In difficult dinner-table conversations, college students and their parents are revisiting how to pay tuition as personal finances weaken and lenders get tough.
Diana and Ronnie Jacobs, of Salem, Ind., thought their family had a workable plan for college for her twin sons, using a combination of savings, income, scholarship aid and a relatively modest amount of borrowing. Then her husband lost his job at Colgate-Palmolive.
“It just seems like it’s really hard, because it is,” Ms. Jacobs, an information technology specialist, said of her financial situation. “I have two kids in college and I want to say ”˜come home,’ but at the same time I want to provide them with a good education.”
It was none too easy to pay tuition in upturns either.
One of the frustrating things about the apparently ascendent Democrats is that they push on producers in various fields, particularly energy, to reduce the cost of their goods, to make those goods more affordable to persons at lower income levels. However, when it comes to the cost of college education, the Democratic program accepts those costs unquestioningly, and only looks for ways that the government can pay those costs, at their current stated levels. There is no governmental challenge as to those costs. Could this difference in approach be accounted for by the fact that oil companies are percieved as enemies of the Democrats, but the Academy is considered favorable?
A question not to be asked.
In any event, this is an issue of great concern to me, as I have a son who is a freshman in high school, and a daughter who just started junior high school. That is far enough away that it is something I think about, but not so close that it is a source of panic. Years ago, I read that college accounts should be invested in the stock market until four years before college, then each year’s college tuition should be placed into cash equivalents at one year intervals, until, during the student’s senior year in high school, all of the college money is safely in cash/cash equivalents. In late August, I followed this advice, and took what I hope is a reasonable freshman year college budget out of the stocks in my son’s 529 plan, and put it in cash equivalent accounts. By so doing, I at least took 1/4 out of his college money out of the stock market…but it wasn’t prescience on my part (if it had been, I would have taken all of the money out of the market, and the Princesses’ money, too), but simply following the plan. Crossing my fingers for the next seven years….
I went through my bachelor’s degree during the Reagan years (while we were coming out of the economic disaster known as the Jimmy Carter administration…including 9, 10 and 11 percent interest rates on FFELP college loans…yes….those were GOVERNMENT loan rates).
I worked through college to pay for gas for my motorcycle (and to pay for the loan and the insurance on the motorcycle). The only downside was that I could only ride the cycle when it wasn’t snowing. When it snowed, I was on my own hoofs. My parents handed me $20 for gas a couple of times a year. My folks helped me with a grand total of a couple of hundred dollars through the undergrad degree. You know what? I expected NOTHING more. I accepted their small cash gifts with gratitude, and I value my education more than anything else I “own”. It took me 12 years to pay off that teaching degree.
Walk through any student union today and you’ll see students communicating via text messaging while listening to their iPods and drinking $4 cups of Starbucks coffee. Forgive me…but all of this crying about the “cost of education” is starting to sound a lot like the global warming rant.
Your college education is an INVESTMENT. Quit whining. Pick a less costly school. Tell your kid to get off their ass and find a job WHILE going to school.
The cost of education is being blamed these days on the banks while interest rates are at historic lows for college loans. Put the blame where it belongs. It belongs on our society which insists that colleges and universities provide all of the amenities that the schools think they have to have to attract the next freshman class. That wireless internet connection all over campus doesn’t come for free. That $120,000 a year salary to pay for professors (like Ward Churchill) has to come from somewhere. That stadium addition was also sold under the premise that the school needed it to “attract the next freshman class”. So was the Starbucks shop located right in the student union. So was the private dorm room. So was the private bathroom IN the dorm room.
I suggest that maybe you send your kid to the state university, instead of wanting Dom Perignom vellum on a Budweiser budget.
Also, consider telling your kids that the school and the education they receive is what THEY make of it. It isn’t something just handed to them. But, I know…I’m so damn out of touch.
Question: Why aren’t we raising as much hell about the rampant socialism being TAUGHT in these over-priced schools? Answer that.
[i]Question: Why aren’t we raising as much hell about the rampant socialism being TAUGHT in these over-priced schools? Answer that.[/i]
Government collects taxes to provide a secondary market for student loans to pay Marxist professors to trash the culture that generates those taxes. There’s more rationality in a lunatic asylum.
That which is subsidized, its price increases.
Should the subsidy be increased, the price increases more.
Does anyone else think it is just wrong to provide government subsidies through student loan programs, state and federal grants and budget allocations to colleges and universities? Many of these institutions are sitting on vast endowments. The University of Virginia near me has a $3 Billion (WITH A B!!!) endowment while its hand is outstretched to Richmond to send $$$$ to close the UVA budget shortfall.
So long as we maintain this Ponzi gravy train we will be rewarded with higher prices with no increased value in the education our children receive.
To be clear. By the term ‘student loan programs’ I mean SUBSIDIZED student loan programs.
I read somewhere recently that if the price of milk had kept pace with tuition, we’d be paying about $15 a gallon for it.
