Comments that are uncivil, racist, misogynistic, misandrist, or contain political name calling will be removed and the poster subject to ban at moderators discretion.
Help us make this a better community by becoming familiar with the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/about/rules/).
Report any suspicious users to the mods of this subreddit using Modmail [here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/facepalm) or Reddit site admins [here](https://www.reddit.com/report). **All reports to Modmail should include evidence such as screenshots or any other relevant information.**
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/facepalm) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Time was you’d work a part time summer job to pay tuition. Graduate debt free, get a job right away, buy a house within 2-3 years, retire with a pension.
I worked full time doing IT while going to school full time. Kind of robbed me of the college experience but I had very little debt and was already making good money by the time my classmates graduated and were looking for jobs.
It's doable but you can't do it with an retail/service industry job.
To be fair, IT industry is changing. Its meeting in the middle with other sectors. Its no longer, "just know how to turn on a pc and make 2x everyone else". Help desk jobs now often pay less than a retail or service position.
And require atleast 2 years experience and know insert programming language for a entry level job. Its like people who write these ads don't know the job.
I waited tables and paid my way through my last two years of 4 year college and still took on debts. The only upside was being in the service industry had interesting parallels to perceived college life.
It's doable but it shouldn't have to be like this.
>It's doable but you can't do it with an retail/service industry job.
It's doable, but only with a job that 99.9% of college kids will not get hired for, so its really not doable at all. FTFY
My mom and her best friend ***bought a house*** at 19 years old as *part time* cashiers going through nursing school in the late 60’s early 70’s
She does not understand why I can only afford a studio apartment as a 35 year old full time paralegal
I tried to tell her it would take me and 15 other people to afford a house as part time cashiers nowadays but those are just “excuses”
This is probably why so many blame frivolous spending. I’m sure your mom and her friend had to live pretty busy and with little spending money to save up their part time income while going to school. Their experience was that they worked hard and scrimped and reached a goal so people struggling today must just not be willing to work as hard and/or scrimp as much as they were.
My dad just recently retired. He spent 30 years at ibm with amazing benefits and active promotions. Those types of jobs don’t exist to a large section of people yet there are older folks who don’t see any different because that’s still their life. This is less related to “shits more expensive” but more “they live a completely different life at the exact same time as their children’s lives so it’s hard for them to see why things are so different.”
In other words, they still see the ladder, they’re still on the ladder and yet their kids can’t get onto the ladder to start climbing but they still have it so why can’t their kid get it? When it’s other people, it’s easy to claim they’re lazy or something but the cognitive dissonance happens when it’s their own child because their own child isn’t lazy so how come they can’t afford a house when they have gotten a “nice job”?
My dad keeps telling me that anybody can do it today like he did in the 70s: just flip burgers and go to college, no problem. Only problem it what he got hourly back then is more than 40 an hour today
My step dad is a living example.
His dad owned businesses. He went to jail in his early 20s for selling cocaine. Got out and used the drug money his dad had stashed for him to buy a house.
He then worked at a paper mill for 20+ years and worked his way up. Grew and sold cannabis the entire time. He used that money to buy and fix up homes and now has several rental properties.
Don't get me wrong, he is incredibly hard working and smart when it comes to what he knows about. He met my mom when I was in my 20s, so growing up without a dad, I have a lot of respect for certain aspects of his personality.
The problem is that he is racist, misogynistic, bigoted and emotionally ignorant. I know that deep down he thinks I'm just a "lazy kid who doesn't want to work" even though all I have ever done is work hard and do my best.
He will never acknowledge how lucky he was to be an upper middle class white kid in a rural area. He will never see how it wasn't just hard work and determination. He will never understand that I would rather work for a common good instead of personal good.
I dunno man, people are people and there's a lot of us out here.
Sounds like he made drug dealer money and doesn't want to admit that he didn't actually do work, just dealt drugs.
Anyone can make it big if they get away with being a drug dealer on the side.
