I agree those days are over. It should be pointed out that more than 90% of high school students are in public schools. Spending has literally exploded over the past 50 years at the K-12 level, more than tripling in real terms, so it is not a funding issue. Doing less with more is the essence of government.
I marvel when I read the journals of the men from the Endurance. They were sailors, not educated, but the writing…wow. However, before I can wax nostalgic for the good old days when a hs diploma meant something, I must remind myself that in my parents’ era and before, there was no requirement that the needs of special ed students be met. Can’t speak English? Come back when you can (happened to my great aunt). We wouldn’t be seeing threads about students with LDs or MIs because its likely even finishing high school wouldn’t have been an option. Graduation rates were much, much lower for everyone and especially for women and minorities. There was corporal punishment in the schools, teachers needed just a two year associate’s degree, and failing out/being expelled was a lot more common. Trust me, none of you would be going on about how well my dad could write and think with his high school diploma, earned in the 40s. Were all hs grads really that much better educated? Those teachers with 2 year degrees weren’t offering calculus, and gifted ed wasn’t a thing; you just got pushed up a grade. So, I have to ask myself, was it really all that much better?
^ Yes.
Colleges are meant for higher education, not teaching someone skills and knowledge s/he should have learned in high school. They’re also not meant to be the best four years of everyone’s life.
Ordinary- I did not suggest (nor do I believe) that it was better for everyone. Women who could have been PhD’s in neuroscience became LPN’s (or nursing assistants as it was called then); minorities who could have (and should have) become lawyers and corporate leaders became receptionists and clerks. So not better for everyone.
But the baseline for what a HS provided was higher. Calculus? I meet kids who graduate from HS who haven’t taken algebra or trig. And yes, their teachers have Master’s degrees (not the two year’s of old) and STILL can’t teach geometry or percentages to kids of average intelligence. I tried to get a quote on flooring at Home Depot recently- the computer was down, so the very nice sales clerk asked me to come back. I did a quick calculation on the calculator on my phone (and I am no math genius, and am not a tech genius) and the clerk was amazed. I pointed out that if you know the price per square yard (which is prominently posted) and you know how much you need (which I provided) then you just multiply. And then add the sales tax. He was gobsmacked that a customer could do what his temporarily disabled computer could not.
So very sad. Calculus? Please. This is a fourth grade worksheet.
Why is college so expensive? Because schools that charge $75k/year get more than 10x the number they can handle to apply to go there. Sure not all are going to be full pay, but basic economic theory basically tells you to charge what the market is willing to pay for the product.
Economics is about scarcity management. I can choose to have a large house, a new BMW, the latest iPhone, or send my kid to private school. If I’d rather have the former, maybe OOS public or in state public. It is a free market and consumers and providers agree on what to pay for something that is of an agreed upon value. If you don’t like the cost of the product, you can always choose not to buy it. It is not a right to go to Harvard. If enough people choose not to pay it, then the provider will have to lower their price to the amount that consumers are willing to pay.
Government funding in research doesn’t pay for undergraduate tuition. It pays for the labs and salaries that support the research that they fund. Sure, there may be some mutual benefit in that maybe some grad student who is helping out on funding also teaches or TA’s a class or two, but the cut in government funding isn’t what is driving education costs up. It is purely an economic equation that is one of the most basic.
Finally, if you want to pay less for education, there are options. The real value of education at Purdue has actually decreased over the last eight years as they have held tuition (and I believe room/board) flat over that time period. So with inflation included, it is actually cheaper to get a great degree today then it was 8 years ago.
@BrianBoiler: I like your post, but wonder if you meant “cost” instead of “value” in the first line of the last paragraph.
I love your Home Depot story! I can just imagine the amazed clerk! 
I agree completely with all the comments about the standard of living for college increasing steadily over time. When I compare my freshman dorm - no air conditioning in the south – to the dorms now – and new ones being built constantly that are bigger and nicer with so many amenities – of course they cost more!
And the demands for every kind of dietary preference to be accommodated in cafeterias is expensive. We had one cafeteria line at my small liberal arts college with the only alternatives to that being a baked potato or a hamburger. Today, kids are eating sushi (really!) in their college cafeterias, along with a myriad of other options. An all you can eat buffet that is open almost all hours IS EXPENSIVE.
So, bottom line, kids are borrowing money to eat extravagantly, and financing that over decades! That just isn’t smart. As other posters comment, there are less expensive ways to get an education.
