Timex, I think you’re giving most college age kids too much credit. Just like the advice to take on a little more debt since they’re fiscally going into hock anyway, it’s not going to happen. Expecting people in their early twenties, many of them away from home for the first time in their lives, to make far-seeing financial decisions or take the time to cook tasty nutritious foods instead of scarfing down a street dog and hitting the dorm party is kind of outside of reality.
Basically, I do agree with what you’re saying overall - that this is an issue of their own making. I’m also somewhat coldheartedly saying advice is useless for these pups. Like all college kids they need to fuck up a few times before life lessons sink in.
On the other hand, if you want to discuss the outrageous price of tuition itself, I’m all over that. I do think that’s something that needs to be corrected.
Locker K, I’m not sure what your point is, precisely. Is it that life can be challenging? If we want to abstract the problem to “college is too expensive” I’d agree, to a point. But, given the current, known costs A college student needing to fall back on a food bank is almost certainly doing something wrong along the way. Likely starting with the decision to go to a school beyond their means or willingness to accept sufficient debt.
College students are not in the same boat as minimum wage families.
With respect to this particular problem, I think we getting into “wouldn’t it be great if everything was better” land.
I remember that when I got my first apartment, I had only the vaguest idea what my expenses were going to be, and what I’d need in the way of basic living items that I’d taken for granted up until then. Like plates and silverware. I didn’t own any. I didn’t know what my electricity bill was going to be.
College was kind of a halfway house to actual independent living. I was suddenly paying a lot of bills for things like food which was I was getting for free when I lived with my parents.
I, personally, avoided “scarfing street dogs” because all take out food felt really expensive to me. A Burger King run felt like a luxury. While I was frugal by those standards, it was still a very rough time for me.
Shit man, my financial decisions in college were motivated mostly by hedonism. “Rent’s due? Do I have enough to pay rent and buy beer? No? Then I guess I’m buying the booze first. I can be late on rent. The store won’t let me have booze without money right now.”
I didn’t do that, but man I made a lot of bad financial decisions due to plain inexperience. Like buying a really, really crappy used car because I’d never owned a car before and didn’t know the warning signs and didn’t know enough to pass on to the next one. I needed a car pretty badly and I let that push me. Doing multi-mile grocery runs on a bicycle sucks.
Yup, buying a crappy vehicle is one of those money pit types of decisions that only experience or the rare ability to listen to one’s elders can save a college student from, lol.
And when they come from those families, and have zero effective backing for them in a system which assumes there will be backing?
Again, you’re assuming that loans have kept pace with the price of living, etc, you’re basically telling a lot of poorer people not to go…and this absolutely ties back into the fact many poorer people simply don’t, and perpetuates your social mobility issues.
Blaming poor students for using food banks is…bluntly silly.
Ya, but I think that’s part of going to college. You fuck up, hopefully not too baddly, and start to grow up.
When you’re in college, you’re a fucking adult. Now, maybe a lot of kids don’t act like adults when they get to college, but hey… you can’t be a kid forever. You really should know basic stuff like, “I have X dollars, and need to buy Y things.” or “I need to eat food that will make me not die.”
I think the idea that we cannot possibly expect people who are adults, and indeed, are in institutions of higher education, to be able to feed themselves… is kind of absurd.
I don’t know what can really be said. College is crazy expensive. Hell, it was already crazy expensive when I went, and now it’s even moreso.
Part of it probably has to do with the fact that there’s essentially a seller’s market, since everyone assumes that they have to go to college. (I’m not sure they do)
As it currently stands in the US, nobody is owed the right to attend college. I could certainly see the philosophical argument for it, but that’s not how the system is set up at this time. That sadly means that some people won’t be able to afford it and not attend, and also that others will purchase the “service” (it’s not really a product, imo) when they shouldn’t. When I was in school, I used to volunteer at a mobile soup kitchen. Every once in a while, an obvious college student would come for food. I’d hand it out, but I admit that I fequently did so with a glare. At one point I mentioned “the problem” to the person running the organization, and he mentioned that none of us knew what situations these people came from or found themselves in. If they really needed it and would suck up their pride to come to our “wagon,” they deserved a smile. A homeless man who was a regular happened to be standing right by and echoed the sentiment, saying “A mile in their shoes, young man. A mile in their shoes.” I’ve always remembered that.
So I don’t begrudge college students leaning on food pantries just because they’re college students. Even if they’ve overspent and can no longer reasonably afford food due to their own mistakes, they’re still people going hungry. That small benefit of a free meal in no way outmeasures the pain that’s in store for them or that they’re currently dealing with, but it does provide enough comfort and humanity to hopefully keep them going strong and to maybe eventually make their way out of whatever hole they find themselves in.
