37% of the Federal Government’s Total Reported Assets Are Student Loans

Quoting what I said in the Presidency thread:

"And college isn't affordable its just available. It's a scam of the highest order. You want to go to college? Cool! Here's a loan at 5% interest, that you will have to pay back for 20+ some years on average (That means you are paying back loans into your 40s at least. Interest rates mean you aren't even paying back the principal for a good number of those years.). The loans are set at a 10 year payment schedule that isn't realistic in payment amount or frequency, leading most people to double the amount of time it takes to pay it off, leading to the lenders (Sallie May/ie the government) collecting double the interest. College tuition on average is 3 times that of 1990. Around $45,000 in total. Why? Because the higher the tuition, the higher the interest collected when it takes most people twice the amount of time to pay off the loan as projected. This is just government taxation by another name."

 

Fewer schools than 1990? Tuition is 3 times that of 36 years ago. So you're saying there were 3 times the number of schools in 1990 than there are now?? Could you even argue there were double the number of schools then than there are now? Absolutely not.

 

Tuition being 3 X what it was 36 years ago sounds about right. What was the price of a burger, car, house, movie ticket? I'd say 3X is pretty fair and accurate (no hard data to back up my opinion, BTW)

 

According to the internet the average prices for those were:

movies: $2.69
burger (mcdonalds): about $0.50
car: $7,200
house: $68,700

now:
movies: $8.61
burger: $3.79
car: $31,252
house: $365,700

Roughly. Just for reference for you guys.

 

Thanks Real.

While I didn't pay for college, my graduate degree was $250 per credit hour. Most courses were 3 hours.

$750 X 20 courses is $15,000. That is from OU. My undergrad was $22,000 at a private school, but that also included parking, all books, internet fees, printing, and a few other things colleges like to tack on.

IMO, it's a great investment. Not just the earning power, but the knowledge itself.

I fear the "student loan" issue will sway people away from going to college.

 

I wasn't clear.

Household median income in 1990= $52,623

Household median income in 2014= $53,657

So while the cost of school has gone up at about the same rate as inflation (3x that of 1990), people still can't afford it because wages have not gone up much at all.

 

There are ~5,000 Title IV-eligible degree-granting institutions (including 2-year and 4-year) in the USA. There are about 21 million students in colleges. (Or this is true up to 2011.)

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_005.asp

If you want to know why there's a "problem" associated with colleges, look at what happens when you institute licensing requirements. Then think about how heavy the licensing requirements are in the US, particularly in colleges.

Then look at what happens in a market when you subsidize one product (in this case it's particular approaches to 2- and 4-year college study programs).

Combine these ideas with massive numbers of people involved, and you'll see a need for quick (but mindless) methods for making decisions about who should be admitted, etc.

You'll have an insanely strong push to get students into colleges when many of them would find that their life would go far better without college. The education they receive will not benefit them in terms of job/career prep, will not make them better people, and will not do much other than put them in debt.

In my case, my life went much better for having gone to school. I can't imagine that my grandfather's life would have gone better. I don't think my father's would have, either. And you can't say that someone's life will go better if they go to school because you need a degree to be hired for almost any job now. We can change that. And we should.

 

My advice to young high school students is to find a field they enjoy and make their way there. Go back and get your degree at night if you need one to move up in the company you find yourself. That way you get the degree when you need it and you don't find yourself in great debt at 22-23 years old. Not to mention some companies and fields will pay for your college education in order to help you move up (Target for instance will help educate you).

Unless you want to go into the medical field, maybe information systems, maybe engineering... There's some fields you should go for right away, but for me? I know a lot of graduates that end up just going to any old job they can find with little to no help from their degrees.

 

What jobs are you looking into?

 

Find something you love and give it everything you've got and the money will come.

I truly believe that.

 

That's basically the story I'm seeing everywhere and it's more or less my point. I understand and appreciate that you got some great value from your degree. I work with and know a lot of graduates that get degrees that are far less specialized than yours and those are the ones I'm talking about. I know business majors, communications majors, liberal arts majors, and even forestry majors that graduated with that degree and got absolutely zero from it professionally.

I love that you're trying to get into a graduate program. My advice (and I'm sure you've heard it already) is find a company in the field and try to intern there. It's a hard, long process but if you stick to it you can find the rewarding work you want. THAT is what I tell kids to do. You might have to intern by day and work a second job by night to make ends meet. My brother did that coming out of the military. He worked with a tech startup and interned for 8 months before they CREATED a position for him as an analytic consultant. It's tough, but if that's what you want to do then that's the kind of effort you need to put into it.

I'm a salesman and I make a good living for myself. It's not the only thing I want hough. I've also got a few writing jobs that I do on the side (I love writing, I don't know if you can tell since I'm on this site so often ). I put in a lot of time and effort into those projects to hopefully have one of them take off and I can do that full time because while I appreciate my sales job, it's just not that rewarding.

Really though, I applaud you for doing what you love and having a plan. You are different from a lot of graduates. So many kids these days are encouraged to go to college for the experience and get a degree and are given almost no direction in what degree to get. They're not necessarily given the attention they need to figure out where they want to go so they get a degree that may or may not be helpful and they find themselves basically gone in a circle that cost them 30K in debt. It's hard for me to see that and not grow bitter towards the process. That's why I encourage people not to just go to college without a plan (maybe that's how I should have said it). For a great many people college is a platform to great things. I know pilots that I went to school with, executives, etc. but there's also a great, great many that go to school and find that the degree they paid for isn't as helpful as they'd been lead to believe. Then they end up taking a sales position to make ends meet and find that there's a good career to be had there that they could have started before they went to school and acquired so much debt.

 

I'll PM you some of the things I'm working on. I don't want the riffraff around here taking my ideas and running with 'em!

 

Relevant to tuition costs: