Accreditation is expensive. Education is free. So, maybe it is a racket. After WWII, higher education and free thinking were seen as the ticket to a brighter future. These free thinkers protested for Civil rights and gender rights, and against the war in Vietnam. Free thinking had to go. Today, students are trained to be cogs in a machine, not free thinkers. No more of this rocking the boat nonsense. The system is set up so you have to be a cog in the machine to pay off your accreditation costs.

I am sure that this is searchable, though I don't immediately know how.

If you take university education as a whole, and go back several decades (say: to the 1940s or so as a starting point, and then forward by each decade) you ought to be able to chart the rise in university educational costs in 2017 dollars.

You should also be able to do this by individual university or college.

(I picked the 1940s because that decade includes the students who were there on the G.I. Bill, so it is a kind of base mark...and in later decades (the 1950s, the 1960s, etc.) the rise in costs will start to rise dramatically at some point. ("Costs" includes tuition...TEXTBOOKS (whose prices have risen to absolutely crazy levels, and the publishers keep publishing, and the institutions keep requiring, "new editions" SPECIFICALLY so they can raise the price, meaning that the used book market will no longer work for most students)...room and board...and any extra fees that are part of the required academic work (research trips to archaeological sites, equipment, etc.).

As I (imperfectly) understand the university educational industry now, "everyone" who is collecting those fees is benefiting: the university or college itself, textbook publishers, and those who lend the money for student loans.

There has been a huge infusion of "easy money" into the education INDUSTRY. A great deal of this is loans, which students (or somebody) will have to pay off. When you increase funding, you get increased prices (inflation). People can talk about "opportunity" and "investing in our children's future" and throw euphemisms around all they want, but economic reality eventually prevails.

Incidentally, you won't be able to skip out on these loans with bankruptcy. Even after going Chapter 7, you, your parents, or somebody, will have to pay them off. A local politician gets lots of accolades when she speechifies about freeing young adults from college debt, but she got $430K for teaching a single 3-hour course! So beware silver-tongued liars with gold-plated promises.

BTW, I live in a student neighborhood. As the dorm rates & fees go up, so do my rents. They're paying my retirement.

Dwindling funding of public schools makes them expensive.

let real competition take hold and the true cost of education would be seen within a few years.

for some types of education it may be higher, for others much lower.

Two things have happened. First, the development of student loans enabled colleges to raise prices and collect what students borrowed. So what started out as a way of enabling poorer kids to go to college became a way for colleges to collect more tuition and fees. That contributed greatly to the rise in rates.

Second, colleges realized that you can set the headline figure as high as you want. The very wealthy can pay those rates straight up. Middle-class and poorer kids get financial aid, either scholarships/grants or student loans. The proportion of students not paying the full tuition rate is quite high. But the net effect of the student loan racket and higher sticker price is that the universities can exact the maximum possible from their students and the burden of repayment/default is shifted to those kids and their families and, when the banks take the hit, shareholders and ultimately taxpayers. You can prohibit bankruptcy as a means of discharging debt, but that won't save the lenders or the (public) guarantor when the NPLs appear on balance sheets.

Economic reality does indeed eventually prevail. Financial innovation is part of that reality. Credit standards were loosened dramatically starting in the 1980s, which enabled a vast increase in household indebtedness and a big inflow of cash into the stock market. The 2000-2002 crash was one major correction; that of 2008-2010 was another. In both cases deregulation and financial innovation shifted wealth from future generations to present consumers--just google household debt over time--creating debts that became unsustainable and were eventually shifted to taxpayers. The same thing is now happening in the student loan and the sub-prime auto markets.

Where lies the responsibility for this mess? Part lies with the universities and the lenders, who pocket the proceeds of the borrowing and spending. Part also lies with the politicians who, in the name of free enterprise, loosened regulations and allowed the development of new products without paying attention to the distributional effects of those changes. Then there are the regulators who even today refuse to clarify the rules as to who will pay for the losses when they materialize. That loss should in theory accrue to the lenders, who have the resources to evaluate and price risk properly and hence should not rely on a public backstop. But when push comes to shove, when the delinquencies mount, the government will bow to political pressure and recapitalize the lenders.

