12 ms·

A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap

132 points by hudibras 13y ago

eweise 13y ago
Yup its true and the norm. I made about $6K over the summer months and my college tuition was $350 a semester. Shared an apartment for $200/month. The thought of taking out a loan never entered my mind.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Depending on your age, you may have been able to discharge any debt you acquired after graduation, which made it nuts for anyone to loan you money. The reasons for making student loans non-dischargeable was based on a theory that only rich students would be able to go to college. However, I think experience has been a very harsh teacher that we got something much worse out of that bargain than we thought.
meddlepal 13y ago
Sort of. The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business. It became easy to get loans for higher-education and then tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital. There other contributing factors as well; for example, the rise of the ridiculous requirement to have a college degree to get anything close to a decent job these days has created tremendous demand for degrees and allowed colleges and universities to raise tuition into the stratosphere.
- speeder 13y ago
  Here in Brazil at least that is true. The Brazilian boomers thought us that we needed college, period. Then lack of colleges happened, thus government started giving student loans, and private companies building colleges like crazy, and the government build at a more reasonable pace Now most people.of my age have a.degree that only proves you can wipe your ass with it, because most universities here have terrible quality, considering the amount of them grew much faster than we had teachers, and people.are terribly indebted. I pay for example permonth 2 times the minimum monthly wage. And most people stay stuck earning minimum wage until they retire. And I am not a exception, the only people I met that are below 28 and don't have absurd debts are dropouts or child of someone with net worth bigger than. 5 million. EDIT: In the fields I got my degrees, every year we have more students completing their courses than the total number of employees on those fields in the country... Or the one that is so absurd to the point of hilarity: Brazil has more law schools than the rest of the world summed, last time I checked in the justice department site, 5% of our population has a bachelor degree in law... (remember Brazil has a 200 million + population)
  - thifm 13y ago
    I get almost 10 minimum wages with 24 and I think that I'm underpaid(and I am...). I was making WAY MORE money working as a freelancer than working for a company here but it seems that people(and the government) only respect who is employed by a company, otherwise I will never be able to buy a car or a house with a loan. Our government sucks. College on Brazil is alright, the problem is with research culture -- horribly bad. Teachers on universities are rated by how much shit they published instead of the quality of their work. The academic field is very bad for anybody wanting to study something advanced but at least in computer science, being a undergrad is just fine. You learn the same shit that the MIT does, the problem is 1. the people of your class, 2. your teachers don't do anything interesting to inspire you.
    - speeder 13y ago
      I guess you went to some expensive university or a federal one... I am talking here about the ones that majority of the population use, UNIP, Anhembi Morumbi, Anhanguera, that sort of stuff... Also, at 10 mininum wages, you are on the top 4% of the population in income (yes, it is that bad here in Brazil).
- mjn 13y ago
  That's true at some universities (especially private ones), but costs don't explain the results everywhere. In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms. Why has tuition gone up, then? The state of California has cut its per-student funding to less than half of what it used to be, which leaves a substantial gap even after the cost improvements. Here are some funding numbers I compiled, via the rough-estimate method of taking the state allocation to the system and dividing by its undergraduate enrollment: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt
- tokenizer 13y ago
  Yup. Make it impossible for people to get this kind of money, and the schools will change to meet the new realistic tuition amount. People argue that this would mean only rich people would be able to go to college, but I think colleges would rather keep the number of students up high, and not become an extremely privileged institution.
- nhebb 13y ago
  The other half of the story is that even back in the 80's a summer job typically couldn't cover the cost of a school year. I started school in the fall of '82. Tuition was dirt cheap compared to today, but the cost of housing, food, etc. was still high enough that very few students I knew were able to pay for college via summer jobs alone.
- VLM 13y ago
  "when the government got involved in the student loan business." Its more general than that. System wide. Same scenario during the same timeframe in cost of housing, cost of day care, cost of automobiles... Anything involving loaning money from a bank and possibly paying it back, or anything where the .gov hands out money to certain favored groups. "the rise of the ridiculous requirement to have a college degree to get anything close to a decent job" At least in the USA there are fewer jobs every year. So its not ridiculous so much as market forces. Also note that society wide (ignoring the very narrow IT code monkey situation solely in NY and SF, I mean country-wide) we produce more college grads than we have job openings. This is kind of an important lesson for HN startups etc. Yes is it true there is a shortage of IT folks in NY/SF. But in the rest of the country, we're rapidly moving from merely needing any bachelors degree to be a receptionist or call center script reader, to perhaps needing a STEM degree for those kind of jobs. I know experienced and productive STEM people lucky to be working in call centers. The lesson is if you intend to scale your startup outside SF/NY you need to face jobforce realities outside SF/NY. For example say you create a startup to sell to education. Don't do your marketing plan aimed at Ed degree holders (maybe a .edu discount or some kind of viral marketing via sponsorship of alumni activities or something) because most of those grads are either working in the hospitality industry as waiters / bartenders unable to get a job, or got a teaching job and burned out in a decade and are already on their next career. So most Ed degree holders are going to be unable/uninterested WRT your startup. You could aim at people actually employed in the field, which will be a pretty small subset of those educated in the field. Its tempting, if you're in silicon valley, to try to scale, based on what works in silicon valley where you live. The rest of the country that you're trying to scale into is basically a different, failing economic model. Sometimes this is important when scaling, sometimes it isn't.
  - yummyfajitas 13y ago
    At least in the USA there are fewer jobs every year. False. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=PAYEMS http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=PAYEMS
    - specialist 13y ago
- freehunter 13y ago
  I'm one of the few who paid for his college tuition out of pocket. Not in the 80's; I graduate this December. I'm not rich, I live like a pauper. I've worked multiple jobs, I've done intense internships, and with the money I've made I've paid for as many classes as I could afford each semester. It's been 7 years now since I started college, and I'll be graduating after one more semester. I just recently found a company willing to hire me full time with just the promise that I will be a graduate in the near future. If I don't graduate in December, my salary gets cut (further limiting my ability to graduate). It's not good enough that I've been working in my industry for five years; I need a degree too. I feel that people who pay their college on student loans don't really feel the full impact of how much their tuition cost them until it's far too late. People like me feel it all too well. Most of my friends have graduated and have nice jobs, taking vacations in Europe, and going to see the doctor (what I wouldn't give for health insurance...). They criticize me for not having graduated yet. But we'll see which plan pays off in the long run.
  - Roboprog 13y ago
    Congratulations on your coming finish line. Hard to say if the loans would have been worth starting higher paying work a few years earlier, or not, but at least you are doing it instead of giving up!
  - glesica 13y ago
    Actually the loans may very well have been a better deal for you. You have sacrificed three years of income (assuming you finish in seven years instead of four). If you would have been able to command $50,000 per year, but instead made, say, $20,000 per year, then you've left $90,000 on the table. That is your opportunity cost (as the economists say) for being debt-free. So unless your loans would have been greater than that amount, you should have just borrowed the money and finished sooner, then lived cheaply and paid down your debt.
- john_roberts 13y ago
  Anyone who says it is easy to get loans for higher-education from the government must have never dealt with my school's Financial Aid office, or filled out a FAFSA. It might be easy to get private loans for higher education, as they are for profit and you can't bankruptcy out of them, but I was lucky enough to not need them.
- narcissus 13y ago
  So just upfront, I don't know what the 'average' cost of university is in North America. Having said that, people this way tend to argue about the cost of tertiary education a lot more than in Australia, for example, so I presume (quite possibly incorrectly) that it's cheaper in Australia. With that in mind, I wanted to just point out that in Australia, all student loans are done through the government and a quick search shows that the average cost of a degree ranges between about $5000 and $10000 a year. I don't know if that supports your statement about the government being "involved in the student loan business" but I figured it may be a helpful piece of data...
  - jwoah12 13y ago
    For some perspective, my degree at a public state university in the US cost about $20,000 per year. That was almost 10 years ago. There are plenty of universities in the $40-50k per year range.
    - narcissus 13y ago
