I met a college student last weekend and promised her I’d put a post online about the outrageously high cost of college tuition. I’m working on some figures now and hope to post a chart by tomorrow.
Meanwhile the bottom line remains the same. It doesn’t matter much which inflation indices or economic indicators one looks at. The brute fact is that when I went to college in the 70’s, students in California didn’t have to take out loans, but today they to have to. Big loans, too.
1. This indicates that we are moving backwards, not forward in terms of higher education in our society.
2. It is unjust, absurd, and socially counterproductive in the extreme to subject youth to this burden.
3. They are being taken advantage of, because they lack the historical perspective to understand that this was not the case 25 or 30 years ago.
4. Nobody is speaking up for them or representing their interests.
5. If anything, the costs of a college education should be declining (relative to the cost of living) because computer and internet technology can be used to facilitate distance learning, video lectures, etc.
More on this topic later…
Filed under: College tuition, Cultural psychology
why do you think the cost of college is going up?
Maybe one reason is simply that nobody has identified as a priority keeping it down or reducing it. As they say, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” If people felt in their heart that we should do our best to make sure that everybody could go to college, we’d find a way to do it. I just don’t know how many people let themselves feel how important this is. Another part of the problem is that families and students accept it. As long as there are families willing to dish out $20,000/year on tuition, we can be fairly certain the universities will continue to do this.
A third, very basic economic factor, is regulation. You have to receive government accreditation to confer university degrees. That amounts to a kind of monopoly among existing universities.