There are a number of states where tuition is covered if you graduate from an in state high school and then go to an in state college or university. That’s how I got my degree.
Rich parents.
There’s really no other answer for this one. I went to a very nice university. The average person has no idea how many college students are coming from phenomenally high income families where price is essentially no issue.
It’s just a matter of how high up the top 10% is relative to everyone else. Both your parents are doctors and they have 18 years to save up - half a mill for Amy’s college bill is basically piss money.
The only problem is that these college students tend to grow up in areas where this is basically the norm. I had so many 19 year olds act flabbergasted that not only are neither of my parents doctors/lawyers/engineers… they didn’t even gasp go to college!
It got this way because younger people are willing to go into debt to get an education, and schools take advantage of that expected level of debt. I highly recommend looking up certificates that are available. One of the best ways to change this is for people to switch to alternatives.
How Did This Happen?
College loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Simple as that.
With lenders knowing that the government will make sure they get paid, they’re happy to loan out any amount of money to anyone regardless of credit worthiness, because they take on literally zero risk.
Then colleges realize the same, and jack up their prices in turn. The feedback loop brings us to where we are today. There is no market (or other) force putting any downward pressure on tuition costs, at all. This is the inevitable result.
College loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Simple as that.
Yes Biden is basically running on the idea of solving a lot of the problems he created. He spent most of his life in government. Those of us who are informed came to terms with that in 2020
Not so much “came to terms” with it as much as “this dumb motherfucker is the only way we escape Trump. I hate him and his policies but I’ll vote for him I fucking guess.” Just like where we are now, but now many are even more pissed because it was already supposed to be just one term of a lesser evil before we’d have new options. Now goal posts are being moved and we all have to do it AGAIN for an asshole like Joe Biden who does not deserve it.
Why can’t these old fuckers just die already?
It’s going to be “lesser evil” for 20 more elections. Count on it.
Seems that way. It’s been pretty much how the DNC has operated for the last 20, so why would they change what’s been working for them?
Ain’t that convenient huh!
None of us can see the future. Doing something in 2005 maybe made some sense at the time. Now he can see the chain from there to now and realizes it wasn’t good or needs fixing. It’s better than ignoring it.
Plenty of people knew what he did was armful read the article I posted. He was getting paid by the banks and credit lenders at the time. Super ethical dude.
This isn’t the first time. He’s just as responsible for the rise in incarceration. He tried to vote in a constitutional amendment to make sure states could overturn Roe v Wade. He was pro capital punishment until like five years ago. He did so much horrible shit over the years it’s hard to keep up.
But now it’s trust me bro, just vote for me one more time and I’ll undo all the horrible shit I did
Damn. Don’t hurt ‘em.
A system with only positive feedback inevitably ends up unstable.
Pegged to an extreme at best
Yes this is generally true but I don’t feel like it’s fair to the colleges/universities who work to keep tuition and tuition increases in check. There are lots of decent public universities that have more reasonable tuition. The public university in my smallish city is about 10k a year for in-state. Not necessarily saying that’s ideal for everyone or cheap but it’s a far cry from these places pushing it to 40, 60, 100+k a year.
Also important to point out that we slashed Public Funding of these universities and that’s why the prices are going up in large part
Because there is no cap on student loans for the most part. Kids who just finished high school are sold on the concept of these loans without knowing what they are really getting into.
If a guy can’t legally buy a beer, then they should not legally be allowed to sign up for 6 figure loans either
Seems like an easy “hey you predators took advantage of me while I was young and naive” case.
And then watch all the self serving reasons why we allow this just catch on fire.
It’s administrative bloat. All that money isn’t going to hire more professors. It’s going to pay for non-faculty admin staff who provide services to students and work to attract students to the school. Schools are in competition with each other and the trend has been towards providing an all-encompassing luxury experience. While at many schools the fancy buildings may be paid for in whole or in part by donations from rich people, government grants, or other non-tuition sources (endowment), the staffing and maintenance of these buildings is paid for by tuition.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that students comparison shop four-year luxury “Club Ed” vacations, paid for with borrowed money. That student loans are available without collateral or credit history and automatically approved is a huge part of the problem. If the flow of money dries up, the bloat goes with it. But in the mean time only rich people would have access to an education.
I came up with a plan to lower college tuition years ago while tripping. It starts with the decriminalization of all drugs. And to prevent gangs and what not from profiting colleges will get the exclusive privilege of making and selling all drugs. Drug proceeds would be split between lowering tuition, setting up more college ran centers, and rehabilitation of drug users outside the colleges programs. With a small percentage allowed for the college to profit.
For the program itself, i would have the colleges set up drug manufacturing classes which should benefit students in other chemist and medical fields so it should draw in quite a few people. With the drugs made they then would be sold by college ran businesses whicj could also employ students to have on the job experience and to keep more money in the colleges sphere of influence.
At these centers where drugs are sold, there will also be areas for people to partake in the more dangerous drugs, which should be inheritly safer now that its not being tainted with other nonsense. There would be medical students watching and taking care of their patients making another facet of experience that will help in future jobs.