      That's amazing. Another quick search shows up to about $17,000 a year in Canada and as far as I can tell the loans are part government, part private (though rates etc. are set by the government). From all of that, then, while I can't argue that "The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business" (from my original parent's comment) is incorrect, I don't think it's fair to infer that one is necessarily the fault of the other. Implicitly, of the course, if the underlying problem is more related to the "tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital" comment, then it just comes down to 'greedy higher education' which is its own problem I guess.
- lmg643 13y ago
  Great point. I wonder how long it will be before we can publicly acknowledge the foolishness of these government subsidies. Efforts to improve college affordability created skyrocketing costs. Same story with housing affordability - an epic and damaging bubble. We can acknowledge wasteful subsidies for farmers, when we see food rotting in fields instead of being exported or consumed. And yet, the presence of millions of highly indebted, unemployed or underemployed college graduates and there's nothing to see here, please move along.
- skwirl 13y ago
  Strongly disagree. The example used in this article is the University of Washington. The government has always been involved in every facet of the University of Washington as it is run by the government. You seem to be claiming that because the government dropped their share of covering a student's tuition from 90% to 30% and allowed them to take out a loan instead, they were suddenly willing to pay a lot more money to go to school, which is absurd. You don't give nearly enough credit to what you call "other contributing factors." What happened was an economic sea change. Years ago upon graduating high school you had options. You could go get a job in manufacturing and make good money right away and live a solid middle class life. For many, college was an unattractive option. Today, our manufacturing base has been destroyed. When you graduate high school today, what options do you have besides go to college? There are simply not enough good paying jobs that don't require a college degree to go around. Not even close. I think ultimately you are mixing up cause and effect. The government is involved in the student loan business because college education has increasingly become the only path to a middle class life. Our education policy is reactive, not proactive. When the government plows the streets of snow it tends to be snowing. It doesn't mean the government caused the snow.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Today, our manufacturing base has been destroyed. The USA manufacturers more than it ever has. However, it does so with fewer workers, just like the agricultural revolution moved us from 90% of people needing to be farmers to 2%. When you graduate high school today, what options do you have besides go to college? There are simply not enough good paying jobs that don't require a college degree to go around. Not even close. I agree with these facts, but probably not your conclusion. A lot of jobs that supposedly require college education really don't require a college education at all. However, since so many people have a college education, employers are free to use the presence of a bachelor's degree as a test for your socioeconomic status.
    - waps 13y ago
      > The USA manufacturers more than it ever has. However, it does so with fewer workers, just like the agricultural revolution moved us from 90% of people needing to be farmers to 2%. I wonder who's next, then.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Sort of. The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business. It became easy to get loans for higher-education and then tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital. We have the same upper class problem we had in the same 1920s-30s but they've replaced poverty with subordinacy. They've become more wily and would rather people fall into servitude than fail completely. When capitalism broke down in 1929-33, people actually died of starvation. Now they go into high-interest credit card debt. The same is happening in higher education. The need for widespread higher education is too strong for people to just not go, but the upper class isn't going to just give it away (even if there is benefit to them of an educated society). Thus, non-dischargeable loans have replaced taxpayer-funded grants, and college is just at the point of affordability where the upper class feels comfortable with the number of people who can go to school.
- tzs 13y ago
  > Sort of. The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business. It became easy to get loans for higher-education and then tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital. This is very commonly asserted, but no one offers data to back it. Some try to argue it on general supply and demand principles (loans increase demand, supply does not increase as fast, so price goes up), but this fails because that theory predicts prices should rise to the point where supply and demand are equal, yet in fact prices are far below that.
cm2012 13y ago
Isn't it also true that private institutions have seen an equally fast or faster growth in tuition expenses? That would invalidate the article. For reference btw, $3 to $6 in 1981 dollars is $7.50 to $15 in today's dollars according to Westegg.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  Yes. Higher education is the only industry to give medicine a run for its money in cost inflation. Some blame Baumol's cost disease[1], and that's probably an element of it, but so too are the multiplication of deanlets and deanlings[2], the cancerous growth of the physical facilities a of every school, spending per student being used as a proxy for quality by the USN&WR, the rise of bidding wars for celebraty faculty, ect. Much or all these effects are enabled by incentives for those that run universities in which holding costs down play little to no role. That's partially a function of the student loan system and partially a function of lax oversight of "charitable" organizations in general. [1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease [2]http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...
  - danielweber 13y ago
    Once you get a group of customers who have been told and internalized "price doesn't matter," then you will only see one response from the producers. Producers who tried to avoid the game got left behind. When the students don't care about the cost, then it becomes a losing proposition to skip out on (say) the $10 million expense that only provides $1 million of value to your students.
esalman 13y ago
It is hugely annoying when clicking on whitespace on a web page opens ads in a new tab.
BvS 13y ago
Does anyone know why the cost of the universities have skyrocketed? Do they offer a better staff/student relation, better equipment, better buildings, do they pay their staff better...? I honestly don't know but since a lot of the universities are non profits the money is not going to their shareholder's and if I understand the article correctly the (inflation adjusted) amount of money the government provides also has not decreased.
- Nutella4 13y ago
  Bigger, newer buildings. Lots more administrators paid much higher salaries. Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams. Gourmet food and single rooms for students (so they can attract the best and brightest!) rather than hash-slinging cafeterias and dormitories. Fancy gyms for the same reason. Faculty salaries, however, are much lower since a large percentage now are part time temps with PhDs.
  - Nutella4 13y ago
    I should have said that median faculty salaries are much lower. A few stars get big salaries and more than half get starvation wages.
    - VLM 13y ago
      We have been moving to the pro sports salary model, not just in pro sports, but obviously already happened in .edu and is more or less along that path everywhere else. I'm sure there's startup opportunities and risks in this cultural and economic system change.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    At my school, a lot of the instructors (at least the non-research instructors) are people who hold 9-5 jobs at a private company in their field of instruction as an adjunct professor. They're willing to work for a lot less pay, since it's a second job.
    - 13y ago
tibbon 13y ago
Tuition has skyrocketed, but have universities changed that much? They act like they never have enough money, but yet... they have more than ever. What are the offering now for their 10x increase in tuition in 30 years?
- rayiner 13y ago
  Have you seen all the shiny new academic buildings?
- codva 13y ago
  Kids in a lot of colleges today are living a life of luxury compared to what I had in the 80s. Any dorm built or renevated in the last 10-15 or so years will have semi-private bathrooms. The dining options today are way better than what we had. I trudged down to the dorm cafeteria and ate whatever slop they were serving, high school cafeteria style. My son (at a small public university) has what amounts to a mall food court at school, and he can choose from burgers, pizza, wraps, vegetarian, Italian, Mexican, etc. every day. The libraries are more functional, the sports facilities are all updated, etc. All that costs money.
  - VLM 13y ago
    I've noticed the luxuriousness of modern higher ed, and I imagine the culture shock after graduation for virtually all grads must be interesting. My favorite waitress used to eat at a facility like that, after graduation now she's stuck working at a similar facility. A bit too personal to ask, but I imagine its kinda a shock to the system for about 99% of the students.
    - danielweber 13y ago
      I imagine the culture shock after graduation for virtually all grads must be interesting. Unless they think that they cannot possibly go through a reduction in their standard of living and borrow to keep up with what is, in their mind, "normal." College used to be rare and ascetic. Now it's required and expensive. I don't think either of those are a good trend.
jimhefferon 13y ago
