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A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College

Arbo

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http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/b...l=1&adxnnlx=1336924899-7j2fEdhHEUB9uA5C7RvZyw

Kelsey Griffith graduates on Sunday from Ohio Northern University. To start paying off her $120,000 in student debt, she is already working two restaurant jobs and will soon give up her apartment here to live with her parents. Her mother, who co-signed on the loans, is taking out a life insurance policy on her daughter.

“If anything ever happened, God forbid, that is my debt also,” said Ms. Griffith’s mother, Marlene Griffith.
Ms. Griffith, 23, wouldn’t seem a perfect financial fit for a college that costs nearly $50,000 a year. Her father, a paramedic, and mother, a preschool teacher, have modest incomes, and she has four sisters. But when she visited Ohio Northern, she was won over by faculty and admissions staff members who urge students to pursue their dreams rather than obsess on the sticker price.
“As an 18-year-old, it sounded like a good fit to me, and the school really sold it,” said Ms. Griffith, a marketing major. “I knew a private school would cost a lot of money. But when I graduate, I’m going to owe like $900 a month. No one told me that.”


"No one told me that." Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.
 
Bubbles are created when the prevailing wisdom says about a certain type of investment "this is ALWAYS a good investment." It happened in the housing market, and too many people took on more debt than they could handle, and behaved irrationally because the assumption underlying it (that X is always a good investment) is also irrational.

$120,000 for a Marketing degree is no wiser an investment than $500,000 for a shoddy condominium. Marketing and other general business degrees are a dime a dozen, from most employers' perspectives. It amounts to a very bad investment decision on this girl's part and she will feel it for decades. To some degree she should have known better, but many 18-year olds don't know better and don't understand finance. So it's also too bad that these parents didn't know better or advise her better.
 
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Oh....students are to blame for the costs of college.

Thanks guys, problem solved.
 
Oh....students are to blame for the costs of college.

Nobody said that, now did they? What has been said is that people should have the knowledge to figure out what the cost of school is going to run them in terms of monthly payments and how long, as well as they should put a little more thought into the whole thing in terms of cost to benefit ratio.

But I give you an A for effort to derail with falsehoods.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/b...l=1&adxnnlx=1336924899-7j2fEdhHEUB9uA5C7RvZyw



"No one told me that." Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]

You know, if student loans and government grants didn't exist, I'll bet the price for college tuitions would be cut in half.

On another note, they act like it's a tragedy that the poor girl was forced to move back in with her parents. It used to be that nearly all college kids lived at home with their parents (unless the distance prevented it) until they graduated. Often kids would live at home until their careers took off, or until they got married. Families used to stick together until their kids decided to have families of their own, and even then much of the time they would still live with parents for a while. It's still that way in most parts of the world, but hasn't been that way in America for a few generations.

With the economic times we're living in today, don't you think it might be a good idea to rediscover the concept of family unity?
 
Nobody said that, now did they?
They didn't blame the student...?

Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.
It amounts to a very bad investment decision on this girl's part and she will feel it for decades. To some degree she should have known better, but many 18-year olds don't know better and don't understand finance. So it's also too bad that these parents didn't know better or advise her better.


I'll give you another chance to begin a discussion on the causes of the increases in college costs.....if that is what this thread is about.
 
Oh....students are to blame for the costs of college.

Thanks guys, problem solved.

Maybe I missed it but where did the article focus specifically on 'the costs of college'?
 
You know, if student loans and government grants didn't exist, I'll bet the price for college tuitions would be cut in half.

On another note, they act like it's a tragedy that the poor girl was forced to move back in with her parents. It used to be that nearly all college kids lived at home with their parents (unless the distance prevented it) until they graduated. Often kids would live at home until their careers took off, or until they got married. Families used to stick together until their kids decided to have families of their own, and even then much of the time they would still live with parents for a while. It's still that way in most parts of the world, but hasn't been that way in America for a few generations.

With the economic times we're living in today, don't you think it might be a good idea to rediscover the concept of family unity?

False. Most colleges act as businesses first educators second. Making them non-profit however may decrease cost.
 
You know, if student loans and government grants didn't exist, I'll bet the price for college tuitions would be cut in half.

On another note, they act like it's a tragedy that the poor girl was forced to move back in with her parents. It used to be that nearly all college kids lived at home with their parents (unless the distance prevented it) until they graduated. Often kids would live at home until their careers took off, or until they got married. Families used to stick together until their kids decided to have families of their own, and even then much of the time they would still live with parents for a while. It's still that way in most parts of the world, but hasn't been that way in America for a few generations.

With the economic times we're living in today, don't you think it might be a good idea to rediscover the concept of family unity?

I'm doing it now, and it sucks balls.
 
Maybe I missed it but where did the article focus specifically on 'the costs of college'?

The roots of the borrowing binge date to the 1980s, when tuition for four-year colleges began to rise faster than family incomes. In the 1990s, for-profit colleges boomed by spending heavily on marketing and recruiting.
Nationally, state and local spending per college student, adjusted for inflation, reached a 25-year low this year, jeopardizing the long-held conviction that state-subsidized higher education is an affordable steppingstone for the lower and middle classes. All the while, the cost of tuition and fees has continued to increase faster than the rate of inflation, faster even than medical spending. If the trends continue through 2016, the average cost of a public college will have more than doubled in just 15 years, according to the Department of Education.

Instead, reading from the same handbook as for-profit colleges, they urge students not to worry about the costs. That’s because most students don’t pay full price.

