@gallentjill I think it is a combination of UG and grad loans. But plenty are complaining about the $30k they owe and/or the loans they took out with their parents. There are so many threads on this site where people are contemplating taking out $100k+ in loans so their kids can go to the college they want to attend. They don’t realize what the monthly payment will be and /or how it will impact their ability to pay their bills, buy a house, lease a car etc…when they graduate.
I believe public schools should be affordable to any person living in the state! WHich they kind of are.
@gallentjill, students are limited to : the Direct Loan amounts of $26,000 or $57,500 if independent or if parents are turned down for PLUS, some other federal loan of a few thousand more, state loans if their state has such programs, private loans sometimes through the college or other venues. They also can get loans if co-signed by parents or other qualified person.
The co-signed loans are particularly insidious because they tend to last as long as either party is alive. If for some reason the student can’t paid, the lender goes after the parents. I’ve known senior citizens have their social security checks and tax refunds confiscated due to non payments to these loans.
So kids can actually gain access to a huge dollar amount in debt for college
For student financial aid info this report is the bible—it has many details regarding totals of institutional aid, government aid, and student loans. https://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/2018-trends-in-student-aid.pdf
There is an incredible amount of information to process and unpack in this report. Page 4 has some debt summary points, as you can see, annual student education borrowing has actually declined for a number of years in the last decade (makes sense due to the great recession)
Page 19 has some good data that shows what proportion of students have what level of debt. Page 22 shows bachelor’s degree debt, page 24 shows graduate school debt.
@vpa2019 :
I think there’s a confusion here: the idea/policy wouldn’t be that ANY 4-year college is FREE to ANYONE.
Want to go Out of State? Attend a pricey private? Or a college in a random city you’ve seen on TV? Your problem: earn a scholarship, use your trust fund, get a loan even. No one “needs” a private college or an OOS university.
But if a student has worked hard and been admitted to a public university in their state, they should be able to afford to go without debt and they should be able to take their classes without a financial burden. It’s especially important because a college degree is necessary nowadays for a working class or middle class job. People shouldn’t be in that bind: either you take on debt or you’ll end up poor.
Students shouldn’t be crippled for years because they attended their state’s own public university and they should not have to turn down an acceptance to their flagship, which distinguished them for admission but didn’t provide enough financial aid. Optimally, no one should have to travel to other states because of affordability.
(They could be able to, but they should not have to. I’m guessing even Tuition-Free Rutgers wouldn’t be sufficient for upper middle class NJ students.)
Note also that the idea exposed above, pretty consistently, is to have tuition-free post-high school education, so that you can have a credential beside a HS diploma. It doesn’t mean “4-year college for all” at all. Or at least I don’t think I’ve seen it defended on the thread.
Other developed countries have caught up in terms of % of 25-34 year olds with college degrees: 36% in the US, which is below Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Switzerland, and the UK. Most European countries are catching up and most also offer vocational 2-year degrees (HNDs, BTS, FachHochSchule Diplom…) The myth of US open-ness v. triage and selectivity in Europe is no longer true.
The first question should be why is college so expensive? Could it be provided at a cheaper cost? That’s the more fundamental issue: not whether kids take out federal loans or private loans cosigned by their parents.
My issue is holding up European universities as a model for free tuition because the systems, admissions criteria, flexibility of areas of study etc… are significantly different than the US. What Americans expect/want in their university experience is different than what their European counterparts receive. European schools don’t have all the amenities American students expect, they often don’t provide housing, all you can eat dining with lots of options, the lectures have hundreds of students so less interaction with professors, often they take fewer classes per semester with more independent learning, less flexible curriculums. Is the answer to streamline/strip down the public schools to the European model to control costs? To me it’s an apples to oranges comparison.
No, there are fundamental issues before that. I’d say, why so many see a college degree ss the only path.
I think states could offer a free education for everyone, but not at the flagship level. States could even out all schools to the same tuition level, take the ‘best’ professors and spread them around, assign students to the college in their ‘zone’ just like we do for public elementary schools. We could say “If you want to choose, you need to go to a private school” and then give no public funding to any private schools. I don’t think California public schools have enough room for all Californians who want to go to school there. Vermont might, Montana might, but most states rely on private schools to relieve the burden. This is true even in public grade schools. NYC school district could not absorb all the students currently in private and parochial schools.
If only rich people can afford private schools, we are going to create even more of a ‘Haves’ and “Have Not” system.
I have one who went to an (inexpensive) OOS public, and one who went to a very expensive instate private. I don’t think their lives would have been drastically different if they’d been ‘forced’ to go to an instate directional.