I also paid for my college largely with high school jobs (I was fortunate enough to have had a home, clothes, food, etc. while I was earning that money). So kids, it is all true. I work at a college and I am also just finishing putting my two children through college, so I am very interested in the topic. I find the report at http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Anatomy-of-College-Tuition.pdf http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Anatomy-of-College... informative. In particular, on page 2 you can see that the steady increases in the cost of college fits with the fact that college is a service industry (or at least it has been up to now). On page 10 you see in a graph the point that the Seattle Times's article made with an anecdote, that state and local governments have reduced support and families have had to make good the difference. In my mind, just as we as a society pool our resources to build bridges, we also need to produce people who will lead tomorrow (but then, as I say, I work at a college).
- gambogi 13y ago
  I've been working since I was 15 (I'm 20). In total, I've made around $15k. My first year of school cost roughly twice that figure. If I wasn't majoring in CS (or my Grandfather hadn't died), I would not be going to the school I am. This isn't how the system should work.
  - jimhefferon 13y ago
    Oh, I absolutely agree (as does the original article) that a hard-working bright student from a middle class household who wants to go to a state school cannot do so from working hard, as you and I did, from age 15 through college, at the kinds of jobs that such students would hold (I worked in a resturant; that's the kind of job I meant). I agree with the article, and I assume with you, that it is wrong that such a thing is not possible today.
- danielweber 13y ago
  We also didn't have price explosion. A generation was told "go to college, don't worry about how much it costs, just go to college." And the colleges priced accordingly. Make college debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and you will see real price pressure. No school will expect any student to go more than $10,000 in debt because they'll discharge and walk away.
FatalBaboon 13y ago
The fault is shared between both parties: employers demand degrees because it's so much easier to recruit that way, and youngsters don't fight and just go to college. In my opinion we need way (WAY) more smart dropouts, people who realize they don't belong in school but stay by fear are just as much at fault. There's no fear or shame to have, I've been through it and it just disabled poor professionnals from hiring me, which is more of a blessing than anything else. And of course, it's all debt-free from there on (except I bought a place in Paris before my friends even moved out of their parents').
- agilebyte 13y ago
  Yeah but for that to work we need a big mass of people without degrees. Right now the status quo is on the other end of the spectrum so you get a trickle of fighters. We need someone to pave the way :). Maybe rising tuition is the way to go. At some point uni education becomes so prohibitive that even the mass may avoid it. (btw I was not a fighter)
trotsky 13y ago
Wage stagnation is probably a bigger factor. Minimum wage, 1951: $0.75/hr Minimum wage, 1981: $3.25/hr Minimum wage, 2011: $7.25/hr
- zanny 13y ago
  While I don't agree with the status quo, if your labor isn't worth $15 an hour to someone (mainly because someone else is perfectly willing to do the work for less) then they don't have a moral obligation to pay you more, and minimum wage laws only artificially constrict the limits of what the value of unskilled labor is. I'd rather see a basic income guarantee (mainly for creative people like artists or FOSS developers) and the removal of minimum wage, so businesses can correct the true value of labor in various fields. It would help eliminate the rampant service industry that destroys souls because most people don't have the fortitude to deal with random strangers idiocy.
  - psaintla 13y ago
    How about an obligation to not shift your employee cost of living onto the government?
    - viveutvivas 13y ago
      This is the important aspect that most people don't think about when discussing this issue. A quick google search reveals 80% of Walmart employees are on government assistance.
- adventured 13y ago
  It's not wage stagnation per se, it's the implosion of the real economy. Minimum wage can't keep up because our economy is a shadow of its former self. From 1950 to 1980, America had on average half the total global manufacturing base, courtesy of WW2 having blown up everybody else. If we matched minimum wage from 1951, or 1961, we'd need to be paying $40,000 to $50,000 per year. Anybody that has run a liquor store, or a fast food business, understands that's mathematically impossible.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
perlpimp 13y ago
Hate to break it to you but universities are in the business of research. Teaching is nearly worthless use of researcher's time - taken away from progressing science and getting those private and government grants. Or so the teachers told me in Canada. Some teachers believe in teaching - others treat students with contempt and shrug them off to assistants. And the bigger university, the bigger the stakes are in research at least - lower quality education you get. Granted elevated acceptance requirements will get you in the boat with some smart people - for four years of tedium and exasperation but then you'll have the network to build from. my 2c
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >Teaching is nearly worthless use of researcher's time No, it isn't or else you'll soon run out of researchers.
Alex3917 13y ago
This is a little misleading. When adjusted for inflation, the average amount that students pay has increased only moderately. And on average students at public universities only pay about 18% of the money that's spent per student. There's no question it's a little bit harder now than it used to be, but it's not like its twice as expensive, let alone 10x as some people would claim.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  You're looking at tuition increases. Food, Housing, Books, etc. have also increased in varying amounts.
  - Alex3917 13y ago
    Fair enough. But the average net tuition at public universities is only $4,900 per year. Assuming you make $10 per hour at a summer job, that works out to exactly 40 hours per week over the summer. Obviously there are still other expenses and considerations, but tuition itself isn't especially unreasonable. The bigger issues are the fact that education you'll receive is likely complete garbage, your degree won't be worth anything, and wages of the middle class have been decreasing for decades.
    - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      > Assuming you make $10 per hour at a summer job Do you mean $10 per hour over the cost of living/driving/eating/etc ? >The bigger issues are the fact that education you'll receive is likely complete garbage The lectures are the same, the bar has been lowered too much.
  - philwelch 13y ago
    Food and housing are both a scam, depending on the school--where I went, it was significantly more cost effective to get these things from the free market than to live and eat on campus. Textbooks are also a scam. Often you could buy international editions but god help you if you were assigned problem sets.
- 13y ago
steven2012 13y ago
I went to university in Canada in the early 90s. My tuition per year peaked at $2500/yr. I could make about $6000 over the summer, which would pay for my tuition and a big chunk of my dorm fees ($6000/yr). Nowadays, I don't know how anyone can afford to go to university, or even if it's worth it anymore. I believe there's a lot of value in higher education, but not if it means having $100k+ in debt.
- Danieru 13y ago
  Canada has been spared the American insanity if my understanding is correct. I pay ~7k/year for University of Calgary. Even University of Waterloo our most prestigious computer science university is only 10k. Provided you are not an international student tuition should be reason. I expect my Microsoft internship to pay for two years of uni including living expenses. Freelancing paid for another year. Compared to the farm work, tree planting, and landlording which my father did to pay for University I'm on vacation.
calinet6 13y ago
Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor emeritus of Berkeley, spoke at a fundraising event I attended and said something I thought was poignant: "The University of California has gone from being a state-funded institution, to a state-sponsored institution, to a state-located institution." The level at which the State of California funds the university is practically nothing at this point. Alumni donations have filled some gaps but don't nearly cover everything. Tuition has increased to the point where even I, who graduated in 2006, consider it ridiculous. It is now over 8 times the maximum semester tuition I paid. I can't imagine considering Berkeley a "great value" anymore, as I did when I was there considering the (excellent) quality of education versus the price. It used to be a sense of pride; that a public university could be so great, to prove the experiment, to show that society could produce academic excellence without falling to the vices of money and the divisions that come with it. Now that experiment has failed, and only those who believe in it strongly—the Alumni and supporters—are upholding it, but that's not sustainable. We need to grow up. This fantasy of American individualism is killing us. We need to grow up and learn how to share—and this is the worst part: as we once did.
- emehrkay 13y ago
  > We need to grow up. This fantasy of American individualism is killing us. We need to grow up and learn how to share—and this is the worst part: as we once did. Reminds me of the very first chapter of The E Myth book (good little book if you haven't read it).
- caseysoftware 13y ago
  I think the vast majority of people are okay sharing when they can see things moving towards some sort of mutual benefit. For example, funding students in STEM, medicine, etc. But now we have programs like "[choose "minority" group] Studies" and we talk those students as seriously STEM.. or worse, we consider the STEM students as an afterthought. Also, if tuition is now 8x what you paid before, I would suggest that there's a problem with the program itself and not necessarily how we're funding it.
  - hack_edu 13y ago
adventured 13y ago