They suggest, for example, that state schools are bloated, antiquated and don’t do a good enough job graduating students or training them for the work force. Some complain about the salaries of football coaches and college presidents, like Mr. Gee, who has a compensation package of $2 million a year as president of Ohio State. Mr. Kasich questions why all state universities need to offer every major, like journalism or engineering, instead of parceling those programs among the schools.

“It’s not just inefficiencies,” said the governor, an Ohio State graduate. “It’s, ‘I want to be the best in this.’ It’s duplication of resources. It’s a sweeping change that is needed across academia.”

Should I go on....?
 
I have no sympathy for people who chose to go to an expensive private university.

I went to a public university and got a respected degree, that cost around $30,000.
 
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We put our kids thru college, state schools, none of that private Ivy league crap....
It is the best thing you can give your kids in this era, a paid for college degree in a major that makes them employable.....
 
My biggest concern is with the cost of college rising, our future generations will be less able to compete in the economy making our country even more poor.
 
My biggest concern is with the cost of college rising, our future generations will be less able to compete in the economy making our country even more poor.

My generation being sacked with what is essentially mortgage level debt in our mid-20's without the benefit of actually owning property is worrisome.
 
the cost of college has outstripped wage growth, inflation, or any other measure. put simply, a college education has become nearly unaffordable since i graduated. i see absolutely no societal advantage to weighing down entire generations with nearly insurmountable levels of debt in a status quo of limited employment opportunity. it seems to me that this practice only encourages a higher level of socioeconomic unrest.
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/b...l=1&adxnnlx=1336924899-7j2fEdhHEUB9uA5C7RvZyw

"No one told me that." Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]
Yep. This is all pretty unfortunate and something needs to be done about it. Although, I'm not going to simply say that universities, loaners and the government bear the responsibility for this. There are also many cases of people who rather go on nice vacations and stuff like that before paying off their loans. They're part of the problem too.

And :roll: at the comments in here that have nonsense to say about private and "Ivy League" type colleges. It's just as bad as people having a problem with higher education in general. This board is the only place in my life where I've seen people refer to higher education and high quality higher education as "crap" and the like. Such nonsense.
 
I wonder what the Federal Student Loan debt would look like if ALL of these people had gone to public universities instead.

I bought a new car a year ago, can I get my loan forgiven? I use it to drive to school.
 
My biggest concern is with the cost of college rising, our future generations will be less able to compete in the economy making our country even more poor.

That's not really a problem of rising tuition costs, it's a problem of job supply and demand. For illustrative purposes, say we have a trillion people in the country but only a million jobs, you can throw all the reasonably-priced college you want at those trillion people but we're still gonna feel pain because >999.9 billion people have nothing to do.
 
I have no sympathy for people who chose to go to an expensive private university.

I went to a public university and got a respected degree, that cost around $30,000.

I went to a private university and graduated debt free. That was in 1964.
I went to a public university for an MA, paid no tuition, and graduated for about $200. That was in '73.

I think things have changed a bit, and not for the better.

Now, we could blame the student for the lack of jobs. It would be totally illogical to do so, but we could. We could blame them for the high cost of tuition, and the lack of jobs that pay enough to earn your way through college, too. That would also be illogical.

It's not today's youth that has made a mess of things, now is it?
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/b...l=1&adxnnlx=1336924899-7j2fEdhHEUB9uA5C7RvZyw



"No one told me that." Did you not learn such basic things as to figure out total cost and payments in high school? Good grief, take some responsibility for your own choices.[/FONT][/SIZE][/COLOR]

I think it's a shared fault.

Fault of parents who cosign loans and encourage their children to overlook common sense (cost being one such thing)
Fault of students who want to attend high cost schools and are making might adult decisions without handling it maturely
Fault of schools for treating potential students as customers and not students.


Right now I'm at a fork in the road: take out massive school loans to cover living expenses and school expenses for the next 3 years. Or leave school - pursue our business plan without a degree - and self-educate what I have yet to learn as best as possible.

I'm taking the later-path: we're already paying a considerable amount each month for my husband's OLD student loans - I'd much rather add a business loan and a business oportunity onto that than just another mass of student loans is an uncertain future far in the distance.
 
I went to a private university and graduated debt free. That was in 1964.
I went to a public university for an MA, paid no tuition, and graduated for about $200. That was in '73.

I think things have changed a bit, and not for the better.

Now, we could blame the student for the lack of jobs. It would be totally illogical to do so, but we could. We could blame them for the high cost of tuition, and the lack of jobs that pay enough to earn your way through college, too. That would also be illogical.

It's not today's youth that has made a mess of things, now is it?

Of course not, but that's probably not what anyone's really arguing. Each student entering higher ed has a choice to invest a certain amount of money in exchange for some sort of expected return. A fine arts degree from a private college in exchange for six figures of debt is not a smart investment decision, generally speaking, and it is up to each individual to recognize not-smart investment decisions like that. Six figures of debt in exchange for a medical degree or engineering degree is probably a better investment move. It's not students' fault if a college charges astronomical tuition, but it's the student (and family's) responsibility to carefully consider the costs v. benefits of actually paying it. There is a point at which college is so expensive that it's not worth it to attend. Like any investment, if the price is too high, you don't pay it.
 
They didn't blame the student...?

Um, pointing out the lack of people to think ahead and then take responsibility for their decisions is not blaming them for the cost schools charge.
 
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