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.
How Did This Happen?
College loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy. Simple as that.
With lenders knowing that the government will make sure they get paid, they're happy to loan out any amount of money to anyone regardless of credit worthiness, because they take on literally zero risk.
Then colleges realize the same, and jack up their prices in turn. The feedback loop brings us to where we are today. There is no market (or other) force putting any downward pressure on tuition costs, at all. This is the inevitable result.
My school was expensive but was marketed as cheaper. It was cheaper through scholarship, factored in Pell grants and did not comsider the extra fees from bureaucracy.
The problem is that when you try to work while paying for school the grants go down and you pay more and still struggle.
While you do this you see your school build a sports stadium and see host extravagant dinners with business clients. You see how much the president or dean makes and how much the professors make.
I gave up and transferred to a non-profit university and the experience was night and day. It was affordable and the staff worked for you.
And people who actually do most of the work (aka grad students) are still not getting a living wage.
Support striking grad workers everyone! https://duckduckgo.com/?q=support+grad+worker+strike&ia=web
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.
I have accomplished very little in my life.
I have pissed off innumerable people, been ostracized, ghosted, fired, disowned, discarded, and deserved all of it.
I have never lived up to my potential. I've got less than zero ambition.
I have been a historically awful husband and/or boyfriend.
But I accomplished one thing:
I got my daughter through college with no debt.
While she did the work to get admitted and slog through the classes and deal with the remote classroom bullshit of the COVID era, I'm proud that I was able to pull my shit together just long enough to keep writing those godforsaken checks so she will never know the struggle of being shackled to a lifetime of crippling debt.
I did one good thing in this lifetime, and because it gave her opportunity, it was all worth it.
It’s administrative bloat. All that money isn’t going to hire more professors. It’s going to pay for non-faculty admin staff who provide services to students and work to attract students to the school. Schools are in competition with each other and the trend has been towards providing an all-encompassing luxury experience. While at many schools the fancy buildings may be paid for in whole or in part by donations from rich people, government grants, or other non-tuition sources (endowment), the staffing and maintenance of these buildings is paid for by tuition.
Ultimately, what it comes down to is that students comparison shop four-year luxury “Club Ed” vacations, paid for with borrowed money. That student loans are available without collateral or credit history and automatically approved is a huge part of the problem. If the flow of money dries up, the bloat goes with it. But in the mean time only rich people would have access to an education.
I came up with a plan to lower college tuition years ago while tripping. It starts with the decriminalization of all drugs. And to prevent gangs and what not from profiting colleges will get the exclusive privilege of making and selling all drugs. Drug proceeds would be split between lowering tuition, setting up more college ran centers, and rehabilitation of drug users outside the colleges programs. With a small percentage allowed for the college to profit.
For the program itself, i would have the colleges set up drug manufacturing classes which should benefit students in other chemist and medical fields so it should draw in quite a few people. With the drugs made they then would be sold by college ran businesses whicj could also employ students to have on the job experience and to keep more money in the colleges sphere of influence.
At these centers where drugs are sold, there will also be areas for people to partake in the more dangerous drugs, which should be inheritly safer now that its not being tainted with other nonsense. There would be medical students watching and taking care of their patients making another facet of experience that will help in future jobs.
With all this taking place in the college system, and with plenty of opportunities to view patients, it should be easy to spot people who are in a real bad place that would benefit from health and life counseling. So for the people in need of help, counselors will approach giving an offer to participate in a program to train psychology students that comes with a heavy discount for their drugs while in the program.
My whole idea had several beneficial aspects for all of the country.
Lower colleges tuition
Raising the educational level of general poplus
Lower drug dependencies rates
Lower crime rates
Getting people help who need it
Reduction of drug over doses
Less burdens on are justice system clogged up with drug related crimes
Hampering outside nations who push dirty cheap drugs into our country
Extra tax money
Etc
Idk if anyone has any comments on my wistful thinking, but im open to revisions of my plan.
TLDR: Decrimnalize drugs and make collegese create dispense and sell said drugs to fund the well being of our society.
It all started when they outlawed bankruptcy discharging student loans. Cry and cry over "Lawyers will graduate from college then immediately declare bankruptcy on $5000 loans!". Then, when they captured the students in inescapable debt, convinced everyone that college was the answer, and then Sallie May being put in charge of defaulted loans.... being paid to collect.... Federally guaranteed money.... It's like getting paid to get paid, perfect racket!
Rich parents.
There’s really no other answer for this one. I went to a very nice university. The average person has no idea how many college students are coming from phenomenally high income families where price is essentially no issue.
It’s just a matter of how high up the top 10% is relative to everyone else. Both your parents are doctors and they have 18 years to save up - half a mill for Amy’s college bill is basically piss money.
The only problem is that these college students tend to grow up in areas where this is basically the norm. I had so many 19 year olds act flabbergasted that not only are neither of my parents doctors/lawyers/engineers… they didn’t even gasp go to college!
Scam bubble
It really depends on the scholarships. If they offer common merit based scholarships that bring it down to single digits of thousands, I'd think it's okay. Same with demographics based scholarships or registered need. You'd be using the rich dumb students to subsidize making the better students pay less.
But I have a feeling a lot of places are just price gouging, not subsidizing from the rich kids.
Just to keep the poor out of studying or to get them in debt for the rest of their life, easy peasy round business..
It got this way because younger people are willing to go into debt to get an education, and schools take advantage of that expected level of debt. I highly recommend looking up certificates that are available. One of the best ways to change this is for people to switch to alternatives.
Permanently Deleted
Most colleges are just sports franchises that just have higher education as a side hustle these days.