You haven’t let them in for the past 50 years they’ve been trying.
Honestly some of it is more STEMy than some of the work I’ve done.
Huh? 
That was more than possible when I went to school but for my daughter the smaller instate school runs about 9100$ per year not counting books, fees or living expenses. Consider that the average minimum wage job here gets you about 14, 500 per year, and most of them require odd shifts, how does that even work?
Working may not be enough to 100% pay for college these days, but it can make a big dent. Along with other cost-cutting steps, the student can graduate with a very manageable amount of debt even if they end up working low paying jobs. Some of these steps are:
- Student gets excellent grades, which can cut 1/2 off the tuition or more
- Apply for every scholarship possible. Many scholarships are for just a few hundred dollars, but the student will often be eligible for many scholarships and together they can make a big dent in cost
- Student takes lots of advanced placement courses which confer college credit. This allows the student to graduate early (saving on tuition) or to take a less demanding course load which leaves time for a part-time job.
- Attend an in-state school rather than out-of-state or private school
- Attend a school within commuting distance to the family home to save on room and board.
- Attend the less prestigious, satellite campus of the state school instead of the primary campus.
- Minimize costs as much as possible during school by shopping at thrift stores, eating budget meals, living in cheap housing, no expensive vacations, etc.
- Parents can help significantly. Starting from birth, every $100/mo in a 529 plan can grow to $30k-35k by the time the student is 18
Obviously not every student will be able to take every step possible to cut costs, but every student needs to be thinking of cost as a primary concern. Long gone are the days where a student could stumble along through 4 years of college in a quest of self-discovery and graduate with a debt manageable through low-wage jobs. Students now need to know that going to college without a clear plan to manage costs and pay back loans is going to mean their post-college life is going to have significant hardship. But if the student takes cost and payback plans into consideration, the debt will not be that impactful.
And take longer. When I went back to school in middle age I went back to a Minnesota State School that specializes in working adults. Most of my classmates were working full time. Most of them were in their mid-20s - they tried college just out of high school, and now were back. Some lived with parents. One young woman in a lot of my classes was a live in Nanny during the day. Generally, students would take two classes a semester, and go Summers.
And utilize the GI bill.
But my real problem is your last point. I have two in college, and it isn’t like an 18 year old arrives at your doorstep with “surprise, can you help pay for college?” And it isn’t like the price isn’t something we’ve been talking about since I went to college almost 40 years ago. The number of parents completely in shock over their EFC - or that they have an EFC at all, stuns me. And the willingness of people to blame the college system and the government, while ignoring the culpability of parents - the ones who chose to have and raise the students - in the student loan mess disappoints me.
I agree with this. I was shocked that my 80’s tuition was essentially pocket change compared to the 2010’s tuition my kids were looking at. I can’t fault any parents for not realizing the explosion in tuition and not appropriately planning for it. But going forward, any new parents should realize that college is going to likely be a major financial expense on par with the price of a house and their kid isn’t going to be able to pay for it with minimum wage jobs like they did.
This is completely untrue.
That is sort of what I fault parents for. Because I also went to college in the 1980s, and even then it was darn hard to go to school and manage to pay for it - and by the time I graduated from college in 1988 (well kind of graduated) tuition was already outpacing inflation by a lot. Because this generation of parents has access to the internet, which will tell you how much college is. Because we are the generation of parents to whom 529s were touted to. Because my mailbox started to fill with “how to pay for your kid’s college” seminars when they were in middle school. And I’m not sure if I ever picked up an issue of Money or Kiplinger’s without seeing a “how to save for college” article.
I get living hand to mouth and not being able to save money - we should certainly make sure there is more grant money out there for low income students to go to school. I do not get people whose kids were on the downhill ski team and ate out three times a week and vacationed every single year and had two professional incomes having kids who have no choice but to graduate with debt. That’s simply an abdication of parental responsibility. And I get wanting your kids to have some skin in the game, but that’s your choice, and having the taxpayer bail them out…that’s your job.
There are 266 Research Universities in the country, compared to about 1500 accredited universities that award PhDs. Right off the bat, the majority of PhDs are not being awarded by Research Universities. Once you figure that less than 60% of the PhDs of those 266 Research Universities are STEM related… and not forgetting that the original comment lumped Master’s degrees into the “they’re pretty much all free” category, there is absolutely no plausible way that the previous statement was correct. I think you guys are seriously underestimating the number of accredited institutions issuing PhDs in Leadership, Ministry, Business Administration, Management, etc.
