Again, The University of Alabama Honors dorm. Many years ago, the Wall Street Journal or, possibly, the New York Times, did an article on luxurious dorm rooms. In my day, it was GWU.
And in line with @kelsmom’s post above, expect to see lots of small school closures.
I remember reading about a college with a lazy river (I think it is in Florida), but it came with the hotel that the college purchased in order to increase the number of dorm rooms. They kept it, though, because they felt it was a way students could relieve stress.
I’ve read in the past that lazy rivers can be found at U Alabama, Iowa, Missouri and LSU.
I personally don’t have a problem with rising tuition rates. Everything in life gets more expensive over time, that’s how it seems to work. As a “consumer” (also know as a parent paying the bill), I can decide to send my kid to a cheaper school, study online, or even enroll in a trade school or apprenticeship. No one is forcing any of us to send our kids to high priced schools.
I think the state public schools should try to keep the cost affordable for it’s in state residents, but I don’t care what private colleges do in terms of their tuition. Let the market determine what the price should be.
Wasn’t Yale building a new dorm that cost $600,000 per bed (though that does not necessarily mean posh)? Of course, Yale has the money, unlike lots of other colleges…
State budgets have been squeezed over the decades. They used to see state universities as investments in the skills of the people that would grow the economy and provide greater future tax revenue. But short term pressures eventually took priority over long term investments. For example, the crime wave that peaked in the early 1990s forced a lot of expensive prison spending by the states.
All of this also explains why so many small colleges which do not have very large endowments are shutting down, and why this trend is likely to continue. They feel the need to keep up with colleges that have a lot more money and they cannot, without both huge donations and an endowment which makes money as well.
@RightCoaster I care what private colleges charge, but you’re right - they’re private. They can charge what they want, so long as it’s within the perimeters of maintaining their non-profit status.
Re: “parents as the costumer” - I find the entire “student is an adult, but is not an adult” concept to be somewhat confusing, but that’s a very American thing. Where I grew up, you were an adult at 18, period. You could vote, drink, get married, you could be drafted, etc. In the USA there’s this weird idea that at 18 you’re an adult, but just for some things. You can be a soldier, and die for your country, but you’re not allowed to drink. So you are trusted with a tank and with choosing the leaders of your country, but you’re not considered mature enough to drink a bottle of beer. It’s as though there are, legally, three stages: Juvenile, Adult, and Indeterminate.
The “parent as a consumer” thing I used is only because there is hardly zero chance someone at 18 would have the resources to pay for college themselves. It forces the burden of college financing onto the parents. But again, no one if forcing any kid or parent into paying to send their kid to college. At 18 my kid could enroll in the military and learn a skill that way, go get a job somewhere, or try to go to a trade school or something like that. I too think it’s weird you can’t drink at 18, but I’m pretty sure you can get married at 18 in the US 
I think the rising cost of college education has reached a tipping point of some sort. At some point in time, people are going to realize you can make a decent living for yourself by learning some sort of skill or start a business that will pay you a decent wage, and not start life in the hole equal to cost of outrageous tuition.
My guess is you will see a lot of smaller schools that don’t offer some sort of “ bang for the buck” fold up shop over the next decade. I also think technology will make it easier for kids to earn their degrees online from reputable schools.
@RightCoaster: As usual you are right on target, in my opinion.
The Online Degree revolution / evolution is here. Most noticeable in MBA programs. Shocking what CMU & Michigan & a few others are doing in their online MBA programs.
Bloated administration. All those MBAs gotta work somewhere. Skyrocketing price increases are bound to happen once you start running universities like businesses instead of educational institutions. Unsurprisingly, the beancounters got it wrong: students aren’t looking for dorm luxury; they’re looking for privacy. I think most kids would give up a climbing wall and lazy river for a private room without a bunch of suitemates.
Some decades ago, it was possible for a high school graduate with no special skills to live on his/her own and self-support with a job, while studying at a state university with very low cost highly subsidized in-state tuition (possibly needing a small student loan). I.e. even those with wealthy parents who did not want to pay could work their way through college (and not be limited to colleges within commuting from the parent’s house, if the parents would let him/her do that).
But now that is much less possible (except if the student earns a full ride scholarship), so most who want to go to college immediately after high school have some dependency on parents to fund college (and/or cooperate on financial aid applications).
However, the skill/education premium in employment has been increasing over the decades, as has the trend toward occupational licensing. So entering the job market for a skilled job increasingly requires getting some sort of education, certification, or licensing first, and the costs of such are increasingly being put on the (potential) employee since employers are less willing to hire to educate and train on the job.
It is no surprise that the millenial generation is mostly poorer than the previous generations.
