<p>“Loans at Cal after graduation are about $16k. Looks pretty affordable to me”.</p>
<p>Maybe but highly unlikely… The average student debt after graduation figures are almost always only reporting the average amount of outstanding Stanford student loans. </p>
<p>The numbers do not include private loans by students or parents, parent-plus loans, and expenses paid out of pocket or on other forms of credit. </p>
<p>It is entirely possible (and often likely) that a student will graduate owing (with their parents) more than $100,000 and the reported debt still shows only $27,000 (if they received the maximum amount of Stamford loans). </p>
<p>Reporting and publishing “the average amount of student debt at graduation” is the worse kind of lie, if for no other reason other than it is such an institutionalized lie. And many people who should know better quote it to other people don’t know any better, Yet.</p>
<p>Speaking from a “good” public school district in the suburban Northeast, it is unfortunate that the middling HS students get the message from other adults (not their parents) that their parents should have $300,000 cash, per kid, after taxes, laying around for a degree that the kid may not finish, at an academically undistinguished school. Yes, $50,000 times 6 years, with a 50/50 chance of the middling student walking across the stage to pick up the degree at the end of the six years.</p>
<p>This is $600,000 if you have two kids, or $900,000 pretax, at the tax rates that apply to people whose income most certainly does not not put them anywhere near the 1%, considering the cost of living in this region.</p>
<p>The message filters to the kids through guidance counselors who don’t remind the kids that cost is a consideration, teachers, coaches, college reps who come to the HS and say “reach for your dream! it doesn’t matter what it costs!” and most of all, from peers, who learn in grade school to turn their noses up at more affordable college options. And the dream, in many cases with middling students, is only vaguely academic – it’s more a dream of checking into a resort for 18-22 year olds.</p>
<p>I guess the only antidote is speaking frankly and clearly with your own kid. But it’s unfortunate that the societal momentum is in an unrealistic direction.</p>
<p>*It is entirely possible (and often likely) that a student will graduate owing (with their parents) more than $100,000 and the reported debt still shows only $27,000 (if they received the maximum amount of Stamford loans). *</p>
<p>If the students parents allow them to go into $25,000 of debt a year, amassing over $100,000 for an undergraduate degree, then they have failed as parents.</p>
<p>Chardo: “Best way to deal with it, the only foolproof college plan, is to be an outstanding student. From before first grade, stress that nothing is more important than school. Never settle for or be satisfied with a B. No excuses. Everyone can be a straight-A student if they put in the effort, and parents need to unconditionally demand and expect that effort.
The payoff is scholarship options and merit aid. There will always be schools, many of them excellent, that will pay a top student to come there.”</p>
<p>Okay, so are you crazy enough to believe that our kids aren’t getting aid because they are not straight A students? My daughter worked hard and it wasn’t because I pushed her, it was because she pushed herself: intrinsic value, I believe is better than extrinsic. DD was a 4.47 gpa and she got a whopping $307 scholarship. She was an outstanding student, but there were also 62 other straight A kids in her class that had above 4.0’s in her AP classes. Being a good student doesn’t necessarily translate into automatic merit aid and scholarships. And she’s an URM! In 2008, when there were still monies, my eldest daughter got full tuition and her gpa was 4.2. There is not enough room for all of these kids at our state schools in California.</p>
<p>It’s unfortunate, but that country probably disappeared when baby-boomers started having kids of their own. There was a time when college professors, particularly at elite insitutions, were expected to live within walking distance of work (even if that meant an apartment building or a house on a tiny lot), wear jackets with patches on the elbows (assuming they were men), and qualify for financial aid if and when they sent their own kids to a good school. Their one perk was that they had three months “off” during the summer, during which, in most cases, they were expected to keep up with research in their fields. If they were extremely lucky they could look forward to tenure after five or six years and move to a slightly bigger house on a slightly bigger lot, also near school. </p>
<p>Not a bad life if you were sufficiently motivated by teaching, research and a certain altruism; many of them, not so far removed from the “Greatest Generation”, could have made much more money in more lucrative fields. I believe one of the things that happened over the years was that the differential between what professors were making and and what many of their students could expect to make the moment they graduated from law school, or upon signing with an i-bank, or consulting firm just grew too big. The spectre of some of the nation’s best and brightest students being taught by people who could not compete with them intellectually grew so uncomfortably close to reality that the decision was made to pump more money into salaries until they were commensurate with the upper middle class families whose children they were teaching. </p>