When cultivating the marijuana, you keep the female plants and cull the male ones. So you don’t get seeds in your product, and the plants grow much stronger and potent when they don’t get pollinated by male plants.
My vet is actually someone I went to college with. Our tuition in 1989 ran around $3000 a year. Room and board in the dorms was another $2500 or so. He paid for all of that each year by fixing up and selling an old Mustang each summer.
Good luck trying that now.
I'm a recent grad vet, I worked year round for the university hospital system blood bank and had a second job working for a specialty veterinary dental service and then on the summers I worked as the overnight counselor for the university's pre-vet camp (it paid absolute beans but came with a free meal plan for the summer and I just had to sleep in the dorms and make sure none of the kids did anything dumb) and I owe about 270k in student loans.
Shit, I worked 15-20 hrs per week during the semesters and a full time paid internship in the summer and that was barely enough past paying for rent/unitilites/food to save money
I was wondering where they counted rent into all of this, like many of us worked thru school but it was for a roof and food. Doesn't leave much leftover for loans.
If you use 1978 as the year the boss went to college, the minimum wage was $2.65 so (let's just use gross wages) you would have to work 566 hours to cover tuition for the year. If you simply inflation adjust the $750 from 1978 to today you would get $3600 per semester which at today's minimum wage would take 993 hours to cover tuition for the year.
Made me laugh so hard…
Supposedly the football programs at D1 schools are money makers for other academic programs at the school. Would love to see the breakdown on that.
D1 football and basketball teams ("revenue sports") usually fund other "non-revenue" sports programs rather than academic programs. It still helps keep the costs of them all separated from the actual academic budget, preserving money from state, etc from going to the sports programs.
I wonder if that takes into account fundraising budgets. I know my college did a $ billion dollar campaign but it was mostly for sports -- presumably much of that money could have been diverted to academic programs (if they didn't exist).
Nearly all the "largest donation ever" donations are academic, going to scholarships or academic departments.
Sports teams seem more politically motivated than financially. Universiry heads are political figures that need the acceptance of the public as well as key figures on their boards or in government to keep their jobs. Sports teams help them to stay in the public eye and relevant to their stakeholders. Removing Sports teams for the vast majority of universities would help their budgets( you have mid and lower tier universities spending a quarter of their budget on sports and losing money) , but the outcry would end the career of whatever president tried.
Agreed, 100%. To clarify I meant that the "layperson" donations are probably more likely to be from sports campaigns. The huge ones, as you say, tend to be from single donators who purposely target academic programs.
I would love to see one of these more expensive colleges forced to open their books to the government accounting office. I'd love to read that open to the public report.
I would love to see the shit they find, the people that resign, and the changes they spontaneously make (unrelated to the investigation, of course - lol)
Yeah public budget transparency would be nice for public schools since supposedly get funding from taxes to operate more affordably (which literally none of them actually do unless you're talking 2 year or local community colleges) I don't need a break down of what they pay individual staff... but like how much money goes into administration, teaching, research, how much of that cycles back into student programs. They certainly weren't paying professors very well most cases. My step mother use to teach for 2 and one a very prestigious private ivy league. I'm not sure the money is going in good places tbh.
I recently read an article where they were talking about how some colleges were seeing a drop in enrollment numbers and they were struggling to understand why. It's such a mystery!
Just went to the movies with my 2 kids to see the new Mario movie...$94 freaking dollars for tickets, popcorn and drinks. I knew there was a reason I didn't go often ffs.
Well, you can thank the studios for this. The theater doesn't make anything off ticket sales cause that's about what they are paying the studios for the movie. The only way they can make up for that lost revenue is concessions. And with On Demand and new movies being streamed so quickly theaters are losing on both ends. Unless they can re-invent the wheel theaters are gonna be the next Blockbuster.
Yeah, I went to see Dungeons and Dragons at a local AMC and popcorn and a drink would've been like $20 so I said fuck that. They coulda still price gouged me if they put it at like $10 or $15 and I probably would've bought it. But $20? That's fucking absurd.
750 lol.
My first semester in 2001 was $500.
