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More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

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Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#71

Post by bagacrap »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #28

I have 3 college-aged kids and one nearly there. Their universal concern is the cost. It has become prohibitive. Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy. If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.

The loans are exactly why the colleges were able to continue jacking up the prices. As with homes, people will pay as much as institutions are willing to loan them. In both cases the currently low interest rates allow the loan principal to be much higher (given that folks calculate cost based on recurring payments). If you remove the student loan system then tuition would become cheaper. However that does unfairly impact those from economically disadvantaged households.

Also, in-state tuition for state schools is much less than $50k/yr so try going to Cal and/or your best local public school and supplement with self teaching (e.g. via public/free lectures from MIT)? The self directed learning/motivation is the hard part for many people of that age, but few have said living frugally should or would be easy.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#72

Post by syki »

treis wrote: post #58
modernpink wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is outrageous if true. An airborne virus is best treated with ventilation (i.e. opening windows). Surface transmission almost never happens [1]. The irony of course being that having a cleaner go in and out of rooms poses much greater risk of spread. [1] COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

>That is outrageous if true It's not true.

Consider that some colleges asked students to sign liability waivers to go back to the classroom. I don’t have the memorandum the chancellor sent to us at the beginning of the pandemic so I can’t prove that my statement is truthful but it does appear plausible given that some colleges asked students to sign waivers.

I don’t know if the rules that my system put in place at the beginning of the pandemic are still in force. They may have put that rule in place just to make sure we all went online when this mess first started. I just know I’m not going back to the classroom until most of my colleagues do too. My college is still almost entirely online.

EDIT: Chancellor’s memorandum was about cleaning protocols. The union advised us on liability issues and said that we could be liable for sicknesses if we fail to follow the protocol. My union membership includes a $1 million liability coverage for the classroom. They might have brought up this as a way of saying that our classroom insurance does not cover this possibility.

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/08/03/students-aske...

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#73

Post by [deleted] »

treis wrote: post #58
modernpink wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is outrageous if true. An airborne virus is best treated with ventilation (i.e. opening windows). Surface transmission almost never happens [1]. The irony of course being that having a cleaner go in and out of rooms poses much greater risk of spread. [1] COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces. So why are we still deep cleaning? https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00251-4

>That is outrageous if true It's not true.

[deleted]

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#74

Post by disambiguation »

treis wrote: post #46
disambiguation wrote: post #27

Less than 3k kids under the age of 24 have died from covid since the start of the pandemic [0] yet they have some how wound up with the harshest restrictions. These kids will never get these years back. What a disgrace. [0] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Deaths-by-Sex...

I don't think it's Covid related. The graph in the article clearly shows a steady decline that pre-dated Covid. Covid may have accelerated it a bit, but it's not a fundamental shift.

eye-balling from the graph: the drop in the past 2 years is as much as the drop in the 4 years before that (2015-2019)

but yes, I agree education was in a sorry state prior to the pandemic as well

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#75

Post by micromacrofoot »

sAbakumoff wrote: post #10

why bother? you enroll to a college, you collect a huge debt that the government is not going to cancel - they prefer to give money to corporations instead. covid-19 disrupted in-person education and it's not gonna away any time soon. at the same time there are plenty of crypto startups that don't give a sh*t about education and could be pretty lukrative

the government will actually cancel your student debt eventually (25 years) if you're on an income-based repayment plan

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#76

Post by Aperocky »

rootusrootus wrote: post #57

Maybe it just got too damn expensive. I make pretty good money and I'm still planning carefully for how I'm going to deal with it for my kids (who still have 7-9 years left before college). I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus. Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids…

Aren't state colleges relatively affordable (while mostly OK academically)?

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#77

Post by notreallyserio »

qlm wrote: post #26
reaperducer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always chuckle when someone on HN inevitably rails against education in a post with bad spelling, grammar, and expletives.

You think expletives are a sign of poor education? How dull.

Yeah, when combined with the bad spelling and grammar.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#78

Post by eschewobfuscat »

MattGaiser wrote: post #60
ChicagoDave wrote: post #28

I have 3 college-aged kids and one nearly there. Their universal concern is the cost. It has become prohibitive. Colleges assumed the trend of charging $25k to $50k per year would be sustainable. They were dead wrong, especially given the horrendously predatory loans backed by the government and barred from bankruptcy. If we fix the college financial system, enrollment would likely skyrocket.

Aren't state colleges must cheaper than that?

When I went to Colorado State University (by no means prestigious) tuition ran around $2,300 [1] and is now almost triple [2] per semester, I could rent a 2 bedroom apartment and live alone for $735, where as that's now sharing a 3 bedroom apartment. Renting the apartment I had is closer to $1,300 per month, or nearly double what I paid. It's not very affordable, whereas I could relatively easily afford it.

[1] http://irpe-reports.colostate.edu/pdf/tuition/Tuition_Fees_H...

[2] https://financialaid.colostate.edu/media/sites/38/2018/05/Un...

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#79

Post by rkk3 »

mfer wrote: post #12

US colleges have many students from foreign countries on visas. I wonder what the impact of the pandemic is on that segment of the student population. This isn't likely to hit community colleges, which the article touches on. Just trying to point out that digging deeper might show some interesting details.

> US colleges have many students from foreign countries on visas. I wonder what the impact of the pandemic is on that segment of the student population.

The elephant in the room is that those foreign students are also the ones paying sticker price and subsidizing college for the other students, even at public schools.

Re: More than 1M fewer students are in college, the lowest numbers in 50 years

#80

Post by rootusrootus »

Aperocky wrote: post #76
rootusrootus wrote: post #57

Maybe it just got too damn expensive. I make pretty good money and I'm still planning carefully for how I'm going to deal with it for my kids (who still have 7-9 years left before college). I'm hoping that online school really takes off, and that colleges follow Georgia Tech's lead on pricing for it. OSU still wants full price for online classes, which is bogus. Beyond that, I'm going to strongly incentivize my kids…

Aren't state colleges relatively affordable (while mostly OK academically)?

Relatively, yes, I believe so. But Oregon State still tells me to budget 30K/year for a resident undergrad. About half of that is living expenses, half is school.
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