I never understood the private or Ivy league college idea. I went to a public State university, put in my 4 years, graduated with honors, and came home to trudge through the morass of contract work and menial jobs until I got my break. Kids these days expect to come out of college and just sit down in their new cubicle with benefits and six-figure salaries, and it is just not like that.
I started making $15/hr. with no benes and had to work my way up to where I’m at. If kids start out of high school with that mentality, it’ll take them a while longer, but they can make it there eventually. College just accelerates that, but anymore it seems to me that undergraduate degrees confer nothing more than having spent four years drinking and learning how to think PC. I had hard skills to back up my degree. I did not lean on my degree to get work, it was just a very nice accent.
Student loan debt is obviously becoming a problem, but I think the mentality with college needs to shift from “I have to go, so I’ll take out loans,” to “Let me get a job and see if I can afford it going forward.”
Not all private schools are the same. My second bachelor’s is from a private institution. William Carey is a Baptist school in Hattiesburg MS. They are not into the mega-salaries for modestly qualified faculty. They have reasonable tuition rates.