@ucbalumnus, Yale built two new residential colleges which opened in 2017 at a cost of $500 million, which allowed the university to expand from 5,400 to 6,200 students. They look a lot like the other residential colleges, with beautiful stonework, heavy doors, high towers, and interior courtyards. They also have the interior features found in the other RCs, such as dining halls, libraries, and meeting and recreation spaces.
https://news.yale.edu/2017/08/23/yale-opens-two-new-residential-colleges
cfsnowy- I second that; I think the whole “college experience “ having to include rooming with someone is bogus.
@MWolf
I was in academia for a couple of decades, and I have seen the degradation of academic standards in the name of “costumer satisfaction” by chancellors, provosts, and deans who think of academia as a business, with them as the CEOs or something.
I’m sure part of that is that there are many students in college that should not be in college. Somewhere along the way in the 70s and 80s, it was decided that all American students should go to college resulting in so many non-academic type students attending weak universities. There should be more focus on job/vocational training for kids that don’t belong in college and a way for them to have affordable housing so they can get out of their parents house and be real adults, not quasi-adults.
Suzy, It was not a pernicious plot to send “all American students”. It’s called the Viet Nam war, and the draft, and exemptions for men who were enrolled in college or graduate school. Yes, many brave young men were drafted and served. Some went to Canada or were jailed as conscientious objectors. Some had medical issues (e.g. bone spurs) and some figured out that the National Guard would fulfill their military obligation but make it very unlikely that they’d be sent overseas.
And tens of thousands of draft-eligible men got educational deferments which sent many, many young men who had no interest or aptitude directly to higher education, and kept them there, sometimes in made-up graduate programs. There are at least a dozen professions which one could enter with a BA prior to the draft and the war, which suddenly required a Master’s degree. This is not a coincidence.
Those who forget the past and all that. I’m happy to participate in a screed about college costs but some of these posts have a lot of words but not many facts.
Some jobs that did not require more than a high school diploma then commonly require a BA/BS degree now.
Some jobs where on-the-job training was common by employers now have a greater likelihood of employers wanting the employees to have completed some of the training/education/certification/licensing (at the employee’s expense) before starting work.
UCB- the trend of employers requiring BA/BS degrees seems to be more of a reflection of the decline in the quality of a typical HS education than it is the “credential creep” that was one of the legacies of the draft/deferment cycle of the Viet Nam war. The days when you could hire a HS graduate who could write, analyze graphs, turn a 50 page report into a two page executive summary, and even speak a foreign language are sadly over.
I think of my elderly family members who didn’t go to college- and the skills they had (have). They have read complicated literature and non-fiction for their entire lives; they are numerate and financially literate; politically aware and active, can evaluate medical terminology and understand basic epidemiology.
But the link between the rise in graduate programs, degrees, and post-grad education exploded during the draft years. It is much more clear cut than the BA/BS creep.
@blossom I was just writing a post saying the same thing.
MWolf-
Those days when being a high school graduate meant those things must have been before current college students’ parents went to high school (and even earlier, the “good old days” meant that white students in many areas did not see any black students in the schools, since the latter were forced into lower quality schools whose diplomas probably would not signal much even if the reader were not racist).
I remember attending a non-elite high school a few decades ago. About a third of graduates went to four year colleges, mostly state universities.
While there were good students in the college-bound cohort, there were others who were just marking time earning at least D grades to fulfill graduation requirements, who would be visible in required-for-graduation courses that included both them and the college-bound cohort (US history, civics, health, etc.). In electives that were less commonly taken by the college-bound cohort, the academic standards were quite low.
However, such graduates, while not as well prepared for the types of jobs requiring the skills you mention, could still get then-more-available blue-collar-type jobs.
Perhaps back then when they were graduating high school, there was not so much the pressure then for all strong students to attend college (indeed, it may have been discouraged especially for women in many contexts). So your elderly relatives may have been strong high school students with intellectual leanings, but were not pushed to college like similar people would be today.
My elderly relatives were mostly growing up in large families during the depression where the path was HS graduation to a job or the military. But the HS’s even in somewhat rural areas did a fine job (or so it seems) teaching literacy, math, a foreign language, social studies and geography, etc. You could not become a teacher or librarian or accountant without a college degree, but you could become a secretary/receptionist, paralegal, pharmacy assistant, insurance adjuster, sales rep for an industrial products company, bank teller, commodities assistant trader, bookkeeper, etc. and then climb the ladder.
Those were different times in many ways- but someone with a decent HS education could go head-to-head with a college graduate in a lot of fields. Sigh. If everyone on CC could take their anger and energy about Harvard and Princeton’s legacy policies (or the cause du jour) and use it to improve HS education in this country, that would be a wonderful thing.