Why? Because since Citizens United there are few limits to how much money goes into the political parties. We illegalize bankruptcy by students (who don't make significant campaign contributions) but in the event of a crisis recapitalize Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and, through loss carry-forwards, wealthy individuals. Students are not a threat to capitalism: big financial institutions that have, through campaign donations, procured from politicians implicit put options are.

Actually, no.

The student loans are individually tiny. The government's guarantees of those loans are not problematic.

The problem is that the major banks and hedge funds are too large and too leveraged. When adverse economic trends hammer borrowers of any sort, the banks go underwater and the government is confronted with the possibility of a systemic credit crunch and depression. To prevent that from happening, the governments infuses huge sums of money into the banks and the Fed cuts rates to zero and expands its balance sheet.

The problem is not the explicit government guarantees of loans but rather the implicit guarantee of the banks' solvency. To put the point bluntly, if the choice is a depression or using public money to bail out the banks, the government always bails out the banks. The banks and hedge funds know this, so they take on more risk than they would in a truly capitalistic market. If those bets pay off, the financial institutions pocket the gains; if they don't, the banks and funds shift the losses to the government and the taxpayer.

The readily available money has caused a lot of "basement dwellers" to go back to school as a means of support. Parents wont be so set on the kid getting a job if he is working on his master's degree in fungus studies.
It would be a great plan to fund student loans in line with the job placement that is achieved by the respective degree. Maybe students would choose more carefully, the road to pursue, if there was more incentive to be "marketable".

I don't think that you can really blame student loans. We had student loan availability back in the 60s and 70s as well. It didn't seem to have an adverse impact on college tuition rates, which were quite reasonable back then. I was able to go to an out-of-state public flagship university without draining the bank.

What did happen is that schools got defunded. The generous government subsidies that they had formerly enjoyed went away.

By the early 90s, when I entered grad school, tuition rates were rapidly escalating. I went to a public school, but it didn't matter. One semester, tuition went up 8%. We were told it was to keep the salaries of professors competitive. The very next semester, tuition again rose 10%. No excuse was given then. More than 18% in one year alone? My original budget for grad school doubled by the time I was out.

The one thing about grad school is that you *must* have an on-campus job (GA,TA, or RA) in order to make your education affordable.

I feel sorry for the majority of students nowadays. There is no more room for learning for learning's sake. Your education has to be very intentional. You need to know exactly what you wish to get out of it.

Hi Summer,

What you say about government support is true. But that is only half the story. The availability of credit is critical. And this is not only a student-loan phenomenon. Starting with credit cards and more expansive mortgages and auto loans, etc., there was an enormous increase in household debt that started in the early 1980s. It wasn't just in the US either; the new financial innovations and lassez faire regulation enabled people to borrow much more money than in the past. That money went into goods and services but also into assets like homes. The result was more rapid appreciation and hence higher prices.

The same thing has happened in higher education. The variety and volume of loans available to finance college has expanded dramatically, and so too has the cost of an education. If the extra financing had not been available, universities would have done a lot better job of managing their costs; professorial compensation, to take one small example, would not have risen so fast.

The logic is simple. If you free up more money to chase a relatively limited supply of some good--a quality education--the price of that good rises. The price of higher education is a great example of that; it has increased far in excess of inflation even if adjusted for the stagnation or decrease in state support.

In any case, I agree with your conclusion. Learning for learning's sake is now a quaint idea, one you can read about in history books. Society is the poorer for it. The wisdom that comes with learning (liberal or conservative or both) philosophy, economics, politics, literature, anthropology, archaeology, and many other fields is diminishing. The higher cost of education ad the ready availability of student loans is changing the nature of academia and of society.

It appears that fiscal waste happens because it can. You can't blame professor salaries either. I was shocked to find the department head of my old Physics department making only 15% more than the same job 25 years before. Administrators get the big bucks.

However, much of the blame goes to state funding drying up, which is a political problem. Educated people pissed off the rich, so the rich changed the game.

