College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.

That's the consequence of choosing priorities. America gives priority to the military, Europe gives priority to the social aspects of its inhabitants. In most European countries (except Britain, but they are an exception in everything possible) college is either affordable or free.

A college education should be free, courses should be standardized, and everyone should have to pass the same level of testing, and complete the same requirements. The government should provide testing, and the basic course material so that anyone who wants to earn a degree can access the needed information on line, take the required tests at a government testing center, and earn their degree for free if they are able. Those who want to pay for professors and tutors can do so if they choose, but a college degree should require all people meet the same requirements, and the information made public for free. Otherwise, using a college education as a barrier for employment should be considered discrimination. It is supposed to be equal opportunity for all, but the expense of a college education clearly cuts off a huge portion of the population from a fair opportunity to succeed.

What we have is a class system designed as an education system, which is a joke.

people may realise its a hoax anyway...
college education that is.

reply to post by poet1b

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While we're at it, how bout we adopt the 3-tiered approach that Germany uses? Universal pre-preschool to those who want it, mandatory preschool, kindergarten all the way to 5th grade and then they're given aptitude tests to determine if they're going to be high performers of society.

Cause nothing says freedom like predestination!



This is an outrageous fallacy. If everyone had a college degree, what do you think it would be worth? Value is only applied to scarcity, and when you neutralize the rewards of those who work hard now, make their OWN opportunities, and pull through college, you've got nothing to show for it but another failed law. No, socialist.


[edit on 4-12-2008 by SpencerJ]

I thought this recent story is rather pertinent to the thread.



online.wsj.com...

The numbers are simply staggering. The article goes into greater detail regarding other schools as well. With endowments this large, why the skyrocketing tuition rates? Granted Harvard is the largest but endowments are the bread and butter of any university or college.

Completely untrue.
I say this with a modicum of authority as someone who has a) worked in higher education for over a decade and b) wrote my master's thesis on the subject of this thread.
Now I focused on state institutions since they receive a lion's share of the middle and lower income students so I cannot speak to the world of Harvard, Yale, Stanford or the University of Spoiled Children (USC). But with the creation of the G.I. Bill (1940s), National Defense Education Act (1950s), and the Higher Education Act (1965) the number of people attending university or two year college has exploded. In 1949 there were 2.6 million attending (this data does not parse the enrollments between public and private) source by 1970 there are 6.4 million in Public institutions alone source. Now I don't want to go all wonky in here but suffice it to say that higher education has been consistently more affordable for a larger number of students until about 20 years ago. At that time TPTB began shrinking the amount of money available to students through grants and federal loans making it more difficult for poorer students to attend. This is where, in the last 10 years or so, we have seen a growth in PRIVATE student loan companies which are for all intensive purposes loan sharks, to fill the gap. Their interest rates are ludicrous and they prey on unsuspecting (mostly ignorant about credit and personal finance) college students. Many of these students are basically becoming financial indentured servants after college due to these loans.
Higher education inflation is out of control. This is in part due to simply the nature of the beast. Colleges are not supposed to be for-profit entities but more and more often they are expected to be just that. As state budgets tighten they go after softer funds (much easier to cut funding to higher education than say medicare) leaving state univ's to either, cut courses, research and staff (to the detriment of everyone) or raise tuition, which itself basically an increase in "tax" on middle and lower income students.

The easy answer to all of this? There is none. Higher education needs to find ways to help offset their budget cuts without killing students pocketbooks but states and federal governments need to prioritize education (of all levels) to a higher place in the pecking order.

Obs out

The first thing that should be done is to take the focus off college sports and place it on education. Get away from giving any kind of scholarship for any kind of sport. Instead, give scholarships for academic performance. And I agree, get rid of student loans. Education should be free, at least through Master's level. Not every one will choose to go to college. Some people are just not cut out for it. Their temperment leans toward other things. But there will be some who will go on to greatness.

reply to post by kettlebellysmith

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This is a bit of a misnomer, the idea that athletics siphons off a tremendous amount of resources. It is, for the most part, not true. Most of the "big time" college athletic departments are not even technically part of the Universities they represent. Many live in a never-neverland of not quite part of the uni and not quite a corporation. How else could coaches get million dollar salaries? Uni presidents certainly don't make that much, partly (again from the public school perspective) because states won't allow it.

I can say that the uni where I work gets scholarship money paid to them by the athletic department for their scholarship students. Also of the gazillions of dollars that "big time" athletic departments make from bowl games, going deep in the NCAA b-ball tourney, from wealthy donors, etc. the uni gets some of that back.. not MUCH mind you... but a bit.