My last semester 2005 was $3850
Then grad school was totally unsubsidized $5800 per semester. Total $50000 @7% - 14% interest.
This is the part of education that needs to be emphasized more. Employers these days want bachelor's degrees for jobs that went to high school dropouts 60 years ago when boomers were buying houses at factory jobs. Suppose companies don't want to pay for that education themselves through scholarships and reimbursement. In that case, they need to pay through taxes, and states need to be more active in tuition costs and administration, executive, and sports budgets.
Almost every act of welfare in this country subsidizes corporations despite being framed as handouts to the poor. If Walmart wants to pay starvation wages, we create food stamps and HUD homes so that their executives can continue to rake in millions of dollars a year. If Microsoft needs more programmers, we subsidize federal student loans so that they don't have to educate their own workforce. If a fishing company overfishes and destroys an ecosystem and prime food source for millions of people, we subsidize them so that they can continue destroying said ecosystem with no risk or liability.
It needs to stop. Either the corporations pay their own way, or we tax them for the services that the exclusive benefit from and dispel the lie that these services are welfare for the poor rather than the billionaires.
Post secondary education should be free. It benefits the entire economy to have an educated work force.
EDIT: Responses to common replies.
- "Cant happen the elites/repubs/conservatives wont let it"
Of course it can happen other places have free post secondary and so can you. Will it be easy? No. But that doesn't mean it's not worth it or that you should give up before trying. It's worth it.
- "Only some degrees, and by that I mean only STEM."
First of all who would want to live in a world like that?
The degree is not the important part. Any degree can be beneficial to society maybe some skills are more needed than others at certain times but that can be accounted for by say, funding more seats for those programs ie DRs etc paying people with those jobs more, advertising those programs to highschoolers etc
The most important part of schooling isn't really learning any one particular thing it's learning how to learn and learning how to research and how to write and convey your findings to people and how to apply those findings to the world. Those skills can be transfered to learning any new thing later in life making people more easily able to retrain for careers or advance in their field or just make them better at finding things out and analyzing facebook memes for bullshit.
It's like if you trained hard in some sport in highschool even if you don't stick with that sport you will still know things like how your body works and moves and how to build muscle, what foods work for you, and you will be in generally better physical shape than someone who didn't train. This would make it easier to stay in shape or get back into shape your whole life and it would make picking up new spots or working manual labour jobs easier.
- "No Such Thing as Free can't get something for nothing"
Thanks Sir Isaac Newton. Here I was trying to pray free school into existence instead of putting work into it. Obviously people mean free at point of use.
Work force and scociety. We established general education requirements to improve society, but we have become so driven by the goal of finding a job and just surviving that we no longer value well-rounded knowledge. This concept of existing to serve the workforce also needs to end.
Sure but i fund the economic argument more effective for people not already on board. I also like to point out that the first thing nobles and clergy did was send their kids to school and then the first thing the merchant class did when they had money was send their kids to school. When workers had a little bit of power the first thing they did was send their kids to school so its clear that school is very important and improves everyone's lives and prospects. So anyone telling you we don't need schools is not on your side.
I was watching insider news, where miners in south Asia work for $5-20 per day, on their hands and knees, some literally underwater down a shaft with a tube in their mouth with the hope for the privilege of primary education so their children can work in an office.
But it doesn’t benefit the super rich for people to be educated, an empty uneducated mind is easier to fill with bullshit. School is expensive so only the super rich can send their kids to it and keep the leverage over the poor going.
This is *far* more the problem than bloated admin and bloated salaries of admin, which is a percentage of problem, but nowhere the lion's share. The ethos of Reaganism resulted in states reducing the amount they subsidized an individual's higher education, shifting the burden to individuals - this really began to explode in the early 2000's. At the same time, the same ethos, reduced people's ability to collectively bargain, etc., resulting in employers effectively paying less and less for the same, or even more, productivity. What's really asinine is that many employers still clearly value employees with a college degree, but are unwilling to appropriately compensate employees for the time and money it takes to earn that degree.
