scooter, I'm sure I don't have to explain that the campus tour isn't going to show you the everyday struggles of college students. I'm sure they didn't take you by the food pantry or by the parking lot where kids are sleeping in their car because they can't afford rent or on campus housing.
Here's an article from yesterday featuring some work by a friend of mine at Temple.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/real-cost-school-first-generation-college-students-n1007796
These aren't "broke college students." Those "broke college students" in the 70s, 80s, and 90s likely didn't work 20+ hours a week much less full time. They could devote more time to finishing in 4 years and earning an income without having to pay off massive loans.
Strick, great points about loans and rising education costs. The big drivers of increasing tuition and other costs are lower state spending on public education and administrative bloat. Of course, income inequality exacerbates all of these issues. A full-time job plus loans barely cover tuition and expenses for students who don't have help from their parents. Of course, those students need a college education the most and would benefit the most from earning a degree.
As far as this "unemployable majors" stuff, I'm not sure what the argument is. Are people arguing that engineering majors don't have any trouble paying off student loans but philosophy majors do? That's ridiculous. College loans are expensive for everyone who has them. Blaming people who aren't interested in STEM or business or going to law school for the student loan crisis ignores all the social, political, historical, and economic factors that have led up to this point. In effect, you all are blaming young people for not having the advantages you had 20, 30, 40 years ago. They're working much harder than we ever had to just to keep pace. And all you have for them is disrespect. I'm a big fan of college students nowadays. So much of them work full-time and go to college full-time and have family responsibilities all the while knowing they're entering a workforce designed to keep them struggling.
Honestly, I don't understand why people on a college sports message board seem to have such disdain for higher education and educators. It's a consistent theme here. I'm not sure if it has to do with rising anti-intellectualism or what. Why did you all even bother to go to Wake, a liberal arts school? Plenty of you come from money, so going to Wake didn't give you an advantage you wouldn't have had otherwise. If you didn't have money, you could have learned a trade and made a good living for yourselves and been part of this cohort of men in their 50s and 60s in manufacturing that we're having a tough time replacing.
