Average cost of raising a child in middle income families currently runs to nearly a quarter million dollars.
I believe free college was going to be paid for by raising taxes on the 1%? That’s what I’ve heard, anyway
Ha! ^^
THAT only happens if Sanders gets elected President AND the majority of Republican congressman get thrown out of office in the next 2 years. Fat chance of both happening. .
What about those (like me) who say “My kids aren’t likely to have a problem obtaining postsecondary education, but way too great a proportion of our population does”?
There’s more than just two (or three, even) sides to this whole discussion.
The 99% apparently couldn’t agree to do it, even with help from some of the 1%.
For the PA residents, what is wrong with Pitt engineering? Temple? Penn State is the flagship, main campus, but there are ABET accredited programs at other campuses too. If there is an ABET accredited program,. all the standard engineering requirements are offered. Start here http://main.abet.org/aps/accreditedprogramsearch.aspx
There is no ABET accredited engineering program that will not get you an engineering job.
And if engineering yields a 70K a year income out of school, I think 20K debt is servicable, maybe more.
And as far as CC goes, even engineering has 2 years of fairly basic classes that should be offered. Let’s exclude AP credits, since the goal is to enter a 4 year school at the junior level with only the required classes, so AP or CC are functionally equivalent. Let’s say you are still missing one or two sophomore classes, can’t you go to the 4 year school for summer class or even 3 years?
Let’s also face the fact that engineering in 4 years is pretty challenging and that many people either take longer or leave the major all together. So the outcome of a motivated CCer taking prerequisites and some interesting offerings at CC, then evaluating their GPA and interests and transferring … it’s really not a bad option, unless you are a top 10 or 20% student, in which case there are places you can go … or you can just suck it up, get As while working at Walmart and making yes $8K a year which adds up to a good pile of cash, and then using those savings to help pay room at board somewhere.
Finally - it’s all about voting - I also am shocked at how high some states have priced their schools - but these are often states where taxes were capped years ago (NJ) or likely where taxpayers supported really severe cutbacks in state services.
Students who work greater than about 20 hours during the school year have much poorer graduation rates. There are only so many hours in a day.
For engineering, it is very common for students to take 5 years as a way to decrease stress and course load.
It definitely depends on the major and university. For Connecticut I would strongly advise potential CS majors to avoid going to a community college. If they transfer to UConn they’ll have to start the CS curriculum from the beginning since UConn doesn’t convert community college classes to UConn classes for CS. I think the CT State universities are a little more generous. Even many natural science courses don’t transfer. So in this case you’ll need to retake them or just transfer early.
This begins to defeat the purpose of going to a community college to save money. Many people do have difficulty maintaining a full-time course load in engineering fields, but it’s usually not because they have to retake classes they’ve already passed.
It seems like these problems are less common in other states. The fact that UConn is the special snowflake of Connecticut public universities and has far more academic offerings than the others is probably the cause of this.
I’m not at all sure sending more kids to college is the solution. We are seeing more and more students who can’t perform at the level their degree advertises.
For some people, college is not the right choice. For them, a skilled trade might be better. High schools push college on everyone regardless of talent. We need to make better choices about post secondary education.
Another issue for those who want to go into health care, other science or engineering graduate programs is that a number of those programs require that you take all your science courses at a 4 year school.
However, the typical student loan debt level is:
$36,935 Penn State (system average)
$36,466 Pittsburgh
$35,750 Temple
The high debt levels are likely due to the poor in-state financial aid.
Also, one cannot predict where in the industry and economic cycle it will be four or five years from now. If one is unlucky enough to graduate in a downturn (when a $70,000 per year job will be hard to get) with a high debt load, that can be trouble.
Laboratories of democracy…
What this thread shows is that many states could invest more in public colleges, including establishing clearer paths to transfer from a juco, but choose not to. They spend their dollars elsewhere.
So yeah, in those states with high public education costs, or rural flagships, it can be difficult to obtain an education on the cheap. (years ago, I got into it with a then long-time poster on cc about the cost of UMass, and that it was not all that accessible. While she was correct, my point was that the forefathers of MA made a conscious decision to park their Uni in the beautiful Berkeshires. And then my question to her, who was supporting more federal funding, why should other states have to pay for that decision, particularly if they chose to build colleges in their urban centers, making them more accessible?)
btw: even the ease-of-transfer issue is not simple computer coding. It took the California Legislature to mandate that the three college systems work together. But it can be accomplished, if states make it a higher priority.
This isn’t really central to the whole discussion, but a very mild objection: Yes, Massachusetts made a conscious decision to place their flagship campus well away from the main population center of the state. This isn’t always the case, though, even if present-day eyes might see it that way—Alaska isn’t alone, for example, in having placed its flagship campus in what was at the time the population center (in that case, Fairbanks), only to have demographic history make that choice look silly in retrospect.
UMass is not in the Berkshires.
^^Perhaps, but your example only reinforces my point: Fairbanks was booming in 1910 and the state established a land grant college there. But, the population shifted over time, and the state added a college in Anchorage, which is now twice the size of the initial campus in Fairbanks.
In contrast, while UMass-Boston is growing, it is still half the size of the “Berkshires flagship,” which years’ later is still financially inaccessible to the vast majority of the poor in the state (who live in the Boston environs). Besides hard to get to, making commuting impossible, rural college towns don’t have much in the way of opportunities for off-campus works, the point of this thread.
IMO, that is a choice/priority made by the state population.
Incidentally, the UCs were also land-grant colleges, and founded at the same time at UMass, but UC opened its first campuses in urban centers.
Perhaps it is not a coincidence that two other states with relatively poor in-state affordability for their public universities (PA, IL) have flagship schools located away from major population centers?
Amhert made perfect sense - a big, important farm town - for the location of an agricultural college in the 19th century.
One other thought: Rural land is nearly always cheaper than urban land. Those who would argue that states should economize on higher-ed expenses while also arguing that states should expand urban higher-ed opportunities are in some ways speaking out of both sides of their mouths.
Suburban office parks are going for cheap these days OTOH. I think we’ll see (likely are already seeing) more and more satellite campuses in them.
Not all such places have that good access for commuter students, with both poor public transportation connectivity and heavy unpredictable commute traffic.