Professorial compensation has declined. Adjuncts are the majority now. Most are not tenure track or tenured. A sizable number of college instructors are at poverty level or beneath it and have to use food stamps.

I really feel for the adjuncts, Loyalexmo. Their situation is terrible. Most would earn more if they taught at a public high school.

Actually, universities are limited in most cases to how many adjuncts they have....it's an accreditation thing. Several years ago in WA state I could make $2400 a quarter teaching one class as an adjunct--not bad, not great. In Texas I found it was more like $1,600 a semester. Maybe it's gone up but _that_ was very low and not worth my time.

This is a good point.

I think it's important, though, to separate out tenured faculty and adjuncts. It used to be that everyone was either tenured or tenure track. Adjuncts are a relatively recent phenomenon and, in my mind, aren't really professors. They are hired slaves, like grad students, who teach courses for virtually nothing.

If you'll accept my description that they are professors in name only, we can separate out the "real" professors. Those people have seen their incomes rise at well above the rate of inflation.

So what you have since the advent of the student loan (and in large part as a result of that increase in credit) is much more money for universities, which is spent on facilities, professorial pay, and administration. College presidents at big schools make money like CEOs of mid-sized corporations. Meanwhile more of the actual teaching and grading has devolved on adjunct faculty and those indentured servants known as grad students.

It's not a good situation. The cost of education has gone way up on the back of indebted students and their families, and the gains from the expanded income has flowed disproportionately to tenured faculty and administrators.

"I think it's important, though, to separate out tenured faculty and adjuncts. It used to be that everyone was either tenured or tenure track. Adjuncts are a relatively recent phenomenon and, in my mind, aren't really professors. They are hired slaves, like grad students, who teach courses for virtually nothing.

If you'll accept my description that they are professors in name only, we can separate out the "real" professors. Those people have seen their incomes rise at well above the rate of inflation."

That's not true. Most of the time, the only difference between what you call "real" professors and adjuncts is that adjuncts have little/no institutional support, get paid 1/3 what full-timers do, and have no benefits, even though most have terminal degrees, experience, and good CVs -- but because the number of full-time jobs available has decreased dramatically over the past few decades, this is often the best we can get. That's why many of us burn out and end up leaving academia; it's simply not sustainable to live for years with terrible pay, no benefits, several pay gaps per year, unemployed summers, and no job security.

It's much cheaper for the university to hire -- and replace -- adjuncts as they phase out FT positions. FT salaries have not, in most places, kept pace with inflation. Restructuring of pay scales to reduce or eliminate raises is common, while many institutions slash their contributions to retirement funds, and gut funding for conferences, research, and other activities while they increase teaching load and department commitments. In my region, a FT position with a 4/4 teaching load for a well-qualified PhD in my discipline might pay $65-$80K/yr. They expect research and publication, plus departmental activity, on top of that.

It's also untrue that there's a threshold adjunct percentage for accreditation purposes: https://www.aaup.org/report/looking-other-way-accreditation-standards-and-part-time-faculty

The problem is that colleges and universities are spending less and less on teachers but more and more on administration (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/06/higher-ed-administrators-growth_n_4738584.html), construction, and declining state funding (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/05/05/report-says-administrative-bloat-construction-booms-not-largely-responsible-tuition).

I'm not sure you understood what I was trying to say.

Your position and mine appear to be very similar. My point was that adjuncts are treated like slaves despite their qualifications and experience.

Regarding your citations, I have not mentioned anything about the ratio of adjuncts for accreditation purposes so I'm not sure why that article is relevant. And your two final citations contradict each other about construction, etc.

But again, I think we are on the same page about adjuncts and the way they are used by universities and colleges. They are, like grad students and college athletes in revenue-generating sports, treated very cynically.

AS you probably know, my wife has taught Maths at a public University near Paris.

Out of curiosity, I just checked on how much it costs for students. The answer didn't really suprise me, as all three of our children have been educated in French public universities, but it might surprise you.

The answer is 186 euros (about 207 US dollars) per year or 393 euros (438 US dollars) if you want full health insurance.

Vive la France, I say ;-)

Tom in Paris



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2017 12:51PM by Soft Machine.

