Posted on 07/21/2014 9:21:07 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
Any sanguine prognosticators who may have predicted a decline in the average cost of attending college may need to rethink how they arrived at such an off-the mark conclusion. college grad hire me
At least 50 American colleges and universities are now charging students more than $60,000 per year. This marks a significant increase from last year when only nine schools exceeded the 60K mark.
What’s shocking about this year’s figures is that the data presented in the story from Business Insider does “not reveal the true financial burden of higher education.” Other fees not included in the story include costs for textbooks, travel fees, and social expenses.
Increases in total college expenses are nothing new to those who have remained vigilant about rising collegiate costs. Yet, the seemingly inexorable spike in the cost of a college education has assumed a distinct personality of its own. To many, university rates have gone up in a fashion unmatched by most other industries.
What began originally as a modest effort to help ease the financial burden of war veterans with the GI Bill of Rights (1944) has evolved into a modern, nationwide effort that includes massive lending programs conducted at the national and state levels to help Americans foot rising tuition bills.
The unexpected success of the GI Bill spurred the thinking that perhaps the federal government could subsidize college expenses for civilians. It did so with the national Defense Student Loan Program, later renamed the Federal Perkins Loan Program.
Despite the good intentions of these lending policies which may have succeeded initially, they have come to actually accelerate the rise in tuition and the student debt load as well as the overall financial instability of the nation as a whole.
And yet, convention still mandates that those who want to maximize their earning potential and job prospects (particularly in a sluggish economy) should graduate from a four-year college.
Ostensibly, the increase in college applicants might indicate more of a desire to learn and participate in a robust intellectual community. However, such an idealized view of motives might be optimistic when one takes into account that what is probably fueling the surge of students is that higher education may be their only option to help ensure a secure financial future.
The natural response to more demand for college education is a rise in tuition rates. Schools could theoretically increase the supply of educational options by accepting more students in lieu of higher costs, but this would likely yield insufficient returns and could be damaging to a school’s bottom line. One must take into account as well that colleges are physically limited as to how many students they can reasonably accommodate.
This demand for a college education may be consistent with more natural, uncontrollable processes, but what is most definitely within the powers of the Congress and the statehouses is lending practices.
Taxpayer-backed subsidies only exacerbate the situation. Loans may make college more affordable for some, thus increasing overall consumption of higher education. However, this leads to a higher demand, which in turn causes costs to climb. In actuality, loans do not lower costs, but end up making them higher.
And since colleges have no trouble filling their freshmen classes, they feel no pressure to cut costs. Notice that new academic building with fancy plasma screen televisions, that new student center, or new dorm?
Big Goverment demands price fixing for medical services. Let’s try the same with academia.
$8billion dollar endowments and all that yet the tax payers have to fund it in “public education” and bad loan bailouts (as well as “instate” tuition for foreign born non-citizens).
It takes the tuition of about six students to pay for one year of Liz Warren’s 1%er salary. There are many “Liz Warrens” in academia, so naturally costs must rise.
I suspect that profit has a bit to do with it as well.
Funny ... it’s free for illegals.
I agree.
I wish some private investors would start a private college to compete with these other “universities”.
I can’t wait for the college bubble to burst.
if they didn’t have to pay for professors like Liz, who would?
College does not offer that much, thanks to the internet.
My daughter qualifies for a full tuition scholarshipto University of Alabama. We live in California, but she wants to go to college in the south.
Her college costs would be under 6k a yeaar compared to over 30k a year at the UCs.
We think she’ll get into one of the iIvys, but they rarely offer scholarships.
I can’t wait to gon on a visit to Alabama!
Now that kids can be covered under their parents' plans until they are 26, many are opting out of the college health plans. This is making the college health plans more expensive for the teachers and admins.
No worries though. The colleges are requiring all students to have sufficient health insurance protection. In many cases their parents' health insurance (surprise, surprise) is not deemed worthy and so the student must pay as much as $2000 or more per year to enroll in the college's plan.
College administrators are pure hypocritical scum.
Any and all subsidies and free money provided by government are "successful." why wouldn't they be?
I’ve convinced my daughter to live at home when she goes - it cuts the bill pretty much in half and since she wants to be a physician she’ll have a minimum of 7 years to save. Of course I also managed to convince her to take hunker down and take over a dozen AP courses in HS so I’m hoping she can cut a year off through that also.
Home schooling will evolve into home colleging from the necessity of no options.
I tell my 13 going on 14 year old he better keep pitching shutouts and hitting home runs, if he wants to go to a good university.
The private individual’s dollar is competing against unfettered access to the public treasury.
You know who’s going to win in that equation.
Sky’s the limit!
Until the sky falls, that is...
I hate to tell you, but if you’re being literal, most colleges have dropped baseball due to Title IX
Big Education is a primary funding component of Democrats.
Don’t expect it to “burst” anytime soon.
How could the parents’ Obamacare mandated coverage level possibly be deficient?
“...and take over a dozen AP courses in HS so I’m hoping she can cut a year off through that also.”
There is that option. It’s not a bad one. Another is to hold off for a year or so on entering a 4-year institution and instead taking care of your pre-reqs at a community college.
The credits are cheaper, many of the professors are just as good and these types of credits (math, English, etc) almost alway will transfer when applying to admission to a four year school.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.