Some Colleges Will Soon Charge $100,000 a Year. How Did This Happen?
Some Colleges Will Soon Charge $100,000 a Year. How Did This Happen?
Some Vanderbilt students will have $100,000 in total expenses for the 2024-25 school year. The school doesn’t really want to talk about it.
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There's literally no market incentives for it to be otherwise. Look at the factors.
50+ years of institutions and borrowers alike trained to believe that education debt is "good debt" that won't hurt them.
"Club ed" arms race of expensive non-education-related amenities, targeting students. Essentially it is marketing costs passed on to the student/borrower.
Heavy subsidization of student loans by state and federal governments.
Laws to make student loans not discharged in bankruptcy.
Constant implication that growing amounts of student debts can or should be "forgiven" by federal programs.
If you are the lending institution or the college, literally all of those factors only incentivize charging more.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition or a feasible alternative. I have encouraged hiring managers to look at alternative credentialing and training for this reason. No bachelors degree is worth going $200k+ in debt for.
Regarding your last point, I was an IT manager for a decade and hired many people. I saw no difference in the skill set between a community college grad with an Associate's and a grad with a Bachelor's from a prestigious university. The vast majority of skills simply don't translate from university to real life, so I don't understand why we still hold them so highly in IT. I can't speak to other fields, though.
I very intentionally received only an associate's degree with the plan being to immediately get a job and start learning from there. It's worked great. Except that was 20 years ago and now many jobs "require" a bachelor's or otherwise have the nerve to say that 4 years of on the job experience is the same as 1 year of college.
In my experience, I've seen the same thing. The university time kick starts things. But university lessons are so different than real on the job work.
Or regulation.
Driving prices down would require meaningful competition, or a feasible alternative, or regulation.
(Feasible alternatives do exist, eg trades, but are not treated as viable alternatives by society)