Well, as I said asbestos is not a danger until disturbed. That is why businesses and schools don’t have to remove it unless they are going to disturb it.
I think most schools would love to build newer more high tech buildings, but that takes a lot of money. Taxpayer money in most cases.
But higher education has become big business now.
On community college as a way to save money: keep in mind that branch/regional campuses are where you want to be to save money and have the best opportunity to transfer every credit hour over to the 4-year degree programs at the main campus. At a regional campus you can take all the same freshman courses and many of the same sophomore level courses as you can at the main campus, often at half the cost, and the main campus will count every hour towards your degree should you transfer (provided you stay within the same program obviously). Some branch/regionals even offer specialized 4-year degrees, and when you graduate it doesn’t say “Regional Campus” on the degree, it looks exactly like the degree they hand the main campus kids.
This what my boys are doing. The first graduated from university in BC a couple of years ago, and our high school senior only applied to Canadian schools. They can get same, if not better education, for 10%-15% of the cost. Even as a foreign student, it is a huge savings.
Universities in both France and Germany have great programs for English speakers, again at a tiny fraction of the cost of even in-State tuition here.
At most large universities those courses are primarily taught by grad students in any case. I got much more out of the courses I took at a CC than I ever did in my 800 person freshman econ class at U of A.
Watch out for the European model. When I went to school in the Netherlands I was not prepared for it. It was 100% self study with only 2 classroom sessions a week, which were just giant lectures with 200 to 300 other students.
I was glad to leave and go to a US college after that experience.
That hasn’t been my experience… or rather the experience of my kids. My daughter as a Junior at UNC has only had a TA teach a class or two of her four-dozen or so classes thus far… and both of those were labs, not classroom courses.
Honestly, in these days of “Rate Your Professor” apps, I wonder how many teaching professors can get away with using grad students like that any more? I have some friends who are associate professors at a Virginia state school and they both leave in daily fear of those apps.
UNC? Huh! If you’re ever down here to visit, we should grab dinner, man :)
The experiences my friends and I mirrors most of the ongoing discussion. The local community colleges back home were just so sad and filled with people–staff and students alike–who clearly didn’t give a shit and were only there because there was nothing better to do that day that it drained anyone’s enthusiasm for being there. Attrition was crazy high and classes were mediocre to average at best. At the larger uni’s, my alma mater (Boston U) included, things ranged from similarly dire (with disinterested difficult-to-understand grad students with no pedagogical training whatsoever rotely reading from textbooks) to the fabulous (with highly invested, brilliantly educated specialist professors expounding at length with passion about their subjects in engaged, active classrooms).
I should have specified UNC-Wilmington.
But next time I’m in the Raleigh region I will absolutely arrange a dinner.
Real talk.
Per our financial advisor, at the time (2011-ish) funding college costs $83,000 per kid… assuming you start at birth. This is crazy.
So what is college going to cost in 2032, when my kids are starting?
Let’s use the online calculators.
Oh, only $190,000 to $390,000, depending on college. That’s cool. Oh times 2? That’s only just shy of a cool million to get a couple of degrees. A million dollars, up front or in debt. Sounds fun!
One of the professors at the college I went to, never took his class we just talked, said tuition for him was somewhere around 7k for all for years in the 70s. When I went to school it was about that per year, including fees but not including Room and Board. Today it’s over 7k for tuition, in state, and room and board and fees is twice that… fees have ballooned to almost 2k.
A number of professors were surprised with how much tuition cost when I graduated… they didn’t even know.
Yeah, it’s kinda like the doctors that treat you having no idea of how much the procedures cost. There is a separation there.
Modern EMRs have the ability to share costs or tie into the costing system and bring in that information. They don’t want to see it.
Yeah, the bullshit that conservatives throw at young people about them being to work through college doesn’t hold up today. You could do it when the cost of college was perhaps the cost of new car, total. Now you’re looking at a McMansion in an expensive market.
When i went to univ of Kansas, all the frosh classes were taught by ta’s. You’d be lucky to see a prof outside of office hours, so i don’t think this argument is valid for all schools
I have had good and bad luck with room and board. Dorms are most expensive of course, but an apartment or house far from campus sucks for those who have no car. (And is not that great even if you have a car, unless you can park right in front of your classes.)
