College what a croc !!!!

[Bassman]

My 2nd oldest decided to transfer to the same school as my oldest. Yesterday we went down for his orientation, and to registrar him for his classes this fall. Everything was going along pretty well, I decided to blow off one of the meeting because I've been through this before, same story different year. Went to look at his dorm where he will be living, (very nice nothing like when I went to school)I then went over to the Bursar office to check on something, with his transfer. While I was there, It hit me on how much I was actually spending !!! I'm going to be paying for both boys (who are each taking a full load of classes.) almost $7000.00 per semester for tuition, $5000.00 for housing per semester, plus fees about $1500.00 per semester not counting any of the food plans, books, parking etc.... Now add that all up and double it for two. I've been lucky, because back when they were babies, I plan for this. I'm still going to have to put out some money, but not the whole cost. I don't see how people can pay for this, or were they get the money from. Then yesterday, I was reading that congress isn't going to do anything about the student loan rates going up. If you ask me this is crazy, and college education doesn't seem what it use to be. I feel you are just paying for a piece of paper now.

[Tim Alexander (fmrly. Camalex)]

www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-arthur-f-kirk-jr/a-bachelors-degree-as-an-_b_3437760.html

[RickW]

We have been paying $15k plus per year, per kid, for two kids, in private school Wasn't that much at the start, but that's what it is now, i grade 11 and 12. We did it because being adopted and of a different race, we wanted to make sure they were in a more supportive environment than public school. We can never know if they would have had problems because of who they were, but the school has been excellent, they have thrived, and we view it as money well spent.

University - yikes. It'll be cheaper for us if they stay local, and for a bachelor's, who cares. There is much discussion in the education world about the value of a bachelor's degree. Really, no one much cares where it came from, as long as it's a decent school with a decent rep. It's grad school degrees that matter. For a lot of schools, the bachelor students are really supporting the the grad programs.

Jeff Miller, who retired from the forum, predicted the death of big education. Can't say I disagree. As you say, who can afford that? Talking to university folks, they'll still say that getting a general BA is a great all round education. But if you end up starting your working life with 50 to 100k in debt, with a degree that doesn't target a particular job, I think you're going to see fewer and fewer people willing to do that.

[AlanC]

Empires are expensive. Priorities are chosen; hard decisions made. We spend our money on what we think is important. It must be what we want or it wouldn't make any sense.

[Russell Letson]

I once calculated that my private-school undergrad degree (which is now 47 years old) cost around $10K all up (which included a year in Italy), but the tuition part of it was paid for by a New York State Regents Scholarship. And for two of the four years we reduced costs by my living at home and commuting the 17 miles to school in a $75 used Chevy.

An inflation calculator puts those 1962-66 dollars at around $73K in 2013 money. The college website puts current costs at around $30K/yr for tuition and fees and $12K for room and board. Thanks to the mixture of on- and off-campus living in my case, it's hard to do a direct comparison of costs, but it's clear that LeMoyne is relatively more than twice as expensive as it was four decades ago. And what was the Regents Scholarship program has become a pitiful shadow of its old self, more of an honorarium that might cover books than a true scholarship.

On the other hand, the school has expanded facilities and programs--it has even more pre-professional tracks than the old pre-med, pre-law, and "accounting" (pre-MBA) it used to. And if the success rate of grads is anything like what it was then, it's probably a decent investment, though the Jesuits always insist that their education has aims beyond worldly ROI.

[Village Idiot]

The only way we can handle Peyton's tuition is from early planning on the part my folks, and the fact that she's almost getting a free ride. I don't know what we'd do if it wasn't for those two things.

Tuition isn't ridiculous, it's insane.

[Cosmic Wonder]

Katie's tuition at OSU is 8K per yr, with room and board it will come to between 26 and 28 a yr. We will pay for her undergrad degree, she is on the hook for post grad. Not going to college is not a option for a budding biologist/zoologist/marine science kid. it does seem we need a new paradigm, but the for profit private enterprise system is strong, and simply ranting about what a rip off it is does not seem to change anything.

Fortunately I have that super lucrative school bus driving position.

Mike

[brucemacneill]

The chart looks, to me, as if the best bang for the buck is still a tech-school if you can't afford a full college without going heavily into debt. With a tech oriented associate's degree, which includes things like nursing, you can get a decent paying job that will quite likely provide assistance in finishing college over time and maybe even post-grad schooling at the employer's expense. I don't think enough kids are pointed that way and I think that's a long term mistake on society's part. A good tech-school, such as the one I went to, is closely associated with a full college and provides some at least transferable credits. My school provided associates degrees in as little as 2 years but also bachelors degrees in as many as 5 years for some engineering programs and was associated with Northeastern University such that most credits were transferable. It was a lot less expensive than Northeastern though.

[Russell Letson]

I've posted this kind of thing before, but it is worth repeating, for the sake of establishing some context--

Public higher ed, which used to provide an affordable education for the middle and working classes, has been systematically starved of funding by state governments, which has led to bigger portions of costs being covered by tuition. At least that is what happened in Minnesota. And I can't let the universities off the hook, since we have seen bloat on the admin levels, both in pay and numbers of staff. To be sure, teachers get paid better than they did in, say, 1977, but not at anything like adminstrators. And at St. Cloud State we have witnessed various capital expenditures that seem to have little to do with what we old farts think of as the core mission of a university. We have a new library, but also a giant hockey arena and various beautification projects that I suspect were driven by admin (specifically presidential) ego.

