Posted on 06/09/2014 6:33:02 AM PDT by Loud Mime
Tuition is up 1,200 percent in 30 years. Here's why you're unemployed, crushed by debt -- and no one is helping
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
(Excerpt) Read more at salon.com ...
Step 1 of nationalizing college was student loans.
Step 2 of nationalizing college was eliminating private student loans.
Step 3 will be forgiveness of student debt via taxes.
Step 4 will be nationalizing all tuition through taxes.
Step 5 will be government colleges.
Step 6 will be the demise of the USA as a significant player on the world stage.
I’ve often wondered why America is so insignificant in end-times prophecy. It may just be that we had a moment in time on the world stage.
No question that many students do wash out. I simply offered up the biggest reason that tuition has risen so dramatically. In some cases, state support has gone from more than 80% at public institutions to less than 20%, and every year the support continues to erode. It is just one more of the rat traps to undermine education while enhancing welfare dependents.
I am not arguing your point. I simply stated the facts on state funding for higher education. I simply offered up the biggest reason that tuition has risen so dramatically. In some cases, state support has gone from more than 80% at public institutions to less than 20%, and every year the support continues to erode. Welfare, not education, is the progressive king.
The article barely touches on the government-sponsored easy credit that allows the prices to go up.
And the article neglects to mention that colleges are filled with an enormous number of favored students (mostly various minorities, Democrat grievance groups) who do not pay full freight. The current system is just another avenue of attack in the redistributionist war on White Republican clingers. At least, that is how I think the Obama crowd looks at it. I mean, their voters are not the ones whose children are graduating from college with enormous debt.
Not much worse by the time I got my MBA from Minnestoa State University in 1988: $108 per credit hour or less than $6500. for all the class credits(60) needed to complete the degree. Add $1000 or so for the cost of texts, materials and commuting expenses.
Especially when you consider the quality and usefulness of the curricula has declined significantly.
The two areas of the economy that have inflated by far the fastest are health care and education, both of which have had trillions of government money pumped into them. Hardly a coincidence.
I don’t think I agree with the author:
“Let me repeat, as a fact of some significance, that the great tuition price spiral began in 1981. That was the same year in which Ronald Reagan brought his jolly band of deregulators to Washington, in which Congress enacted the landmark Kemp-Roth tax cut, and in which the air-traffic controllers’ union went down to humiliating defeat...
...But in retrospect I think the answer is obvious. It happened then because these things are all related: deregulation, tax cuts, de-unionization and outrageous tuition inflation are all part of the same historical turn.”
I’m not buying the “It is Ronald Reagan’s fault” line...
Club Ed is now a resort business.
The problem is state appropriations for higher education have dropped dramatically, forcing more costs onto students in the form of higher tuition.
State of Michigan Higher Education Appropriations vs. tuition:
Causes not blamed in this article:
* Cost shifting, charging middle class students more to subsidize “diversity” candidates
* The increasing in utterly useless departments like women’s studies and the bureaucracy to support it
They did touch on administration and government regulation, but not the massive bloat where each drives the growth of the other.
You're talking nonsense.
Thomas Frank presents a casebook example of muddled liberal thinking.The government comes in with classic third-party payer-victims (aka taxpayers) through a guaranteed and subsidized student loan scheme, and Frank doesn’t come close to identifying its role in the spiraling prices. Instead he bizarrely and without evidence tries to pin it on “tax cuts”.
And the solution is rather easy and simple, and has already been adopted by many Chinese universities.
Get rid of nonsense courses and nonsense majors. In the US, this is the job of state legislatures, and only a few of them have made any tentative steps to do so.
“The University of South Carolina Upstate eliminated the center that sponsored a gay culture symposium this spring as part of $450,000 in cost cuts for next year. School leaders said that sponsorship did not lead to the 15-year-old center’s demise.
“Meanwhile, state senators voted Tuesday to require Upstate and the College of Charleston to spend nearly $70,000 to teach the Constitution and other U.S. founding documents. That is the same cost as the colleges paid for gay-themed books that they assigned to freshmen last fall.”
In more general terms, all it takes is a single state legislator to start with the axiom that, “The purpose of the state subsidizing higher education is so that students can get better jobs as graduates than if they were high school graduates, thus benefiting the state.”
Then he holds of a list of majors offered by the state universities, compared to how many graduates of those degrees were placed in degree specific employment within six months after graduation.
At the top of the list are Nurses, Criminal Justice, Education, etc. And at the bottom are race and gender studies, sports, basket weaving, Star Trekking, etc.
Then he asks the simple question: Why is the state subsidizing the turkeys? Why are taxpayers paying for degrees with no effective return? Why can students impoverish themselves to support these scams?
Why don’t we stop?
And the facades of the ivory towers fall off. In the first year alone it could save a single state a billion dollars or more.
Exactly. One wonders why this so-called "expert" does not pick up on that key point.
Remember when the federal government decided to weigh in on the switch to digital broadcast TV? It sent everyone a $50 certificate for a converter box. Magically, these boxes went for sale at *surprise!* $50. The box was a very simple circuit with no moving parts other than a switch or two. At the same time, Best Buy was also selling cheap DVD players (moving parts, a laser, many buttons) for $25. This was a great lesson on how government subsidies grossly distort prices.
Make college ‘required’ for everything, make loans real easy to get, indoctrinate the young skulls full of mush, take government control of the loans, make a repayment deal for votes...
Some of the people here simply don’t like the numbers. The welfare state is our new slave-master. Thank you for posting the graphic.
See graphic above.
Also hypnotize employers, who still seem to believe that colleges turn out perfectly adapted employees for their businesses with zero training cost to the employer.
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