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Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

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Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#361

Post by gen220 »

gumby wrote: post #326

As a single datapoint, in 1983 MIT tuition hit $10K -- highest in the nation according to a cartoon in the paper. It's currently $60K (total cost estimated $80K) so 7X is about right. However there's another way to look at it: over the summer I would earn over $10K so roughly covered my tuition. Admittedly that was at the high end of summer job compensation due to the AI boom, but gives you a rough idea of where that…

Big tech and big-tech-competitive places will generally pay you around $30k pre-tax for a summer job. But of course, most college students don't have access to those jobs at all, let alone for each summer in college.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#362

Post by frumper »

tempsy wrote: post #119
kortilla wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is wrong. You’re mixing up subsidized loans with the ability to get loans. People can get unsubsidized loans that still come with the same constraints around inability to discharge in bankruptcy for vastly more money. It’s essentially all unsecured student loans (i.e. effectively the entire student loan market) that have this risk free model for lenders. It would all be completely toxic trash otherwise that no l…

No its not Literally says "Subsidized and Unsubsidized Aggregate Loan Limit $31,000-No more than $23,000 of this amount may be in subsidized loan" Just confirms most people have no clue how small the limits actually are.

Those don't include private loans which can be co-signed by parents if needed, nor do they include PLUS loans where parents also take out loans. Colleges are also quite helpful in what you need to do to be declared independent for financial aide purposes, which almost doubles that limit.

Graduate students are where it gets wild though.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#363

Post by HDThoreaun »

ralmidani wrote: post #136
hospitalJail wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No no don't let the Physician cartel get out of this. Year over year they get at least 5% pay increases with US tax dollars. Not to mention, they get private pay increases by weaponizing the ACGME to keep residency slots low. Residency does not need to be paid. Outside of the Medical industry, people pay for their college. For some reason Physicians make tax payers pay for their education and a decent salary.

Medical school is education, and in the US it’s astronomically expensive (some people graduate with half a million dollars of debt). Residency is more like on-the-job training (a hospital still makes money when a resident sees and treats you). It just takes longer to train a physician because there are human lives at stake. Yes, teaching fellows and others in academia are often taken advantage of and work for free, b…

> a hospital still makes money when a resident sees and treats you

Hospitals lose money on residencies. That's why there aren't enough and the ones that do exist need to be subsidized by the federal government.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#364

Post by ed312 »

naijaboiler wrote: post #342
toomuchtodo wrote: post #2

The only service category that has outpaced higher education is hospital services. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century/

People forget that fundamentally, these are services that become relatively more expensive over time (as other things get relatively cheaper). Both healthcare and education don't really benefit from cost-reduction from scaling. At the end of the day, its still one service provider to few service consumers. Productivity in that sense is unchanged in 30 years. Meanwhile, consumer goods can continue to drop precipitious…

Hopefully AI starts to bend the cost curve. Just like a huge chunk of doctor visits could be handled by a nurse/NP, probably AI could do a lot of triage work and/or improve labor productivity.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#365

Post by taeric »

shkkmo wrote: post #321
dragonwriter wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how is it misleading? Because the limit cited only applies to students whose parents can get (federal, direct, and capped only by the school’s estimate of costs) PLUS loans, and yet is characteized as a limit of the impact of federal subsidies on school costs. A cap that only applies where another unlimited federal loan stream is available to the same student is, well, not a limit at all, when discussing federal im…

The cap when PLUS loans are not available is $57,500. The impact on prices is not just the direct, but the general understanding that private educational loans also could not be discharged in bankruptcy that was created by the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Courts have started to push back against that but there are only a handful of precedents.

Another misleading point, though? As you can then go on to get 138500 for graduate/professional school.

I'm interested in how many students aren't able to have their family go in on PLUS loans. As that is still a gaping hole to relying on the page and limits linked.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#366

Post by nightski »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #227
pclmulqdq wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In other words, the government has become a predatory lender with some intermediaries.

Which I find really weird, they take this stance against education but businesses don’t have to deal with such predatory loans - in fact govt loans for businesses tend to have low interest rates, or forgiven like the PPP loans. Why do we take anti-individual stances, but pro-business stances? Is that a byproduct of capitalism, or am I misreading the world?