However, I found an (tiny) apartment that was cheap and closer to classes than the dorms! That was pretty much ideal.
I went back to school to get a second master’s from the Lindor College of Business , and I do highly recommend it. I hope your kid makes it.
On college costs in general, I am reminded of a running gag in the new Sam and Max episodic games that came out… wow, like a decade ago. One of the characters would tell our anthropomorphic protagonists that he had a device that could help them do Freelance Policing. The price was first $10,000. Every episode that price would go by at least an order of magnitude for the new device, but of course they always got the money so the player could proceed and win the game. In the last episode, I think it was in the trillions. When pressed as to how his devices could actually be worth that amount of money, the seller responded that no matter what price he named, Sam and Max always managed to pay it so he’d be crazy to not keep raising his prices.
Yeah, that is what college is kind of like. Colleges keep raising tuition, and students (along with their parents, government subsidies, and bank loans) keep paying it. Where does that money then go? Well, whatever it takes to attract the students. That is simple market forces at work.
That being said, I think state colleges have gotten a lot more applicants, and students are getting smarter about picking fields with income potential and perhaps starting at community colleges.
I went to Fresno City College (a JC) during 75-76 for $50 a semester, flat fee, plus books etc. I went to Fresno State during 77-82 (hey, I was working full time :) ) for $360 a semester, full time some semesters, plus books etc.
Yea, things have changed.
Working minimum wage part time is not going to pay for even the tuition part of a college education. With room and board even a state college will run you $20k a year minimum.
If you don’t mind me asking, did you guys stick all of that into something like a 529? I did half of that and thought I was being a bit silly. Now, not so much.
I am very aware of what my students are paying to be in my class, and how their lives differ from mine when I was in school. We bring that up right at the beginning, as I explain the text choices (paperbacks, PDFs via our LMS, stuff available online for dirt cheap, usually) and discuss with them things like attendance and turning in work on time. Many of my students work, but as noted above, what they make comes nowhere near to covering what they need for school. While when I was in school (state school, dirt cheap), it wasn’t unreasonable for the professors to expect you to treat college as your primary full-time job, that’s no longer the case. I cannot in good conscience expect my students to have the sort of laser focused dedication to academics that some of my colleagues seem to think they should have. College for them has become just one of the many things they are balancing, and the stuff they are doing outside of college is, mostly, because of going to college.
One thing that keeps me going though is that I feel very confident that what I am doing will have positive benefits. In our general education curriculum, which is what I mostly teach, we focus on integrative and critical thinking skills using, usually, humanities-based content,with a strong emphasis on being able to transfer those skills to what the students are preparing to do in the workforce. As a professionally focused school without true arts and sciences type majors, we have a responsibility to educate students in ways that will, we hope, improve their chances of success both as professionals and as, well, people. So while I may assign Plato or Smith or Shakespeare at times, the focus is on the process we use to analyze them, and on seeing how those particular approaches to complex problems can help us approach our own complex questions. Whether or not they retain specific knowledge of Republic or Othello is utterly immaterial to me, really.
We are working as well on competency based approaches to degrees, where assessment would be decoupled from 19th century metrics like time of butts in seats and instead be based on whether students could actually do the stuff we say we are teaching them to do. It’s a difficult task, for a lot of reasons, one being the regulatory structure that is firmly rooted in a very outmoded form of instruction, but it offers a lot of potential benefits, not the least being a more fluid path to a degree, one that in many cases would cost the student a lot less (we’d make up the difference by being able to have more students, or at least more throughput). Most of all, it’s pretty solid philosophically; we come up with very specific outcomes, assign stuff that tests proficiency in those areas, and when students demonstrate they can actually do something, it gets ticked off the list. When they demonstrate competency in enough areas to justify a degree in that field, voila, degree issue, even if it’s three years and not four. Lots of work to be done before we get there, but I do think that’s one way forward.
One thing that does bug me a lot though is that, like a lot of places, where I teach we have a real tension between the whole “make college an efficient job training program,” which requires students to at age 18 know exactly what they want to do and stick to a rigorous program, and the “kids need time to figure out who they are” approach, which I find much more reasonable, but which is pretty much incompatible with our entire structure of very rigid (if very effective and high-quality) majors. This is a problem faced by many institutions I think.