University costs about the same in Germany, too. A few hundred euros in administration fees, but zero tuition.

It's a good education, too. But campuses don't have football stadiums or even food courts. Students aren't customers, so the attitude is more sink-or-swim than rate-my-professor.

Each faculty member teaches from one to three full courses, where a full course is one that meets for three hours each week.

Preparing for those face-time hours takes a lot more time. Faculty with three-course loads have no time at all for anything else; schools that expect their faculty to conduct world-class research have one-course loads. Two-course loads mean a bit of time for research. Do you need to learn your subject from a world-class researcher? Not necessarily, but it can be worth something, maybe even a lot. Senior-year college isn't shop class. You're not there to learn facts——you're learning how to think about your subject. Great researchers are good at that.


Freshman lectures may have hundreds of students but advanced classes usually have far fewer. If we estimate an overall average of 20 students per class, and a five-course load for full-time students, then each full-time student needs to pay for 1/20th of five courses, or 1/4 of a course. That's 1/4 of a research professor's teaching output, or 1/12 the teaching output of a professor at a teaching-heavy college.

If professors don't get the salaries of highly skilled professionals, nobody becomes a professor. So if you're paying 1/12 to 1/4 of that salary, you're already looking at a fair number of thousands of dollars per year.

Education is a multi-billion dollar industry in America. Take away the students, student loans, books, high cost of tuition & housing, what do you have left?

Jobless hordes.

Over the past century and a half, there used to not be a social security net to protect the aged and infirm from slipping through the cracks of the economy.

Children didn't have an adolescence as we know it today. They went from childhood to adulthood rather swiftly in order to help support their families. It was common to marry young, with barely a high school education, if that.

Post world wars and post-Great Depression came the need to allow the aged to retire gracefully with old age income protection, so the younger generation from the Depression Era would be able to find jobs and employment.

The young were kept out of the job market by delaying their childhood longer, creating the adolescence period we defined our generations by. Higher education came about as a result of keeping the next generation out of the job market until their parents generation was nearing the end of their cycle - then the next generation would take over, better educated and older than ever before.

I learned this in a graduate education program on Social Security, women and education in America (a history.) It is social engineering, if you will.

As for expense, chalk it up to inflation. Like medicine, it exceeds the cost of living ratios while being driven by the machinery in place ie, which loosely translates to greedy corporate interests. Consider the CEO of Sallie Mae. Worth many billions of dollars. One guy. From the backs of enslaved students who leave college feeling more like indentured servants than college graduates, saddled with student loan debt that will last for years.

This would make sense if the economic structure had remained static over the period in question. But that did not happen.

The US went from a predominantly agricultural society to an industrialized and urbanized one, then to a services- and technology-based economy. Even agriculture is now highly mechanized and requires a high level of education. These changes required that educational levels rise dramatically.

Another way of looking at it is to compare the rate of improvement in life expectancy with the increase in educational standards. Life expectancy rose much more slowly after 1945 than did the number of years spent in school. A college degree today is what a high-school degree was 20 or 30 years ago, and that is driven by the fact that the modern economy requires a significantly more competent workforce.

Here's an article that looks at many sides of the issue...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States

When I was young I'd hear the old geezers sitting around the dinner table saying, "Back in my day..." I swore I'd never be one of them. But turns out, I am. hmmm

So---when I went to college back in the late 60's, early 70's, tuition and books were not expensive. Tuition and fees were $88 a quarter at a college with good solid teaching and an excellent library. I still have my freshman German book: it was $8-something, and we used it all year. That paper and print quality are good.

Some of our classes were in a Quonset hut. Our buildings were not air conditioned. They had windows. (Whoever decided to build schools without windows was making very unhealthy decisions).

After I moved away from home, I lived in a tiny little rental house with horrible furniture--we put the mattress on the floor so it would not sag any more)---the only warm place was hovering over the heater, which was in the kitchen. We used to go to the library and stay till it closed in order to be warm.

So--what made costs go up? Everything was less expensive in real dollars back then. The house I rented probably would not pass code in any city now--and passing code means costing more. The spotted owl ruined our domestic source of affordable paper; the cost of textbooks, or any books, has never recovered.

