Yup. A big factor is not just the steep rise in tuition costs, but the shift from “need-based” to “merit-based” scholarships. The latter allow colleges to compete more aggressively for high-performing students who will raise their admissions stats and make them look more “competitive” and “elite” in college rankings. But of course, the students who most need scholarships financially generally haven’t had the educational advantages that the “best and brightest” merit-scholarship winners have benefited from.
I think you’re right on the money with the suggestion that the whole higher-education model needs some radical reformation and a completely new time frame. Let’s start a thread about that sometime and see how we might combine it with the idea I’ve been toying with about modifying Social Security: namely, raise the retirement age (regular and early) but offset it with a year or two of “mid-career benefits”, temporary partial SS benefits for a period to be chosen by the recipient any time after s/he has qualified for retirement benefits. In other words, we would introduce the custom of a mid-career “sabbatical” or “temporary retirement” at an earlier life-stage, instead of putting it all after the end of one’s working life. Education, work, and retirement/new career would thus be more blended throughout one’s life, instead of occurring mostly in rigid sequential stages as they do now.
I worked my way through school and watched tuition costs rise consistently above the rate of inflation. If it were possible I’d have the President of every public university arrested for failure to keep costs down. There is no excuse for price increases that are not in step with the private sector.
Trouble is, a lot of the tuition cost increases, as I mentioned, are being driven by other price increases that are outpacing inflation, such as health insurance costs. So if we’re going to arrest all the college presidents, can we arrest all the insurance company CEOs too?
That’s an interesting idea. Social Security is outdated, too, and since both education and SS are such fundamental aspects of our society it does make sense to rethink the whole package. Maybe we can solve world hunger while we’re at it.
There is a new trend that I think is even more disturbing than the rise in tuitions- internships. Now, in the past some high-acheivers sought out part-time or summer internships with prestigious companies. But now it is beginning to become a prerequsite, especially if you want to get hired in a large corporation. It’s not uncommon for people to take a year after college working at a full-time internship. You practically arn’t in the club if you havn’t spent at least two summers doing an internship somewhere. Of course, your average Joe can’t just not work for a year. He probably can’t even spend his summers doing unpaid labor. So guess who wins? The rich get jobs, and the companies get free labor that won’t talk back. The poor and the middle class get shut out of jobs and the chance to work their way up a company since so many people are willing to do these entry level jobs for free.
Or it could not happen at all. Who knows? Were the thirties anything like the fourties? where the fourties anything like the fifties? Where the fifties anything like the sixties? An examination of the last century shows that economically, pretty much anything can happen. Examining the lifetime earnings of people who were hired in to companies for life is not useful when figuring out what is going to happen to todays people getting hired for the same jobs as temporary indepedent contractors. Things are very very different now than they were ten or even five years ago.
II’m not just talking out of my ass. The truth is that recent college grads are returning to their parent’s homes in record numbers. Things like “Grads see Brighter Prospects” are seen as reasonable news stories. Added to that is the housing problem. My mother’s house in a not-so-great part of suburban Sacramento tripled in price last year. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Student are walking out in to a bad financial world.
I don’t think that this is how the demand and supply for college works, I will post more on this further on.
Not necessarily, a computer today is worth a lot more than a computer 15 years ago but they also cost less.
This is an interesting point and you are right the numbers don’t account for this. However, considering that your average student is coming out with 17,600 dollars in debt its clear that some real price increase has happened.
Well you also have to consider that college is hard and not everyone makes it through. The last numbers that I have heard is that 50% of freshman that start school will not graduate. Its a cold fact that a lot of the people that start college just won’t finish it. A good number of those people that do fail don’t do it becuase they are too stupid or too lazy. Many have to drop out due to family troubles or personal issues. For a lot of people college is the first time they are away from family and friends. That can leave them isolated an unable to cope with stress often leading to depression. It is difficult to mantain grades along with working while suffering from depression.
A prospective student also has to consider this when they are deciding whether to go to school. Dropping out after two years with no degree and $10,000 in debt is a pretty crappy way to start out your adult life. Twenty years ago all of the above is true except that you wouldn’t be saddled with crippling debt.
My anecdotale experience is that you generally don’t see a lot of foriegn undergrad students but most of the foriegn students are grad students. This is another interesting topic that I have been considering starting a thread about. It seems like the American grad student is simply disappearing. I would estimate that probably 70-80% of my TA’s have been foriegn. In fact even my freshmen English course was taught by a grad student from China.
The thing about the college market is that you have a situation with extremely inelastic demand and supply. For the majority of college students they would be going to college no matter how expensive it is. Provided of course that they could actually procure the loans somehow. Thus if all the universities started raising tuition there would be very few students saying “screw this” becuase what other options do they have? The economic decision is a no brainer as evidenced by the income disparity between college graduates and non graduates.
From the supply end its extremely hard to start a college competitive with the major colleges in existance. I am willing to bet that in the top 50 rated schools in America not one of them were founded in the last 100 years. When you start looking at the elite schools that number starts moving more towards 150-200 years. Its hard to compete with decades of reputation and successful graduates. That means there is no real incentive for colleges to lower their prices besides the complaining of those paying them. But since those paying them really don’t have any other option the colleges know they will pay them.
