and encourage them to look into trade schools, where the demand is great and the outcomes rewarding.
Colleges and universities can and do charge ever higher tuition and fees, seeing no obstacle once the federal government under Obama had taken over the entire student loan racket. The program forswears any underwriting as to the creditworthiness and likelihood of borrowers’ ability to repay their loans, and no interest accrues before graduation or dropping out. Then the rates when finally charged, are below market, and certainly far below what the true risk of default would have indicated should have been applied.
I suppose the offset to the easy money was to make student debt non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, but that just locks hopelessly indebted borrowers into years of payments for an education that did not enable them to earn commensurate with the expenses incurred.
Not for profit! I say make them incorporate and live by the rules the rest of business lives by. They’ve been burying their profits for generations by buying up properties all around the universities and removing them from the local tax roles. It ain’t rocket science!
Make the universities responsible for loan defaults and the number of degrees awarded for Theoretical and Applied Puppetry will diminish significantly.
It always amuses me when the news reports the opinions of respondents having college education because I’ve met a number of recent college graduates and some of them couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted them the ‘c’ and the ‘t.’
If you’re ever in doubt as to the uselessness of a college degree in predicting competence, just remember that AOC has a BA degree in International Relations and Economics.
Ya know, that equationy professor at the 4:06 mark bears an uncanny resemblance to that Troy Senik guy that used to hang out around here.
The economics clearly didn’t take.
And as we saw at the detention center parking lot, the International Relations part just makes her cry.
The latest factoid from Harvard states that there are 7,024 full-time administrators versus an undergraduate population of 7, 153 students.
As for Yale it’s also about a 1:1 ratio.
Hmmm. Now what is that telling us? Of course! Those colleges need more money! Time to raise the tuition!
When my daughter was graduated last spring I toted up the number of people in the ceremony – one school out of many – and multiplied by the price of tuition. It was a ridiculous sum. Multiply that by the other schools at the University, and it’s the GDP of a small nation.
Harvard’s got Professor Lightfoot!
“Leadership.”
No doubt she’s pointing to the source of her superior intelligence…
Leadership during the covid quarantine is going out to get your hair cut and justifying it by all the time that you have to be on TV for your job.
College costs so much because there is no limit to the greed of the middle class once given access to the public purse.
Quite a bit more to this story, that I’m sure Kite and Key is aware of. An example of why costs have gone up so much is the fact that colleges are marketing heavily to students now, their dorms, etc, are nothing like they were years ago (not all of them, anyway, freshman still get crappy dorms). High tech gyms, lounges, much better food service, game rooms, you name it, it’s there – and contributes to the increases in tuition.
Dorms pay for themselves relatively quickly, so once a new building is paid off by the school, they don’t drop the fees – they just keep raising them. I think it was the rule of thumb that it’s 20 years to pay off a new dorm construction, back when I was working at a college.
I’d love for K&K to deconstruct college endowments.
Or maybe it did, and they were teaching Marxist economics. Last year, the high school econ. teacher of a young family friend was a non-binary (“Call me mister-miss Parker”), self-declared communist. This is in a deeply red part of Texas, BTW.
Indeed. Tina is retiring and always did a great job, even though she had never gone to college. There aren’t any college courses that relate directly to her job, anyway. I guess we better put an ad out to hire a replacement for Tina and make sure it says “college degree highly preferred.”
Besides that, a lot of people don’t know what they want to do with their life at age 18. If someone has known since the age of 13 that they want to be a dentist, great. But if someone doesn’t have a specific goal in mind, they may be best off going to work after high school and getting a sense of what kind of work they like and dislike before signing up for schooling of any type.
This.
Another aspect, which maybe someone mentioned and I missed, is the cost of housing and campus amenities. My nephew’s in-state college tuition is about $12,000, but the cost of living in the dorm plus fees is another 20,000 at least. That was also the case for our in-state school, UT Austin. With a very generous scholarship to s private school out of state, my daughter will end up paying about what she would have to attend the state school.
The private school has a list price and the price people actually pay. A lot of private universities won’t even tell you what the tuition is until you enter your income and assets. It’s pretty obnoxious to have some people paying more than twice what others are paying for the same “product.” That also encourages some people not to save or live within their means. I know of someone who bought a speed boat rather than have money in the bank that colleges would take into account.
I know a very successful artist who basically took a couple of “gap years” (instead of working he was his own GC for a new home) to lower his income and get cheaper tuition for his daughter.
I talked my own sister out of refusing a promotion that came with a substantial raise; she was afraid her daughter’s tuition at a UC would go up.
Your sister was lucky to have yr input.
The UC system is a terrible way to go.
In order to fulfill requirements for many 4 yr under graduate degrees, the student must take all mandatory classes.
However it is set up so that there are never enough of these classes offered to satisfy the requirements for the tens of thousands of undergrads at each campus.
So parents or the students themselves find out that they need to enroll and pay for year 5, at which time their admittance into the required course work becomes a priority.
This often makes the total tuition cost of what was supposed to be a 4 year program some 25% more expensive.
My wife and I recently went to visit State College, PA, where she attended Penn State University 40 years ago. She had not been back since.
She didn’t recognize the place. When she was there it consisted of a couple of buildings and some housing for students. Now all the structures she remembers are gone, apparently torn down and replaced with something like 4 square miles of slick modern multistory buildings. plus the biggest football stadium I’ve ever seen, a big building for an ice rink, a vast arboretum, and so on.
The town has also exploded. She remembers one store, a grocery store, that was useful to students, and the only place to eat was the school cafeteria. Now it sprawls all over with every chain store and eatery you can imagine.
What explains this success? Billions of dollars in government money and student loan money. In other words, government subsidies.
Same with Arizona State. Everything around the university is a massive new building. Almost nothing remains from 25 years ago.
When I went to college in the 1970s it took me nine months’ salary at my first job to earn back every penny I paid in tuition, books, and fees. When my middle son went to college in the late oughts, it took him 36 months. We both graduated with similar degrees – BS, Engineering. You cannot convince me the quality of a college education went up 400% in 40 years. My suspicion is that the reason academic keep hitting the private sector about price gouging is projection. They are doing it, so they figure everyone else is, too.
Well, all those DEI trainers and diversity administrator positions aren’t gonna pay for themselves, ya know.
Which is why I recommend college age kids skip 4-year schools unless they intend to major in engineering, law, or medicine. Otherwise go to a community college and pick up an AA or AS in a two-year program that will give you a valuable skill. If you need the BS/BA later do it weekends and evenings as you work a well-paying day job.
But @seawriter, then there would be a shortage of social workers and community organizers!
Good plan.