There is a fascinating study which I hope I can link to that shows that in the various regions of the US, the levels of equality and social mobility in immigrants countries of origin are being replicated in the areas in which this particular group of immigrants dominates - right down to college access, and it affects everyone living in that region, whether they belong to that particular ethnic group or not.
https://voxeu.org/article/immigration-inequality-and-intergenerational-mobility-us
So, college access is easier in the Midwest due to its German and Scandinavian immigrant patterns, with large public’s being culturally accepted, and harder in places where English or Italian groups have historically dominated.
I do not think Americans would ever feel comfortable looking to Europe for models to replicate - look at the health care debate! But one could look at states in the US where college access works for a vast majority and replicate that. Not sure which mythical perfect state that would be, probably different aspects in various states that work. But I do know that if anyone were to offer a college experience modelled on German universities, American students wouldn’t want to go!
^ Are you saying that if the American college format was changed to the European model American students would stop attending college? I doubt that. They would just adjust their expectations of what post-secondary education was all about and still attend. What would be the alternative?
This could be the opportunity to create a new model.
Keep the class format and support - but don’t “bundle” the amenities. But since colleges make a lot of money from “bundling” high-cost meal plans+dorms+gym+?, they might not go that route. “Get rid of your money-makers so students don’t have to take loans” isn’t going to float, especially if loss of revenue isn’t compensated by the States (and often, it won’t be).
One has to remember that you have lots of higher education settings in Europe, not just universities.
While I wouldn’t recommend the French university model, the BTS and IUT are great systems, to the point I wonder why American students haven’t tried those! Instead of mega lecture halls with zero professor contact, they offer intense instruction in small class settings. BTS is selective but relatively easy to get into (especially for STEM), IUT is pretty selective.
Their downside is that there’s little “community”. There’s support, there’s help in finding internships (mandatory), there’s a social life (you are with the same 24 or 30 people 35 hours a week so you can organize parties) but everybody goes home on weekends.
“I don’t think California public schools have enough room for all Californians who want to go to school there.”
What is the evidence for this? Not enough room at desirable UCs perhaps. But how many qualified kids are shut out of UC Merced or Chico State? And that’s even before mentioning the option of community college followed by transferring to a four year college.
Myos- I’d love the evidence that colleges make money on meal plans and dorms.
The non-academic money maker is athletics. The reason many colleges have outsourced their dining hall operations to large commercial companies is precisely because it is TOO hard to make any money running what is essentially an all day, multi location restaurant, with an “all you can eat” clientele. The days when a college could offer breakfast, lunch and dinner where the operation shut down at 7 pm (like when I went to college- you got hungry at 8 pm? Find a local diner. No such thing as using your dining hall credits at a University owned snack bar).
I think you’ve got the economic model backwards.
Do European universities teach remedy classes in community colleges?
I just looked at the class schedule in a community college in California and found that there 9 remedy English classes before English 101 and more than 10 remedy math classes before College Algebra.
Do community colleges exist to support failed high middle and high schools?
@gwnorth, well part of what I’m saying is that in the US, there always is an alternative, and the application pressure on private schools would simply grow.
There are some states which have aspects of the European model, such as the SUNYs (right down to ugly architecture), some California schools (impacted majors, huge classes, little advising, some campuses with high commuter populations and now big sports) etc. Students hate it, and only go if they have to. Unless ALL schools change, the most desirable students won’t have to.
I would disagree that students hate SUNYs or UCs. Upper middle class students whose grades or family income provide alternatives sure, they can afford to hate SUNYs, UCs, not to mention Rutgers. But there are plenty families who don’t care that the buildings are ugly or the sport teams bad, they’re fine with affordable price/good academics.
https://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/finances/ suggests that very few colleges actually make money on athletics.
Perhaps there may be a few more if having athletics attracts more donations, but has the effect of athletics on donations ever been carefully measured (versus assumed)?
You are likely to be correct. Most college students in the US commute (from where they lived before college) to local community colleges or universities.
Agree that some major unbundling might need to happen. I know of no college town or city in Europe in which it is LESS expensive to move out of the dorms and cook for yourself. Seriously, how expensive can it be for schools to house young adults in bunk beds in double rooms and feed them cafeteria food, and frequently in the middle of nowhere? None of this needs to be substandard for economies of scale to kick in. It’s an unholy racket.
I’d posit that Pell grants and subsidised loans could be rolled into one, with the quota going from all grant (for low income students to all loans for high income students, for four years, to be used exclusively for room and board, with colleges who accept these funds being required to offer meal plans and/or housing at cost, up to the amount the grant/loan amount is capped - including capital costs, unless a school considers those part of the endowment.
This helps students who choose schools in low COL areas and hurts students in high COL areas. A feature, not a bug.
Student fees (the climbing walls, lazy rivers, clubs, athletics, gyms, laundry) to be billed separately. It’s not “free”!
Tuition charged is up to the college. As long as there is a seamless system for all state schools, with rising scholarships the further a student goes down the food chain, no yield protection allowed.