4 ms·

> people went to college for at least 100 years prior to that law. This is the fallacy of comparing the upper classes of one period with the masses of another.

by comicjk 13y ago

> people went to college for at least 100 years prior to that law. This is the fallacy of comparing the upper classes of one period with the masses of another. A far smaller fraction of people went to college in the century before 1976, and those who did go from lower-class origins often did so through direct scholarships like the GI bill. The college loan market was not very viable at this time. None other than Milton Friedman discusses the problem in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. Actually, he proposes some form of legally undischargeable debt as a solution.

msandford 13y ago
Yeah that's a really good point! I've heard plenty of people talk about working their way through school by having a summer job to pay for room and board and tuition and that it was possible to do it that way, even if it was uncomfortable. That really sounds great but maybe a little bit too great: it's a good narrative about how things were better back in the olden days when things were still good and not fucked up. I WANT to believe it but I'm not sure that I should. And it's all anecdote, no data. I did some searching for pricing and I found this: http://www.collegeview.com/admit/?p=1858 http://www.collegeview.com/admit/?p=1858 It looks like a decent summary. In 1960 the minimum wage was $1.00/hr and the cheapest tuition I'm seeing is $960 for the University of Texas. If you made minimum wage for three months of summer that's a total of 40 * 4 * 3 * $1 = $480 pre-tax. So definitely not enough to pay for a whole year of school from just the summer job. At an Ivy League school you're at about 1/4 of your yearly total. Today if you work a minimum wage job for a whole summer you'd get 40 * 4 * 3 * $7.25 = $3480 (pre-tax of course) which wouldn't even pay for your tuition (nevermind room and board and other expenses, that's another $5k per year at least) at the University of Florida, arguably the best deal in college tuition in the last decade. Comparing it to an Ivy League these days, it's not the 25% it used to be but rather about 10% if you go to one of the cheaper schools.
- bradleyjg 13y ago
  My dad worked his way though state schools (SUNY) for undergraduate and law school from 1968 - 1975. A few things about your calculations. First back then, unlike now, no college degree didn't mean automatic minimum wage job. Second, he worked while in school, not just over the summer. Third small scholarships back then actually made a difference. Today if you get the national merit scholarship for doing well on the PSATs, it's meaningless at $2000. Back then he got a $500 a year regents scholarship and it really helped.
  - msandford 13y ago
    Yeah I'm not suggesting that I have a definitive answer to the question. I just wanted to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see the scale of the thing. So if you work 15 hours/week during the year and 40/week during the summer and take the winter break completely off that would be 40 * 4 * 3 + 15 * 4 * 8 = 1140 hours. If you manage to bring in $2.00/hr that would be enough to pay your way at Harvard. That sounds doable for a person who isn't a genius and willing to sleep only three hours a night or otherwise make really big sacrifices. Truly exceptional people will always be able to bootstrap. But one thing I think is important is to make it possible for those who are talented but not insanely talented (I don't know what the percentages are) to get a degree and learn enough to be useful to society. It's remarkable that people really could (at least in some cases) do that without going into debt.
    - bradleyjg 13y ago
      I have a different perspective. Rather than thinking it's remarkable that they could do that back then, I think it's a disgrace that we can't do that today. Harvard's tuition back then adjusted for inflation is around $18,700. Assuming 10 classes a year an using an average class size of 40 students (which is what Harvard reports), that's a budget of $74,800 per class. You should be able to run a college on that, even taking into account some overhead for libraries and such. Yet Harvard today charges more than twice that.
      - mjmahone17 13y ago
        Harvard could afford to charge nothing for any of its students. However, by having a form of price discrimination where they gouge the wealthy, they then get to subsidize their low-income students, so that they don't have to miss out on as many of the non-economic opportunities that their classmates engage in, and still provide all the amenities (nice gyms, libraries, clubs and activities) that the upper-class students expect. The issue is, after the most endowed schools ($/student), there is a steep drop where schools suddenly aren't able to provide the same opportunities for their low-income students, but still compete for students capable of paying in full. This leads to escalating costs, as schools construct nicer gyms, study areas and dorms, pricing out the mid-to-low income students.
- thwarted 13y ago
  I started college in 1993 and my parents (and the rest of my extended family) talked a lot about me getting a summer job to pay for college, that that was all I'd need to do. That was so far from the case (I did attend a university rather than a state school) but I remember pricing it out and coming to the conclusion that my family was really disconnected from reality.
- tsotha 13y ago
  I went to one of the University of California campuses in the late '80s. Back then fees were about $500 per quarter my freshman year, and minimum wage was $3.35. I was able to cover all my fees and most of my living expenses by working summers at a job that paid about double the minimum (with lots of overtime). A job in the campus cafeteria during the school year covered the rest. I took out one $2500 student loan for a rainy day fund but never spent the money. There are a few things that have changed since back then: * College tuition has gone up faster than anything else in the economy. Anything. The UC system was a great deal at $1500/yr, but back then you could go to Stanford for $13k or so. The increase has been driven mostly by easy money from student loans, but also by administrative bloat related to government dictates. Books have become an extortion racket - $150 for a stack of unbound pages? * Almost 20 million illegal aliens have entered the country since I went to college, completely wiping out the low end of the job market. My 1986 summer job is now done by illegals in their late 20s, and they're making about $0.50 more per hour than I made 25 years ago. My old employer doesn't pay more because he doesn't have to. * The rise of unpaid internships. You work a summer for free so there's a chance you can get a job when you graduate. I think this is another consequence of easy loan money. If you offered me (or my classmates) an unpaid internship we would have declined - we needed to get paid so we could afford to go to school in the fall. Between the low wages and easy loan money today you can almost see the wheels turning - "What the hell. It's not like a job at Burger King will make a dent in my debt."
  - muzz 13y ago
    College tuition sticker price has gone up a lot. The actual amount that students pay hasn't gone up as much. A half-decade ago, Stanford waived tuition for students from families of income less than $100k [1]. Median household income in the country is roughly $57k. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/21/us-education-stanford-tuition-idUSN2041220220080221 http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/21/us-education-stanf...
    - mjmahone17 13y ago
      Stanford may now have more students on scholarship than off. But I know many of the Ivies have 40%+ of their students receiving no scholarship money, and it takes a family income of 150k+ (often more like 200k+) to not receive scholarship or loans. That means more than 40% of these schools' students come from families earning in the top 5% of household income (the 95th percentile is ~$190k). That is to say, the schools that offer the best aid, that have the potential to be the most affordable, aren't typically serving those who could most take advantage of the lower prices. Instead, private universities that do not guarantee to meet a student's need, state schools and for-profits tend to serve those students. Those are the schools where the sticker price is more likely to be the real price.