I have always wondered about figures showing government funding per student for state schools. I have even looked online and can’t find anything. What is the subsidy by state or by university per student?
@Publisher you are correct. I did mean cost.
@deborahb it isn’t exactly one for one, but you can get a close estimate by taking the difference between instate and out of state tuition. That difference can give you a decent scale. Another way would be to pull up a state budget, find the line item for the university, take that and divide by # of in state students. I guess that would give you the true amount of state spending per student. Those numbers should be public. But because they come from government run organizations, they probably aren’t that intuitive and easy to find.
@Blossom. Most kids today can’t count back change when going to a store if the cash register is not working or electronic … Doing what you asked for is considered advance math…
My sons at Michigan and I don’t see any lazy rivers. For what we pay OOS there should be one though) :. Climbing walls… Well I am sure the rec center had one being a division 1 sport college. His first year he was placed in West Quad. The dorm is like a nice hotel. Seemed to be mostly OOS students and athletes like the football team.
Then this year he is in Northwood 3 campus apartments. Think like a really crappy apartments, old like 1940 but with a decent amount of room. He likes both types actually.
They do tend to run Michigan like a business I guess. They get almost no state money but have like $11 billion in endowments. I think recently they just raised like 5 more. So maybe they don’t need state money then but with that much money why are the kids paying so much tuition. I feel they could easily lower tuition for all without really feeling negative effects. Let’s just say make OOS $5,000 less. Can’t imagine that would affect their bottom line at all.
And we wonder why folks don’t realize they are taking on a mortgage they can’t repay or taking on too much educational debt when they can’t calculate a 5% sales tax on a $10 purchase?
This sounds like a lot of “get off my lawn”, waxing poetic about the fictional good old days of great HS educations.
High school students then, as now, were everything from brilliant to very challenged. Some were offered some great educations (if they were wealthier, white and/or lucky enough to be in an area that valued it highly), many - even most -were not.
Was Calculus a universal skill at some point in history? When was this, exactly, that all HS grads were able to do trig? (or even algebra)?
HS grads today…their cursive sucks, too.
@ohio_mom. Cursive sucks since they are told they don’t need it anymore. They need typing skills for their computers. Soon, it will be just voice recognition skills… “Alexa, type out…”
It pains me to watch my 19 year old handwrite anything these days. I don’t think their hand muscles are developed for something like a pen /pencil.
When I was in high school, graduation standards were lower. The math requirement for high school graduation may have only been algebra 1 (maybe geometry). Now, it is common for high schools to require geometry and algebra 2 (or integrated math 3) least for graduation.
The state of high school education in the US is not good now, but idealizing the “good old days” is misleading because they were nowhere near as good as believed (even for those who were not members of outgroups).
Very true. But they have OTHER skills that we didn’t. I did restaurant/bar work around my college time. We wrote down orders on paper checks, punched them into a cash register maybe.
Now servers and bartenders have to learn relatively complex computer systems. But those systems send the order to the kitchen and total everything and give inventory reports, yadda yadda. I bet servers today aren’t very good at writing neat orders the kitchen staff can read. Or totaling checks.
I enjoy the Home Depot and broken cash register stories because similar anecdotes have been around since handheld calculators and cash registers became the norm in retail.
Darn abacus - the beginning of the end of good arithmetic skills.
Many public schools in states that adopted common core have eliminated cursive because it’s not in the curriculum, and no time to teach it.
Common? Where? Lake Wobegone, where all the children are above average?
It’s amazing to me when my son’s teacher in middle school said, “don’t worry about handwriting… We are not really teaching that anymore”. I have to admit, I do speech recognition with Dragon for years for my clinical charts and it’s much easier and faster…
https://local-resources.ucdavis.edu/local_resources/docs/catalog/GenCat19461947.pdf is a course catalog from a state flagship university in 1946-47.
Math courses are listed starting page 334.
Note the remedial/developmental offerings:
G = high school geometry
D = high school algebra 2
C = high school trigonometry
1 = high school precalculus (other than trigonometry)
This suggests that the idealized notion that high school graduates in the “good old days” were far more competent at math than they are now is mistaken, since even those who went to college at the state flagship were often expected to need math courses that are now considered very low level in the context of college bound high school students.
Note that women back then had restricted housing choices, described on page 56. This is likely why the housing cost estimate was higher for women than men on page 52.