A bachelor’s degree could cost $10,000 total. Here’s how
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
1. Go to a community college in a county that you are a resident for your two-year associates. The money I'm getting from Pell grants is paying my 18-credit hours per semester tuition right now (Roughly $120 per credit hour tuition). Books on top of that are costing me about 300 a semester (buy cheap old editions as much as possible). I've gotten scholarship money to cover that, and I'll also get Tax credit money.
2. Transfer to an in-state 4-year public university. Tuition rates will double for me during this transition, but YMMV (I'm in Maryland FYI). The hike in tuition will cost me about 7k a year for two years. Hence ~15k out of pocket for a degree.
Moral of the story: If you really want a premier education where you will be learning from those on the forefront of research, by all means spend 100k at an elite private college. If you want to be part of academia or research projects this is probably the route you have to take.
If instead you know what career you are going into and you have a desire to learn those skills on your own, then go the cheap route and just get the piece of paper to prove to HR you are worthy of a job.
*Obviously some careers might not fit this model, but I'd guess most people throwing money away at private universities could go this route with the same basic outcome.
The other issue is missing out on extracurriculars. I learned a lot on my student news organization and got to experiment with building websites and trying out new special features (this was back when news orgs were a lot more cautious on the Web). It helped me get my first few jobs. It also helped me make a lot of connections (same with just going to the same school for four straight years).
If you go through with this plan, join some organizations as a junior at your four-year institution and get to know people outside of class. Connections matter a lot. Also, join professional organizations and go to conferences. You don't have to start doing that while a student, but it can't hurt either.
Luckily you're in Maryland where we aren't cutting higher education left and right. College Park is one of the better state schools, and it's pretty affordable still.
I guess it depends on the community college, but I imagine most of the larger ones in major metro areas have extracurriculars that somewhat rival large universities. Here in Baltimore Co. there are a lot of clubs and the student newspaper is a pretty decent production[1].
Still I get what you mean about connections, especially in some of the more social disciplines like business. But for me (Comp Sci) it wouldn't be worth the extra 60k+, and I actually already have some connections into the field through family. Nepotism works for me :D
For example, according to Harvard:
During the 2012-2013 academic year, students from
families with incomes below $65,000, and with assets
typical for that income level, will generally pay
nothing toward the cost of attending Harvard College.
Families with incomes between $65,000 and $150,000
will contribute from 0 to 10 percent of income,
depending on individual circumstances. Significant
financial aid also is available for families above
those income ranges. [1]
If two years of community college and two years of in-state public school will provide all you want, then by all means do that. But if you would actually prefer someplace like Harvard, Stanford, Caltech, MIT, etc., it's worth actually running the numbers rather than eliminating them on the assumption that they are terrifically expensive. Most of them have online net price calculators that will let you enter details of you and your parents' incomes and assets and family situation (how many kids in college, for example), and will tell you your real cost of attending.
Personally this wasn't an option for me for various reasons. But I shouldn't have made it sound like going to elite private universities was economically non-viable.
I should have made my counterpoint the private liberal arts universities that don't really add that much value compared to my route. Or even just starting out at Community college and then transferring instead of going straight to a 4-year state college.
So far she is looking likely graduate with an associates degree free after tax incentives. She is quite disillusioned with the idea now though and many areas of study she was previously very interested in she cannot stand now because it brings up memories of wretched experiences with. I'm not sure she'll be able to stand another two years in this sort of environment though, it feels like such a waste of time to the point where no piece of paper could be worth this much punishment.
The difference between her experience and my recent one in a masters program at a top tier university (largely paid by my employer or else I wouldn't have bothered) is night and day. The facilities work. The administration works. You can take the classes you want and the registration system works. Everything can be done online without standing in lines. If you actually want to talk to a person you can walk in and do it rather than setting up an appointment a month in advance. Instructors teach current knowledge and get their facts mostly correct. If you ask them questions they can usually answer them. They treat you like a human being rather than a child they are there to babysit. The other students don't think you are a god because you can show up on time and do some homework.
I don't intend to generalize to all community colleges, I am sure there are some OK ones, but at least with the ones I've had experiences with you may have to deal with an unreasonable level of BS in exchange for the discounted tuition. Because of the way the in county / in state rules work you often can't shop around too much and may be stuck with whatever school is where you live.
Still I'm just going into it with the mentality of it being work more than education. This is an obstacle I have to get through to get where I want to go. I've already decided on my career path, and I've learned more about it (Comp Sci) on my own than I will at community college. And it's something I'll continue to improve at the more I do it, so experience is more important than education. Especially considering how rapidly things change.
tl;dr It's definitely not a quality experience, just gotta put in the time and don't let it discourage you. And live in Baltimore County :P
This is something that a lot of low income students never take into account when applying to schools. The fact of the matter is that most of America's top tier institutions will cover cost of tuition, as well as housing, for most of its poorer students.
As for being in the top 2-5%, that unfortunately is still a requirement.
"So why not do it?