The reason for this explosion in cost, is the Feds began fully subsidizing the cost of a college education. Colleges then had the green light to perpetually raise prices - even in the depths of the great recession - they knew Uncle Sam would cover the bill. Education costs have had no connection to reality because you could get a government backed loan for it. When you see an entire industry, with plenty of competition amongst schools, disconnecting from reality, you can almost always bet the government is involved in the cost inflation. Colleges then took that massive influx of government sponsored cash and put it to work funding their bureaucracies, building an endless parade of buildings they didn't actually need, significantly boosting professor pay, and accumulating substantial endowments. Meanwhile the actual education - their product - did not get more valuable. At a time of terrible economic performance, with 14% real unemployment, falling incomes, and lack of jobs post graduation, clearly the cost of an education should have fallen by quite a lot. It didn't because of a guaranteed loan back stop. There is talk now that students should pay the same low interest rates on their debt that banks pay when they borrow money. If that is put into effect, all it will do is accelerate the debt accumulation. It'll enable students to borrow more, and colleges will accordingly charge more. This government fueled scheme can only end in tears (bailouts).
- stuaxo 13y ago
  Citation please !
  - adventured 13y ago
    Guaranteed loans means students can borrow almost as much as they care to (how else does one borrow $60,000 without the prospect for a job, in a disastrous economy), and accordingly universities can perpetually raise prices as they know the Feds will just keep guaranteeing the loans via Mr Printing Press. It's quite a simple equation in fact. If you wanted to solve the education cost spiral, the Feds need merely begin reducing the guaranteed funds, stop guaranteeing loans, or strictly lock down the guaranteed loan sums. Colleges would be forced to adjust to that new reality, in which they don't get perpetually increasing tuitions. And if you want to check the concept, look up how much of a college education is subsidized by government loans today, versus 30 or 40 years ago - personally I think the general answer is obvious.
jseliger 13y ago
Well, that’s the part we don’t want to talk about anymore. That's not true at all: college costs are constantly discussed. The book Why Does College Cost So Much is the most comprehensive treatment of the issue I've seen, and it argues that the main driver of college costs is Baumol's Cost Disease. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists. Universities like the University of Washington are also in a spending arms race: universities are increasing their per-student spending, even in the face of falling state spending: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/04/public_university_spending_is_up_not_down.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/04/public_univer... . A side note: Danny Westneat is something of a joke among people who read the Seattle Times, and it's a mistake to take almost anything he writes seriously. He's the sort of pious liberal that makes intellectually minded and honest liberals crazy because of his tendency to repeat various kinds of half-truths. This is a good example: he's right that if Washington picked up 90% of UW's tab, tuition would be cheaper. But it's also true that if he'd read more, and read more about the people who actually study this issue, he'd have a more complete picture of the situation. You'll learn more reading this comment than reading his column.
- skylan_q 13y ago
  The reason a summer at KFC could pay for a year of UW med school in 1981 isn’t that we were so hardworking and industrious. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists. Source?
  - Djehngo 13y ago
    The article in question? ~5 paragraphs from the bottom. Or are you asking a commenter who disagrees with the article to provide sources for an assertion made in the article?
- Retric 13y ago
  Your speaking in half truths, taking inflation into account the increase intuition is mostly related to lack of funding for state schools. Consider a few states hand out fee rides to a significant faction of students who meet basic qualifications. The real issue is most states have been poorly run over the last 50 years and face a wide range of funding issues related to pensions and healthcare issues. PS: In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms.
larrydag 13y ago
Here is something to look at 2013 Tuition: $12,500 Subsidized: 30% 2013 Total: $17,857 1981 Tuition: $687 Subsidized: 90% 1981 Total: $6870 2013 Dollars: $17,690 (at 3% inflation) So the argument is not the cost of education as that hasn't changed in 30 years. Its more who is footing the bill which is implied in the article. Should taxpayers pay for the education?
- adventured 13y ago
  That $12,500 tuition is wholly subsidized. The loan guarantees provided by the government are back-stopped by the tax payers (and ultimately the Fed, aka people holding dollars). The sole reason students can get loans totaling $40k or $50k is the government is subsidizing the entire process with guaranteed loans. Most likely as this soon to be multi-trillion dollar debt debacle explodes, the government is going to end up paying for a lot of that debt via bailouts. They're certainly not going to let that tower of debt truly fall over, so a bailout is the only likely outcome.
saintx 13y ago
I paid for my undergraduate education (97-03) by dropping out to work as a full time consultant. Because I did this twice, it took several extra years to graduate. For grad school, I worked a full time night job and missed out on the quintessential grad student experience of being a TA, getting to know the faculty, making friends, and being a part of the grad student and research community. I did manage to finish grad school with no debt, but I'll never know whether it was worth missing out on the social academic experience. It may technically be possible to pay for higher education through hard work, but the opportunity cost is hard to appreciate for those who do.
lettergram 13y ago
I'm going to University of Illinois the tuition for the engineering department = $19,980, and the living expenses = $7,000 ($400 rent, $100 food, $40 internet per month with roommate). That's a total of $26,980 not including books, parking permits, clothes, any possible fun, computer, etc. I made ~$25,000 working a year at jimmy johns as a delivery driver 20 hours a week (averaged $18 an hour), my 40 hour a week summer job ($10 an hour), and my website/youtube income (only $500 or so). This year i'm broke, but I went to a junior college for two years at $4000 a year, saved up, and I should graduate with a bachelors in C.S. with a minor in BioE for a total loan (for two years) I took out myself of ~$50,000. 1-2 years to pay back the loan, did it myself (I did have a cosigner for the loan, but it is still in my name AKA I call it doing it myself because i'm liable and am pretty responsible) Quite frankly I would rather require each student to take out a loan themselves, than have my future self pay for the students to drink and screw around. My GPA is 3.5/4.0, i'll graduate when i'm 22 (currently 21), I have always worked 20-60 hours a week, I have 110 credit hours and a year to go (i've taken classes every semester including summer), and I have kept a girlfriend even. Its possible, you just have to be serious enough to do it. OR you could take $100,000 in loans, work 10 years to pay it back ($500,000 by the end with interest). Part of the reason it costs so much to go to school is so many people default. Do you think I will? Perhaps take some of the pressure off the public to pay, put it on the student and less people will default because only the most serious will go to expensive universities. Like I said, $4000 a semester at a junior college and I honestly think my education there was about the same quality as U of I, I had professors from Argonne national labs, one guy even designed the electronics for the f-18 hornet and taught as a kind of retirement. Sorry for the rant, but the point is, I did it all myself and all of these comments about how hard or ridiculous it is it is are pathetic. Go to a junior college for a couple years, transfer, take out some loans, pay them back and get off the public's back (too many college students party to consider it a worthy public investment). Although it's harder, its definitely more gratifying to do it yourself.
dasil003 13y ago
Someone who went to college in 1981 does seem ancient to me, after all my mom went to college just a few years before that and she smoked cigarettes in class ($0.25 a pack!), but this guy is only 48! Now I'm 35 and rapidly catching up! I think the theory of logarithmic experience of aging where you have experienced half your life by age 12 is totally true.
dclowd9901 13y ago
This one's easy. It's obviously the availability of cheap money (loans) that has caused the price of college to go up. Just like homes and cars (which are equally ridiculously priced), we can only afford them because they are comparatively leveraged. If people had to pay out of pocket for these things, you can bet they wouldn't cost nearly as much. If you can tack an additional X thousand dollars onto the price and only affect the payment for the item marginally, you can bloat pretty damn quickly. That said, the quality of these things might also go down, but I have a hard time believing our elders got a comparatively worse education/home/car, adjusting for technological advances. This may be a ridiculously sweeping statement, but I truly believe consumer credit is one of the worst inventions of the modern era, and has drastically reduced quality of life across the board.
peter303 13y ago
Yes, I paid for MIT with five summers of work in the 1970s. When I graduated I had two months of living expenses left in the bank, the lowest ever in my life. the first three summers were blue collar, e.g. auto factories which paid triple minimum wage then.
munin 13y ago
no one should have to do what I did. I grew up in the mountains. there were no rich people around. it would be very rare to find a family that my family knew that had a college degree. also my family didn't really have any money and I needed to move out as soon as I finished high school. I found tech jobs on the internet (yay IRC). I moved to different cities and worked entry level tech jobs. I went to community college at nights and then a state school during the day when I had a job with flexible enough hours. I worked full time and went to school part time and after seven years I should be done this fall, with no student debt (or really any other kind of debt). but doing this really sucked. no one should have to do it. I've met more people than you would think who were like me. when I started, people referred to me as a "nontraditional" student but I think the "traditional" student is becoming the abnormality...

