Colleges at the breaking point, forcing ‘hard choices’ about education

If you come from a not so wealthy background, then you only get a loan for a program that has a higher earnings potential than what you put in. I mean come on, Williams College, the supposedly best liberal arts school in the country has a "median" graduating salary of 58k, and this number does not include the possibility that you could graduate with a major no one wants to hire. 1 year of cost of just tuition and room and boarding is 74k. This does not include other costs like health insurance, books, and other equipment, extra living costs. You add this up, you can easily run up the bill to 400k. You seriously think a person should be able to get this loan to graduate in "Arabic Studies"? I mean I am sorry that people come from a poor background (me included), but taking out that 400k loan without any checks and balances seems irresponsible.

UCSD has a food bank on campus. Here's the math as to why:

Recommended daily dining dollar spend: $19

Breakfast: $3.95, "Bobcat Sandwich" Lunch: $5.25, Hamburger Dinner: $6.95, "Wok Entree"

This adds up to $16.15. That hamburger isn't very filling (between Whopper and Whopper Jr.), especially if you still operate on a teenaged metabolism. Add a fries to it, or do what I did and get a $2 salad from the salad bar. At 39¢ to the ounce, it's a cheaper option to maximize nutrition. Sometimes they have leftover salmon, flaked.

Okay, that's the expensive meal plan. You get five days of those, not seven. This is on the maximum dining dollar plan of $3800. You do not get a discount. One dollar in is one dollar spend.

But you can't afford the full plan. The other option – and you have to pick one, they're mandatory for on campus residents – is "worth" two meals a day, five days. You need to stretch it out.

It's not enough. If you don't do the accounting and budget beforehand, you will run out. If you don't supplement with ramen, you will run out. If you want a snack every now and then, you will run out.

Also, you don't have a kitchen in the residential halls. I hope you have a friend in an apartment or with access to the rare communal kitchens [1], since you otherwise can't cook, and must eat.

Oh, and as of winter quarter 2019, they started using scales to measure everything, down to the last noodle.

Panda Express doesn't do that, by the way. You get filling meals at only a slight premium, though I can't remember the price off the top of my head. The real value option is Subway, which costs $6.99 for the footlong of the day, including tax, and each is good for 1.5-2 meals with more or less balanced nutrition. If you somehow have a stove, a pre-packaged two-pack of Tikka Masala from Costco runs at around $3.50/meal, plus rice, and takes less time than the cross-campus dining hall roundtrip.

Fortunately, for 2019-2020, they increased the maximum package to 5100, which helps those who have financial aid. This doesn't reduce the daily cost, however.

People universally get the lowest dining plan allowed by HDH. It's just cheaper to go to the vendors, even with the invisible on-campus price hike.

[1]: The price of access to a communal res hall kitchen is fire alarms at 3 AM during finals week.

"But I didn't have childen! Why should I pay taxes for schools?" is not uncommon. The answer, of course, is that we all benefit from their education, and so it isn't unreasonable for tax money to be spent to help heavily subsidize education.

I'm lucky; I went to college in the early 80s, at a good state school, and it cost about $5000/year ($13K/year in today's dollars). I'm doubly lucky: my parents paid for it, so I left college penniless but without debt. It sickens me to read how much colleges are charging these days, and how even state schools are modeling themselves after for profit schools. When I went to school, most classes were taught by full time professors, many tenured, aided by TAs. Now there are so many "associate professors", i.e., getting paid minimal amounts per course hour taught without benefits. The system is rotten.

Back in the 70s, Texas was awash taxes from oil money. I knew someone who attended UT Austin back then and it was a few hundred dollars per semester, as the state picked up the rest. Conservatives were conservative back then too, but they saw the value in an educated public. Now they feel like schools should be self funding.

I am a drop out. I really had no business ever going to college in the first place.

I love what I do now but I had to figure things out on my own.

Free college would have just been more free party time for me. You can run it a 1000 times and every time I am partying.

What we need to do is make sure people like you don't put off college because it becomes too pricey.

I also think I would have figured things out sooner if I would not have been pushed so hard by all these signals as a young man that college was a given.