The cost increased due to government intervention. They wanted more people to go to college so they told lenders they'd guarantee loans for education. They do that by having the ability to take it out of your paycheck for the rest of your life if you don't pay. Anyway, with the flood of money instantly available, schools were able to jack tuition by double digits every year for as long as the want. The place I went has been on a building spree for the last 20 years - it's a whole different place now. Part of that was needed since the number of students has about doubled, so it's not entirely wasteful. But the bottom line is that the "free" money is what caused the rates to rise. I feel bad for that entire generation - they got fucked from all angles financially.
The irony is no one will ever be able to afford a gym membership as nice as the gym they had in college because they're too loaded with debt from said college.
But.....that being said, I have heard that they lost over half of their government subsidies (it's a private school), and the state has been perpetually 6 months behind on those subsidy payments, so that's at least part of the reason for the tuition increase also.
Prestige and pride have a lot to do with it. Two degrees from the same school are worth the same if one person was there for four years and one went to community college for two first, but ask the 17 year old HS student who just has to sign a promissory note which one they want to do, and they're going to pick the first option 9 times out of 10.
Also, who are you to tell someone that they can't go to a school if they can find someone to lend them the money to do it?
If you're in the US and you don't think that rate is unreasonable, I'm curious as to why. We're talking about loans that cannot even be discharged in bankruptcy, in a 0% interest rate environment.
But I'm paying roughly the same for loans taken out in the last five years. It's irritating.
That part is also a zero-sum game, because all parents work harder to afford the best neighborhoods and that makes the price of living in those neighborhoods go up, leaving everyone right where they started only they now work two jobs instead of one.
Decoupling property tax from school funding can help with that. In Universities, a system that is free but only accepts the people with the best grades, IQ, or some arbitrary qualification can help, but brings its own problems.
My best investments are the raises I get when paying off my student loans ahead of schedule.
Just an anecdote of someone who not only wasn't educated about the options, but actively encouraged to ignore them.
I think, realistically, the only benefit I maybe missed out on at a more expensive school is that I could have (completely anecdotally) met a larger, richer network. And now, I would be using said contacts in that network to get me better job(s). For example, I've seen perfectly regular people come out of Cornell and they just mint money.
On the other hand, investing in a network doesn't stop at college, so it can be overcome in various ways.
I guess what I find most disappointing in retrospect was that I wasn't encouraged to research further out from the local area. My original comment may have been a bit hyperbolized in that clearly I knew about state schools, but my idea of what constituted a "state college" was influenced by the three within an hour drive of where I grew up. In my state's college system these three also happen to rank toward the bottom of most lists in terms of job placement and campus quality of life. I toured two of them and wasn't exactly impressed. So belief became that "state college" meant "cheap college", as in the degree would be worthless. Again, this is the naivete of a rural-raised 17 year old.
In the summer before my final year at my expensive university, I did a "Research Experience for Undergraduates" internship thing at one of my state's larger research universities and was blown away by how different (and better) it was compared to the state schools I was familiar with. I was 21 at this point and had a better understanding that even though it was about a 7 hour drive from home, it really wasn't that far away, and if I had known about it when I was graduating high school it would've been doable.
For curiosity's sake, I just looked up what the tuition plus room and board for this state school, and in 2016 it's still less than half of what I paid for my school in 2005.
But that's all in the past. I think I got a decent, though not stellar, education from professors who genuinely seem to care (even now, as I stay in contact with a few), in addition to the networking opportunities. In the end I don't regret it, but I do try to advocate to my younger relatives that they should shop around and take the decision seriously, and of course ask me for guidance should they need it.
Also, I'm still paying off the loans from when I went back to school a five years ago. The jump in tuition after 10 years away from school was a major shock when I went back.
Everyone going to Stanford will get a tech job in SV, which is nice for about 0.1% of the population, but its a national problem and rando graduate of some state U has at best 50/50 odds of getting a job in their field or working retail/restaurant/bartend work. Better off as a 22 yr old electrician than as a 22 yr old unemployed kid in moms basement.
Most of the building trades have also fared badly (with electrician somewhat of an exception), as wages have collapsed over the past few decades in trades like carpentry and roofing.
The problem is that these programs are notoriously underfunded (the financial assistance barely helps. It's like 10k a year if you're very lucky), have their resources misallocated, and do just enough to say that they're doing "something". Their funding is also often lumped in with other welfare "handouts". So when people vote against funding "handouts", they vote against helping people who need it most.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance
Where I live, we have Second Career Ontario[1]. When I was in college, several of my classmates were formerly highly paid tradespeople who ended up unemployed and unable to find work after the decline in Ontario's manufacturing sector. The Second Career program funding was enough for them to go back to school for a couple of years. To to best of my knowledge, all of my classmates ended up making the transition to a new career successfully.
I've seen programs in other jurisdicitions that provide some funding for retraining, but not enough funding to teach people enough skills in enough depth for them to realistically be able to move to a new career.
:-)
Seriously though: I have been begging plumbers to come and work on a reasonably high-priced project at my house. I reached out to 10+, no one is interested - they are booked for weeks in advance.
What would it pay for them?
$6k got me a 4 hour response of a 5 man crew with an excavator to replace a rusted section of a wastewater pipe, which involved digging 14ft down and demolishing part of my driveway (and pouring new concrete in after it was finished)
> No more than 2 days of work for 1 person.
You'll have us believe a plumber charges $375/hour for this project, based on the $6k quote?
This is not typical, so either your project is extremely difficult or you're not telling us something else.
Trades are great, but we, as a society, are not really prepared to deal with them. It's easy for someone working a comfortable desk job to say "those kids should go into the trades" without realizing the following things:
1. Trade jobs often involve non trivial amounts of physical risk.
2. Trade jobs rarely allow you to work until normal retirement age (65 or even 70). I never met a diesel mechanic over the age of 50, and precious few in their 40s.
3. Despite all that, they don't pay as much as your desk job.
If you're going to sit a kid down and give them the option between a physically demanding, difficult trade job or a climate controlled, higher paying desk job, what do you think they are going to choose, realistic or not?
1. On-line loan repayment calculators showing you're monthly payment for years.
2. Youtube videos under the search "I majored in debt".
3. The FAQ on the loan servicer's website; or "Where's all this interest coming from?!"
http://www.studentloan.org/about-us/frequently-asked-questio...
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fancy-dorms-arent-the-ma...
Here is one link: http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/funding-do...
There is no longer a reason to think that you must go get a 4 year degree in order to have a career and financially independent. Education has evolved drastically over the last 20 years because tuition has gone through the roof.
I was an international student in the U.S. and went to a community college and did very well then went to a 4 year college after. I had little choice since $1 USD = $2.5 of my country's currency so community college was a cheaper option especially after having my parent also send my other siblings to college out of pocket. At community college I watched kids(Americans), not all though just waste their opportunity, slacking off in the cafeteria when they should have been at class and eventually getting dropped. It was basically free for them. We international students just wished amongst ourselves that we were given the same opportunity of free schooling at that level. Going to community didn't seem to hurt me in anyway.
When the in-state flagship university costs $25k/year to attend, it's not very reasonable.