132 points by hudibras 13y ago

Yup its true and the norm. I made about $6K over the summer months and my college tuition was $350 a semester. Shared an apartment for $200/month. The thought of taking out a loan never entered my mind.

danielweber 13y ago
Depending on your age, you may have been able to discharge any debt you acquired after graduation, which made it nuts for anyone to loan you money. The reasons for making student loans non-dischargeable was based on a theory that only rich students would be able to go to college. However, I think experience has been a very harsh teacher that we got something much worse out of that bargain than we thought.

meddlepal 13y ago

Sort of. The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business. It became easy to get loans for higher-education and then tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital. There other contributing factors as well; for example, the rise of the ridiculous requirement to have a college degree to get anything close to a decent job these days has created tremendous demand for degrees and allowed colleges and universities to raise tuition into the stratosphere.

speeder 13y ago
Here in Brazil at least that is true. The Brazilian boomers thought us that we needed college, period. Then lack of colleges happened, thus government started giving student loans, and private companies building colleges like crazy, and the government build at a more reasonable pace Now most people.of my age have a.degree that only proves you can wipe your ass with it, because most universities here have terrible quality, considering the amount of them grew much faster than we had teachers, and people.are terribly indebted. I pay for example permonth 2 times the minimum monthly wage. And most people stay stuck earning minimum wage until they retire. And I am not a exception, the only people I met that are below 28 and don't have absurd debts are dropouts or child of someone with net worth bigger than. 5 million. EDIT: In the fields I got my degrees, every year we have more students completing their courses than the total number of employees on those fields in the country... Or the one that is so absurd to the point of hilarity: Brazil has more law schools than the rest of the world summed, last time I checked in the justice department site, 5% of our population has a bachelor degree in law... (remember Brazil has a 200 million + population)
- thifm 13y ago
  I get almost 10 minimum wages with 24 and I think that I'm underpaid(and I am...). I was making WAY MORE money working as a freelancer than working for a company here but it seems that people(and the government) only respect who is employed by a company, otherwise I will never be able to buy a car or a house with a loan. Our government sucks. College on Brazil is alright, the problem is with research culture -- horribly bad. Teachers on universities are rated by how much shit they published instead of the quality of their work. The academic field is very bad for anybody wanting to study something advanced but at least in computer science, being a undergrad is just fine. You learn the same shit that the MIT does, the problem is 1. the people of your class, 2. your teachers don't do anything interesting to inspire you.
  - speeder 13y ago
    I guess you went to some expensive university or a federal one... I am talking here about the ones that majority of the population use, UNIP, Anhembi Morumbi, Anhanguera, that sort of stuff... Also, at 10 mininum wages, you are on the top 4% of the population in income (yes, it is that bad here in Brazil).
mjn 13y ago
That's true at some universities (especially private ones), but costs don't explain the results everywhere. In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms. Why has tuition gone up, then? The state of California has cut its per-student funding to less than half of what it used to be, which leaves a substantial gap even after the cost improvements. Here are some funding numbers I compiled, via the rough-estimate method of taking the state allocation to the system and dividing by its undergraduate enrollment: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt
tokenizer 13y ago
Yup. Make it impossible for people to get this kind of money, and the schools will change to meet the new realistic tuition amount. People argue that this would mean only rich people would be able to go to college, but I think colleges would rather keep the number of students up high, and not become an extremely privileged institution.
nhebb 13y ago
The other half of the story is that even back in the 80's a summer job typically couldn't cover the cost of a school year. I started school in the fall of '82. Tuition was dirt cheap compared to today, but the cost of housing, food, etc. was still high enough that very few students I knew were able to pay for college via summer jobs alone.
VLM 13y ago
"when the government got involved in the student loan business." Its more general than that. System wide. Same scenario during the same timeframe in cost of housing, cost of day care, cost of automobiles... Anything involving loaning money from a bank and possibly paying it back, or anything where the .gov hands out money to certain favored groups. "the rise of the ridiculous requirement to have a college degree to get anything close to a decent job" At least in the USA there are fewer jobs every year. So its not ridiculous so much as market forces. Also note that society wide (ignoring the very narrow IT code monkey situation solely in NY and SF, I mean country-wide) we produce more college grads than we have job openings. This is kind of an important lesson for HN startups etc. Yes is it true there is a shortage of IT folks in NY/SF. But in the rest of the country, we're rapidly moving from merely needing any bachelors degree to be a receptionist or call center script reader, to perhaps needing a STEM degree for those kind of jobs. I know experienced and productive STEM people lucky to be working in call centers. The lesson is if you intend to scale your startup outside SF/NY you need to face jobforce realities outside SF/NY. For example say you create a startup to sell to education. Don't do your marketing plan aimed at Ed degree holders (maybe a .edu discount or some kind of viral marketing via sponsorship of alumni activities or something) because most of those grads are either working in the hospitality industry as waiters / bartenders unable to get a job, or got a teaching job and burned out in a decade and are already on their next career. So most Ed degree holders are going to be unable/uninterested WRT your startup. You could aim at people actually employed in the field, which will be a pretty small subset of those educated in the field. Its tempting, if you're in silicon valley, to try to scale, based on what works in silicon valley where you live. The rest of the country that you're trying to scale into is basically a different, failing economic model. Sometimes this is important when scaling, sometimes it isn't.
- yummyfajitas 13y ago
  At least in the USA there are fewer jobs every year. False. http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=PAYEMS http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?s[1][id]=PAYEMS
  - specialist 13y ago
freehunter 13y ago
I'm one of the few who paid for his college tuition out of pocket. Not in the 80's; I graduate this December. I'm not rich, I live like a pauper. I've worked multiple jobs, I've done intense internships, and with the money I've made I've paid for as many classes as I could afford each semester. It's been 7 years now since I started college, and I'll be graduating after one more semester. I just recently found a company willing to hire me full time with just the promise that I will be a graduate in the near future. If I don't graduate in December, my salary gets cut (further limiting my ability to graduate). It's not good enough that I've been working in my industry for five years; I need a degree too. I feel that people who pay their college on student loans don't really feel the full impact of how much their tuition cost them until it's far too late. People like me feel it all too well. Most of my friends have graduated and have nice jobs, taking vacations in Europe, and going to see the doctor (what I wouldn't give for health insurance...). They criticize me for not having graduated yet. But we'll see which plan pays off in the long run.
- Roboprog 13y ago
  Congratulations on your coming finish line. Hard to say if the loans would have been worth starting higher paying work a few years earlier, or not, but at least you are doing it instead of giving up!
- glesica 13y ago
  Actually the loans may very well have been a better deal for you. You have sacrificed three years of income (assuming you finish in seven years instead of four). If you would have been able to command $50,000 per year, but instead made, say, $20,000 per year, then you've left $90,000 on the table. That is your opportunity cost (as the economists say) for being debt-free. So unless your loans would have been greater than that amount, you should have just borrowed the money and finished sooner, then lived cheaply and paid down your debt.
john_roberts 13y ago
Anyone who says it is easy to get loans for higher-education from the government must have never dealt with my school's Financial Aid office, or filled out a FAFSA. It might be easy to get private loans for higher education, as they are for profit and you can't bankruptcy out of them, but I was lucky enough to not need them.
narcissus 13y ago
So just upfront, I don't know what the 'average' cost of university is in North America. Having said that, people this way tend to argue about the cost of tertiary education a lot more than in Australia, for example, so I presume (quite possibly incorrectly) that it's cheaper in Australia. With that in mind, I wanted to just point out that in Australia, all student loans are done through the government and a quick search shows that the average cost of a degree ranges between about $5000 and $10000 a year. I don't know if that supports your statement about the government being "involved in the student loan business" but I figured it may be a helpful piece of data...
- jwoah12 13y ago
  For some perspective, my degree at a public state university in the US cost about $20,000 per year. That was almost 10 years ago. There are plenty of universities in the $40-50k per year range.
  - narcissus 13y ago
    That's amazing. Another quick search shows up to about $17,000 a year in Canada and as far as I can tell the loans are part government, part private (though rates etc. are set by the government). From all of that, then, while I can't argue that "The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business" (from my original parent's comment) is incorrect, I don't think it's fair to infer that one is necessarily the fault of the other. Implicitly, of the course, if the underlying problem is more related to the "tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital" comment, then it just comes down to 'greedy higher education' which is its own problem I guess.
lmg643 13y ago
Great point. I wonder how long it will be before we can publicly acknowledge the foolishness of these government subsidies. Efforts to improve college affordability created skyrocketing costs. Same story with housing affordability - an epic and damaging bubble. We can acknowledge wasteful subsidies for farmers, when we see food rotting in fields instead of being exported or consumed. And yet, the presence of millions of highly indebted, unemployed or underemployed college graduates and there's nothing to see here, please move along.
skwirl 13y ago
Strongly disagree. The example used in this article is the University of Washington. The government has always been involved in every facet of the University of Washington as it is run by the government. You seem to be claiming that because the government dropped their share of covering a student's tuition from 90% to 30% and allowed them to take out a loan instead, they were suddenly willing to pay a lot more money to go to school, which is absurd. You don't give nearly enough credit to what you call "other contributing factors." What happened was an economic sea change. Years ago upon graduating high school you had options. You could go get a job in manufacturing and make good money right away and live a solid middle class life. For many, college was an unattractive option. Today, our manufacturing base has been destroyed. When you graduate high school today, what options do you have besides go to college? There are simply not enough good paying jobs that don't require a college degree to go around. Not even close. I think ultimately you are mixing up cause and effect. The government is involved in the student loan business because college education has increasingly become the only path to a middle class life. Our education policy is reactive, not proactive. When the government plows the streets of snow it tends to be snowing. It doesn't mean the government caused the snow.
- danielweber 13y ago
  Today, our manufacturing base has been destroyed. The USA manufacturers more than it ever has. However, it does so with fewer workers, just like the agricultural revolution moved us from 90% of people needing to be farmers to 2%. When you graduate high school today, what options do you have besides go to college? There are simply not enough good paying jobs that don't require a college degree to go around. Not even close. I agree with these facts, but probably not your conclusion. A lot of jobs that supposedly require college education really don't require a college education at all. However, since so many people have a college education, employers are free to use the presence of a bachelor's degree as a test for your socioeconomic status.
  - waps 13y ago
    > The USA manufacturers more than it ever has. However, it does so with fewer workers, just like the agricultural revolution moved us from 90% of people needing to be farmers to 2%. I wonder who's next, then.
michaelochurch 13y ago
Sort of. The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business. It became easy to get loans for higher-education and then tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital. We have the same upper class problem we had in the same 1920s-30s but they've replaced poverty with subordinacy. They've become more wily and would rather people fall into servitude than fail completely. When capitalism broke down in 1929-33, people actually died of starvation. Now they go into high-interest credit card debt. The same is happening in higher education. The need for widespread higher education is too strong for people to just not go, but the upper class isn't going to just give it away (even if there is benefit to them of an educated society). Thus, non-dischargeable loans have replaced taxpayer-funded grants, and college is just at the point of affordability where the upper class feels comfortable with the number of people who can go to school.
tzs 13y ago
> Sort of. The cost of higher-education skyrocketed when the government got involved in the student loan business. It became easy to get loans for higher-education and then tuition skyrocketed with the suddenly available capital. This is very commonly asserted, but no one offers data to back it. Some try to argue it on general supply and demand principles (loans increase demand, supply does not increase as fast, so price goes up), but this fails because that theory predicts prices should rise to the point where supply and demand are equal, yet in fact prices are far below that.