The higher reaches of admin have also seen bloat--one of the parting gifts of a powerful state legislator (a Democrat) was the establishment of a central governing board to manage all of the non-land-grant state colleges, from the community-college and tech-school level on up. This was supposed to result in all kinds of efficiencies and savings, but what I see is an expensive and irrelevant bureaucracy operating out of St. Paul and mandating all kinds of things that might look good when you squint (e.g., a uniform grade system, a single-vendor solution for on-line courseware) but that don't work so well at the classroom level. And I can already hear the voices to my right saying "We told you so" about central control of local activity. But teaching comp isn't meat inspection or watershed management, and in any case, execution is everything. (The NYS Regents secondary-school exam and diploma system struck me as eminently sensible and effective in 1962, and the output was pretty impressive, judging from the stories I gathered from my high-school class's fifty-year-reunion website.)

[RickW]

Have to agree with both Bruce and Russ. We are starving for trades people here, and starving for IT people. And the amount of ''monumental" building on school campuses is ridiculous. I know universities are supposed to be incubators for talent and provide surroundings that inspire such, but it does seem to be getting out of hand.

[Doug]

Don't forget to add the sports programs.

For years in FL the two highers paid people in the state budget were Bobby Bowden and Steve Spurrier.  Both making over 4 times what the governor made. 

No coach should be paid more than the Freshman English teacher.

 

[Russell Letson]

I agree with Bruce (get up off the floor, Bruce, I'll try not to let it happen again)--our culture needs to adjust its thinking about what kinds of education lead to various outcomes and to stop thinking that four-year degrees solve all vocational problems. Interestingly enough, the ed system itself embodies a sensible set of options: St. Cloud is the home of a public tech school (renamed a "technical college" to make everybody feel better about it) as well as a university (a much-evolved normal school), plus a clutch of for-profit vocational outfits.

That said, I'd love to see as many people as possible take their non-vocational educations as far as they can manage, just so we can maintain a rational and balanced citizenry. My father's class-of-'39 high-school education gave him the skills and cultural orientation at least equal to what I see coming out of colleges now. Dad maintained a lifelong interest in history and archaeology--and he was a mill-hand's son whose own work was on the blue-collar end of things, even when he got into management. His sisters, who graduated a few years before him, were enthusiastic readers whose large libraries of popular fiction I happily raided when I was growing up. I wonder how many blue-collar kids have that kind of context now. It's not easy to unpick the causes--the schools are shoddy, but then so are the attitudes of many of the people whose kids go through them. My wife often observes that her students (and probably their parents) don't want a real education--they just want the credits and the certificate they lead to. And the Wizard is content to award that better-than-a-brain piece of paper.

[Village Idiot]

It's funny how small towns talk about how we can keep the young people around on one hand, and then talk about the all-importance of college. Our oldest daughter is no dummy, she graduated fourth in her class, got her two-year degree from a community college, and said she didn't want to go any further.

In the meantime, she's landed a great job in town doing insurance stuff that I'll never understand, so she will be one of those young people who sticks around. That's fine by us. We feel better about that than her cousin, who majored in anthropology, who is struggling to find a job that pays as well as our daughter.

I've always pondered the idea of the German system of education might be better than ours, with the Realschule and Gymnasium. It makes perfect sense to me, as one can walk out in a very employable situation having attended either.

[Cosmic Wonder]

Jun 30, 2013 14:19:11 GMT -5 Russell Letson said:

My wife often observes that her students (and probably their parents) don't want a real education--they just want the credits and the certificate they lead to. And the Wizard is content to award that better-than-a-brain piece of paper.

Not doubting the above at all, and yet, I am jealous of my daughter, who gets to go to school and study the coolest stuff in the world. Biology and ecology. Astronomy. Marine biology. If I ever get to retire I can think of nothing cooler than studying astronomy.

Mike

[Russell Letson]

And in a sane polity, there would be an affordable option that would allow retirees (or career-changers) to take courses. My wife's experience (and mine) has been that "non-traditional" students can be the most satisfying to have in class. Their motives and goals are less likely to be confused, and they rarely turn up hung over. Less tweeting and texting, too, though that's bound to change as the non-trad demographic ages.

[RickW]

Come to Canada, Russ. At least in BC, not sure about everywhere else, tuition is free at 65.

[Russell Letson]

With a Ph.D. and a handful of extra courses in computer science, I think maybe I'm done with school. Unless they're hiring superannuated English hacks in B.C., in which case I'll come up if the Vancouver real estate market gets reasonable.

[sekhmet]

I was just thinking about that Rick. I don't think I could manage any more though.

[RickW]

I think about it lots, Kate. But I don't know what I'd take. I could do history, English, or music. The latter would require some prework.

As to reasonable real estate, well, Vancouver is not going to change soon, Russ. The burbs aren't oo bad, but getting worse all the time.

[Doug]

I thought of going back till I looked at the prices.  I wanted to take stuff that I had to skip for courses that were needed for the major.  I thought Medieval History.  Even the community colleges are way out of my price league.