Some of my best teachers were masters-degree people. They were gradually fazed out to be replaced by PhD's--some of whom were much less good teachers.

I was able to earn enough money to graduate debt-free working through summers at minimum-wage jobs plus small part-time work in the school years.

So--the economy has changed in a lot of ways; I think things, especially housing, are more expensive now. We didn't expect to have things as fancy---and much of the required technology expected now was not even available then. We had no TV for years; we did have a "landline" telephone---party-line, no less, for part of the time. We walked and biked a lot. The library had a card-catalog. My husband did his masaters thesis on a mainframe computer where he had to submit boxes of these little punch-cards to somebody, and several days later get them back with where the errors are. We went from manual to electronic typewriters in "our day." Dishwasher? nope. Iron and ironing board--yup. (One thing I don't regret!!) Women wearing pants? Just coming in--thank goodness. Jeans? nope.

And so on. I think a lot of it is technology not yet there. A lot is upgrading of building codes and expectations of comforts/work ethic. Just plain ol' inflation.

As far as I know, our education was at least as good in terms of foundational things. Not so much with keeping up with modern technology, of course, and that certainly is necessary.

I watch my granddaughter in middle school, and I think she's learning more than we did about actual critical thinking skills---but she has much less of the classical literature, for example, and I think that is too bad. There's some pretty impressive thinking in that old literature too. But on the whole, I think the saddest change is that kids aren't outdoors, and aren't doing work with their hands that demonstrates process. And I think that is important.

Has anyone see the stuff about how the schools in Finland are doing? That is interesting. Lots more hands on. No homework. Lots more time outdoors. The kids are doing way, way better than ours are.

By the way; I grew up "out west." recently I read about kids growing up in big cities in America who have never seen a grocery store, let alone a garden or farm. Wow. One's environment would make a difference in all kinds of things.

relievedtolearn Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> So---when I went to college back in the late 60's,
> early 70's, tuition and books were not expensive.
> Tuition and fees were $88 a quarter at a college
> with good solid teaching and an excellent library.
> I still have my freshman German book: it was
> $8-something, and we used it all year. That paper
> and print quality are good.

Maybe I can put that into perspective...

The official inflation calculator ( https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl ) says that $88 in 1970 is the same as $570 today.

And $8 is the same as $52 today.

My local community College (Palomar College, a well-regarded college) costs $644 per semester for tuition (that would be $322 per quarter) for a "full load" of classes. That's quite a bit below the $570 per quarter cost you paid in 1970 -- almost half.

Palomar estimates book costs (if you buy all-new books) and lab fees per semester at $882. A "full load" means an average of 6 books and 2 "lab books" per semester, so $882 / 8 = about $110 per book, almost double what your cost was. That includes lab fees as well, though...and if you buy used books, the average is about 1/4 the cost of new books, which would make books less expensive than you paid in 1970.

So new books have gone up (though Palomar is one of the colleges moving to "digital textbooks," which will significantly lower the cost). But overall, the cost to attend is about the same, maybe a bit more or less, than when you went in 1970.

Yes, Palomar is a 2-year college -- but credits transfer to all CalState and UC schools, and most other accredited universities. Come out of Palomar with a decent GPA, and you're darn near guaranteed admission to CalState or UC as a junior.

Overall college costs have increased faster than inflation over the past 40 years or so. But there are still affordable options, and in many cases the costs haven't gone up nearly as much as the most outrageous examples (largely private colleges/universities).

edit: I should add that Palomar has a large, modern, hi-tech campus. No quonset huts. Air-conditioned. Well maintained. :)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2017 04:52PM by ificouldhietokolob.

Yes, but in my experience many transfer students from 2-year colleges end up having to spend additional years at UCs, which are some of the most expensive schools around. Most take 5 years or more to graduate. So that's still about $180,000 of debt for a LOT of students.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2017 04:56PM by Loyalexmo.

Loyalexmo Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yes, but in my experience many transfer students
> from 2-year colleges end up having to spend
> additional years at UCs, which are some of the
> most expensive schools around. Most take 5 years
> or more to graduate. So that's still about
> $180,000 of debt for a LOT of students.