cm2012 13y ago

Isn't it also true that private institutions have seen an equally fast or faster growth in tuition expenses? That would invalidate the article. For reference btw, $3 to $6 in 1981 dollars is $7.50 to $15 in today's dollars according to Westegg.

bradleyjg 13y ago
Yes. Higher education is the only industry to give medicine a run for its money in cost inflation. Some blame Baumol's cost disease[1], and that's probably an element of it, but so too are the multiplication of deanlets and deanlings[2], the cancerous growth of the physical facilities a of every school, spending per student being used as a proxy for quality by the USN&WR, the rise of bidding wars for celebraty faculty, ect. Much or all these effects are enabled by incentives for those that run universities in which holding costs down play little to no role. That's partially a function of the student loan system and partially a function of lax oversight of "charitable" organizations in general. [1]http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease [2]http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2...
- danielweber 13y ago
  Once you get a group of customers who have been told and internalized "price doesn't matter," then you will only see one response from the producers. Producers who tried to avoid the game got left behind. When the students don't care about the cost, then it becomes a losing proposition to skip out on (say) the $10 million expense that only provides $1 million of value to your students.

esalman 13y ago

It is hugely annoying when clicking on whitespace on a web page opens ads in a new tab.

BvS 13y ago

Does anyone know why the cost of the universities have skyrocketed? Do they offer a better staff/student relation, better equipment, better buildings, do they pay their staff better...? I honestly don't know but since a lot of the universities are non profits the money is not going to their shareholder's and if I understand the article correctly the (inflation adjusted) amount of money the government provides also has not decreased.

Nutella4 13y ago
Bigger, newer buildings. Lots more administrators paid much higher salaries. Tuitions subsidizing very expensive football teams. Gourmet food and single rooms for students (so they can attract the best and brightest!) rather than hash-slinging cafeterias and dormitories. Fancy gyms for the same reason. Faculty salaries, however, are much lower since a large percentage now are part time temps with PhDs.
- Nutella4 13y ago
  I should have said that median faculty salaries are much lower. A few stars get big salaries and more than half get starvation wages.
  - VLM 13y ago
    We have been moving to the pro sports salary model, not just in pro sports, but obviously already happened in .edu and is more or less along that path everywhere else. I'm sure there's startup opportunities and risks in this cultural and economic system change.
- freehunter 13y ago
  At my school, a lot of the instructors (at least the non-research instructors) are people who hold 9-5 jobs at a private company in their field of instruction as an adjunct professor. They're willing to work for a lot less pay, since it's a second job.
  - 13y ago

tibbon 13y ago

Tuition has skyrocketed, but have universities changed that much? They act like they never have enough money, but yet... they have more than ever. What are the offering now for their 10x increase in tuition in 30 years?

rayiner 13y ago
Have you seen all the shiny new academic buildings?
codva 13y ago
Kids in a lot of colleges today are living a life of luxury compared to what I had in the 80s. Any dorm built or renevated in the last 10-15 or so years will have semi-private bathrooms. The dining options today are way better than what we had. I trudged down to the dorm cafeteria and ate whatever slop they were serving, high school cafeteria style. My son (at a small public university) has what amounts to a mall food court at school, and he can choose from burgers, pizza, wraps, vegetarian, Italian, Mexican, etc. every day. The libraries are more functional, the sports facilities are all updated, etc. All that costs money.
- VLM 13y ago
  I've noticed the luxuriousness of modern higher ed, and I imagine the culture shock after graduation for virtually all grads must be interesting. My favorite waitress used to eat at a facility like that, after graduation now she's stuck working at a similar facility. A bit too personal to ask, but I imagine its kinda a shock to the system for about 99% of the students.
  - danielweber 13y ago
    I imagine the culture shock after graduation for virtually all grads must be interesting. Unless they think that they cannot possibly go through a reduction in their standard of living and borrow to keep up with what is, in their mind, "normal." College used to be rare and ascetic. Now it's required and expensive. I don't think either of those are a good trend.

jimhefferon 13y ago

I also paid for my college largely with high school jobs (I was fortunate enough to have had a home, clothes, food, etc. while I was earning that money). So kids, it is all true. I work at a college and I am also just finishing putting my two children through college, so I am very interested in the topic. I find the report at http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Anatomy-of-College-Tuition.pdf http://www.acenet.edu/news-room/Documents/Anatomy-of-College... informative. In particular, on page 2 you can see that the steady increases in the cost of college fits with the fact that college is a service industry (or at least it has been up to now). On page 10 you see in a graph the point that the Seattle Times's article made with an anecdote, that state and local governments have reduced support and families have had to make good the difference. In my mind, just as we as a society pool our resources to build bridges, we also need to produce people who will lead tomorrow (but then, as I say, I work at a college).

gambogi 13y ago
I've been working since I was 15 (I'm 20). In total, I've made around $15k. My first year of school cost roughly twice that figure. If I wasn't majoring in CS (or my Grandfather hadn't died), I would not be going to the school I am. This isn't how the system should work.
- jimhefferon 13y ago
  Oh, I absolutely agree (as does the original article) that a hard-working bright student from a middle class household who wants to go to a state school cannot do so from working hard, as you and I did, from age 15 through college, at the kinds of jobs that such students would hold (I worked in a resturant; that's the kind of job I meant). I agree with the article, and I assume with you, that it is wrong that such a thing is not possible today.
danielweber 13y ago
We also didn't have price explosion. A generation was told "go to college, don't worry about how much it costs, just go to college." And the colleges priced accordingly. Make college debt dischargeable in bankruptcy and you will see real price pressure. No school will expect any student to go more than $10,000 in debt because they'll discharge and walk away.

