Posted on 10/23/2001 7:53:21 AM PDT by jalisco555
Edited on 04/22/2004 12:31:27 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
It will cost about what it has for the last 40 years. The cost of a year at a private college is about the same as a family car/entry level luxury car. Easiest way to visulze this as a parent is to imagine buying the car and driving over the cliff each year.
Of course, while cars have gotten better over the last 40 years, college educations haven't. Enourage your kids to get engineering or hard science degrees. They should take humanities and the like to be well rounded, but the hard sciences adn engineering schools have generally avoided the PC garbage.
The only things of any value at the average university are the books in the bookstore. Time was when you could find technical books only in a university bookstore, but nowadays, any peon can purchase them at Amazon.com (or read the reviews at Amazon, and purchase them for even less somewhere else).
The next big trend will be home-schooled undergraduate degrees.
It would be tough to get a home-schooled PhD in nuclear engineering.
Carrying high fixed cost burdens, you would think universities, of all bodies, would recognize and exploit the law of supply and demand. But that would be too "capitalist"...
The PhD part, maybe - particularly if it required experiments at a nuclear facility - but a Bachelor's in math, physics, or comp sci wouldn't be a problem at all.
People know that they can get student loans financed by the public treasury that is the taxpayers. There are all kinds of grants many of which are DIRECTLY SUPPORTED by taxpayers. So, colleges have no incentive to economize and salaries CONTINUE TO SKYROCKET.
In what other career category could you find "professors" -American mandarins - teaching one course per semester while they do their "research" in postmodernist post colonial feminist queer theory and GET PAID BIG TAXPAYER FUNDED BUCKS TO DO SO!? And in their spare time they find the time to attack America in public demonstrations and "conferences".
If I had a kid of college age, I would send him to a community college or the military service where he can get an absolutely adequate general college education while he is finding himself and prevent the socialist drivel that is pummeled into the mushy heads of vulnerable undergrads. Then a little wiser and older let the younguns' finance their own education. At that point, no taxpayer should mind some help for vets.
When the economy was booming 3 years ago, college costs were increasing faster than inflation because the strong economy was luring away teachers, and the demand for college educations was growing.
As you observe, the federal and state subsidies are the driving force for increasing college costs.
I dare any college administrator whining about increasing costs to come up with a scenario where the rate of inflation for college education is no greater than the general rate of inflation for 5 years. They won't.
This same force is the driver for the continually increasing cost of medical care.
---max
Every time I feel sorry for myself about my impending expenses I think about my brother and his 11 year old triplets!
Of course college costs will soar. The federal government subsidizes higher education with taxpayer dollars does it not?.
If people were really interested in lowering the cost of education they would get rid of federal government subsidies.
I agree Max. Anytime anything is subsidized (third party payment)it ends up costing more.
Having noted that, I don't know what can be done about it.
;-}
And providing an increasingly suspect product as they fill the heads of our children with anti American crap.
I just try to brush my teeth like I was taught in first grade.
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