"California is also close to bankruptcy "
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In other countries there are no counseling centers at the university for kids with learning disabilities. I have a cousin- tested off the charts in mathematical ability but some complex learning needs. In the US she’d be an engineer by now- in her country she works decorating cakes (no college education at all). In many parts of the world there are no dietitians making sure that a kid with a potentially fatal nut allergy doesn’t go into shock eating lunch on campus- so the kids with severe food allergies don’t go to college- or are limited to what they can commute to. In many parts of the world, college entrance is strictly gate-keeper style starting at age 11 or 12- so no late-bloomers, no kids who struggled in middle school but blossomed in HS in university.
I have family members overseas who are doctors, lawyers, engineers, plus those who have jobs which do not require a college education. They hope, pray, and work hard that their kids can attend university in the US. The next one to graduate HS will become a pharmacy assistant or a clerk if he stays in his country but his family knows that in the US he’ll be heading towards a BS and an actual career in Allied Health.
Lets keep in mind that the money that the USA spends on war in nine months is enough to send every college-age student through their masters degree for free. Peace is not only the right choice, but the cheaper choice.
The price of college has gone through the roof int he last few years. There is no debating that. But I wonder if it’s truly unaffordable for most students. Lots of time it comes down to people overlooking an affordable choice chasing brand names and prestige. For example, a friend of my daughter wants to attend Temple University with similar stats to my daughter. It’s and OOS school and it’s highly unlikely she will receive much or any merit money. But she and her parents are dead set on her going there. The most affordable option would be for her to attend am in-state GA State university since she qualifies for hope. But NO since she can’t get into GA Tech or UGA the rest of the schools are not good enough and Temple is more of a brand name(at least to them it is).
So how much is it about affordability vs bad choices?
@erohs the merits of military spending and its costs is another monster in itself. If we want to talk military spending, medicare and social security spending increases is just as much of a fiscal behemoth for the future. One fiscal problem at a time…
@sensation723 that’s another huge problem. These parents can borrow limitless money through Parent Plus and they can do this because the government backs this idiocy. We are so comfortable with debt in this country that it makes me sick a little. I still remember a counselor meeting my school set up for all seniors where they told everyone needed to go to college and “to borrow only as much as you expect as your first year’s income”. That’s it. The clueless attitudes of GC, the allure of rankings, feeling of entitlement for the “best” school possible, the brand name, and public perception pushes people to make stupid choices. Easy money from the fed government reinforces these dumb choices vs. having the tap shut and being SOL for OOS colleges or private universities. The tap needs to stop flowing to these attitudes and really limit where people should be heading if they don’t have the money in the first place. Easy money blew up the housing market. It is starting the bubble blow in colleges as well…
Well that’s an issue of sampling bias since CC is strongly concerned with rankings and has an overwhelmingly college educated user base. Most people won’t get full ride scholarships to even the state schools.
Say that A lives in Middle of Nowhere City, which is far enough away from home that driving is an issue - assuming that A’s parents can even afford a car for A to drive/be driven. A isn’t a great student, just like most people, and gets only a moderate scholarship + financial aid package that covers 70% of tuition, since he comes from a somewhat poor but not very poor family. Tuition costs $20k a year, plus $12k for housing to move close enough to the university to actually be able to go to class. The parents can’t or won’t give much money, so A will graduate with maybe $80k of debt. A knows that he/she is only a decent student, so that $80k will be pretty hard to pay off if the job search doesn’t go as well as he/she would like, or if he/she would like to pursue a somewhat lower paying career like teaching or social work instead of engineering or business. The other choice is to go to a cheaper vocational school of some sort that will be paid for in full, but will not open the same sort of opportunities that a university would.
I’ve known many people who are A who would go to school if it weren’t prohibitively expensive, and I know many other people who went, worked hard and finished school, but spent too many years in debt to justify going to even a state university. Safe to say they would have done better if school were free.
Limiting the loans would be a solution that might help.
Help to lower prices, or help to exclude people based on what they can afford?
@NeoDymium A doesn’t fall under most students. A would be the exception to the rule. There are not many people that live in towns like Nowhere town. And lots of states offer affordable in-state options and in-state aid. I know there are a few people that get screw because they live in states with high state tuition and little to know aid. PA is an example of this. But there are states like NY and GA that offer affordable options for their state residents. We can’t address the cost of college without addressing the chase for prestige and loans. It all plays a part.
