Honest question, why are Universities becoming so expensive? Is because these credits are available? Was estudying a degree cheaper before the credits?
The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
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Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#12Honest question, why are Universities becoming so expensive? Is because these credits are available? Was estudying a degree cheaper before the credits?
Short answer: Because they can.
Longer answer, according to the universities: Because modern students demand more than just classes, they also want social services (on-site counseling, bias incident response teams, etc).
Longer answer, according to a cynic: Because universities are more or less guaranteed the money from the federal government, they've grown to spend the money on inflated administration. As costs go up the government allows students to borrow more and more to cover the costs, and universities find ways to jack up their prices to match the money on the table. While the government loaning poor students money to better themselves with an education is a great thing in theory, I think it's what directly lead to the current situation. I don't want to turn this into a long post against capitalism, but I think that the unfettered capitalistic worldview we have here in the US is the root problem.
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#13Why have the costs for healthcare and higher education been rising so rapidly? This article seems to blame government money and people wanting higher ed, but it doesn’t back up any of its claims.
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#14Honest question, why are Universities becoming so expensive? Is because these credits are available? Was estudying a degree cheaper before the credits?
Short answer: Because they can. Longer answer, according to the universities: Because modern students demand more than just classes, they also want social services (on-site counseling, bias incident response teams, etc). Longer answer, according to a cynic: Because universities are more or less guaranteed the money from the federal government, they've grown to spend the money on inflated administration. As costs go u…
A project will grow to fill the timeline, and departments will grow to fill the budget
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#15Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
This is the crazy thing about discussions like cost of education or health care. Where does the f....ing money go? Nobody seems to know or care.
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#16I think a lot of the student debt crisis is self-inflicted. No one is forcing you to attend a 4 year straight from high-school, go to a community college and then transfer to a state school/4 year. (I spent 3 years at a CC, but I graduated from a UC and paid off my student loans within a year) Yes, college is expensive, but there is an existing alternative that everyone seems to forget about and it boggles my mind.
Drop-out rates are much higher at community colleges, particularly for low-income and minority students. This is kind of a privileged statement to make. Also, the UC system is one of the few that retains a robust CC-to-university pipeline, so it's not fair to compare the opportunities available in California to those in a lot of places in this country, particularly when so many who would take advantage of what you did are priced out of housing.
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#17Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
This is the crazy thing about discussions like cost of education or health care. Where does the f....ing money go? Nobody seems to know or care.
Yup. And in healthcare most of the focus is on Pharma (which is certainly profitable and gouging Americans but is a small piece of the pie) and insurance companies (which don’t even make much profits), but not on hospitals which constitute around 70% of healthcare costs.
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#18Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
This is the crazy thing about discussions like cost of education or health care. Where does the f....ing money go? Nobody seems to know or care.
I think the answer to both tends to be "administration costs"
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#19Interesting that there is no mention here of the drastically inflated number of administrators in colleges as compared to say 30 years ago. “literally nobody knows who these people are or what they are doing” https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinesimon/2017/09/05/bureau...
Administrators remind me of the old lady who swallowed the fly, administrators to administrate the administrators, eventually they'll swallow the horse, maybe
Re: The Long Road to the Student Debt Crisis
#20The statistics in this article aren't especially useful, and could easily have been made more so by breaking debt down by attainment. Students that leave postsecondary without a 4-year bachelor's degree on average apparently owe less than $10k; with a bachelor's, less than $25k; with a graduate degree, $45k. Roughly 1/3 of all borrowers drop out, implying (I think?) that the majority of debt is held by people who com…
The last point is key. There are so many options that provide relief for those who need it most that don’t bail out New York Times journalists who paid $150,000 for a Columbia English degree or big firm lawyers who paid $250,000 for a Columbia law degree. And given how much of the debt is subject to income-based repayment, there is also a set of options for bringing relief to those who don’t qualify to cap their loan payments at 10% of disposable income.