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A college degree is a lousy investment

My Wake room mate went to JuCo in NC, then graduated from Wake and (Bowman Gray) Wake Med School.
 
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There is no way Wake should cost more than Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. There’s just no economic rationale for it.
 
Relevant.

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PhDeac said:
There is no way Wake should cost more than Stanford, Harvard, or MIT. There’s just no economic rationale for it.
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agreed, but

if WF can get it, and they can, then why not?

<except for, you know, Pro Humanitate>

by the way, I know at least 3 of the other schools on the list I provided are need blind in admissions; WFU is not (not sure about Duke)
 
thatguy2016 said:
agreed, but

if WF can get it, and they can, then why not?

<except for, you know, Pro Humanitate>

by the way, I know at least 3 of the other schools on the list I provided are need blind in admissions; WFU is not (not sure about Duke)
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Wake used to be need blind, right? Honestly, I feel like you can figure out who has "need" and who doesn't pretty easily. I'm sure Wake still gives big scholarships to people of need.
 
deacondamo said:
Wake used to be need blind, right? Honestly, I feel like you can figure out who has "need" and who doesn't pretty easily. I'm sure Wake still gives big scholarships to people of need.
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Yes, WF used to be need blind. Sure they give big scholarships to people in need.

Carefully offset by admitting a healthy percentage of students who don’t “need” financial assistance
 
Millennials feel burden of college loan debt
https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/...lennials-delay-life-milestones-154831862.html

Because of the crush of student loan debt, millennials have hit pause on saving for other life events. According to the study, at least a quarter of millennials said they are struggling with saving for retirement, buying a house and car, and moving out of their parents’ homes.
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And setting your sights on an Ivy League or more expensive college might not be worth it in the long run. An analysis by Investopedia compared Ivy League colleges to public and private universities and found public school graduates receive a higher rate of return on their educational investment than those who attend an Ivy League school.
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Clearly these schools are not providing the education that commands salaries that can take on this level of debt. Yet educators enjoy extravagant salaries, multiple layers of administration, and college campuses are a perpetual construction zone. Why should the debt they cause others be exempt from bankruptcy proceedings? It should not. Make them feel some fiscal pain for the bad loans they provide.

As a Wake alum, this stings; but also why my daughter is going to UNC
https://www.unc.edu/posts/2018/09/07/unc-chapel-hill-ranks-top-in-the-nation-for-value/

Wake Forest made me smart enough to not send my kid to Wake Forest?
 
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/a...debt-is-a-failed-social-experiment-2018-10-16

“We are making several policy decisions right now based on the idea that student debt is essentially a benign mechanism for funding higher education,” said Julie Margetta-Morgan, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and one of the authors of the paper, which focused on borrowers between the ages of 25 and 40. “Our research suggests that is not, in fact, that case.”

“We’ve essentially engaged in a failed social experiment where the government thought that it would be fine to give people student debt because that would pay off in the long run and we’re seeing that’s not the case,” she added. “Individuals shouldn't bear all the burden for paying for that mistake.”
 
“For Chingos, the evidence that the wages of college graduates are stagnant and that earnings for those with a high school diploma is troubling, “but I’m not sure what it tells us about higher education and student debt,” he said. “If the point is that ‘we’re all screwed because of the structure of the labor market,’ then go fix the labor market.””

This. Fix the economy and fewer people “need” to go to college. Fix the economy and there’s a higher wage return on loans. Loans are an issue, sure. But fix the broader economy and more people could pay their own way to college. Tuition would likely flatten as well.
 
There's just no reason college needs to be so expensive. It didn't used to be - relative to everything else. I'm sure it has been analyzed to death and said before but the easy availability of student loans certainly contributed to the vicious cycle of (i) increased demand for a college education - everyone wants to go, means (ii) increased competition by schools for students and the easy loan money they are looking to spend, means (iii) a building boom on every campus of student rec centers, pools, workout centers, etc. etc., and (iv) increasing numbers of administrators of every kind to make sure the students are happy and served - and on and on. All leading to costs increasing at many times the rate of inflation.

Whatever happened to the concept of the starving student living in a basic dorm room with no amenities, with the money for college going toward the actual education? I can't imagine how you go backwards but that is a big part of the overall problem.
 
That is still the model in most of the Western world where higher education is taxpayer funded or heavily subsidized without loan middlemen.
 
Or deep pocket parents and donors.
 
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