by comicjk 13y ago

msandford 13y ago

Yeah that's a really good point! I've heard plenty of people talk about working their way through school by having a summer job to pay for room and board and tuition and that it was possible to do it that way, even if it was uncomfortable. That really sounds great but maybe a little bit too great: it's a good narrative about how things were better back in the olden days when things were still good and not fucked up. I WANT to believe it but I'm not sure that I should. And it's all anecdote, no data. I did some searching for pricing and I found this: http://www.collegeview.com/admit/?p=1858 http://www.collegeview.com/admit/?p=1858 It looks like a decent summary. In 1960 the minimum wage was $1.00/hr and the cheapest tuition I'm seeing is $960 for the University of Texas. If you made minimum wage for three months of summer that's a total of 40 * 4 * 3 * $1 = $480 pre-tax. So definitely not enough to pay for a whole year of school from just the summer job. At an Ivy League school you're at about 1/4 of your yearly total. Today if you work a minimum wage job for a whole summer you'd get 40 * 4 * 3 * $7.25 = $3480 (pre-tax of course) which wouldn't even pay for your tuition (nevermind room and board and other expenses, that's another $5k per year at least) at the University of Florida, arguably the best deal in college tuition in the last decade. Comparing it to an Ivy League these days, it's not the 25% it used to be but rather about 10% if you go to one of the cheaper schools.