Now, I am not defending the way that college sports is handled in the U.S., simply pointing out that dumping on athletics or shredding athletic budgets (for small schools that don't have these gargantuan programs) hurts students.

Obs out

Education is free for those who learn to educate themselves properly however when things are free you get diseases and they poision the body or the system. Its like Disability i know lots of people that have it that dont really need it, unfortunately one of them had an accident and now needs it... serves them right. Education is for people who are willing to put it to good use, thats what I say... and you have to keep the crap out. Proper screening is required... a non bias... screening but that wont happen. Human nature is corrupt

reply to post by kettlebellysmith

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Actually, a far better idea is to eliminate Title IX's influence over collegiate atheletics. That would allow universities to eliminate sports which don't at the very least pay for themselves, or preferably even turn a profit for the university. You seriously have to had an atrocious atheletic program to not break even in at the very least football and basketball in the NCAA. The shared TV contract revenue for the various conferences, ticket sales, and whatever bonuses the schools share from conference bowl games & tournament appearances generally produces enough revenue that even teams that suck can break even. But when you start expending resources on sports like women's basketball, volleyball, field hockey, etc, sports in which maybe a fraction of the teams actually generate enough revenue to support themselves, then the you end up with lower tier schools actually losing money via their athletics dept.

Where engineering is concerned, the degree & experience are of mutual importance, actually. The way the licensing is set up, you have to have a Bachelor's degree from an ABET accredited program to take your Engineer In Training (also called the Fundamentals of Engineering) exam. After you have the degree and have passed your exam, you get an EIT license. Then you must work for 4 years (in most states, California, for example only requires 2 years) as an Engineer in Training, hopefully applying what you learned in college. You are then eligible to take your Professional Engineering exam which grants you license and gives you the privalege to sign off on plans as a registered PE.

In my experience, the three things employeers are looking for in this field are ingenuity, technical mastery, and the legal abillity to sign off on their work (thus taking a great deal of responsibillity over the quality of the work.) I will tell you, my job title is Project Manager, and I am compensated as such. However, I am currently working on a project in which my official job description is lead Civil Designer. Since I'm not the PM on this particular project, I won't be signing off on any of the work... but my company still holds me to a high degree of responsibillity and accountabillity. If I didn't have the license, then legally speaking they couldn't place that kind of trust in the level of my work and they could have to pay someone with the license to scrutinize my work as a protective measure against liabillities should something in the design fail after completion of the project.

Based on that, I don't think that education & experience are exclusive to each other in finding the right person for this position. I think it also depends very much on not just what field you're in, but also how narrow your scope of work is. If you work in an industrial factory designing worm gears for augers, at some point you could probably justify naming a senior worker who may not have a single college credit to his name as the factory design manager. If the man has spent years doing the work without any issues arising and the position doesn't require them to work outside their realm of experience, I think the education recieved from years on the job is possibly even more valuable there than any classroom education someone might have in that field. I've worked with DOT employees from several states who barely had high school diplomas, but knew more about the real world practice of hot mix asphalt mixtures, lay down processes, and roadway construction than I could ever learn in a lifetime of classroom education. I defered to their judgement almost without fail because they knew what they were doing.

College is just one big test to see if you can handle being employed by those seeking workers of a certain caliber. You can have the knowledge but you will never get the income without the degree. It says "I am able".

reply to post by earthman4

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Thats a negative. That degree symbolizes that you can succumb to certain requirements and thus you can conform to a working place that may not always be ethical but you can deal with and not cause problems. Or more shortly put, College is a Fenced in piece of land for sheeple, or people that are smart enough to be able to handle the bs.

reply to post by TheWayISeeIt

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Did you read about the Harvard endowment fund, lost 8 billion USD or 22% in just 4 months. That must hurt.

More people saying education is a right/should be free yadda yadda...

Correct. The right to be educated is inalienable.

The right TO an education? That's an entitlement, and as such is different.

If you want to solve the problems of skyrocketing tuition fees, socializing education is not the answer. Certainly not if you're going to call it "quality".

Why is our graduate program still the finest in the world? Because immigrants, "birds of passage" whatever, come here and keep our scores high! It's certainly not many kids born here that are attending these colleges. Few - but not many. Competition.

Why should we just hand the reigns over to a huge bureaucracy and give them control over the last surviving tenet of education in this country? Because we're BORN here? Cause we have a RIGHT to it? No, socialists.