UC tuition is under $14k per year.
To rack up $180k in debt they'd have to attend for 13 years....

I'm more than highly skeptical of the "most take 5 years or more to graduate" claim in the first place (since starting with NO college credits takes 4 years), but the $180k claim is mathematically absurd.

ificouldhietokolob Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I'm more than highly skeptical of the "most take 5
> years or more to graduate" claim in the first
> place (since starting with NO college credits
> takes 4 years)...

I didn't understand this either until, over a period of about ten years, I met a number of part-time employees of a [particular national chain of stores], who were all students in the UC system (whether university or state college), and here is what I learned so far as California is concerned:

Critical required classes for at least a large number of majors are only available at certain semesters during the year, or on alternate years, etc., and since these are REQUIRED classes for whatever degree that person is in the process of attaining, they MUST be taken before graduation...which means that when registration is possible, they fill up to capacity virtually "instantly," and those who don't get in before the close-off of registration, must then wait for the next time the class is available (which may be two quarters away, or next year, or whenever).

So there are, in practical terms, a very large number of students who have completed all of the requirements for their degrees EXCEPT for these particular REQUIRED classes they have not been able to get registered for because registration has been closed off so quickly.

Which is why so many of these students are working as part-time Sales Associates at retail stores for two or three years before they are able to get their degrees.

This may only be a problem in California, but IN California, it is a very big problem right now (and has been for at least the ten or eleven years that I have been aware of it).

Tevai, you're absolutely right -- that's a problem.
However, if you're just maintaining your enrollment status, and not taking a course (waiting for an opening), you don't pay full tuition.
And still, 13 years of waiting...:)

Costs for in state include housing, textbooks etc-- at least $30,000 a year. UCs are also courting massive numbers of international students so fewer and fewer of the students are from Cali. Their costs per year are about $60,000 and they take longer to graduate.

The 5 year claim is a statistical fact as of this past academic year. Not opinion. At least at the one where I work. They aren't going to advertise that though.

Hie, my local community college is excellent and affordable as well. I've taken numerous credit classes there. The prices of the books are what get you, like anywhere else.

The problem is in our state university system. It is ridiculously expensive. I told the story above of how my tuition in grad school rose more than 18% in one year alone. It makes budgeting impossible.

I remember when I was in grad school my university added an IT major. They built a beautiful new computer lab. I couldn't help but feel that I, along with my teacher education cohort, were paying for the technology upgrades for which students who would eventually be earning far more than us would benefit.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2017 06:55PM by summer.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I remember when I was in grad school my university
> added an IT major. They built a beautiful new
> computer lab. I couldn't help but feel that I,
> along with my teacher education cohort, were
> paying for the technology upgrades for which
> students who would eventually be earning far more
> than us would benefit.

You probably were paying for it. At least part of it.
They used to do such big additions only when they got donations to build them, or state funds to build them. That is one of the big changes -- now they build 'em without waiting, and kick up tuition to pay for it. Usually saying, "We have to in order to remain competitive!" Which is partially true, and partially an excuse :(

I have to agree with you Summer about the prices of my text books. This past spring, I payed about $1200 in tuition and $950 in textbooks. Once it gets closer to the start of the Fall semester, I am going to work on seeing if I can get as many of my books on Amazon as I can instead of going to the college bookstore in hopes to save dad some money.

Yes, definitely look online, Kativicky. You might also consider shopping for older editions. Normally the prior edition is not all *that* different. I also borrowed textbooks from my school's library where I could.

One problem is that you need a B.A./B.S. or above for ANY job nowadays unless you are working in a particular vocation. In my post-B.A. job search I would have needed a master's degree for almost anything. I lucked out and got a job with health insurance fairly quickly, but would have been paid at least $10,000 more a year with any grad degree. So the demand keeps rising and rising. You really can't 'move up the ranks' anymore in any field without a B.A. at the very, very least. There might be a few exceptions but they are rare. I even see food service jobs advertised that expect you to have a college degree. It's essentially the same as getting a HS diploma now. The number of people with master's degrees and Ph.D.s continues to rise as well. Ph.D.s at least generally are fully funded and pay you a stipend, but very few master's degrees do.