FatalBaboon 13y ago

The fault is shared between both parties: employers demand degrees because it's so much easier to recruit that way, and youngsters don't fight and just go to college. In my opinion we need way (WAY) more smart dropouts, people who realize they don't belong in school but stay by fear are just as much at fault. There's no fear or shame to have, I've been through it and it just disabled poor professionnals from hiring me, which is more of a blessing than anything else. And of course, it's all debt-free from there on (except I bought a place in Paris before my friends even moved out of their parents').

agilebyte 13y ago
Yeah but for that to work we need a big mass of people without degrees. Right now the status quo is on the other end of the spectrum so you get a trickle of fighters. We need someone to pave the way :). Maybe rising tuition is the way to go. At some point uni education becomes so prohibitive that even the mass may avoid it. (btw I was not a fighter)

trotsky 13y ago

Wage stagnation is probably a bigger factor. Minimum wage, 1951: $0.75/hr Minimum wage, 1981: $3.25/hr Minimum wage, 2011: $7.25/hr

zanny 13y ago
While I don't agree with the status quo, if your labor isn't worth $15 an hour to someone (mainly because someone else is perfectly willing to do the work for less) then they don't have a moral obligation to pay you more, and minimum wage laws only artificially constrict the limits of what the value of unskilled labor is. I'd rather see a basic income guarantee (mainly for creative people like artists or FOSS developers) and the removal of minimum wage, so businesses can correct the true value of labor in various fields. It would help eliminate the rampant service industry that destroys souls because most people don't have the fortitude to deal with random strangers idiocy.
- psaintla 13y ago
  How about an obligation to not shift your employee cost of living onto the government?
  - viveutvivas 13y ago
    This is the important aspect that most people don't think about when discussing this issue. A quick google search reveals 80% of Walmart employees are on government assistance.
adventured 13y ago
It's not wage stagnation per se, it's the implosion of the real economy. Minimum wage can't keep up because our economy is a shadow of its former self. From 1950 to 1980, America had on average half the total global manufacturing base, courtesy of WW2 having blown up everybody else. If we matched minimum wage from 1951, or 1961, we'd need to be paying $40,000 to $50,000 per year. Anybody that has run a liquor store, or a fast food business, understands that's mathematically impossible.

deleted 13y ago

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perlpimp 13y ago

Hate to break it to you but universities are in the business of research. Teaching is nearly worthless use of researcher's time - taken away from progressing science and getting those private and government grants. Or so the teachers told me in Canada. Some teachers believe in teaching - others treat students with contempt and shrug them off to assistants. And the bigger university, the bigger the stakes are in research at least - lower quality education you get. Granted elevated acceptance requirements will get you in the boat with some smart people - for four years of tedium and exasperation but then you'll have the network to build from. my 2c

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>Teaching is nearly worthless use of researcher's time No, it isn't or else you'll soon run out of researchers.

Alex3917 13y ago

This is a little misleading. When adjusted for inflation, the average amount that students pay has increased only moderately. And on average students at public universities only pay about 18% of the money that's spent per student. There's no question it's a little bit harder now than it used to be, but it's not like its twice as expensive, let alone 10x as some people would claim.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
You're looking at tuition increases. Food, Housing, Books, etc. have also increased in varying amounts.
- Alex3917 13y ago
  Fair enough. But the average net tuition at public universities is only $4,900 per year. Assuming you make $10 per hour at a summer job, that works out to exactly 40 hours per week over the summer. Obviously there are still other expenses and considerations, but tuition itself isn't especially unreasonable. The bigger issues are the fact that education you'll receive is likely complete garbage, your degree won't be worth anything, and wages of the middle class have been decreasing for decades.
  - fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
    > Assuming you make $10 per hour at a summer job Do you mean $10 per hour over the cost of living/driving/eating/etc ? >The bigger issues are the fact that education you'll receive is likely complete garbage The lectures are the same, the bar has been lowered too much.
- philwelch 13y ago
  Food and housing are both a scam, depending on the school--where I went, it was significantly more cost effective to get these things from the free market than to live and eat on campus. Textbooks are also a scam. Often you could buy international editions but god help you if you were assigned problem sets.
13y ago

steven2012 13y ago

I went to university in Canada in the early 90s. My tuition per year peaked at $2500/yr. I could make about $6000 over the summer, which would pay for my tuition and a big chunk of my dorm fees ($6000/yr). Nowadays, I don't know how anyone can afford to go to university, or even if it's worth it anymore. I believe there's a lot of value in higher education, but not if it means having $100k+ in debt.

Danieru 13y ago
Canada has been spared the American insanity if my understanding is correct. I pay ~7k/year for University of Calgary. Even University of Waterloo our most prestigious computer science university is only 10k. Provided you are not an international student tuition should be reason. I expect my Microsoft internship to pay for two years of uni including living expenses. Freelancing paid for another year. Compared to the farm work, tree planting, and landlording which my father did to pay for University I'm on vacation.

calinet6 13y ago

Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor emeritus of Berkeley, spoke at a fundraising event I attended and said something I thought was poignant: "The University of California has gone from being a state-funded institution, to a state-sponsored institution, to a state-located institution." The level at which the State of California funds the university is practically nothing at this point. Alumni donations have filled some gaps but don't nearly cover everything. Tuition has increased to the point where even I, who graduated in 2006, consider it ridiculous. It is now over 8 times the maximum semester tuition I paid. I can't imagine considering Berkeley a "great value" anymore, as I did when I was there considering the (excellent) quality of education versus the price. It used to be a sense of pride; that a public university could be so great, to prove the experiment, to show that society could produce academic excellence without falling to the vices of money and the divisions that come with it. Now that experiment has failed, and only those who believe in it strongly—the Alumni and supporters—are upholding it, but that's not sustainable. We need to grow up. This fantasy of American individualism is killing us. We need to grow up and learn how to share—and this is the worst part: as we once did.

emehrkay 13y ago
> We need to grow up. This fantasy of American individualism is killing us. We need to grow up and learn how to share—and this is the worst part: as we once did. Reminds me of the very first chapter of The E Myth book (good little book if you haven't read it).
caseysoftware 13y ago
I think the vast majority of people are okay sharing when they can see things moving towards some sort of mutual benefit. For example, funding students in STEM, medicine, etc. But now we have programs like "[choose "minority" group] Studies" and we talk those students as seriously STEM.. or worse, we consider the STEM students as an afterthought. Also, if tuition is now 8x what you paid before, I would suggest that there's a problem with the program itself and not necessarily how we're funding it.
- hack_edu 13y ago

adventured 13y ago

The reason for this explosion in cost, is the Feds began fully subsidizing the cost of a college education. Colleges then had the green light to perpetually raise prices - even in the depths of the great recession - they knew Uncle Sam would cover the bill. Education costs have had no connection to reality because you could get a government backed loan for it. When you see an entire industry, with plenty of competition amongst schools, disconnecting from reality, you can almost always bet the government is involved in the cost inflation. Colleges then took that massive influx of government sponsored cash and put it to work funding their bureaucracies, building an endless parade of buildings they didn't actually need, significantly boosting professor pay, and accumulating substantial endowments. Meanwhile the actual education - their product - did not get more valuable. At a time of terrible economic performance, with 14% real unemployment, falling incomes, and lack of jobs post graduation, clearly the cost of an education should have fallen by quite a lot. It didn't because of a guaranteed loan back stop. There is talk now that students should pay the same low interest rates on their debt that banks pay when they borrow money. If that is put into effect, all it will do is accelerate the debt accumulation. It'll enable students to borrow more, and colleges will accordingly charge more. This government fueled scheme can only end in tears (bailouts).