“The real reason for soaring college costs is higher demand for colleges, largely resulting from well-intended but dubious governmental policies. When demand rises relative to supply, prices (in this case, tuition fees) go up. Demand is rising partly for non-governmental reasons, such as higher incomes and a growing earnings differential between high-school and college graduates. But it is also rising rapidly because of the huge growth in government loan and grant programs as well as tuition tax credits. Pell grants, Stafford and Perkins loans, tax-sheltered college-saving schemes (“529 plans”), work-study programs, etc.: All serve to increase the number of students wanting a college education at any given price. Kids without money for college simply borrow it.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/issue/vedder200409241259.asp
There is no reason for college to be so expensive. The reason it is expensive is that colleges have a monopoly on what constitutes learning. There is no reason why a Physics PhD, an English/Philosophy PhD, a History/Economics PhD, a Chemistry PhD, and a Math/Astronomy Ph.D. could not set up a university in a home like setting and offer classes that would rival any actual teaching done in pricier settings. If you paid each person 100,000 (generous) and had them teach 4 classes a day do administration in the afternoon, with 20 students each, and live on campus in a home like setting supervising the students, all of this plus the campus/dorm could be done for under a million. At 10,000 a year including tuition room and board, even a relatively tiny campus of 200 students would make a huge profit in the first year. If you charged 5,000 a year you could still make a profit in less than 2years.
The reason this can’t be done is that the government has placed huge rules about who can have a college, and what constitutes a college, making it difficult to do so, and lucrative to play the government’s game. The only college that bucks this trend is the college of the ozarks which is entirely free (though all students have on campus jobs).
The same calculus applies to medicine.
Because Government closed all the non-university affiliated medical schools after the Flexner report, as well as all the medical apprenticeships (where folks learned to be docs by working with a doc for 7 years) new physicians graduate about 150,000 in debt prior to internship (closer to 200,000 post residency).
Medicine would be a whole lot cheaper if the government would eliminate the need for a prescription for most non-addictive or dangerous drugs (if somebody can learn to give themselves insulin safely, then can learn to give themselves hypertension medications).
Then one could have tiers of medical care.
Tier one would be a provider (pharmacist, herbalist, med tech, nurse or physician) who charges a set price/hour (10-20 dollars/hour, cash on the barrel, no insurance accepted, and buyer beware, no lawsuits permitted).
Tier two would be physicians or certified nurse practitioners who charged higher prices (50 dollars/hour) cash on the barrell with need for government certification, Patients would pay up front, but if insurance approved a provider, then they would reimburse the patient later. Alll lawsuits settled by arbitration only.
Tier three would be physicians who require government certification, insurance will pay the doc later at whatever exorbitant price they charge (150/hour-300/hour depending on specialty) and yeh you could have the unlimited access to lawyers enjoyed now.
If folks did that, most sensible people will take level one or two. The litiginous and self absorbed would choose level 3 but would no longer be subsidized by every body else.
Providers income would depend largely on whether or not patients thought they were worth the price.
But thanks to guvmint, we cant have a sensible system like the above.
#2 I would definately encourage
Kevin Babb (and others) to consider sending their college bound kids to “Hard Work U’. No tution payments whatsoever. Students pay for college by working 20 hours a week on the college farm and other industries. It is a “stone cold sober” school and there is a Christian atmosphere with none of the hook up culture of the Ivy leagues.
If my kid wasn’t already going to a decently priced State University I would seriously consider it.
http://www.cofo.edu/about.asp
“Ms. Holiday, who wants to go to medical school and become an immunologist in a laboratory, said that despite the poor economy, she was not worried about being able to pay her debts after graduation.”
Which just shows you that she is a MOron. Fortunately they are accepting Morons in medical school these days, acceptances are down to 1 in two applicants, and it is tougher to get into nursing school than into most medical schools.
Speaking as somebody who did go to medical school, and as a matter of fact even was a Neuroimmunologist there is no way she will be paying off her loans as an immunologist. She might pay off as a physician, but probably only over 30 years and in lieu of owning a home. Anybody who goes into debt to go to medical school these days is asking to be in debt bondage for the rest of their lives. My own kids have been strongly discouraged from pursuing medicine as a career unless they go through the USUHS (Uniformed services university of the health sciences) where their tuition will be free.
I told them that I would pay for graduate school in Engineering or some other field that might produce a product that folks might wish to buy. Going into debt and spending your life on an average of 4 hours sleep in order to learn how to turn dying patients into litigenous and unemployed patients is like becoming an alchemist in order to learn how to turn gold into lead.
http://www.usuhs.mil/
On the other hand, on the subject of college tuitions, the best medical school in the US is also free. (And speaking from experience in both systems, its teaching is superior to Johns Hopkins – generally thought to be the top civilian medical school).
Universities and the medical guild have an interest in keeping things the way they are, not just the government. There is also a public interest in regulation, of some sort.
it is true, given that medicine is a lot like a craft, best to have an apprentice system. Doctor’s salaries might go down to European standards, but they’d justifiably lose their god-like luster.
There are a few colleges (Berea, cooper union) that are also free.
It wasn’t the medical “guilds” that closed down the apprentice system. It was the Federal government, over the physicians protests. The Fed wished more control over physicians, and since physician students paid the upfront costs of Federal control there was nobody to say no besides the docs.