<p>Tk21769 might disagree with me about this, but I think it goes a long way to explaining why college costs have exceeded the rate of inflation for the past thirty years.</p>
<p>The problem with this narrative is that faculty salaries are not driving the increase in college costs. And most faculty still don’t make nearly as much on average as doctors or investment bankers. Faculty salary is very discipline-dependent, also.</p>
<p>The increase in college pricing is due to 1) more and more layers of administration; 2) far more extensive student services, including tech support, psychological/learning disability support, and student activities; 3) construction of lavish facilities. It is true that the costs of faculty (and other employee) benefits have soared in the past 30 years, but those increases have been shared in every industry, not just academe.</p>
<p>Most shocking part of this to me is that there’s an upper middle class still. Also the idea of being taught by people who can’t compete intellectually, sounds a lot like a mere extension of K-12.</p>
<p>Nice fantasy, but it has nothing to do with the rise in the cost of college attendance. It is well known that most colleges are hiring more and more low paid faculty and less and less tenure track professors.</p>
<p>The increase in the cost of college has nothing to do with education and everything to do with the bloated administration salaries, the increase in the number of administrators and, at the state colleges, the overly bloated “pensions” collected upon retirement by these same administrators.</p>
<p>In other words, less educational return on dollar invested for the students.</p>
<p>People either will or will not figure it out. Makes no difference to me. We could pay for our kids’ education. I’m not talking about us. I’m talking about what I see as someone with no dog in the fight at all, with the exception of an interest in the kids who are being ripped off left and right getting what they actually deserve, before they go on to live in the abysmal economy they are being left by the selfish entitled ego-driven “leaders” in this current generation as they embody greed and waste and petty thievery from their own kids.</p>
<p>^^yea, but even assuming nothing else went up but health insurance benefits (and that’s a big “if”), why would that not be enough to be a driver of college costs? Faculty are by far the largest single human resource budgetary item on any college campus.</p>
<p>I think for better or worse, we live in a country where being paid for intellectual work of any sort (whether or not it’s connected with teaching) is still highly supect. There was an otherewise intelligent interviewee on one of last Sunday’s morning news shows who blithley suggested that American taxpayers should NOT be paying for NASA to send probes to other planets – that private industry should be paying for it!</p>
Merit scholarships are designed to attract high-achieving students who would otherwise go elsewhere. They are available to the top x%. If every applicant has great stats, the school will no longer pay to attract those students.
I’ve gone through the SHEEO finance data in past threads. Some state systems do a better job of controlling costs than others.</p>
<p>Thanks for the link to the UC COA, santookie. UC tuition is no higher than the tuition in my state … it’s the living expenses that are higher, which I suppose makes sense (as living expenses are higher in CA). Students can save by living off campus, and those who can commute to a UC can save by living at home. The tuition itself isn’t that high as public schools go (not saying that it’s LOW, of course).</p>
<p>*Faculty are by far the largest single human resource budgetary item on any college campus.
*</p>
<p>The profs I know at big universities, have outside funding that pays the bulk of their salary.
Our state governor, had a fit earlier this year when the upcoming contract at my Ds school allowed for a raise. An asst prof makes $55,300. Is that really so astronomical?</p>
<p>Average US full-time faculty salary is around $80,000/year. The “load” for leave, benefits, etc. at my college is about 30%, so that makes $80,000*1.3=$104,000. Say the typical Student:Teacher ratio at colleges is 16:1, then each student needs to pay $104,000/16=$6,500/year for faculty salaries.</p>
<p>It depends on the school. A tenured professor at Yale makes a lot more; even an associate professor is projected to make $108,000 in 2013. That’s about 30% more than their 1975 counterparts were making, adjusted for inflation.</p>
<p>The last figures I have for salaries for lecturers is for 2006 and they could make as much as $53,000 a year, up from $12,000 in 1975. They were not doing quite as well as their full-time colleagues; they were only beating inflation by about 20%.</p>