Posted on 03/18/2018 7:53:39 AM PDT by reaganaut1
The cost of college has risen at more than twice the rate of inflation for decades, and the increasing availability of federal student loans is a principal cause. But even as demands grow daily to do something about student debt and loan defaults, hardly anyone laments the demise of a once-proud American aspiration: working your way through college.
In 1956, as a freshman at Yale, I waited tables in a student dorm for about $1 an hour, 10 hours a week, over the 30-week academic year. I received a full scholarship, but even if it had ended, I recall that Yale’s “all in” price—including tuition, room and board—was $1,800 a year. My work during the term could have covered one-sixth of that.
Today tuition, room and board at Yale run $66,900. Working the same amount as I did—even at, say, $12 an hour, an increase of roughly one-third after inflation—produces income of $3,600, or slightly more than 5% of the total. To earn enough to pay for one-sixth of a Yale education would require an hourly wage of more than $37! Yale’s own literature, by the by, lists the amount that a freshman on scholarship can expect to contribute during the school year at $2,850. The same basic economics applies to summer employment.
Yale’s experience closely tracks what has happened at virtually all of America’s elite private colleges and universities. The situation in public schools is little better. A half-century ago, the tuition and fees at many such institutions were barely above zero. Fully working your way through college was a real possibility. Now a year’s education at a typical state university, even for in-state students, can easily exceed $25,000, well beyond what can be earned while studying full-time.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
There is thought that holds colleges changed from the inheritors and transmitters of Western Civilization into white collar trade schools because of the GI Bill after WW2.
Since no one cared much about Western Civ after that change, liberal arts were taken over by Marxists of one sort or another.
Back in the Pleistocene (1968) a college degree supplied a diverse education. I paid $3200/year for a state school, including tuition, room, and board. Since then greed, unionization, and stupidity have pushed that to $42,000 and college had devolved into a trash heap of political SJW. Of course it is collapsing.
Agree!
The problem there is no longer an agreed societal baseline to draw the western seven liberal arts the trvium ( grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy).
“Higher Education” is a bubble of massive proportions, funded by massive debt (both government and private), in our printed, fiat currency.
Recently, practicing law solo, I had a prospective client come in to talk about bankruptcy as a possible solution to staggering student loan debt. It was not. He went to undergrad, medical school and, due to the fact that he never was accepted into a residency program, earned two master;s degrees while waiting for another shot at residency. Last year when he spoke to me he had $588K in student loan debt, with a minimum monthly payment of $8800. Because he never completed residency, he's not a doctor, and makes ~$1200/month tutoring kids who are preparing for standardized exams. This would be laughable, except for the fact that we, the taxpayers, are on the hook for whatever part of the already spent $588K he chooses not to pay back.
A majority of those Spring Break partiers are using their tax payer gov. grants and loans for drunk brawls this week. Hey, it’s free money and they don’t have to pay it back. Party hearty!
Mike Rowe was on FOX last night. He wants more to get a marketable skill such as plumbing rather than a degree in underwater basket weaving.
We scrimped and saved every dime so daughter could go to college. Guess who her roommate was? An illegal on a free ride.
The same is true for public schools. There is NO reason for classroom instruction any more. Individualized lessons can be offered over the internet for a much lower cost per student (or none....see Kahn Academy). Public facilities will only exist for those subjects that need hands-on lab-type experience. Once a student has tested proficient in classroom work for a specific subject, he is allowed to take lab courses for the subject "at school".
Those same years, I worked p/t, went to a state school, lived in the dorm, ate 45 cent canned spaghetti on the weekends when the lunchroom was closed, made my own clothes, bought used-used-used text books or used the library ones and took the max number of semester hours (21) and went summers to graduate in 3 years rather than 4 with no debt. Wished I’d taken a more skills related major. Yes, I degreed in my future career area but by then they started dropping the required degree program to any old piece of sheep skin.
Today’s kids think they have to live in expensive apartments and can only manage 9 hours max. and no p/t job.
Yep, that is our system - been around for decades now.
https://www.collegeaffordabilityguide.org/co-op-programs/
Co-op programs - One Semester in class, next Semester working with a company which has an established program with your school.
I went back to college at age 50 to work on a Computer Science degree as a co-op student. Toward the end of my first Work semester I realized that I could only manage to schedule 2 of the 5 classes I needed the following Semester. My employer said that they could put me to work on a project for Engineering Services. Before the semester was over I’d been hired full-time by that department.
One of our kids was attending Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, a private school. She co-oped plus worked as a dorm resident advisor. She finished with some loans to payoff, but along the way she worked at:
NASA Space Camp, running the fighter simulators & centrifuge.
Engineering department at a company production plant getting paid at a starting engineer’s salary.
NASA Micro-Gravity Center helping to build a laboratory module for the ISS. She worked once as an undergrad and again during grad school.
Upon completion of her Master’s degree, she was hired to continue work on the ISS laboratory module.
The other great way to help pay for and education is through the military.
“There is NO reason for classroom instruction any more. Individualized lessons can be offered over the internet for a much lower cost per student (or none....see Kahn Academy).”
A friend’s boy in high school suffered a back injury so severe he had to stay at home. He is taking his classes on the internet. He jumped from a low C to a low A and is weeks ahead of the rest of his class. He has a sleep problem as well. Now, if he can’t sleep, he gets up and does school work until he can sleep. Now that his back problem is over the school wants him back in class. He dad is fighting it.
A nice microcosmic validation of my point. Thank you.
One of the things about Riddle back when my son went there was they didn’t go the “scholarship” route. Their tuition was the same across the board and half the cost of the schools my other children attended.
I worked through college to earn a B.Comp.Sci degree at UMN in the 1980s. I didn’t use a dime of FinAid, loans, or my parents money. At one point I had three PT whike taking night classes. It was brutal and ook me five and a half years to graduate (1986).
By the 1990s paying your own way like that with PT jobs became pretty much impossible, esp if you were also paying for living expenses.
Sounds very familiar. Staying out for two years and building a stake would have been better for me. Instead I just worked any 40 a week at things from surveying, welding, throwing hay, TA, you name it i worked it and went to school as I could. Graduated in 8 semesters and a summer with like 146 credit hours and went to work 600 miles from home with a stake of about 300 bucks. Good grief.
How would you do labs?
I would never hire a chemist who has never handled a test tube. Or an EE where all his labs are computer simulated. (I am actually seeing that now with newly minted EE.!)
How does one go all the way through med school and NOT get into a residency program with that slave labor being in such high demand?
For me, this story is just unheard of.
“So its all about job training and not education.”
If you want a real education now you need a library card and internet. You don’t get education at a university, you get indoctrination.
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