College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

[groovedaddy]

The rising cost of college — even before the recession — threatens to put higher education out of reach for most Americans, according to the biennial report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

“If we go on this way for another 25 years, we won’t have an affordable system of higher education,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the center, a nonpartisan organization that promotes access to higher education.

“When we come out of the recession,” Mr. Callan added, “we’re really going to be in jeopardy, because the educational gap between our work force and the rest of the world will make it very hard to be competitive. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.”

Although college enrollment has continued to rise in recent years, Mr. Callan said, it is not clear how long that can continue.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?th&emc=th

[Skink]

1. Obama should create a free public university system.

[LWolf]

15. Maybe he should ask Dennis.

http://www.issues2000.org/2008/Dennis_Kucinich_Education.htm

[Dawgs]

2. "May Become"?

Who can afford it now?

[mikelgb]

4. Right. The college education I got 5-6 years ago is too expensive.

I have barely dented my loan payback.

I need loan relief.

[sam sarrha]

7. in CA before Reagan Collage/job training was free.. paid for by very small tariffs in imports, as a

result wages were high, jobs plentiful.

one reason they ended that system is that it allowed people to be Mobile.. they could go to demonstrations without fear of losing their jobs.. now we fear to put an Obama sticker on our car and park it at work.

[proud2BlibKansan]

12. That was in California

I believe most other state universities charged tuition.

[Citizen Number 9]

17. Are you glad you had the loans available

Or do you wish they would have been harder to get at the time?

[niceypoo]

3. Fortunately for me, I have one quarter left

Unless I decide to go to grad school, in which case Im screwed too.

Republicans hate higher education, educated people tend not to be bigots. They also hate it because they believe science is a religion and a threat to their ideology. They don't think far enough ahead to see that killing higher education means we get surpassed by India and China in tech fields, engineering....etc.

[sam sarrha]

5. why pay $40,000 for an outsourced job... high end and tech jobs are next

[SheilaT]

6. It's not quite so bad if you start

at your local junior college and then finish at a public university in your state.

However, even that relatively cheap alternative is expensive compared to what it used to be. I was recently explaining to my 21 year old son that when I first started school, a typical summer job that a typical college student might get would easily pay enough to pay for tuition, fees, and books at your state's public university. He had trouble believing me, but I spelled out the exact numbers and he became a little angry to realize how much that has changed.

The real problem is that the states themselves have stopped supporting the public universities in a way that would make them affordable to their residents. And I agree, public universities should be essentially free/very low cost to all, or at least the residents of that state.

[sam sarrha]

8. before Reagan pre-70 we paid $35 registration and bought used books $5-10 dollars each per semester

[Lydia Leftcoast]

9. That's right

When I started at the University of Minnesota, tuition for the year was $375 (300 times the minimum wage) for a full-time student. A student could just about pay that with a summer job and maybe a couple of hours per day in a campus job.

Now annual tuition is about 2500 times the minimum wage. By my calculations, a student would have to work nearly full time 365 days a year to afford that.

[SheilaT]

11. Lydia,

thanks for doing the math. Giving tuition as a multiple of minimum wage is extremely useful.

[MountainLaurel]

10. Interesting perspective from the Wash Post

Whose article on the same report is titled "U.S. Lags in Providing College Access." I had never realized that the current generation will be the first that is LESS educated than the prior generation. Is this part of the Repukes' strategy to take us back to the Dark Ages?

[proud2BlibKansan]

13. I had loans I didn't have to pay back

National Defense Loan Program. It was done away with - I believe under Reagan. The way it worked was every year I taught, I didn't have to make payments on my loans and I was able to have either 10% or 20% of my loan balance forgiven. 10% for teaching anywhere and 20% for teaching in a school that served low income kids. So your loans were forgiven within 10 years.

So I ended up going to college for free.

And now that my generation has reached the end of their careers, and we are retiring from teaching, there are not enough new grads to take our place. So it only makes sense to reinstate this program.

[but siriusly folks]

14. Well, this is certainly true but in the meantime

I think that community colleges are an economical alternative to the ridiculous prices out there. Even if the student decides to go to a more prestigious university afterwards, they have their general requirements out of the way.

[Citizen Number 9]

16. More than half of students

Attend colleges with tuition and fees costing less than $9,000 a year.

Some of the costs you hear about are shocking, but there are still affordable college educations available.

[deoxyribonuclease]

18. Tuition went up by at least 70% when I was at UT

2000-2005 undergraduate. My parents were able to pay for my education, but brother is there now and had to get a loan to pay the fees.

At least I feel that the quality of education and the whole experience I received was well worth it.