stuaxo 13y ago
Citation please !
- adventured 13y ago
  Guaranteed loans means students can borrow almost as much as they care to (how else does one borrow $60,000 without the prospect for a job, in a disastrous economy), and accordingly universities can perpetually raise prices as they know the Feds will just keep guaranteeing the loans via Mr Printing Press. It's quite a simple equation in fact. If you wanted to solve the education cost spiral, the Feds need merely begin reducing the guaranteed funds, stop guaranteeing loans, or strictly lock down the guaranteed loan sums. Colleges would be forced to adjust to that new reality, in which they don't get perpetually increasing tuitions. And if you want to check the concept, look up how much of a college education is subsidized by government loans today, versus 30 or 40 years ago - personally I think the general answer is obvious.

jseliger 13y ago

Well, that’s the part we don’t want to talk about anymore. That's not true at all: college costs are constantly discussed. The book Why Does College Cost So Much is the most comprehensive treatment of the issue I've seen, and it argues that the main driver of college costs is Baumol's Cost Disease. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists. Universities like the University of Washington are also in a spending arms race: universities are increasing their per-student spending, even in the face of falling state spending: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/04/public_university_spending_is_up_not_down.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/04/public_univer... . A side note: Danny Westneat is something of a joke among people who read the Seattle Times, and it's a mistake to take almost anything he writes seriously. He's the sort of pious liberal that makes intellectually minded and honest liberals crazy because of his tendency to repeat various kinds of half-truths. This is a good example: he's right that if Washington picked up 90% of UW's tab, tuition would be cheaper. But it's also true that if he'd read more, and read more about the people who actually study this issue, he'd have a more complete picture of the situation. You'll learn more reading this comment than reading his column.

skylan_q 13y ago
The reason a summer at KFC could pay for a year of UW med school in 1981 isn’t that we were so hardworking and industrious. It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists. Source?
- Djehngo 13y ago
  The article in question? ~5 paragraphs from the bottom. Or are you asking a commenter who disagrees with the article to provide sources for an assertion made in the article?
Retric 13y ago
Your speaking in half truths, taking inflation into account the increase intuition is mostly related to lack of funding for state schools. Consider a few states hand out fee rides to a significant faction of students who meet basic qualifications. The real issue is most states have been poorly run over the last 50 years and face a wide range of funding issues related to pensions and healthcare issues. PS: In the University of California system, the per-student cost of providing education has actually gone down: total university-system expenditures divided by number of students produces a number about 20-25% lower today than it was in the '70s, in real-dollar terms.

larrydag 13y ago

Here is something to look at 2013 Tuition: $12,500 Subsidized: 30% 2013 Total: $17,857 1981 Tuition: $687 Subsidized: 90% 1981 Total: $6870 2013 Dollars: $17,690 (at 3% inflation) So the argument is not the cost of education as that hasn't changed in 30 years. Its more who is footing the bill which is implied in the article. Should taxpayers pay for the education?

adventured 13y ago
That $12,500 tuition is wholly subsidized. The loan guarantees provided by the government are back-stopped by the tax payers (and ultimately the Fed, aka people holding dollars). The sole reason students can get loans totaling $40k or $50k is the government is subsidizing the entire process with guaranteed loans. Most likely as this soon to be multi-trillion dollar debt debacle explodes, the government is going to end up paying for a lot of that debt via bailouts. They're certainly not going to let that tower of debt truly fall over, so a bailout is the only likely outcome.

saintx 13y ago

I paid for my undergraduate education (97-03) by dropping out to work as a full time consultant. Because I did this twice, it took several extra years to graduate. For grad school, I worked a full time night job and missed out on the quintessential grad student experience of being a TA, getting to know the faculty, making friends, and being a part of the grad student and research community. I did manage to finish grad school with no debt, but I'll never know whether it was worth missing out on the social academic experience. It may technically be possible to pay for higher education through hard work, but the opportunity cost is hard to appreciate for those who do.

lettergram 13y ago

I'm going to University of Illinois the tuition for the engineering department = $19,980, and the living expenses = $7,000 ($400 rent, $100 food, $40 internet per month with roommate). That's a total of $26,980 not including books, parking permits, clothes, any possible fun, computer, etc. I made ~$25,000 working a year at jimmy johns as a delivery driver 20 hours a week (averaged $18 an hour), my 40 hour a week summer job ($10 an hour), and my website/youtube income (only $500 or so). This year i'm broke, but I went to a junior college for two years at $4000 a year, saved up, and I should graduate with a bachelors in C.S. with a minor in BioE for a total loan (for two years) I took out myself of ~$50,000. 1-2 years to pay back the loan, did it myself (I did have a cosigner for the loan, but it is still in my name AKA I call it doing it myself because i'm liable and am pretty responsible) Quite frankly I would rather require each student to take out a loan themselves, than have my future self pay for the students to drink and screw around. My GPA is 3.5/4.0, i'll graduate when i'm 22 (currently 21), I have always worked 20-60 hours a week, I have 110 credit hours and a year to go (i've taken classes every semester including summer), and I have kept a girlfriend even. Its possible, you just have to be serious enough to do it. OR you could take $100,000 in loans, work 10 years to pay it back ($500,000 by the end with interest). Part of the reason it costs so much to go to school is so many people default. Do you think I will? Perhaps take some of the pressure off the public to pay, put it on the student and less people will default because only the most serious will go to expensive universities. Like I said, $4000 a semester at a junior college and I honestly think my education there was about the same quality as U of I, I had professors from Argonne national labs, one guy even designed the electronics for the f-18 hornet and taught as a kind of retirement. Sorry for the rant, but the point is, I did it all myself and all of these comments about how hard or ridiculous it is it is are pathetic. Go to a junior college for a couple years, transfer, take out some loans, pay them back and get off the public's back (too many college students party to consider it a worthy public investment). Although it's harder, its definitely more gratifying to do it yourself.

dasil003 13y ago

Someone who went to college in 1981 does seem ancient to me, after all my mom went to college just a few years before that and she smoked cigarettes in class ($0.25 a pack!), but this guy is only 48! Now I'm 35 and rapidly catching up! I think the theory of logarithmic experience of aging where you have experienced half your life by age 12 is totally true.

dclowd9901 13y ago

This one's easy. It's obviously the availability of cheap money (loans) that has caused the price of college to go up. Just like homes and cars (which are equally ridiculously priced), we can only afford them because they are comparatively leveraged. If people had to pay out of pocket for these things, you can bet they wouldn't cost nearly as much. If you can tack an additional X thousand dollars onto the price and only affect the payment for the item marginally, you can bloat pretty damn quickly. That said, the quality of these things might also go down, but I have a hard time believing our elders got a comparatively worse education/home/car, adjusting for technological advances. This may be a ridiculously sweeping statement, but I truly believe consumer credit is one of the worst inventions of the modern era, and has drastically reduced quality of life across the board.

peter303 13y ago

Yes, I paid for MIT with five summers of work in the 1970s. When I graduated I had two months of living expenses left in the bank, the lowest ever in my life. the first three summers were blue collar, e.g. auto factories which paid triple minimum wage then.

munin 13y ago

no one should have to do what I did. I grew up in the mountains. there were no rich people around. it would be very rare to find a family that my family knew that had a college degree. also my family didn't really have any money and I needed to move out as soon as I finished high school. I found tech jobs on the internet (yay IRC). I moved to different cities and worked entry level tech jobs. I went to community college at nights and then a state school during the day when I had a job with flexible enough hours. I worked full time and went to school part time and after seven years I should be done this fall, with no student debt (or really any other kind of debt). but doing this really sucked. no one should have to do it. I've met more people than you would think who were like me. when I started, people referred to me as a "nontraditional" student but I think the "traditional" student is becoming the abnormality...