Up until the early 80’s, the auto companies ran programs that hired students for the summer. Generally it was for 89 days. This would give these kids enough to pay for a year’s college. This went away as the foreign competition amped up.
I graduated from college the second time in 2007.
The school is still $6,500 a year in full time resident tuition. Two semesters. Summers off for that job. That’s about 20 hours per week at Target year round. 15 hours a week if you do the favorite job of all of my “put myself through college friends” - package handler at UPS or FedEx. Now, you need to live at home and have Mom and Dad feed you - but when my Dad put himself through college in the 1960s, he lived at home and had his Mom feed him.
Several of my peers when I went to college were putting themselves through school as bank tellers (I was an Accounting major) and living independantly. They worked full time and went to school part time. Took them six years year round to graduate - but saying it can’t be done is wrong - people are doing it right now. Most of them were immigrants, not yet citizens, didn’t qualify for aid, and non-native English speakers. It was actually sort of amazing.
Tuition at public, 4-year colleges in VA range from $4000-10,000. Now there *is *certainly a range of quality there. But there’s also a pretty robust 2-year college system that people transfer out of. I know a woman who spent two years at a community college before transferring to JMU ($5,100). She now has a PhD in chemistry and is doing just fine. Another spent two years at PVCC (<$4000) before transferring to UVA.
No, that’s not Yale, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper.
ETA That’s a bad example because Yale would have barely charged her anything.
Exactly. The school I went to for $6k a year eight years ago - that is now $6500, is a four year state school. It isn’t the best four year state school, it certainly isn’t the state’s flagship school (the University of Minnesota). But it offers a Bachelors (as well as MBAs, an MSW, a few other Masters and even a few select PhDs).
The system has changed. Private schools spread their available money across a wider pool of students, having fewer students who receive no grants. Public schools become affordable when you stay in state (or a state with reciprocity) and avoid the flagship schools, and probably spend two years in a two year school. In general Universities have become much more expensive to run - lab equipment, technology, even dorms, have changed a lot. Part of the increase in cost and decrease in aid is in reaction to the quantity of people who go to college now. Boomers didn’t go in the numbers the post boomers do - so money gets spread across more people.
My father put himself through the University of Minnesota busing tables - except he didn’t - after a year, he had gone through his high school savings and had to transfer to St. Cloud State to graduate without debt. And after another year, he graduated with an Associates Degree and ran out of money and had to quit. In 1965.
I’m a UK Baby Boomer (born '53.)
I saved all my life (paid no credit card interest 
), bought a house and paid the mortgage off when I retired, aged 55.
I have several source of income:
- two pensions (both index linked)
- part-time work teaching chess + bridge (it gets me out of the house
) - Premium Bonds
- interest from my savings fund
I’ve found that people around my age who don’t progress in their career as quickly as they would like find an easy scapegoat in the baby boomers. I tend to consider it a combination the mind-numbing mediocrity of an Engineering corporate gig and over-valuing how far an engineering degree gets you; but whatever the case, I’m starting to feel like I’m the only one under the age of 30 who doesn’t think the guys with 25 years experience running the show are holding us back.
I’ve been out of the US for quite a while and so was not aware this sentiment was rearing up among under-30s. This is history repeating itself, as I recall the baby boomers themselves in the 1960s were saying the same thing about older folks.
I’m sure youth resenting experience is nothing new. What I find astonishing is the number of people who get hired right out of college and are shocked to find out that they won’t be a department head within the next five years. Nevermind that they don’t know what sort of responsibility someone at that level has – they just know that they should be in charge and it’s the shortsightedness of everyone else that keeps them out of that position.
Indeed. If they’re good enough, they’ll surpass us no matter what choices we boomers make. If they want to sneer at us on their way past, I can deal with that.
Though I seem to remember that as youngsters ourselves we were mostly enraged by our parents’ loopy social beliefs (marijuana is bad, queers are bad, non-Christians are bad, black people are second rate, etc., etc.). They lost credibility with us early and in a big way and those people hung on to power seemingly forever. You could make the argument, with the average age in Congress hovering near 70, that they still are.
This sounds like the typical generational gap. When the Boomers first started coming of age there was a popular quote: never trust anyone over 30. Well, now they’re (well) over 30 and it’s the new generation that doesn’t trust them.
I think, like every generation, they’ve done good things and bad things. The newer generations tend to focus on the bad.