bradleyjg 13y ago
My dad worked his way though state schools (SUNY) for undergraduate and law school from 1968 - 1975. A few things about your calculations. First back then, unlike now, no college degree didn't mean automatic minimum wage job. Second, he worked while in school, not just over the summer. Third small scholarships back then actually made a difference. Today if you get the national merit scholarship for doing well on the PSATs, it's meaningless at $2000. Back then he got a $500 a year regents scholarship and it really helped.
- msandford 13y ago
  Yeah I'm not suggesting that I have a definitive answer to the question. I just wanted to do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to see the scale of the thing. So if you work 15 hours/week during the year and 40/week during the summer and take the winter break completely off that would be 40 * 4 * 3 + 15 * 4 * 8 = 1140 hours. If you manage to bring in $2.00/hr that would be enough to pay your way at Harvard. That sounds doable for a person who isn't a genius and willing to sleep only three hours a night or otherwise make really big sacrifices. Truly exceptional people will always be able to bootstrap. But one thing I think is important is to make it possible for those who are talented but not insanely talented (I don't know what the percentages are) to get a degree and learn enough to be useful to society. It's remarkable that people really could (at least in some cases) do that without going into debt.
  - bradleyjg 13y ago
    I have a different perspective. Rather than thinking it's remarkable that they could do that back then, I think it's a disgrace that we can't do that today. Harvard's tuition back then adjusted for inflation is around $18,700. Assuming 10 classes a year an using an average class size of 40 students (which is what Harvard reports), that's a budget of $74,800 per class. You should be able to run a college on that, even taking into account some overhead for libraries and such. Yet Harvard today charges more than twice that.
    - mjmahone17 13y ago
      Harvard could afford to charge nothing for any of its students. However, by having a form of price discrimination where they gouge the wealthy, they then get to subsidize their low-income students, so that they don't have to miss out on as many of the non-economic opportunities that their classmates engage in, and still provide all the amenities (nice gyms, libraries, clubs and activities) that the upper-class students expect. The issue is, after the most endowed schools ($/student), there is a steep drop where schools suddenly aren't able to provide the same opportunities for their low-income students, but still compete for students capable of paying in full. This leads to escalating costs, as schools construct nicer gyms, study areas and dorms, pricing out the mid-to-low income students.
thwarted 13y ago
I started college in 1993 and my parents (and the rest of my extended family) talked a lot about me getting a summer job to pay for college, that that was all I'd need to do. That was so far from the case (I did attend a university rather than a state school) but I remember pricing it out and coming to the conclusion that my family was really disconnected from reality.
tsotha 13y ago
I went to one of the University of California campuses in the late '80s. Back then fees were about $500 per quarter my freshman year, and minimum wage was $3.35. I was able to cover all my fees and most of my living expenses by working summers at a job that paid about double the minimum (with lots of overtime). A job in the campus cafeteria during the school year covered the rest. I took out one $2500 student loan for a rainy day fund but never spent the money. There are a few things that have changed since back then: * College tuition has gone up faster than anything else in the economy. Anything. The UC system was a great deal at $1500/yr, but back then you could go to Stanford for $13k or so. The increase has been driven mostly by easy money from student loans, but also by administrative bloat related to government dictates. Books have become an extortion racket - $150 for a stack of unbound pages? * Almost 20 million illegal aliens have entered the country since I went to college, completely wiping out the low end of the job market. My 1986 summer job is now done by illegals in their late 20s, and they're making about $0.50 more per hour than I made 25 years ago. My old employer doesn't pay more because he doesn't have to. * The rise of unpaid internships. You work a summer for free so there's a chance you can get a job when you graduate. I think this is another consequence of easy loan money. If you offered me (or my classmates) an unpaid internship we would have declined - we needed to get paid so we could afford to go to school in the fall. Between the low wages and easy loan money today you can almost see the wheels turning - "What the hell. It's not like a job at Burger King will make a dent in my debt."
- muzz 13y ago
  College tuition sticker price has gone up a lot. The actual amount that students pay hasn't gone up as much. A half-decade ago, Stanford waived tuition for students from families of income less than $100k [1]. Median household income in the country is roughly $57k. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/21/us-education-stanford-tuition-idUSN2041220220080221 http://www.reuters.com/article/2008/02/21/us-education-stanf...
  - mjmahone17 13y ago
    Stanford may now have more students on scholarship than off. But I know many of the Ivies have 40%+ of their students receiving no scholarship money, and it takes a family income of 150k+ (often more like 200k+) to not receive scholarship or loans. That means more than 40% of these schools' students come from families earning in the top 5% of household income (the 95th percentile is ~$190k). That is to say, the schools that offer the best aid, that have the potential to be the most affordable, aren't typically serving those who could most take advantage of the lower prices. Instead, private universities that do not guarantee to meet a student's need, state schools and for-profits tend to serve those students. Those are the schools where the sticker price is more likely to be the real price.