You want to fix this? It's simple. You need to reorganize our primary education system first.

Primary school - Essential K-6 learning
High School - 2 years mandatory (more trade oriented) 3-4 years for a diploma.

Make grade promotion based on aptitude and skill, NOT age. And also...teach critical thinking again!

Diplomas used to mean something. They were a rite of passage in themselves; now they're nothing but a glamorized GED from the school you dragged your heels through.

Then, privatize tertiary education. Make them agree to standard apps, whatever, but the important thing is to introduce some competition. Besides, private colleges are more generous than public ones are through "loan programs".

After this, you'll have exactly as many people getting into college on their own damn dime that want to.




[edit on 4-12-2008 by SpencerJ]

I am wondering why the cost of an education isn't decreasing significantly.

Many of the undergraduate classes could be handled via the Internet, eliminating the need for classrooms, utilities, support personnel, etc. It would seem to me that completing much of your first two-year requirements should be relatively low-cost. Instead, even community college courses are in excess of $100 per credit hour. That's unbelievable.

You could have virtually unlimited enrollment with a standardized program for a number of courses, such as English, Literature, Economics, Accounting, Criminal Justice, Psychology, Sociology, Computers, Philosophy, Algebra -- I'm sure I could think of more. You could have specialty courses held on campus, like Phys Ed, Art, labs, etc.

In fact, the courses should be free, the testing is where the charges should be. You walk in, present ID, take a test and pass or fail, any time of day, any day of week. Testing could be done via computer, allowing professors to work from home.

All you would really need is a large testing center and a proctor, which could be handled by graduate students. Additionally, self-paced study should allow you to finish most of your undergrad work in about half the time.

It seems to me the real problem is that education has not evolved with the technology -- and this includes High School as well. Why do we still have textbooks for God's sake? That is incredibly wasteful, expensive and inefficient means of communicating information. Why do we still have classrooms for people to gather at a particular hour just to hear someone give a lecture? That could easily be accomplished via webcam.

Frankly, the method by which we educate our youth should have been dead ten years ago.

You do have, at least some colleges, that take a percentage of tuition and put it into athletics. not into the program that the student is gettinga degree in, no, athletics, which supposedly pays for itself. nd trust me, i used to rk at a college stadium, UF sports pay for themselves and then some. and some tuition goes towards athletics as wel. So much so that Professors here are not able to print things out they need for classes. That's right, the athletic depatment is taking money from education. What does that leave? more expensive schooling to offset the money that athletics takes away.

reply to post by SpencerJ

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Bullhockey, the more people who obtain college degrees, the more competition in the higher skilled fields we have, and the more efficient and successful the economy becomes. This isn't socialism, it is capitalism at its best. What you clearly prefer is elitism, which is against the concepts on which the U.S. was founded.

Only the only the people who have the ability and the aptitude should be graduating college, but the what we have currently is a system where those with the money graduate, because the curriculum is watered down so the legacies like GW can make it through the system. Getting a college degree isn't about ability in our current system, it is about access and conformity.

reply to post by SpencerJ

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Our graduate programs are so successful because our universites are so well funded and have decades of experience doing research. Our home grown graduates grew the reputations that are allowing our univeristies to rake in the dough from the worlds wealthy elites looking to get their kids prestigous degrees, but thoes aren't the students who earned these universities their reputations.

The U.S. was built by people who had the brains and the ability to survive the harsh conditions of surviving in the wilderness of the new world, the most ambitions and intelligent who came to the U.S. against all odds, and succeeded competing against wave after wave of the worlds most intelligent and ambitious people looking to make it in the land of opportunity. It is only natural that the offspring of these people succeed in dominating the world in technology.

Since the deluge of immigrants has raised our tuition through the roof and change our university requirements from those of ability to those of conformity we have fallen behind on our technological advantage.

How is it that over ten years since Microsoft's successful implementation of windows 95, they seem incapable of developing a new operating system worth a darn. Our IC's have brought in foriegn born engineers by the truckload to lower the wages of engineers. This has resulted in discouraging students from tackling the harder engineering courses and doing the heavy educational lifting of getting a degree in Engineering, simply because the the money is so pitiful. Instead we have become a nation of lawyers and con artists whose main skill is writing shifty contracts that skirt the law.

What you call for is nothing but elitist corporate socialism, which is what reaganomics has loaded on our nation, resuting in our slowly dwindling position as the leader in world technology. IC's destroyed Silicon Valley, and technology has almost gone backwards since then.