College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

[Liberal_in_LA]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/education/03college.html?_r=1

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

By TAMAR LEWIN
Published: December 3, 2008

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.”

[SoCalDem]

1. "May become"??

For MOST middle class people it's ALREADY out of reach..(unless graduating the student with tens of thousands of dollars in debt, is acceptable)..

People in MY generation graduated in 3-4 years..lived IN college residences..(many never even had to have a job) and they did it with little or NO debt..

they hit the ground ,running..even in a job market that was glutted with recent grads (Boomer-gen)..at least they had no debt, so they could AFFORD to take jobs that started at less money, and they knew they had time to move up the ladder.

[demmiblue]

4. That was my first response!

[Liberal_in_LA]

20. me too!

[RedCappedBandit]

8. That's what I was going to say

[Fed_Up_Grammy]

11. Your generation had it a heck of a lot easier than my generation,

which preceded you.

You really had it made,didn't you?

I don't know one person from my old neighborhood that boarded in college,that was for the rich,and we all went to 4 year colleges via public transportation and lived at home.

[SoCalDem]

14. It made me sad to think that in one generation, "it all went away"

and my kids never had the same chances I did..:(

When they watched movies as they were growing up, they did not realize that college USED to be "that way"... Kids lounging around under trees on campus, just studying & pondering..staying up all night at coffee houses, discussing life & all the issues of the day,..professors who actually met with the students..(ahem.,and sometimes had affairs with them too..but we won't go there)..and no one worked unless they wanted to..

[nadinbrzezinski]

17. You beat me to it

[Deja Q]

2. That means school admins will have to take a pay cut. Will that happen?

Tune in next millennium. Same bat-time. Same bat-channel.

[demmiblue]

5. Ummm...

You are clueless.

[FarCenter]

3. Higher education is highly inefficient

It is labor intensive -- essentially a cottage industry, where every professor in the classroom is like a crafstman in a cottage. The technology is available, but the Luddite professors find it very threatening.

It is producing the wrong product -- many of the courses and degree programs do little to prepare the student to compete in the world labor market. Most of the performance of the students after college is predictable based on their performance in high school and on the entgrance exams. Higher education is adding little.

Producing the wrong product is the most expensive production defect that there is, next to producing a dangerously defective product(and yes, there are those fundamentalist liberal arts colleges...).

[Greyhound]

13. The purpose of higher education is NOT simply job training. You, and most Americans seem

to have forgotten that.

Learning a trade/profession in college is very inefficient, but we have almost nothing to fill this need except ineffective loan processing centers masquerading as schools.

[FarCenter]

15. If the purpose isn't preparation for a career, then unaffordability becomes a moot point

The orginal post was about the growing unaffordability of higer education.

Affordability matters if you wish to consider higher education to be an investment, which has a return in terms of higher income in later life.

If higher education is just another luxury consumable, then affordability doesn't really matter. It is just another accoutrement of the rich.

[Greyhound]

16. Not a "luxury consumable" either.

A post secondary education is about learning how to think and utilize those thoughts and to form a common experience from which to build. Becoming a rounded person, flexible, capable in a variety of circumstances and conditions.

What we have now is a university system that was set up to deliver that higher level of education and has been relegated to vocational education. That's how you end up with college educated idiots that know nothing outside their very narrow specialty. The US MBA programs are quintessential of this aberration, a "master of business administration" that knows nothing about business nor administration and is only expert in analyzing spreadsheets (sometimes), usually without the knowledge or background to judge whether the data included are relevant, or even accurate.

It starts to sound like a broken record, but look at Europe.

[FarCenter]

25. Becoming a "rounded person" is like buying fine clothes or jewelry -- it is a consumable

Back in the '50s AT&T did a lot of research on development of managers -- the Bell System was large and needed a lot of good ones.

It turned out that you could identify good young mangers and develop your mangement cadre by providing experiences and selecting further, but you couldn't teach someone to be a good manager. This is a finding that B-schools seem to ignore.

As for entreprenuers, the combination of ambition, appetite for risk, ability, and native shrewdness that makes a great entrepreneur is probably not teachable either, although I've not seen studies.

[Greyhound]

26. We have a Yale graduate, Harvard MBA in the White House. Hardly B-schools.

But that doesn't address the benefits of what we call being well-rounded. Your "vision" is what we have had for at least 3 decades and is one of the major causes of this clusterfuck.

The redefinition of a college education as merely vocational instruction serves nothing except to drive inflation of the cost and devaluation of the benefit of a college education.
:kick:

[FarCenter]

27. Mr. Bush's MBA is from a B-School, Harvard Business School

He attended Yale and received a Bachelors degree in History, which doesn't seemed to have helped very much.

Then he attended Harvard Business School (i.e. a B-school), which is the semi-autonomous branch of Harvard Univeristy that is a "vocational school" for business managers.

I don't so much want to see higher-education be reduced to vocational schools as to revamp their curriculum to ensure that their student leave with a rigorous education in subjects that equip them to compete in the 21st Century.