PPP loans weren't really loans. It was known they would be forgiven before taking them out. If that had not been the case, most businesses would not of participated. I believe they were structured as loans providing a mechanism for congress to pass the aid immediately.

Actual business loans require assets/collateral, even those from the SBA. At least this has been my personal experience with my businesses. You can't get a loan with no credit or assets (like a student can).

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#367

Post by masfuerte »

have_faith wrote: post #233
lordnacho wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the CDOs are probably tranched, so there will be some portions that are safe. But in general, you'd think the student loans would only be in trouble if there's a large increase in the unemployment rate. You'd get a meltdown if the government were to announce a change in the laws.

> the CDOs are probably tranched, so there will be some portions that are safe The mortgage CDO's where tranched in 2008 also.

Sort of. They took the shitty bottom tranches from the mortgage CDOs and repackaged them as new CDOs. The credulous ratings agencies gave these new CDOs the same rating as the old ones but it took only a modest market downturn to wipe out even the top tier of these second level CDOs. Even this might not have been a problem if the whole thing hadn't been massively leveraged. The fact that mortgages were involved was nearly irrelevant. This shitshow could have been built on anything. The regulatory reforms that tackled the mortgage market were missing the point.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#368

Post by throw_m239339 »

Levitz wrote: post #349
codegeek wrote: post #41

It is free money for lenders because backed by the Govt AND protected against bankruptcy. It is Free money for colleges because they know they will get paid regardless. Remove this "free money guarantee" and watch how market corrects itself. When students can file for bankruptcy and/or the debt is not guaranteed by Govt, lenders would now use the same criteria they use to issue credit cards to 18 year olds. Hint: It'…

>Remove this "free money guarantee" and watch how market corrects itself. While I agree, I can't imagine what it would be like for the first generation of students under such change. The reason they are government backed is to make college a possibility to begin with. First ones in line would probably get massively screwed, no?

> First ones in line would probably get massively screwed, no?

No, College education will become cheaper, mechanically. Right now, it's the government that is highly distorting the education market with that loan system under pretense of allowing everybody to get an education.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#369

Post by kjkjadksj »

phillipcarter wrote: post #121

Surprised that nobody here mentioned community colleges yet. Not a silver bullet, but the total cost of someone commuting to a community college from home is an order of magnitude cheaper than going to college. In many cases, CCs have explicit transfer programs, and the chances of transferring to a decent university after year two are pretty high.

Or even just in state colleges. I went to a large public school. It was a great school, but so are the big public flagships found at any state. I knew a lot of people who were out of state, taking loans, to do things like business or premed they could literally do wherever they came from for over half off tuition before you even account for financial aid or scholarships. CCs really aren't that much cheaper than in state rates for public schools, and you can even take certain classes at the local CC and transfer the credits over to the public school to save a little bit per credit hour and have somewhat inflated grades (plenty of people I know did this for their physics or math requirements over a summer).

Another way to get free college is to just join the national guard program they have. A few friends did this as well. You do bootcamp which sucks, and like one weekend a month playing army in the woods during drill which I’m told also often sucks. But in the end you get free school and some pay. If you are used to doing hard work like manual labor, a weekend a month is not a bad deal. You can even land a job after through this experience and your degree e.g. in cybersecurity.

There are options, obviously not as good as affording it outright but there are things you can do that aren’t going out of state on a huge loan, so I’m surprised why so many people opt to take routes that put them in the same exact place by their mid 20s but with a massive debt over their heads versus these seemingly less glamorous routes. Maybe the marketing of “leaving the parents nest” is just that good?

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#370

Post by [deleted] »

tempsy wrote: post #45
taeric wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worse than just "backed by the federal government," the loans are basically protected by the government. Being one of the small list of things you can't bankrupt out of, the risk in giving out the loans has been fully pulled from the lenders. It is frustrating to hear the discourse over the inappropriate students that are taking on too much debt, all the while ignoring the lenders that are taking on too much risk. At…

Eh I think the impact of the federal government on undergraduate costs is largely overstated. The limits for dependent students, which is most undergrads, is really small over 4 years. https://studentaid.gov/understand-aid/types/loans/subsidized... You can only borrow $31k over 4 years. That isn't a lot at all.

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