The burden of paying for college is wreaking havoc on the finances of an unexpected demographic: people 60 and over.
New research from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that Americans in that age bracket still owe about $36 billion in student loans, providing a rare window into the dynamics of student debt. More than 10 percent of those loans are delinquent. As a result, consumer advocates say, it is not uncommon for Social Security checks to be garnished or for debt collectors to harass borrowers in their 80s over student loans that are decades old.
Well, I’m one senior who isn’t still paying off my college loan, because I never got one. I worked my way through college and never needed one.
I chose to attend a state University and my tuition was quite afordable back in the 70’s. I checked their web site today and expenses have gone up quite a bit (about 10 x). For a full time state resident student taking 15 hours of credit in the Spring of 2012 you pay,
$2,272.55 = tuition
And after you tack on all kinds of other fees you wind up with,
$3,174 = total.
So, I think there are bargains out there for those who are eager to learn.
#2–I just went on my (state) school’s website. My last year, 1973/74 I paid $50 tuition, and fees and football tickets for 5 home games came to roughly $300 per semester. For 2012/2013 the tution and fees are $4606 per semester. That would be about a 1535% increaese and the current fees don’t include football tickets.
According to the [url=http://www.westegg.com/inflation/]Inflation Calculator[/url] the inflation rate between 1975 and 2010 was roughly 400%, which means the current tuition and fees in the instance cited by David should only be about $1,400.
No doubt the the other $3,200 (about $800 in 1975 money) is being put to good use. 🙂
Debt slavery is immoral.
In the early 1980s, I attended the principal state university in my state. The entire package for my undergraduate years was $4,000.00 a year. My son’s costs at that same school next year will be $32,000.00 (including a $2,000.00 tuition premium for a scientific major). After graduation, I stayed on at the same university for law school. My annual costs escalated to $6,000.00 year. This brought the cost of my entire seven-year foray through higher education to $34,000–a little less than the current cost of one year’s undergraduate work. And that increase has taken place literally within one generation (OK, a little more than that–I was an old dad. But not that much more than one generation…I was not an ancient dad.).
The fact is, through scholarships (high test scores plus poverty-level family income) and working part time in the school years, and full time-plus over the summers, I was able to get through with no loans, and a little in the bank to get started in my career. But I did not have to deal with the numbers that today’s college students are looking at.
a little MORE than one year’s undergraduate tuition, that is.