With all this taking place in the college system, and with plenty of opportunities to view patients, it should be easy to spot people who are in a real bad place that would benefit from health and life counseling. So for the people in need of help, counselors will approach giving an offer to participate in a program to train psychology students that comes with a heavy discount for their drugs while in the program.
My whole idea had several beneficial aspects for all of the country.
Lower colleges tuition
Raising the educational level of general poplus
Lower drug dependencies rates
Lower crime rates
Getting people help who need it
Reduction of drug over doses
Less burdens on are justice system clogged up with drug related crimes
Hampering outside nations who push dirty cheap drugs into our country
Extra tax money
Etc
Idk if anyone has any comments on my wistful thinking, but im open to revisions of my plan.
TLDR: Decrimnalize drugs and make collegese create dispense and sell said drugs to fund the well being of our society.
Jesus fucking christ this is the stupidest shit with the purest potential. I’ve never loved and hated anything so equally. I’m left completely indifferent.
You’re ambivalent not indifferent.
This is a very American answer. The easy and best solution is to tax the ultra rich and provide college to all Americans.
This is legalizing drugs with extra steps. Tax the shops and manufacturers, direct that money split into social programs, safe centers staffed by professionals and school funds.
Just to keep the poor out of studying or to get them in debt for the rest of their life, easy peasy round business…
Some were 20 years ago.
Twenty years ago the going rate at private liberal arts colleges in the US was $40k/yr (including room and board). What is an example of a school that was charging 2.5x that?
Even in the USA it wasn’t that bad 20 years ago. The priciest schools now are just getting there now
I mean, mine was 65k for a BA 20 years ago, and it wasn’t some Ivy League school.
I mean, a 30k year in 20 years is a big increase. And plenty of private schools are on par with Ivies in terms of cost
Greed. It happened because for-profit schools are allowed to exist.
Fro profit schools are not the cause.
And people who actually do most of the work (aka grad students) are still not getting a living wage.
Support striking grad workers everyone! Search for the currently striking school, and donate to their strike fund if you can: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=support+grad+worker+strike&ia=web
My school was expensive but was marketed as cheaper. It was cheaper through scholarship, factored in Pell grants and did not comsider the extra fees from bureaucracy.
The problem is that when you try to work while paying for school the grants go down and you pay more and still struggle.
While you do this you see your school build a sports stadium and see host extravagant dinners with business clients. You see how much the president or dean makes and how much the professors make.
I gave up and transferred to a non-profit university and the experience was night and day. It was affordable and the staff worked for you.
Holy shit dude, for profits are fuckin terrible. Although, that being said, I don’t know of any for-profits that have sports teams or large stadiums.
And I would also add that academia doesn’t really pay that well, at least for professors. They could make much more in industry in a lot of cases
Any private university is for profit, they just don’t explicitly say it.
It really depends on the scholarships. If they offer common merit based scholarships that bring it down to single digits of thousands, I’d think it’s okay. Same with demographics based scholarships or registered need. You’d be using the rich dumb students to subsidize making the better students pay less.
But I have a feeling a lot of places are just price gouging, not subsidizing from the rich kids.
We as an entire community, species even, let it happen.
It’s my firm belief that until we acknowledge this we are not moving forward. I’ve said this to downvotes on numerous related topics where the response is always “blame the government” or “blame the corporations” or “blame the billionaires”.
None of those excuses work because ultimately all of us are responsible for supporting a system that enables all those things and removes accountability from all but the ones who have no ability to change anything.
Collectively we need a good long look in the mirror about what is really important.
The other bigger problem is people have solutions. We’ve had solutions for decades if not centuries. Solutions no one wants to implement for a multitude of reasons of which a big one is “this is the way the system works”.
Fuck the system. The system is broken. We need to all come to that conclusion and then we can move forward.
We aren’t there yet.
There’s literally no market incentives for it to be otherwise. Look at the factors.
50+ years of institutions and borrowers alike trained to believe that education debt is “good debt” that won’t hurt them.
“Club ed” arms race of expensive non-education-related amenities, targeting students. Essentially it is marketing costs passed on to the student/borrower.
Heavy subsidization of student loans by state and federal governments.
Laws to make student loans not discharged in bankruptcy.
Constant implication that growing amounts of student debts can or should be “forgiven” by federal programs.
If you are the lending institution or the college, literally all of those factors only incentivize charging more.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition or a feasible alternative. I have encouraged hiring managers to look at alternative credentialing and training for this reason. No bachelors degree is worth going $200k+ in debt for.
Regarding your last point, I was an IT manager for a decade and hired many people. I saw no difference in the skill set between a community college grad with an Associate’s and a grad with a Bachelor’s from a prestigious university. The vast majority of skills simply don’t translate from university to real life, so I don’t understand why we still hold them so highly in IT. I can’t speak to other fields, though.
I very intentionally received only an associate’s degree with the plan being to immediately get a job and start learning from there. It’s worked great. Except that was 20 years ago and now many jobs “require” a bachelor’s or otherwise have the nerve to say that 4 years of on the job experience is the same as 1 year of college.
In my experience, I’ve seen the same thing. The university time kick starts things. But university lessons are so different than real on the job work.
