Posted on 04/06/2015 12:39:57 AM PDT by iowamark
ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after...
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much faster rate than government spending in general. For example, the military’s budget is about 1.8 times higher today than it was in 1960, while legislative appropriations to higher education are more than 10 times higher...
By 1980, state funding for higher education had increased a mind-boggling 390 percent in real terms over the previous 20 years. This tsunami of public money did not reduce tuition: quite the contrary.
For example, when I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in 1980, my parents were paying more than double the resident tuition that undergraduates had been charged in 1960, again in inflation-adjusted terms. And of course tuition has kept rising far faster than inflation in the years since: Resident tuition at Michigan this year is, in today’s dollars, nearly four times higher than it was in 1980.
State appropriations reached a record inflation-adjusted high of $86.6 billion in 2009. They declined as a consequence of the Great Recession, but have since risen to $81 billion. And these totals do not include the enormous expansion of the federal Pell Grant program, which has grown, in today’s dollars, to $34.3 billion per year from $10.3 billion in 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
How can such an intellectually honest article be allowed in the Times?
1 example in a long, long, long list of examples in an OUT-OF-CONTROL executive branch.
Socialism Is Legal Plunder - Bastiat
8. The ways in which a great debt, so constituted and applied, will contribute to the ultimate end in view are both numerous and obvious. (1) The favorite few, thus possessed of it, whether within or without the government, will feel the staunchest fealty to it, and will go through thick and thin to support it in all its oppressions and usurpations.
11. ...It may be called, for example, a power for the common safety or the public good…
…As the people, however, may not run so readily into the snare as might be wished, it will be prudent to bait it well with some specious popular interest…
http://www.constitution.org/cmt/freneau/republic2monarchy.htm
DISMANTLE the Dept. of “Education”
Multibillion dollar endowments... they don’t need to raise the rates.
As far as I can see...no state has ever conducted a full wall-to-wall audit of a state university. If you asked any governor to explain how their top state university burns through X number of millions in a year...they will be told to go pound sand and the university will refuse to provide such information.
In Ala, folks got around to asking how they could pay off failed NCAA football coaches from their extended contracts. There never was an adequate answer given.
“If over the past three decades car prices had gone up as fast as tuition, the average new car would cost more than $80,000.”
And today’s $25k price for cars also includes a lot of VERY EXPENSIVE mandates and options that either didn’t exist in the good old days or were not widespread. Take them out (which I mostly don’t advocate), and cars would cost closer to $10,000 today.
Actually some professors are not exactly in the poor house either. I know one that makes close to $150k per year (public record) and teaches 2 classes (i.e., 6 clock hours) per week. Summers off, long breaks for ‘holidays’, etc.
Needless to say, he is a full professor and tenured. Great deal for him...not so great for taxpayers.
Yep, like my brother says, they charge such huge tuition fees simply because they can. If you ran a coffee shop and charged $1000 for a cup of coffee and people not only paid that but lined up to pay it and it was legal, are you going to reduce the price? Helllllll noooo
College degrees are worth zilch because they are given by educational institutions whose faculties are boobs and fools no longer are able to recognize the whole scam.
This is all because of the concept of government-backed student loans first introduced in 1960. Before that, only intellectually proficient applicants were accepted for higher training.
IMHO.
In 1954, the tuition of Syracuse University was $700 per year. You could get an off-campus university room for $66 per semester, and twenty hours working in the dining hall would pay for one's board.
When I first attended an in-state junior college back in 1984, tuition was between $6-$700 for students over 12 credits. It is now over $4,000 and climbing. Still a bargain but...
IF you compare just about any college campus today versus what it looked like 25 years ago you will find that almost all of the buildings are either new (less than tens years old) or recently renovated (which is actually more expensive a lot of cases, than a new building).
If you want a glimpse into why college cost so much look at the construction budgets.
And that's probably just his salary from the university. He is probably pulling in additional income through research or consulting.
I read just the excerpt and concluded that the author was just another whack-job blaming lack of government funding. Read the entire article and you’ll have a different perspective.
Here in Canada young people graduating High School are increasingly seeking a well paid trade, and then attend trade school to become , carpenters, welders, plumbers, aero-mechanics and diesel mechanics as well as power linemen. And they have no debt and a new home within 3 years of graduating. They often pay off their home mortgages in ten years or less and have children while younger.
University in Canada is now pretty much passee and regarded as something for the lazy, or immature.
Are they tax free?
Once upon a time in real America, most Baby Boomers did not go to college and they didn’t need to becuase there were plenty of jobs that did not require college. But the Baby Boomers who did go to college decided that college is required for almost every job and the economics of scarcity drove the price of college up. Then the government got involved and the price went up more.
Government-backed student loans caused price inflation.
Curtail the availability of government funny money and tuition rates will drop.
7-figure salary College/University administration positions were created as a place for ex-Democrat/liberal politicians to go. This will insure that our youths with skulls full of mush will get the liberal indoctrination to continue the destruction of our Republic.
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