Another is the lack of public funding and the huge increase in administrator salaries. Athletes and athletic directors are also paid a ton. Faculty is still not paid much at all and most are not tenured.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2017 04:53PM by Loyalexmo.

We can dance around this, but the Occams Razor is always best. We were told that laying brick or welding were for stupid people (first career was laying brick). That way we would want to avoid that type of work. That funneled us to the university where our minds would be available for brainwashing and ironically, closed to free thought. Cultural revolution. The price goes up because it's sought after. Fell victim to the thinking myself - got three degrees. I remember in the early 80's when we were under pressure to finish the Space Shuttle launch site at Vandenberg AFB base I worked as an engineer and made around $40k. The steel workers had a $20k per month club. Thought a lot about all the years of schooling... Today, where I work, the contract fabricator (welder) makes about $300k. Coulda, shoulda, woulda.

College graduates are a dime a dozen. With debt up the yingyang. Skilled tradesmen not so much.

I would argue that it's not so much that being a skilled tradesmen was meant for "stupid" people, but rather that people, for the most part, are drawn to careers where they are physically comfortable, out of the elements sitting at a desk in a well-ventilated office. And there is some logic to this. I salute all the tradesmen who are doing all the back breaking work out there on a daily basis, but I also think most people are just not cut out for it. Risk of injury is obviously high and one's ability to do those kinds of work greatly diminishes with age. These folks are paid well because not only is the work in demand, but there is an unspoken assumption that they won't likely be able to do this kind of work at 60 years old. At least with degree(s) in hand, nobody can take it(them) away from you...

"These folks are paid well because not only is the work in demand, but there is an unspoken assumption that they won't likely be able to do this kind of work at 60 years old. At least with degree(s) in hand, nobody can take it(them) away from you..."

Truthfully such an unspoken assumption cannot by nature exist. Someone will always break the agreement and ruin it for everyone. They are paid what they are paid because that is what they would get paid by going somewhere else for the same position. Obviously if there were more qualified workers than positions the average pay would go down.

The "regional airline" industry today is a great example of this in reverse.

incognitotoday HIT the nail on the head while sharapata is missing the mark... Measuring twice and cutting once also applies to thinking and drawing conclusion.

"I would argue that it's not so much that being a skilled tradesmen was meant for "stupid" people, but rather that people, for the most part, are drawn to careers where they are physically comfortable, out of the elements sitting at a desk in a well-ventilated office."

Traditionally, last 40 years or so, the trades were relegated for the kids bad at school. I've done both, electrical engineering and I am also a licensed Master Electrician, I prefer the field a lot less BS. I've played on both sides of the business so I understand what is going on well. If offered the option when you are young go to college or be stupid and don't; what is one going to choose? The ironic part is the amount of college grads entering the trades after they find out there is degree isn't worth crap in monetary terms. My last apprentice was a black girl with a sociology degree. Funny thing is they all feel lied to by educational institutions and society to a certain degree.

"And there is some logic to this. I salute all the tradesmen who are doing all the back breaking work out there on a daily basis, but I also think most people are just not cut out for it. Risk of injury is obviously high and one's ability to do those kinds of work greatly diminishes with age. These folks are paid well because not only is the work in demand, but there is an unspoken assumption that they won't likely be able to do this kind of work at 60 years old. At least with degree(s) in hand, nobody can take it(them) away from you..."

Most people not cut out to physically work? Since when? Evolutionarily speaking we have been working our butts off for millennia. We don't "work" physically so we build gyms where we "work" out. What's NOT natural is sitting on your but all day in air conditioning. How long one can work is dependent on how they take care of themselves mostly off work: do they drink too much, smoke etc. Also most people can retire early with a fix pension because they are represented by a union.

The education is FREE. 4-5 year in class program coupled with on the job experience. The union I am apart of is partnered with a community college and when people get done they receive an associates degree.

sharapata is right the money can be great. I know 23 year olds making $12-13k a month with no student loan debt.