The majority of PhDs are awarded by a minority of schools; the top 50 are responsible for half the degrees. And while you can get a physics PhD at Bryn Mawr, it shouldn’t be a surprise that the majority of science and engineering degrees are concentrated elsewhere. Per the aforementioned NSF SED, of the 55,103 PhDs awarded in 2018:
| Type | Science & Engineering | S&E w/o Social Sciences |
|---|---|---|
| Doctoral Universities: Highest Research Activity | 32,367 | 26,160 |
| Doctoral Universities: Higher Research Activity | 6,291 | 4,734 |
| Doctoral Universities: Moderate Research Activity | 1,510 | 766 |
| 73% | 57% |
Now that we’ve cleared that up, there were 1,481 PhDs awarded in business management and administration in 2018. The other fields you list are not broken out, but if they fall under “Other non-S&E”, they don’t even sum to 900.
Yes, k9bfriender was mistaken about graduate education. But we have the option of correcting that with correct facts rather than questionable guesses about leadership degrees.
I’ll confess that I’ve been using the terms Doctorate and PhD synonymously. I figured for the purposes of a discussion on post-graduate student debt, that was fine. However, I’ll concede that this was an error on my part. The Study you linked to was only focusing on PhDs. Many, perhaps most, of the types of degrees I spoke of, are actually professional doctorates, rather than PhDs. Even some of the schools I just found refer to their degrees programs interchangeably as Doctorate of, or PhD in even though the official title conferred would be a DBA (Doctorate of Business Administration) in Organization Leadership or DBA in Business Management. These would no doubt be counted separately from a PhD in Business.
This is important because the study you’ve linked to surveyed just over 450 schools–less than a third of all Doctorate issuing universities. Further, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) estimated over 180,000 PhD and Doctorate degrees were conferred in 2018. Compare that to the the 55,000 research PhDs in the NSF SED study. I think it’s probably safe to say that these extra 130,000 Doctorate degrees were not STEM related nor were the students enjoying a free ride. On the contrary, they were probably paying out of their ass and racking up student loan debt, which is why nearly half of all student debt is held by graduate and post-graduate students. With those extra 130,000 extra doctorate degrees unaccounted for in your cite, I think it’s obvious that most people earning a doctorate degree in the US are not getting it for free. You listed a study that referenced a third of the doctorate-issuing universities in the country, and as expected, it accounted for less than a third of the total doctorates conferred in that year.
If the whole PhD vs Doctorate thing is an elaborate “gotchaya”, then I admit that you were right and I fell into your trap. However, if you thought that your 55,000 PhDs accounted for the majority of doctorate degrees in the country, then you are way off. There are nearly three times that many, and they were not awarded at prestigious research universities that pay stipends to their candidates and waive tuition in exchange for teaching and research services at the institution.
This is correct. Even more so if you throw in Master’s degrees. Ph.Ds are more likely to be supported than trade school Doctorates, as well as Master’s programs of any type (unless it’s an early MS awarded en-route to an aborted PhD), and STEM more likely than non-STEM (primarily due to federal research grants – y’all paid for mine, thanks.)
And bringing us back to debt, overall graduate school debt skews the numbers for education debt because it includes professional degrees that, while expensive, typically (YMMV) still have a high net present value. E.g. borrowing heavily for med school tends to be financially “worth it” (although YMMV; I have one friend who left residency and is now a stay at home parent.)
Yep a good sucker, a great sucker and we’ll build a statue for all the suckers because we love you too. Let others enjoy what you got, we all need to learn things from universities as they teach us a lot, even values and maths.
Remember, be kind with the word “sucker” as many USA people joined the military thinking they were doing something helpful to their country or the world and how would they feel with your words?
But if my taxes are going to pay someone else’s loans, then yes it does hurt me because those tax dollars aren’t going to other necessary programs. And it hurts everyone who a) chose not to go to college because of the cost, or b) chose a cheaper college, or c) worked while going to college part time to avoid loans, or d) worked two jobs to get their loans paid off. Wouldn’t this be rewarding people for being irresponsible – who takes out $100,000 in loans without some clue how they’re going to pay it off?
It really does feel like bread and circuses for the white middle class. And the white middle class does need help, and they certainly need it before tax cuts for the wealthy. But they are a somewhat lower priority for my tax dollars than some other things I can think of.
I can’t think of a single proponent of student debt relief who thinks this is the only fire that needs putting out, or that we should go back to business as usual immediately afterwards and allow debt to balloon again. But when your kitchen is on fire, you put out the fire first, and worry about whether you need to keep your towels further from the burner in the future after, and you certainly don’t use the fire in the next town over as an excuse not to put out this one.
Yes, but this is a fire in on our deck while the one in our own kitchen threatens flashover.
Insult to injury. fml
So, 36% of the SDMB, a group that leans left and is more highly educated than the general population says, ‘No Forgiveness.’
That tells me all I need to know about what a foolish and unpopular policy this would be and the Biden administration shouldn’t even entertain it. There’s no need to waste political capital on it.