Will college tuition eventually be infinitely expensive?

I did notice during the years my 2 kids were in college a shift in the costs of education materials for the most part. Teachers seemed to be more aware of the costs, the kid in the know could figure out were to get a used copy to buy or a copy to rent even.

It’s different now because of online sources, but I almost always missed out on used books because my funding was 100% financial aid, with the parental assistance piece never paid. This meant I couldn’t buy anything until after FA was released, and by then the books were gone.again, in just a handful of years, online sources made that a lot easier to overcome.

I worked full-time when I went back to school, ending my junior/senior year not working and doing a study abroad instead.Ten years after that, it felt like I wasted too much time and money on my education, and now i have the job I do because of it.

I think it’s completely unrealistic though for parents to believe most kids can go to school with minimal debt though. Those years are gone for most… again only so many RA positions available, and even with a tuition waiver, like I wound up having, eventually, I still got hit with all these damn fees and room and board.

Those are the big money makers for colleges, that’s why. One reason you see a lot of schools building things like new dining halls and new dorms is that those are revenue generators, unlike, say, classrooms. Fees for living in dorms and eating on campus rapidly pay off the cost of the facilities, and after that, it’s pure gravy. Also, you can rent both out for conferences and the like in off-peak times. Plus, it’s easy to tell faculty to make do with ratty rooms or poor equipment (luckily, my school doesn’t do that!), but it’s hard to market the school to prospective students and their families in a competitive environment without showing off slick and modern housing.

A huge chunk of what people pay for at a traditional four-year school is stuff like food and living expenses, which are designed more to create a particular “college experience” as defined by nearly romanticized American middle class expectations than anything else.

That’s true. When the local college opened up their family units dorms, basically dorms designed for students with families and not the tradition single person experience, they were certainly nice, exciting and expensive.

I don’t think colleges should turn into job mills. I think they should allow for some exploration and experiences and allow kids to change their minds in what they want to pursue, get out from under the demands of their parents as to what jobs they will try for, but I will say this. In the climate of the 70s, my lower class pretending to be middle class family would not have stood a chance to send any child to college. 2 of 3 daughters have college degrees, my sister actually has a masters, and the 3rd might get on on a horizon. There has to be a way to keep it a viable option while still having the drive to go… nothing gets you out of bed in the morning more to haul your ass to class than realizing you need to pay for all of this, eventually. Man when some petitioner told me they were going to charge me 15 dollars a term so the campus could go green, I got more than a little agitated. Those fees started building really fast, and not everyone going could just not buy one CD to cover cover it. Room and Board is a tough one too… the Cost of Living / Housing problem the general public faces hits there too.

Only reason I afforded college even way back when was my father had retired from the army and because his death was service connected (he died during my junior year in high school) his service benefits paid for my schooling.

And yeah, I tell my students, hey, you’re paying X to go here, you might want to think about attending class, ya know! For most, you’re right, it is a motivator of sorts. Tough love indeed.

This is so weird to me. In-college housing was subsidised when I went to university. £250 a month, including cleaning. Meals were also subsidised.

I have no idea what it might cost snow, but 7-8 years ago when my daughter was at Cal State Northridge we paid roughly $1,200 a month for room an board. The cheapest off cite apartment (well, cleanest safest looking) we could get was $990 a month.

In many college towns, the college still, like Scuzz notes elsewhere, often charges less than the inflated market rates, and thus is competitive even while raking in money for the school. Especially for non-elite private schools, which are often more tuition-dependent than public schools or elite institutions with huge endowments, the costs to build anything is hard to offset because tuition can only go up so much before killing the goose that lays the golden egg. So they take advantage of the usually tight housing market around schools, and build dorms that, unlike classrooms, directly generate revenue. It might take ten years, but once the building is paid for the housing fees all contribute mightily to the college’s overall budget, making such construction good investments (and hence, easy to fund via loans).

For Americans, “going to college” is often at least as much about a particular lifestyle moment as it is about education, and dorms are part of that (at least for those that can’t afford or don’t want to get off-campus housing).

This whole topic scares the shit outta me. I’m hoping that things will continue to shift a bit and one can get selective training to emphasize skills… The big question though — I doubt all young adults would be ready to be that “serious” when they are only say 20.

The college lifestyle that has been outlined above, is a bit of that growing/breakout phase from having mom/dad take care of nearly every little thing to being “virtually” on their own (if they live on campus)

I do believe that period of time can be rather useful - if a child truly isn’t ready for “REAL LIFE”… the idea of someone going to college 4+ years, earning a degree and then working at a coffee shop with a bachelors is just insanity… and an incredible waste of resources (time/money)

Yeah, it is depressing. I have one daughter that will be 18 when I’m 55 and another when I’m 59. I hope my wife goes back to work at some point, which would help immensely with covering the costs.

I don’t know how successful the current attempt is, but Oregon made tuition at Community Colleges free for students with a certain GPA, not extremely high, for I think the first or second year. Someone mentioned above, you really can get your standard stuff out of the way there, like early math, writing… gen ed stuff and the CCs here are designed to transfer. I’ve also heard that students coming out of community college do very well transferring to the prestigious schools too.

A couple of issues with Community Colleges though. They don’t really do room and board, so most the kids live at home or share a house, apartments, something… and the professors, I’m told, don’t really push that hard. This can vary where you live of course, but at the 2nd 4 year I went to, the professors knew your name, checked in on you, and kind of pushed for you to excel. Not every 4 year and I hear most 2 years does that.

One of my close friends worked at Dunkn’ Donuts for 2 years after she got her degree… but she got it in 2008… right in time for the recession. She’s fine now, took years… for most of us to recover from that. If that happens, don’t assume it’s the end!

College is expense without a doubt. I think there are really two ways to go. While the “average” salary is often touted for a career, that is an exceptionally misleading figure. The kids from the top schools get massive offers that raise the overall number. Most everyone else gets something about 75% of the average. So if the average for a position is $45k, you can bank on a handful of kids making $75k their first year and the rest making between $28-$35k. With that in mind, the two options are:

  1. Go to an ultra-competitive college. My son is a Senior and is going this route. He has been interviewed by Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Yale and Dartmouth with more to come. He will get in somewhere like this - he has already been accepted to one of the top 10 engineering schools in the USA - and he will likely make $70-$90k a year when he graduates as an engineer. Any loans that he or I have will not be as big of a deal with that kind of salary.

Also, most of these have massive costs but very, very few students pay for the whole amount. For instance, the average kid pays $12k a year for Harvard which is less than many state colleges.

  1. Do the community college > transfer route. It is much, much cheaper as long as you can maintain the GPA required for the transfer.