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A college degree is a lousy investment

$250K????? I'd kill myself, and I don't say that to be mean. I owed about $20K after undergrad & law school. Paying that off was one of the great moments in my life.

I'm not at $250k, but I'm not that far off. My parents paid for undergrad, so that amount is entirely from law school. My plan is to stay in government for the first ten years, and then the outstanding balance is completely discharged.
 
A good number of my students work 30-40 hours a week in minimum wage or near minimum wage jobs and take classes full-time or close to full-time. They take classes two days a week and work the rest.
 
Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media

The hunt for a market-based solution went on, however. During the presidency of George H. W. Bush, the Department of Justice accused the Ivy League universities of acting as a “collegiate cartel” and conspiring to fix financial aid and hence prices. The antitrust case was settled with a consent decree in 1991; the tuition spiral proceeded as before. (I have written about this elsewhere, in case you’re interested.)

And that was pretty much it—the very last time the federal government tried to get tough with the higher ed industry. Since then, the two parties have gone their different ways on the matter—Democrats today worship education, while Republicans today worship the market, neither of which faith has brought us close to a solution. The efforts of the Clinton administration, for example, were almost unbelievably feeble: With great fanfare, the Democrats streamlined the student loan process, proposed a tax cut for parents who paid for college, and—hooray—cracked down on student borrowers. (“We have tracked down defaulters and made them pay,” Bill Clinton boasted in 1997.)

A low point of sorts was reached in the late 1990s, when Congress appointed a “National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education,” and filled it with university presidents and the head of one of the main higher-ed lobby groups. The report they proceeded to publish in 1998 was an entirely predictable outcome of this staffing decision, I suppose, but still the reader is struck by its resounding impotence. This panel was so pallid it didn’t even amount to a whitewash. On page one of its report, for example, the Commission declared that it wasn’t really interested in soaring tuition at all, except insofar as soaring tuitions might cause Americans to feel “ill will” toward universities. After going on to catalog the usual culprits—blame regulations, blame students—the Commission concluded that there should be—yes!—further study on the matter. (“The Commission recommends that the philanthropic community, research institutes, and agencies of state and local government adopt the topic of academic cost control as a research area worthy of major financial support.”) They also recommended that universities do a better PR job, that they organize themselves to “inform the public” about “the returns on this investment.”

But even that would probably be considered an outrage were it published today. Last year, the Obama administration announced its own “Plan to Make College More Affordable”; the centerpiece was a scheme for doing something analogous to what that Commission proposed back in 1998: building a rating system to inform the public about the returns on college investments. (There was also the obligatory olive branch to the right, in a proposal to “reduce regulatory barriers.”)

The universities responded by going absolutely apeshit. They are happy to talk about the “return on investment” when it’s a vague promise of a million bucks for anyone who pays up and goes to college; when someone actually takes them at their word and tries to measure the claim, it seems that fundamental principles are being trampled.
 
All universities are latching onto all data about outcomes for bachelor's degree recipients and don't want to risk that their bachelor's degrees aren't the ones boosting those numbers.
 
All universities are latching onto all data about outcomes for bachelor's degree recipients and don't want to risk that their bachelor's degrees aren't the ones boosting those numbers.

ya, next paragraph goes:

I hope Obama ignores the wailing of the universities and goes through with his plan, despite the obvious folly of trying to explain people’s relative prosperity by reference to the college they attended instead of their class background. If the president were to expand his approach to include data on the vast and growing size of university administrations and how many courses are taught at each college by adjuncts, his rating system might well be useful.
 
more good soundbytes, but just read the thing

Maybe college shouldn’t be about individuals getting rich. Maybe there is another purpose.

*

In the long sweep of journalistic commentary on the tuition spiral, relatively few have raised that question. One occasion when it cropped up was in 1986, when the shift from grants to loans was under way, and a spokesman for a higher-ed accreditation group was able to grasp the larger meaning of the change. “A grant conveys the message, ‘We value you and will invest in your future,’ ” he told the New York Times. “The message of a loan is, ‘Go forward if you want, but on your own nickel.’ Loans reinforce privatist, instrumental values, a sense that you’re in college for yourself and that college studies have as an end only what comes later—a job and paying off the loan.”
 
@iowahawkblog had a great tweet on the cycle of ever-escalating tuition:

Kid: I can't afford this tuition!
Govt: Here's a $10K loan. Vote for us.
Kid: Yay!
College: We're raising tuition $10K.
#latherrinserepeat
 
and yet wake emailed me like 4 times so they could raise $1 million in a day. fuck off.
 
This is part of what I don't understand. Where the hell is all this money going?

I know that there are scads more administrative drones compared to the past, but can that really account for the millions that tuition increases have brought?

Pro Humanitate, obviously. (sarcasm alert). The mission is to educate the whole person, graduating students who seek purpose-filled lives while building a community dedicated to serving humanity. Seems like Wake does a better job accomplishing the exact opposite by graduating kids drowning in debt that have lost their option for doing much other than trying to pay their loans.
 
This is part of what I don't understand. Where the hell is all this money going?

I know that there are scads more administrative drones compared to the past, but can that really account for the millions that tuition increases have brought?

Dude have you stepped foot on campus? We are gearing up to destroy all comes in the collegiate arms race.
 
Seems like Wake does a better job accomplishing the exact opposite by graduating kids drowning in debt that have lost their option for doing much other than trying to pay their loans.

Did somebody say my name?
campos_student_loans.jpg
 
People bitching about debt need to cool the fuck down. The Govt is drowning in debt themselves which means we'll inflate our way outta it for sure. Relaxi-taxi.
 
People bitching about debt need to cool the fuck down. The Govt is drowning in debt themselves which means we'll inflate our way outta it for sure. Relaxi-taxi.

WAIT

i thought we were all supposed to be terrified of all the bubbles you're also predicting?
 
My, how times have changed! I graduated from WF in 1968 with zero debt. And the only jobs I had while I was at WF were during the summer months....I didn't have a job during the school year. And my Dad was a blue collar machinist for Western Electric in Greensboro who never made more than $10,000/year in his life....and my Mom was a stay-at-home mom who didn't work outside the home.

The total cost for my 4 years at WF....total, turn-key cost....was about $9,200 ($2,300/year). My first year salary after college was $8,000, which recovered roughly 87% of the total cost for my four years at Wake Forest.



and meeting all those great people at Wake was no extra cost :)
 
Yes college is extremely expensive, way too expensive for what it is now. Putting things like never made more than $10,000/year in his life is silly though because that's $70,000 dollars in 2014 inflation.
 
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