For example, they should be able to reasearch topics on-line and from libraries; write well organized, clear, effective reports on the topics; formulate problems and identify alternative solutions; apply the mathematics of the calculus, linear algebra, complex analysis, probability and statistics, etc to solving problems; have a basic understanding of the physical and bilogical sciences; understand the rudiments of micro and macroeconomics using mathematics (instead of pictures); and have a understanding of human psychology, the operation and management of groups, principles of law and government, and world geography.

[nadinbrzezinski]

18. Income POTENTIAL over the course of a lifetime between a

HS graduate and a College graduate bely all your points

That said... COLLEGE is where we are supposed to teach kids how to think outside the box

That job should start in HS, but don't get me started on that

[FarCenter]

24. Most of the income POTENTIAL differnce is due to the entrance selection process

Colleges select for students that are smart, did well in high school, have shown initiative in extracurricular activities, and come from wealthy families.

That accounts for almost all of the higher income potential -- the college education itself adds almost nothing to income potential for a great number of majors.

[JVS]

6. It hasn't been affordable for a long time, but there was credit so it was managable

[WCGreen]

7. The problem is the easy credit made available to College Students...

If there is no real time connection between the cost of an education and the payoff of an education, prices can rise to the stratasphere...

And they have.

Why has the cost of a public education gone up 5-10 even 15% a year when the cost of inflation has lagged far behind?

The answer, because it can. Those predatory lenders out there will just up their loan limits and basically sign the students into a modern day debt prison and, get this, with the full culpability of the colleges who have no market pressure to keep costs competative...

[Bigmack]

9. It's working according to plan....

The plan, of course, is "Kill the middle class."

No GI Bill that's worth a shit for Vets, no possibility of student loans, and tuition thru the roof. The perfect storm for working-class kids. The perfect windfall for predatory capitalism.... cheap, uneducated labor.

[nadinbrzezinski]

19. Also the perfect storm for ahem... revolution

perfect recipe in fact

[Bigmack]

22. I dunno...

about revolution. My son.... 30 yrs old with new baby boy, risky job, wife can't hold a job, big bills... should want a revolution for Xmas. What he does want is a Wii videogame.

Apparently, there's a lot out there like that.

At peace demonstrations, I never saw young people... only Q-tips like me, and I'm too old for revolution.

[ColbertWatcher]

10. Even with military incentives? n/t

[jody]

12. Our higher education system is broken and some states are worse than others. There is no simple,

single answer and a bailout of higher education without a plan is just a stupid as bailout of GM, Ford, Chrysler without a plan.

In no particular order the following should be considered.
- All public colleges in a state should be merged and a single state wide five year plan adopted.
- All 2 and 4 year public colleges in a single metro area should be merged into a single administrative unit. Classes could be dispersed.
- Major functions, e.g. computer labs, should be combined where possible.
- States should eliminate degree majors for which jobs are scarce.
- States should merge special degrees to one or few colleges based on state population, i.e. small states with small populations, e.g. five million, can not afford several engineering and medical schools. That would save money that should be used to reduce student direct education costs.
- Maximum use of online courses with the nonnegotiable rule that every student taking an online course should take at least one proctored exam covering all material for the course. That is a minimum guarantee of quality and that the correct student receives credit for a course.

That's just a few thoughts for a start to support my assertion that no bailout for higher education until a plan is prepared.

[crim son]

21. Thank the Deity my kids' father is a college professor.

That takes care of tuition at a rather decent school, for all three of them. It's a bit of a head start where others may be weighed down with debts upon graduating, or not get the chance to go at all.

[1]

23. you could always learn a trade skill...

apprentice.

and read books in you off hours.

education is what you make of it...

[Irish Girl]

28. Heartbreaking..

It has taken me nearly three years to pay off my student and car loan and I still haven't completed my Masters here in the States.

A few tidbits to ponder -

The Danish government pays its citizens to receive higher education on the basis that educated citizens better serve society as a whole. Although Denmark offers "free" higher education, it is top notch and Danes and other European countries have consistently ranked very well in physics and the sciences worldwide. I studied abroad for a year at Roskilde Universitet which was paid for by their government (I received a check every week as if I was working part time while studying), and the quality of education was extremely challenging and professional.

I've placed "free" in quotes - bare in mind Danes pay some of the highest taxes in the world. I'll get back to this point momentarily.

The United States charges exorbitant fees for degrees and student loans, leaving many graduates in debt for decades. I work at a University in New York and have seen a very disturbing trend of an increasing number of illiterate undergrads who can not do simple reading comprehension or arithmetic. The majority of students are forced to pay for Developmental Courses which are not applied toward their degrees. We as a nation are slipping further and further behind on a competitive global scale.

Now, back to the Danish high taxes - We 'the people' here in the United States may likely see tax hikes due to all these recent bailouts without any of the added benefits of a competitive free education, universal health care, etc. It still remains to be seen of course how Obama will handle these policies but our nation is clearly in loads of debt and our economy is suffering as a result.

There has to be better a solution than to simply allow higher educational costs to spiral further out of reach for young adults my age and the upcoming generation. Most of my friends are currently $30,000 - $50,000 in student loan debt and stepping into a shriveling job market.