I don’t disagree with the fact that state schools are more affordable than prestige schools and that affordability should play a role in your choice. I do reject the idea that the current system is somehow workable based on the premise that state universities are generally affordable for average students of modest means who may live a moderate distance from the closest budget university (say, 30-60 mile drive in one direction). Students like A need not actually live in the middle of nowhere, maybe just in a poorer part of town that is geographically far from affordable schools. And A is the kind of person who would benefit the most from college, not those of already pretty solid middle class means. A may be an exception among actual college bound students, but not among those who would go to college if the means were available to go without debt slavery.
"Because there are restrictions on who’s allowed to attend that “free” university!
In France and Germany, if you don’t make the cut in high school, you don’t get to attend university, period. I had a friend in France who screwed up in high school (and thus was ineligible for college), but whose family had enough money that he was able to re-do his final year of high school in a private school. I doubt such an option exists for most families."
That is ridiculous. Of course there are restriction on who’s allowed to attend university. US colleges worth attending as a rule aren’t exactly open enrolment either. In the countries you name, if you do not manage to pass the university entrance qualification, there are free public options to continue your education, though it may not be the option you would have liked.
In Germany, if you are tracked into a vocational middle school because you did not manage to make a B-average in grade school (yes, that’s all it takes) you can continue in vocational high school and reenter the academic track for FREE, with transitional classes offered - it just gets progressively harder to catch up if you have taken less rigorous classes for years. And kids who see their classmates enter professions and paraprofessional careers such as nursing, physical therapy, clerical careers in government, banks and insurance, paralegals, physicians assistant etc (yes, all those careers which In the US you’d have to shell out for a four year college for as opposed to either attend a vocational academy or technical college for free or even making money in a coop style training arrangement) making good money right after vocational high school simply lose interest. It does take either a good ability in delaying gratification on the part of the student or higher expectation on the part of the parents, which is where the socioeconomic divide comes from. NOT because any of those options cost so much money - even your living costs will be covered by federal grants. Yes, at some point you will have to pass those academic classes and pass those state wide or even nationwide entrance examinations in order to enter university. But between a quarter and half of university students, depending on their home state, have entrance qualifications gained through the vocational system.
I am not pretending the European systems are perfect - not at all! But if you screw up in high school, it will limit options in every country of the world. What would all those posts from panicked teenagers “I go a C in my sophomore year, am I screwed?” be about, then? And how about teenagers who did everything right, and there options are severely limited by their parents financial circumstances? What’s fairer about that?
I live in California and attend one of the “elite” UCs and I’m going to have to agree with @menloparkmom. California’s financial situation could be better, but we’re much more stable now than we were several years ago.
Also, proposition 13 is what hampers the state from funding the public education system as generously as it should, a law that was passed a few decades ago. College can be affordable and should be affordable because it’s a public good that benefits every sector of society. Many other developed countries guarantee free college educations(or “fully subsidized”, whatever term you prefer) to their people. I don’t see why we can’t do the same now, especially since we were doing this with relative ease as recently as 40-50 years ago in many states. Here in California, tuition didn’t even exist until the late '60s(Thanks, Gov. Reagan).
Yes, it’d come with higher taxes, but guess what? We had a higher tax burden back in the 50s and could afford to send many people to college without financially crippling them. And they didn’t have to deal with student loans.
I’m not an expert in financial math, but it seems more logical and more compassionate to everyone, to pay higher taxes now so that I and others don’t have to pay a ton of money in student loans every month after graduation.
If you really stop to examine the model by which we finance college education in America, it doesn’t really make sense and it’s pretty absurd. It’s not sustainable, as clearly evidenced by the fact that college tuition keeps going up and up. Even public universities have become unaffordable for large swaths of the population. On the view that college is a public good(and it is. I challenge anyone here to show me why it’s not), burdening so many people with loans isn’t morally acceptable. We as a society do great harm to many of our fellow Americans and ourselves by implicitly agreeing to maintain this private-good view of higher education with loans as the backbone of people’s efforts to pay for college.
And to those who might say that we can’t make college free/very affordable, I say that we can, but we’ve lost the political will and inclination over the past 30-40 years to make higher education accessible to all.
