<p>College Students' Financial Burden Is About to Get Worse </p>
<p>By Tim Jones and Jodi S. Cohen </p>
<p>Chicago Tribune </p>
<p>March 5, 2006 </p>
<p>'CHICAGO Margo Alpert is on the 30-year plan. Every month, $500 to $600 is automatically deducted from her salary to pay off college loans. By the time the 29-year-old Chicago public interest lawyer is in her mid-50s and thinking seriously about retirement, she will finally be free of college debt. </p>
<p>"It's going to be part of my life forever," Alpert said. "I don't think about it at all because it's just a fact of life." '</p>
<p>i pray that USA will do what UK has already done, and set a low maximum tuition for citizens, I think $10,000 would be a good limit, its 3000 pounds in UK.</p>
<p>Eventually it will get too expensive for anyone to get a college education in this country if rates keep going up like this.</p>
<p>Yes we are looking at a new aristocracy where the rich and educated keep getting more rich and educated while the poor become more poor and less educated as they cannot pay for higher standards of education.
This is also apparent from the growing highest 5% and lowest 5% income gaps in the United States.</p>
<p>Need-based aid is based on the principle that the poor go for almost free and the rich pay full price. The problem is that "rich" is defined as middle class. </p>
<p>There needs to be some accountability in the public's mind for where the tuition is going. A normal tuition at the brand-name private schools is about $800 per week. Consider that what you get for the money is a campus with buildings, cut grass, and 20 hours of classtime with professors who are teaching 20 students at a time. I'm sure that colleges are using the money for research and so forth, but come on.</p>
<p>Of course you don't have to pay that. There are public alternatives.</p>
<p>
[quote]
"College is about opening doors to our nation's young people," he said. "Excessive student loan debt has the effect of closing those same doors by limiting the choices students can make."
[/quote]
...(quote from Luke Swarthout in the sited article)</p>
<p>Wow, so true. It is so tempting to attend the most selective college to which you can gain admission. It is so easy to take out those loans when pay-back is far away. You never think about it being an anchor around your neck later on. I wonder if students like Margo Alpert would make the same decision in hindsight?</p>
<p>Seriously, middle classers get hit the hardest. Lower class people get well deserved aid, upper class people can PAY full sticker price...but middle classers are stuck in limbo. We don't "qualify" for need based aid, but yet realistically we can't fork over $40,000 a year for education.</p>
<p>If the low-class gets deserved financial aid, great for them.
If the high-class has worked hard enough to get to the position to pay for it full price, great for them . . . </p>
<p>But the middle class just can't realistically handle it without certain alternatives, and it really worries me paying for college.</p>
<p>although 45000 a year is alot for almost everybody but is 125000 a year really very middle class or alittle more upper middle class i suppose it depends on where you live such as long island but in many parts of the country i dont believe that that is that incedibly low. i reilize that 45000 is a very large percentage and that is your point but it seems like many people on this site have a very distorted view of what middle class truly is.</p>
<p>I live just outside DC and 125000 is not that much for a family income. I think the figure of 125000 was chosen since that is just about where need-based aid goes to zero. I agree that people making that money are better off than alot of other people, but it is a two family income. Paying 45K per year for college is almost 4K per month. Somehow the people running finan aid have figured that a family where both parents are working and making an average income can afford to pay 2K per month each.</p>
<p>Lower income people aren't always better off if the colleges "gap" you. Our income is about $42,000 with three kids approaching college age and a college my daughter applied to expects us to pay $13,000 a year! That's in addition to her own student loans and working.</p>
<p>$125,000 is definitely middle class here in Northern NJ. House prices are insane, the smallest houses here go for at least 300-400 thousand. When you consider that 125,000 after taxes is only about 75,000, expecting a family like that to contribute the full $45,000 a year is ludicrous.</p>
<p>That's not as bad as Northern Virginia. Where I used to live, an average-big house my family bought with NO yard at all and almost NO spaces between other houses was 1.2 million and it was INCREASING!</p>
<p>Students should be counseled to NOT take on such debt. </p>
<p>Why should the US Treasury (i.e., other tax payers) fund kids to attend private colleges, when each and every state has land-grant public colleges (land grant was funded by federal goverment) where a great education can be had? Furthermore, there are many great second tier colleges that literally throw merit money at students -- dro down a tier or two and go to school less expensively than an in-state public. With 3,000 colleges in the US, many go begging for students well into the summer, and provide discounts the closer to September.</p>
<p>Given the abysmal state of our elementary, middle, and high school education (50% dropout in many cities), IMO, the Govt should be focusing on trying to keep those kids in school to learn. Its not the fact that middle class kids can't afford HYPSM that is creating wealth disparities, it's the fact that over half of Los Angeles teenagers do not even earn a high school diploma. Solving that issue would make society much, much better off, than by funding elite college education for top 10% income brackets.</p>
<p>ACA: UVa is one of the top public Unis in the world, and cheap in-state. William & Mary is one of the top LAC's, also cheap.</p>