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Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

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431–440 of 771 posts

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#431
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hint: It's tough to get your 1st credit card if you have no credit history in the US and most lenders will not even entertain that idea. Some will do if you put in a collateral like $500 of actual cash deposit to guard against the default risk. Is that true these days? At my university 20 years ago, the credit card companies would bribe 18-year-old freshmen to sign up for their cards.

I had an unsecured student credit card, 20 years now. Its limit was $800, no deposit required; just enough to pay for books, lab supplies, and a few meals. I know because I kept it as my last resort emergency card all these years later. Or use it on sketchy kiosk/online shopping sites. Every few years BoA asks me to increase the limit, which I decline to do. I'm still FB friends with the girl that gave me a free t-sh…

Off topic: 20 years ago, FB didn't exist.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will say it again: Private high school costs have also gone up astronomically and there are no federal loans for them. [0] https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-private-school

[flagged]

> It's not economics, analysis, reason or anything like that - it's pure orthodoxy and blind dogmatism.

It would be rich if the data in the article in no way supported your rant.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#433
post #335
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to see numbers on how many are actually discharged. My understanding is this is almost as akin to saying that the lottery does, in fact, pay out.

There's more paths to discharging than bankruptcy. Somebody I know had a medical emergency while in their repayment period. They were unable to work and went on to disability insurance, and eventually had their loans forgiven. I think they had to be on disability for a certain period of time (measured in years, iirc) before they were discharged. Eventually, they recovered sufficiently to be able to return to the work…

Thanks for sharing the anecdotes.

Doesn't it seem like a society shouldn't encourage people to financially self-immolate in order to start their adult life?

I mean, giving the self-immolators some tweaky hacks to prevent being lit on fire is not really the best solution.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#434

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'…

> Hint: It's tough to get your 1st credit card if you have no credit history in the US and most lenders will not even entertain that idea. Some will do if you put in a collateral like $500 of actual cash deposit to guard against the default risk. Is that true these days? At my university 20 years ago, the credit card companies would bribe 18-year-old freshmen to sign up for their cards.

Same here. 25 years ago I got a $500 AMEX card and a bag of M&Ms. A $1,000 Citi card and a T-shirt. And another card—Discover, $2,000!—along with a free CD I think?

The conventional wisdom at the time was that (a) we were college students and were therefore more likely to have earnings in the near future to cover those small credit limits, and (b) we were college students and were therefore more likely to have parents to bail us out if we got in trouble with the credit card, and (c) there's no better time to snag a lifetime customer than at the very beginning of their adult lives.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Society is better off as a whole with a well educated populace. We shouldn't optimize for college only for kids who can learn to program or whatever. Most other developed nations manage to send every smart kid to college for ten thousand dollars per kid or less. Once again, it is only the US that thinks it is a special butterfly that can't somehow manage to give kids college. Sure, most European colleges don't spend…

The education needed for a functioning society should be delivered by the end of high school. A few generations ago it was delivered by the end of 8th grade. And yes, college sports on the whole does pay for itself. Those stadiums are built by donated money, and revenue from ticket sales. Yes taken in isolation there are a lot of sports that don't make money, but they are subsidized by those that do (chiefly football…

It’s a question of what kind of “functioning society” you want to have. Those 8th grade education jobs still exist, but they’re in China, Bangladesh and other developing economies. And no offense to those people either. A lot of manufacturing depends on them.

Those are certainly “functioning societies” but their economies are much less advanced than in the US. It’s not realistic to say that an advanced economy can get by with education ending at age 18.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#437
post #24
post #10

Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government. If an 18 year old with no money and no credit history gets accepted into a qualifying university, she will be able to receive a loan since the bank knows that the government will protect their investment if she fails to pay them back. So now young people have this easy access to credit, and universities can greatly increase tuition and fees wit…

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…

The loans are mostly owned by the government too :)

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the other half is student debt relief programs ...which student debt relief programs? Afaik there are no widely used student debt relief programs.

Work for a public organization or certain non-profits while making 10 years of regularly scheduled payments and you may be qualified for student loan forgiveness. Lots of physicians I know took advantage of this since most of their training is at public academic institutions, and I believe many teachers do as well.

Do you have data on how many take advantage of it? My anecdotes are that everyone who tries this gets trapped in some bureaucratic hell hole that tends to prevent it from actually being used.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#439
post #10

Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government. If an 18 year old with no money and no credit history gets accepted into a qualifying university, she will be able to receive a loan since the bank knows that the government will protect their investment if she fails to pay them back. So now young people have this easy access to credit, and universities can greatly increase tuition and fees wit…

You're missing another driver of the growth in tuition though: many colleges are only superficially "not for profit" and in reality are being run as profit maximizing institutions.

Re: Tuition costs have risen 710% since 1983

#440
post #10

Makes sense when you have student loans backed by the federal government. If an 18 year old with no money and no credit history gets accepted into a qualifying university, she will be able to receive a loan since the bank knows that the government will protect their investment if she fails to pay them back. So now young people have this easy access to credit, and universities can greatly increase tuition and fees wit…

It's worth mentioning that degree granting institutions numbered ~3500 in 1980 and total enrollment was almost 10 million, and in 2022 there were just over 4000 such institutions serving 17 million students, and that number of institutions is actually declining from its peak in ~2016. This alone is bound to drive up prices.
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