"Kamenetz's plan doesn't lack for details. An as-yet unpublished appendix lays out exactly where spending at Cohort Colleges and Adult Online Us would go, down to the instructor salary level. But it also would uproot thousands of workers in the higher ed sector and radically change the careers of those who remained. Kamenetz acknowledges the concern, but thinks reform is too important to not do something drastic.
"'I recognize the political pain involved, but the purpose of public higher ed is to educate people, not to employ them,' she e-mails. 'One of the travesties of the current system is the percentage of classes taught by low-paid adjuncts. I envision a system that might have fewer jobs, but they're better jobs.'"
And my comment on that is that this always requires political courage. To make a large government appropriations plan (and higher education is often the second or third largest budget category in a state budget) work, you have to keep your eye on the people who are supposed to be served by the program. But the people who are employed by the program will almost always be more organized to lobby for their benefit before the state legislature, especially because they can use purported benefits to students as a fig leaf for demands for more administrators and less checking of the effectiveness of how higher education is delivered.
Most of the suggestions in the article seem sound. They also sound rather radical compared to what is usually proposed to improve the bang for the buck of colleges in the United States. It will be interesting to see how much uptake there is of any of these ideas.
Also, Coursera, Udacity, OCW, Kahn and iTunes
Pluses of going legit:
- dorm life is a unique experience unlike any other, worth it just for that
- parties
- according to Thomas J. Stanley, college is by far the best place to meet a quality spouse
- monetize pizza [0]
- pedigree if it's a big name or hipster elite school
- paid internships
- hustle yourself into a paid ugrad research assistant gig
- connections
- meet potential cofounders
- alcohol spending
- textbook costs (buy used and sell them back)
- dorm food -> "freshman 30"
- all-nighters
- unpaid internships
- min wage jobs on campus
Sure you could sit in every day on my morning Thermo lecture and go unnoticed, but I've learned very little in that class that I couldn't already get out of an excellent textbook.
On the other hand Pharmacokinetics meets once a week in the professor's office. He also happens to be one of the leaders of the field. For two hours a week we get to discuss complex pharmacokinetic practices, ask open ended questions and, as he would say "learn how to learn". Museum Display Theory also meets once a week off campus with the head curator of the city art museum and today we discussed Foucault's Panopticon as it relates to museum curation.
These are things worth paying for, or as in my case, working hard enough to get financial aid for.
Caltech has/had pretty awesome staff/student ratio.
So true. The people I'm planning to do my startup are battle tested. We've pulled all nighters, dealt with high stress situations, and come out of it as friends. We know each others work habits, strengths and weaknesses.
All of that is going to be really important when we'll have just graduated with probably no funding.
1. spend less on admins and have massive class sizes 2. spend less on sports, food, dorms, and other perks 5. cut most of the majors
vs.
3. oh, wait, another school reduced costs by spending more on personal instruction and having micro size classes because students actually graduated with less trouble - let's do that too! 4. offering more variety in learning methods actually proved successful, not less, so do that too!
Unfortunately, it'll never happen because there's simply too much money involved in the academic world. The people running the educational institutions, the people running the corporate world, and the people running government are all good friends and none of them want to do anything to screw over the other.
But ultimately, if you can manage a nearly-as-good (or in some cases, better) education, for $10K true out-of-pocket cost rather than $200K+, then eventually a lot more people will complete, and be loyal to, the $10K system than the legacy $200K+ one.
People in NYC or California making $200K/year often pay >40% (getting close to 50% if you are in the $300K/year range) of their salary in taxes (33-35% federal, 8-13% state, and then there's sale tax. And estate tax) and get no reasonable-cost tuition nor reasonable-cost healthcare.
Every time this discussion comes up, US people are quick to quote federal tax rates but when I compared actual rates in NYC and CA, it seems like americans pay comparable taxes, and get nothing in return.
How does NZ fair in this respect? What's the real tax like (remember sales tax / vat), and what do you get for it?
The NZ Government provides free student allowance (a few hundred dollars per week living allowance for your first 4? years of tertiary education, means-tested against your parents' income, not paid back) as well as interest-free student loans (for as long as you stay within the country).
The somewhat counter-intuitive answer is that easy money has increased the price of education, in this case easy borrowing.
The same phenomenon is responsible for almost all bubbles in modern history. Interest rates dropped and qualification criteria got loose and house prices tripled in some areas, also rising in almost all. VC's got sloppy and we had the dot-com bubble.
The serious problem facing America today is that easy money is already flowing yet this bubble is also called "barely getting by as a nation."
Based on my reading of Archibald and Feldman's book Why Does College Cost So Much?, that doesn't seem to be the case: their data show that Baumol's Cost Disease is the real culprit.
I know the price (i.e. tuition) is increasing, but this is due to colleges increasing tuition rates to make up for shortfalls as state budgets for higher education are cut. But I haven't seen any data showing that the costs have risen.
It's also worth noting that the #2 suggestion is mostly just an accounting trick that would increase the price to students, not decrease it. If "perks" like room and board aren't provided out of tuition, students will have to pay for that somehow anyway - they're necessities, not perks. And removing state subsidies for those things means that students will be paying even more, if you add up tuition + room + board.
