A college degree is a lousy investment

PhDeac said:

Interesting NPR profile of two colleges that offer free tuition.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/7763...hools-have-made-free-college-work-for-decades

When students couldn't afford to pay for tuition, school officials eliminated it.

"Berea College has not been collecting tuition from students since 1892," says Jeff Amburgey, Berea's vice president of finance.

To cover costs without tuition revenue, Berea's board of trustees did something almost 100 years ago that impacts its financial situation today. In 1920, the board ruled that any unrestricted money given to the college would be invested in an endowment to grow over time.

The endowment is now worth around $1.2 Billion, and profits from the investments cover a large portion of what it costs to educate more than 1,600 students.

Most students come from Appalachia. They all come from low-income families. And none pays for tuition.

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“Right now, the federal government produces an unlimited amount of money to meet up with whatever pricing the universities want to charge,” he told Yahoo Finance’s On The Move (video above). “The way to basically stop the runaway train is to actually stop the unlimited supply of money coming from the federal government.”

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Impose a 1% tax on for-profit companies on top-line revenue. “Who is the beneficiary of an educated and skilled workforce? ... It's corporate America,” Johnson stressed. “This is a tax on corporate top-line revenue, not bottom-line revenue.”

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...forgiving student loans could also stimulate the economy in the near term by serving as a “tax-cut-like stimulus.”

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And while the moves above look more like those of Democratic presidential candidates Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Johnson said they are necessary to fix the rotten core of the system.

“I give appropriate credit and recognition to them having brought this forward as a major, major topic,” Johnson said. “I happen to believe that this subject will become one of the critical defining subjects for the 2020 election cycle.”

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PhDeac said:

Interesting NPR profile of two colleges that offer free tuition.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/7763...hools-have-made-free-college-work-for-decades

When students couldn't afford to pay for tuition, school officials eliminated it.

"Berea College has not been collecting tuition from students since 1892," says Jeff Amburgey, Berea's vice president of finance.

To cover costs without tuition revenue, Berea's board of trustees did something almost 100 years ago that impacts its financial situation today. In 1920, the board ruled that any unrestricted money given to the college would be invested in an endowment to grow over time.

The endowment is now worth around $1.2 Billion, and profits from the investments cover a large portion of what it costs to educate more than 1,600 students.

Most students come from Appalachia. They all come from low-income families. And none pays for tuition.

Click to expand...

JuiceCrewAllStar said:

teaching home of bell hooks

Berea is also a work college where all students work a set number of hours per week on campus

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PhDeac said:

Application fees are a way to pay people in admissions who have to bother to process an application. It seems like the old purpose of application fees used to be to discourage people who wouldn't get in from bothering to apply. Now it's been distorted to encourage people who won't get in to apply so they can scoop up the fees.

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PhDeac said:

Interesting NPR profile of two colleges that offer free tuition.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/10/7763...hools-have-made-free-college-work-for-decades

When students couldn't afford to pay for tuition, school officials eliminated it.

"Berea College has not been collecting tuition from students since 1892," says Jeff Amburgey, Berea's vice president of finance.

To cover costs without tuition revenue, Berea's board of trustees did something almost 100 years ago that impacts its financial situation today. In 1920, the board ruled that any unrestricted money given to the college would be invested in an endowment to grow over time.

The endowment is now worth around $1.2 Billion, and profits from the investments cover a large portion of what it costs to educate more than 1,600 students.

Most students come from Appalachia. They all come from low-income families. And none pays for tuition.

Click to expand...

texasdeac said:

Department of Education just released a new website called the College Scoreboard that shows not only admissions statistics, but also cost and salary after graduation statistics which they break out by major.

Here's the link for Wake Forest's statistics: https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/school/?199847-Wake-Forest-University

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palmab03 said:

Graduate and immediately declare bankruptcy, or just go without a job for any short period of time and ditch all loans and profit.

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awaken said:

So Berea, Alice Lloyd, and Wise are providing upward mobility to the poor in their area. I hope their model catches on. #bootstraps and all that.
Meanwhile, Wake serves primarily rich kids, charges $70k/yr, graduates kids with tens of thousands in debt, and has the audacity to use Pro Humanitate as their motto.

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