This isn't going to happen because the whole point of the current government back student loan program is to give kids from not-ideal backgrounds access to credit, and hence access to the full range of schools available.
If the government is going to step in and provide direct funding, it will almost certainly only apply towards community colleges followed by local state schools.
People from low or mid-income families have access to scholarships and funding. Kids from ideal backgrounds don’t take out loans.
If you’re saying schools get a blank check via grants and scholarships, then I’m not seeing how that fixes the issue.
This problem feels super similar to the Us health care system. Those with blank checks for pre-negotiated prices (have health insurance), pay low healthcare costs, and those without pay insane prices. Overall everyone is paying insane prices.
Can you explain your reasoning more?
It might be relatively common for low income to get full rides or near full rides, but anyone in mid-income is getting saddled with tons of debt.
I applied to college in 2011 with a household income of like 95k, with an older sibling already in college, and most "financial aid" packages from state universities added up to between $60k-$160k total debt for four years. Going out of state to places like Ohio State, Maryland, etc. was already $50k/year back then.
This was inclusive of significant amounts of merit-based scholarships. Most (all?) schools do not allow you to stack merit scholarships with need-based grants. If you earn a merit-based scholarship, they reduce your need-based aid by that exact amount.
Assuming this is a Supply vs Demand problem, blank checks to more people will increase the demand for the services, but does not modify supply or competition for the demand.
Increasing demand with static supply will keep tuition increasing.
Because the government has determined that you or your parents make enough to pay for school on your own should you prioritize it financially. The low income people could not. For reference, my families household income was near $25k/yr and I got the first two years covered by a Pell. For $95k/yr you could certainly afford college.
No. For 95k a year for a four-person household you certainly could not afford to send two children to universities that were $50-70k/year - which was the price of standard state universities at the time. Not without going into significant debt.
My parents scrimped and saved for decades and commuted hours every day to teach in higher-paying school districts while living in a low-cost-of-living areas and I was awarded all kinds of academic scholarships and I still had to go into debt and work all the way through college. And they were lucky enough to be working when the school districts would still give yearly raises, which has all dried up now.
The financial aid calculations that determine "ability to pay" are just bullshit to make you take out loans.
Maybe start with what city you lived in yea?
I said I was mid-income (just below the median household income for our area at the time) and that it's the mid-income families that get saddled with tons of debt, and the idea that there's financial aid and scholarships to cover that gap in the middle income range is a fairy tail.
When I transferred to a 4-year, I once again filled out the FAFSA and was eligible for an interest-free loan which covered the difference between tuition and my Pell Grant.
Really, the current grant system doesn't work.
We should tell the universities they must provide needs-based grants on their own and prohibit using ability to pay during admissions - or they don't receive federal grants. This way they aren't incentivized to continue to bloat costs (as happens now), since now the school is responsible for the costs.
There’s at least one site showing (oddly enough) private schools with lower tuition than Penn State as well as some non-private [1], but you’re still over the max of a Pell grant
1: https://www.bestvalueschools.org/cheapest-colleges-in-pennsy...
No, tuition rates at some schools are absurd. Max Pell Grant is enough to cover tuition at the three universities closest to me.
I went to community college in 2009. I filed my FAFSA and if I recall correctly, my Pell grant was $300/term. Meanwhile, tuition was $115/credit. My full-time class load was nearly $2,000/term once you included the books.
When I transferred to the state University, tuition was double that and my Pell barely changed.
I was 27 years old when I started college, working at a Subway restaurant for $10/hr, had no savings, and parents that did not give me a dime after I moved out at 21.
I finished my degree with $45K in debt.
The amount you get is based on your financial need amongst other things, so likely your parent could afford some amount of tuition from the govs perspective.
Max for a Pell grant is about $7k/yr atm
Oh, they absolutely could have, but they didn't. Pretty sure the FAFSA even had a line about money coming from others, and I put $0.
And so I get a little salty when my peers talk about being short on money because they're paying for their kids' college.
Whatever, though. I'm making good money now, and I can accurately say that I'm a self-made man.
Think about free education like you think about universal income, except free education is not an experiment with limited data to back up it’s value, but rather a tried and trusted policy with ample data to back up it’s success.
It is also a bit unfortunate that you view education that doesn’t lead directly to a career to be “worthless”. You learn a lot of skills when you get university education, including but not limited to knowledge about the field at hand. If you get education in one field and then go into industry in another area, you will take those skills with you, and the industry at whole will benefit from having a wider skillset among its workers.
For sure there are crafts programs and vocational schools which teach basket weaving, surely you must see the value in maintaining the craft of basket weaving and for there to be skilled basket weavers out there weaving quality baskets, and those interested getting into the industry of weaved basket, there should be an available avenue to learn this skill.
I’m guessing you’re not from this background?
Low income people have a huge amount of programs available to them that decrease or entirely remove that disadvantage. as one example over 20 years my school district placed imacs and cable internet connections into low income homes for everybody in the district that qualified, and paid the internet bill for a year.
What is "merit" for access to education?