The feeling that's "in the air" is that what's really happened is buildup of too much management in the school systems. There seem to be far more "managers" per professor than there were before, and those managers are being paid far to much, especially in comparison to the professors doing the actual teaching.
It's pretty classic: most large-ish universities have marketing departments (or hire marketing departments), large non-educational functions and services that take up tremendous man power, overly large "cultural" aspects like sports, and many more.
The cost of educating hasn't really changed, but that's not what most universities are focused on doing anymore.
[1]:http://graphics.wsj.com/documents/NONCLASS1212/
Unless there is data showing otherwise, I would argue that costs haven't changed, only the price.
The cost of providing education in 2013 at University of Washington is a little less than it was in 1990: $16,800 vs. $17,000. The difference is that in 1990, the state paid for 82%, where today it pays 29%.[2] That's where your tuition increases are coming from.
I, along with many people I know, got paid to go to school this way.
Why people are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year/semester is beyond me.
I'd prefer to get an online bachelor's degree if they existed.
I think the real trouble is that college is still awesome for people who can afford it. It's like anything in capitalism, whatever the people who can pay want is what happens. I read an article awhile back that discussed how one of the private schools in NYC was building new luxury student housing and sending limos to pick students up from the airport, that's about as far from these recommendations as you can get.
The point is that change isn't going to come from the elite schools, not real change. They may offer online programs and such, just dabbling really, but they have no trouble attracting wealthy students and donors, so they have no real incentive to radically change what they are doing. At best, they may tack on some extra programs under different names that just further cement the inequality in education we have in the US.
So, change needs to come from the bottom, from the small state schools and community colleges whose students are struggling to fund their educations. But state schools are on strict budgets, and small ones have small endowments. So real change won't come from there either because those institutions can't afford to make such radical changes, they literally don't have enough money. All they can do in many cases is what they've been doing in the past until they can't do that any more and then they can close up shop.
Either way, I personally have a pretty bleak view of the future of higher education in the US.
By removing research, extracurriculars, sports, and on-campus living, she is paring a university education down to a simple exchange of knowledge, which is free online. These things all add to the essence of college, a place to transition from a child to an adult. The value of college is not what you learn in classes, but the personal development you go through by taking leadership positions in student organizations and pursuing passions with other young thinkers.
University is expensive because it's an adult development camp in addition to a knowledge exchange. The most expensive camps produce well developed, open minded individuals who are generally better positioned to succeed. I'd be surprised if I'm using anything I learned in a classroom even 5 years out of college, but the lessons learned outside the classroom will stay with me for life.
And sure, it's possible to pause a video lecture and look something up, but in my experience, it's just not the same. If I'm trying to understand something for the first time, and a part of the lecture just doesn't quite make sense, I want the transaction cost of clarifying a point to be as low as possible.
Also important is the abundance of merit based scholarships at both schools. I know many people who were on either half tuition or full tuition scholarships their whole 4 years.
(I was one of the lucky ones with a full+ tuition scholarship. My wife had a half-tuition athletic scholarship, which was essentially full-tuition because her dad is faculty so she only had to pay half.)
[1] http://finserve.byu.edu/content/tuition-and-general-fees
Points #1 and #5, though, would likely not go over well with current university faculty. Reshuffling of faculty roles seems much better designed by those with classroom/advising experience. And who's to judge which are similar or niche fields of study, besides departments themselves?
Come on people! Don't you see the huge discrimination?
This system is a blood sucker. Please demand a real change instead of dealing with it
Do you know the amount of the universities that you can study for free?
Dozens.
and I mean: no fee at all. I studied in three of them. And one of them was a great university with a lot of foreign students. Teachers were quite good. And I was also served high quality food (much better than the garbage you pay for every day) for free, every morning, noon and evening.
Open your eyes bro. Not so many people are able to pay thousands to the schools. And my point here is to tell your kind of god damn middle class; start considering everybody.
Don't be one of those fucking selfish dicks.
Since it is easy to get a loan, people will borrow as much as needed to get to the highest tier institution that will accept them. The private ones can thus increase their prices, and lure the staff with higher salaries. Now the public institutions need to level up salaries of professors and administrators, or they will leave for the private institutions.
That has been happening over the last 20 years. Remove the government guarantees for student loans and make them dischargeable in bankruptcy (that is, return their status to a normal loan, from the special status that they have now) - and all of a sudden, lenders will start caring about making reasonable loans, people will have less credit to spend on education, and the prices will go down significantly to a reasonably supported level.
(It is likely to cause an implosion of the higher-ed bubble in the US in the process. So be it - popping this bubble is long overdue)
That's depressing.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/degree_pollutio....
As a few of the comments there note, this could actually form an argument for taxing rather than subsidizing schooling.
I believe the reasoning can be refined (as my bottom-most comment there notes): actual education still has positive social externalities. It's the granting of prestigious, rationed credentials that leads to the negative-sum competition, institutional rents, and growing costs.
So maybe, we could subsidize education… but tax credentials. The unbundling of education and assessment, as is happening with online offerings and could be further encouraged by policy, could make this easier.