Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/08/colleges_are_full_of_it_behind_the_three_decade_scheme_to_raise_tuition_bankrupt_generations_and_hypnotize_the_media/Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media
Rodney Dangerfield in "Back to School"
The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt. Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at.
On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. The newspaper was the Washington Post; the speaker was an assistant dean at a college that had just announced a tuition hike of 19 percent; and the question before him was how much farther tuition increases could go. “Maybe all of a sudden this bubble is going to burst,” he was quoted as saying. “How much will the public take?”
Oh, we would take quite a lot, as it happened. It was 1981 when the assistant dean worried in that manner—the very first year of what was once called the “tuition spiral,” when higher ed prices got the attention of the media by outpacing inflation by a factor of two or three. There was something shocking about this development; tuition hadn’t gone up like that during the 1970s, even though that was the heyday of ascending consumer prices.
Yet at that point, the tuition spiral had more than three decades to go—indeed, it is still twisting upward today. But the way we talk about this slow-motion disaster has changed little over the years. Ever since the spiral began, commentators have been marveling at how far it’s gone and wondering how much farther it has yet to run—“the trend can’t continue,” they say every few years. They ask when the families and politicians of America are finally going to get off their knees and do something about it.
= new reply since forum marked as read
state support has dropped out completely, so public colleges are becoming more and more self-supporting, except they cannot build big foundations like private schools (because then the state says you have too much money), they are more regulated and open door than private colleges, and they tend to accumulate high-paid administrators who are sometime political appointees!
As such, the squeeze is on the students (and their parents).
It is catch-22.
- Capitalism corrupts EVERYTHING. You, understand? [font size=3]EVERYTHING![/font]
K&R
[center]
[/center]
I'm guessing most people here haven't seen the inside of an enrollments management meeting where you can see the stats on this. It's true that no student says (at least openly) "I'm going to University X because their gym facilities are AWESOME and the dorms are killer." But many students will say "That school looks poor" if there's not a modern gym and new construction everywhere. We can deny this all we want with anecdotal evidence ("I would never and nobody I know would ever..."
but if you actually look at the numbers and feedback, the conclusion is obvious: you build these things to maintain and grow enrollments, and if you don't, you lose to the schools that do.
My graduate class had 23, which is probably too high.