One misconception that I see being repeated over and over again in this thread is that kids are too enamored with fancy, expensive private schools and don’t pay enough attention to state schools. 73% of students attend public schools, most of them fairly close to home. This site just has a huge sampling bias.
Also, by definition, the average student can’t get much in the way of scholarships. Seeing as it’s in America’s best long term interest to have an educated population, we need to focus on these kids as well. We can’t brush off students and say, “Well, you should have gotten more scholarships”. That can be applied to a single student, but since scholarships by definition only go to the best, it’s not an overall solution. Even at state schools, college is too expensive. Does it need to be free? Probably not. But it needs to be cheaper.
Everyone wants things to be cheaper.
So what do you cut- the non-instructional staff which has exploded in the last two decades? Sure, close the cafeteria at 6:30 like it used to back in the day. Get rid of the psychiatric and counseling staff in the health center (at my college in the 1970’s if you needed counseling the nurse who staffed the infirmary would have suggested you go to the ER or go home to mom and dad). Get rid of the nice folks who staff the gym and fold the towels and get rid of the lawyers who are fighting the lawsuits brought by parents whose kid fell off a roof during a toga party and claim the university is at fault for having a roof on a building. Get rid of the Dean who works with kids who have a disability and get rid of the folks in building services who make sure that the portable ramps get shoveled before anything else so that the kid in the wheelchair can get to class. And of course- the sushi bar and the climbing wall and the nice baked goods in the cafe which is open all night.
Let’s get rid of all these things and universities can go back to budgeting like they did in the good old days.
Any takers?
Start by cutting the unnecessary real estate, the sort of fancy things that exist because the school is being given tuition money to spend on it, such as the new dorm rooms, the new fancy office buildings when the old ones more than sufficed. In the process, cut out the kind of people who really don’t belong in college, which will allow you to reduce the headcount on a lot of these staff expenses. And yes, cut out the kind of things that are nice luxuries, but that really aren’t necessary to being able to obtain a good, solid education that will do you good.
College doesn’t have to be a 4 year luxury cruise, especially not if someone has to pay for that. A lot of things that are nice but unnecessary are luxuries that the less affluent would prefer not to pay for if it means that they have to go into debt to get an education that they hope will get them further in life.
If people don’t want to pay the taxes, don’t buy liquor and cigarettes. They will be healthier and richer for it.
@CaliCash, CUNY’s decline started in 1970 when they offered open enrollment. They didn’t start charging tuition until 1976 butt the damage was done. Open enrollment in the four-year CUNY colleges ended in 2000 and all of those colleges have become more selective, with some of them quite selective.
I didn’t read the whole thread, but free college sounds ridiculously expensive (like what the heck levels of expense). There is no number of liquor or gasoline or tobacco taxes that could possibly make this even vaguely financially feasible.
A best case scenario/implementation is one where only the most financially needy or at risk of failing (first-gen, URM, etc.) get more money.
A worst case is one where we go really, really, really, really far in debt as a country paying for college education for students that would have to work a little harder, but didn’t truly NEED need the money. Cause no one’s turning down free money right?
Ideally, we change the culture of poorer and lower educated schools and school systems, so that students are more heavily motivated, are supported financially, emotionally, and educationally (is this the right term?) through elementary/middle/high school. This however, would also require the elimination cases of kids feeling like they had to sell drugs and commit crimes to survive, etc, as well as a massive cultural shift, beyond the scope of anything accomplished recently (at least with decent speed). With our best efforts, such a change would be an immense multi-generational effort that would require radical changes in social and education policy.
As a side note, master plumbers, along with other skilled craftsmen, make anywhere from $100K to $200K (or more!) a year, and only require apprenticeship and lots of effort. There is just a cultural stigma against such manual labor, even though it still requires expertise and experience, another thing that needs to be changed.
@Cayton said:
An equally good argument could be made that college is mostly a private good because the benefits primarily accrue to the student receiving the education. Therefore the student should pay for much or all of the education.
Except that’s not true. Marginal tax rates were much higher in the 50s, but the amount of collected federal tax is always in the range of 15-20% of GDP. Excessively high tax rates increase both legal tax avoidance and illegal tax evasion, and so the realized revenues are lower than expected from the tax increase.
What’s wrong with a student paying loans for a college education that he/she deemed was worthy of the price? And if the student chose poorly, shouldn’t he/she be on the hook for that first, and the taxpayers second?