To be honest I have no idea what the right answer is. Certainly there needs to be pressure on universities to keep costs down but where can that come from? We don’t want to get into a situation where the government is throwing money into a black hole but we can’t get into a situation where education is unavailable either.
I don’t know how it is for other majors but as far as engineering goes if you don’t get an internship you aren’t trying hard enough or you aren’t being flexible enough. I am starting my job hunt for summer with an eye on perhaps getting an intership for the winter quarter (I hate going to class in the cold). In just a couple hours of searching I have applied with 10-15 companies offering 20-25 positions. Now of course its possible none of those turn into a job but then again I am not done searching. In fact, through the career services office at my school employers come and request resumes that meet their requirements. My resume has been sent out to 4 companies this way in the past week and have had one screening interview for that.
But sven was talking about unpaid internships—the problem is not that non-wealthy students can’t find them, but that they can’t afford to take them, because they need to earn a living instead of working for free. Fields where the salaried entry-level job is being substantially replaced by the unpaid internship are therefore becoming much less accessible to non-wealthy graduates.
Ah, I see. I still am dubious that a person could not find a paying internship if they looked hard enough. I am sure its harder for less marketable degrees like psychology, art or sociology but they are out there.
I’ll grant a percentage of the increase to health insurance. That’s a given. However, insurance for employees is part of their wage package and subject to the same market forces found in the private sector.
Uhh it’s very, very hard to find an internship that pays. As a recent college grad and currently on my 3rd, unpaid internship, trust me, I have looked. The job market is too competitve these days and it is very easy for companies to find kids who are willing to work for free.
I don’t have much else to contribute to this thread except my college tuition at a UC doubled within the 4 years I was there, and there was no increase in financial aid available to students.
Paid internships exist, but they’re extremely rare. However, some universities consider any experience at all to be an “internship”; I’ve got friends who went to work in a regular job and got internship credit for it. Most universities see internships as a way to learn skills and make contacts, which are especially good in hard-to-enter fields.
In my own field of journalism, good internships are increasingly harder to find, paid or unpaid. For one, union requirements make it difficult for some students to do anything hands-on, and since the student isn’t being paid, s/he can’t join the union. Second, and this is especially true in radio, small stations will get interns to do the work that a paid staffer should be doing. Or they’ll put the student in a “volunteer” position as a member of a “street team” or some such, where the student learns nothing.
That said, if an unpaid internship is being done for class credit, it is possible to get financial aid to cover it. I’m doing an internship this semester and it’s covered by my financial aid package. I’m planning to do another internship next semester, and the same thing will hold true there.
Well, yeah, but financial aid is often loans. Which means you are borrowing money to enable yourself to work for free- perhaps a neccesary move but not really anywhere near a great move. Furthermore colleges charge full tuition for independent study courses and field studies, which means that if you go through the school and get credit, you may end up borrowing money to work for free and paying the school untold thousands for that privledge! It’s a total scam.
Meanwhile, people trying to enter the job forces are competeing against people who are willing to do the exact same jobs for free. The jobs that once helped people of all income levels break in to an industry and develop a career are instead going to people who can afford to take time out of the workforce. People who need to work for a living are left with the dead-end jobs in retail and customer service. It’s an insidious issue and it’s only going to get worse as companies realize that as soon as they stop paying for the work, people are actually going to clamor to do it. When entry-level professional jobs suddenly become scarcer, the workplace gets more competative, and people are willing to do anything they can to get a career-starting foothold.
So? Sure, it costs money to do an internship, which is partly why I’m doing them during regular semesters, when they’re just part of a flat tuition.
On the other hand, I’m able to get a lot of real-world experience, not to mention contacts and contacts-of-contacts. I know this station can’t hire me, but they can put me in touch with stations who are hiring. (My uni’s numbers show that about 1/3 of internships lead to employment afterwards. That’s not counting indirect hiring from contacts-of-contacts.)
Also, for young undergrads, internships are often an introduction to the workplace. They’re places to develop a work ethic and sense of responsibility. For the student in their late teens or early 20s, internships are a painless way to learn appropriate, professional workplace behavior, dress, interpersonal skills, and so forth. I mean, how many Pit threads have there been that complain about rude behavior from young workers? I’d rather work for free and learn the ins and outs of a company BEFORE I decide I want to work there, rather than getting the job and learning that stuff when there’s a lot more at stake.
Doesn’t America have the G.I. Bill? Serve your four years with Uncle Sam and there you go? And having served your four years, you’ll be in a far better position to assess whether you should go to university.
Well, sure. But not everyone is qualified, capable or should go into the military. I’d love to see a national-service program where a high-school grad can go into some sort of national service and get college money out of it.
I’ll wait until you post further, but any good or service will work like that.
No, it isn’t worth more. It may have more functionality, but that’s an entirely different thing. Worth is relative to other goods and services available at the time.
I don’t think we can maintain this over 50 years. What will happen is community colleges will become more useful at providing classes that a 4 year college could provide but at half the price. Thing in the art, humanities, lower mathematics, lower physics, foreign language fields, etc. will be done more at community colleges. Did the idea of a community college even exist 50 years ago?