Hmm. Isn't it more about supply and demand? Most jobs are going to be digital soon. Unfortunately we don't have a model yet outside of the university that trains people for those jobs.

Universities also stand to profit from student labor, whether as athletes or in "entrepreneurship" programs, etc.

Being who I am I feel the need to describe my specific political leaning and how it relates to the burdensome bureaucracy that supports educational institutions. Ignoring, of course, facts that will point out that the bureaucracy has always existed.

This is, at the core, a lesson in economics. Lot's Wife has a very strong hold on this but that hold is a bit above my understanding. So without further ado, supply and demand.

The demand for education is great enough to support seemingly unlimited upward mobility on the price. Sure there are random corrections but overall it just keeps on going up. Think Google stock, which has increased 1,700 percent since it started trading in 2004.

There are a handful of other examples and they all have specific reasons that detail why the demand hasn't fallen off but the long and short of this is supply and demand.

Sure, easier money really helps, but it wouldn't matter if people didn't want an education.

True.

Supply and demand. Demand for a good education is pretty inelastic, meaning people want to go to a strong college even if the price rises. Universities have figured that out.

The innovations in the financial sector--nearly five decades of new ways to borrow more and more--has freed up voluminous money for households to meet those higher prices. The ability to borrow has effectively increased demand at any price point just has has happened in the housing market. If you make it easier to borrow, the prices people will pay for such valued things as homes and education rises more rapidly.

My point is that your characterization of both market prices and household preferences is accurate. It's just that when credit is increasingly available, the upward pressure on prices intensifies. Without the expansion of student loans, the rate of inflation in education prices would have been much closer to rate of inflation in the overall cost of living indexes.

Higher education in colleges,universities are extremely expensive.
The real need is for people with a trade. Trade schools are often shorter and cost less.

Trade schools/apprenticeships in the construction industry are often FREE. A brand new 1st year electrician apprentice starts at $25/hr and all of the electrical schooling (5yrs) is free(earn while you learn). A journeyman makes around $48/hr which is going $52 in Feb.

How many people in their early 20s make over $100k a year with no school debt? However, you do have to work and not sit on your ass all day...

This is specific to Seattle.

Rule number one. Government screws up nearly everything it gets involved with.

There is not only supply and demand for education, but supply and demand for money. Where there a lot of money, prices will go up. You charge more because you can. Same with healthcare or wherever there's free money.

A few years ago at our state university, saw an article saying tuition would go up 17% that year. Next article said state funding would go up to help meet the cost of tuition.

Pretty nice to have a business in bed with government.

So high prices are blamed on lack of regulation and too much freedom, when it is the opposite.

http://www.heritage.org/education/report/the-real-problem-rising-college-costs

Ohio University economist Richard Vedder discusses this problem in his book Going Broke By Degree: Why College Costs Too Much. "Students receiving grants or subsidized loans are far less sensitive to tuition increases than they would be if they were paying their own way," Dr. Vedder argues. "Where entrepreneurs in a free, unsubsidized market seek to cut costs and lower their prices to lure new custom­ers away from businesses that are raising theirs, there is very little of that in higher education."

It is funny that college students are supposedly the brightest among us, yet they all fall for the scam. That includes me and my daughters who all regret the experience.

The propaganda that we all need to go to college is total BS.

But the education industry uses big government to indoctrinate the masses.

It really is a religion. As with the morg, few can question it, especially if they've invested too much.

Actually, prices have gone up since universities are no longer as accountable to the government after the Bayh-Dole Act. They now operate essentially as corporations.

My two cents....

As federal financial aid increased, so did the college and university tuition and fees. Student ability to pay--with loans, grants, etc.--have fueled the increases.

Did colleges and universities do this consciously? Probably not. But as enrollments increased, and it was clear that _somehow_ students were able to pay, the costs went up.

My son started university in Fall 2004 at a TX university (not UT or TAMU). His tuition for that first semester was almost equal to what I paid in total tuition for my 4 year degree at the U of U in 74-78.

What about Western Governors University headquartered near the LDS mothership in Salt Lake City, Utah? It's very affordable.