That said, I’ll echo what everyone else is saying: college is way too expensive for most people, and the debt that gets accumulated by a large number of students is potentially devastating. The system needs to change, and I have hope thatwe’ll see some movement in the right direction before I keel over from old age.
I agree. It is absurd. Then again, I’m in my 40’s and have the wisdom of my years. Back in college though? I was complete idiot. Boring decisions like managing my money, planning for the future, or opting not to get blitzed every weekend (and possibly a night or two during the school week) was lame. PARRRRTY! Whoo! There was no way I was going to listen to someone dusty old guy in his 40’s tell me what to do! He was probably bitter that I was living AWESOME while he was all kids and family and commuter car and mortgage and FUCK THAT! I’m going to blow the doors off this place and change the world!
The situation’s pretty good in most of the EU. Outside the UK.
Dan_Theman - You still have quite a high graduate premium in the US though, so generally students will see a gain over their working lifespans from attending. That isn’t generally true in, for example, the UK.
I beg to disagree. Here in Spain things are still okish, but it’s getting worse, with tuition costs going from 600 euros tuition a year 5 years ago to around 1.5-2k in many cases (can get higher, but it’s not that common).
Since when it was 600 euros I saw a lot of people having to work to make ends meet (housing and food costs) and since we have chronic unemployment and the idea of a student getting a job is laughable (over 50% unemployment rate on young people, and those are people with skills, which a typical student here does not have yet), we are starting to see many people who can’t afford going to college who used to.
All this must seem ridiculously quaint to people from the US…
Nearly every UK University charges £9k, or 11k EUR a year. Difference! (Some “only” charge 8k, but they’re generally not the best Universities)
And once you strip workfare and a few other ****y things which don’t pay wages away, we have ~42% youth unemployment here, too, so… (Also, our wages are dropping wayyy faster ><)
Well, yes and no - my son’s school, if he didn’t have his scholarships, would have cost over 40000 € per year. However, he was exceptionally fortunate and it’s more along the lines of 2000 € (and that’s with food and lodging included). Most people don’t get that lucky, and while VERY few pay the original “sticker price,” it’s generally a lot more than 2000 €.
Just for shits and giggles, I went to my college’s website to see how costs have gone up in the nearly 30 years since I attended. (Holy fuck, when did get so goddamn old?)
This is California State University, Northridge. The CSU system is notoriously inexpensive relative to a lot of other state schools, though most schools don’t have the prestige of the UC schools.
They estimate these costs for a year of full-time studenting:
Tuition: $6,544
Books and supplies: $1,826
Room and board: $4,598
Transportation: $1,494
Personal/miscellaneous: $1,338
Loan fees: $72
Total: $15,898/year
No idea what transportation means, or what they’re using for room and board (as CSUN isn’t really a “get on-campus housing” kind of place).
But when I started there, it was $358/semester for tuition, and books typically cost about $400. By the time I graduated, it was $600/year for tuition. Inflation should put it about $850 today.
Sure. Sorry, I wasn’t trying to compare our situation with that of the UK. We do have a more consistent wellfare system here, and way lower living costs. I know from personal experience the UK is far more predatory.
What I was trying to say is that the situation on the ground here has stopped being “pretty good” (but it was pretty good ten years ago, when there were extremley few people disenfranchised from higher education, which could be interpreted as a right under our constitution).
A big thing is that we do not have student loans or anything remotely similar here. Our banks will never, ever give a loan without a collateral (different banking systems). We have government sponsored fellowships, but those are too scarce to meet demand (and most don’t cover housing/living). So basically if you don’t have the money you don’t have the option to get it unless the family mortages their house/car (if they own one, chances are they won’t if they don’t have the money).
I attribute part of the growing gap between rich and poor to education costs. Also the removal of the middle class. Luckily in europe they are quite resistant to the kind of excessive fees you see in the usa system, but the uk is slowly seemingly trying to follow the american system, so i feel sorry for the younger generation coming through now. It’s not at the insane level of the usa, but still a large enough debt to stop you being a ‘problem’ at any point etc.
The richest are really tightening the screws this decade (and ongoing) it seems?
We’ve leapfrogged over much of the American system, Zak. They have something like six orders of magnitude more grants (might even be seven now) and aid for poorer students, and the UK’s tuition costs are higher (significantly so, in most cases) than the state uni’s in America. And of course the UK government is talking about changing the repayment terms here up because they’ve realised they screwed up the calculations.
You need a college degree for everything nowadays. I’ve seen jobs that ten years ago would have been a GED level job require a 2 year degree (if not a Masters or something silly).