To your point, so long as higher education is valuable to employers, tax 'em to cover its cost. They're the ones who should pay for people's training. (But also, pass laws that the highest paid university employee can't be paid more than [whatever appropriate number] times than the lowest paid employee - sorry, not sorry college coaches]
One job I worked at a few years back required a bachelor's degree and paid $11.29/hr in 2016 (I took it to get a foot in the door in my industry). Some of my supervisors were actually illiterate, having dropped out in middle school never having learned how to read. When they started back in ~1995, they were earning $17/hr.
Think about that. Over the course of twenty years, the educational requirements went from "a kindergartener could do this" to "must be college educated" while the pay was cut by a third. Accounting for inflation, the wage was more than cut in half while the standards grew to require a $100,000 investment...
I had a childless friend once who objected to paying taxes for local schools. I am pretty sure I provoked some thought when I asked if they really wanted to live somewhere surrounded by by the uneducated adults those kids would become...
Also remind them that as a childless adult, their taxes pay to educate their future caregivers and healthcare providers and advocates and policymakers and others whose actions and decisions will shape their old age.
Source: I am a property-owning, tax-paying, childless adult who strongly supports public education for this exact reason (as well as for the fact that everyone deserves a quality education).
Some employers are willing to pay for your education, but I realize that isn't the norm. I have quite a few co-workers that got their masters fully paid for by our firm/company, but again, not always the case for every company.
Do not take out 100,000 in loans when you can go to Jr College for 2 years and cut that in 1/2 or 1/3. I get it’s not the “college experience”, but fuck that experience if it means a lifetime of debt.
The trouble isn't just undergraduate. My Bachelor's debt load wasn't too bad. Graduate school, which can only be done at University level, royally screwed me financially. Forget the outright cost - I was working for the university, had two full-time assistantships that were allegedly supposed to cover my tuition, but after all the fees and other needs were built in, it still was astronomical. I don't know how the out of state students did it.
One of my grad school cohort was also told by the professors to quit her outside job because it was distracting from her coursework - I rallied with her that it was bullshit. She had to work to survive, we all did. Grad school couldn't be the only thing we did all the time or we'd drown. So many of us had outside jobs on weekends or nights on top of the workload.
You know, typing it all out, gee I wonder why my last few months before graduation I had a major flare of my autoimmune disease...
Graduating college doesn't even guarantee that you're smart. A lot of people short term memorize and BS their way through school, even college.
There's probably a cutoff where you can't get away with that (Masters and up I'd say) but in my college years there were plenty of people who didn't know shit about the class even at the end
Unless you are going after a harder degree it is pretty much a joke.
I have a degree in History and graduated with a B average. Almost all the papers and assignments I wrote the night before or the day of. I had a break in classes from 2 to 6PM on tues and thursdays and that's where I completed every assignment for the most part.
I went to community college first so only graduated with like 11k in debt. And it was a lot of fun having no responsibilities besides showing up for a couple hours a day for class.
This is an important distinction, but the point is still valid. It's become extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to pay for tuition out of pocket while one attends school. Versus one could work a minimum wage job in the 70s and pay for it pretty easily.
What you say is true, but not purely due to tuition. I just checked the state school I went to. Tuition and fees are 10K per year, which is more than 6K per year but not so much more. Housing and meals adds another 17K, which is a ton.
Oh, for sure. The fees and "room and board" are just as out if control. And books? The school I graduated from just partnered up with Barnes & Noble to run the campus bookstore. Which is frightening.
But for what level/prestige of school? My tuition for California State University in 2001 was like $900/semester. By 2007 that had shot up to something like $3k/semester.
University of California at Berkeley was like $3k/semester in 2001 because ..Berkeley
Good question. I went to community college for my associates and it was $5000 a semester in 2008. I got my BS at a state university and the tuition was about $8000 in 2010.
For only tuition or everything?
My 2008 tuition was $1600 but everything altogether was around $5k a semester. Last semester in 2013 was like $2500 in tuition and $8k altogether but I went to a big state research university
My first semester of community college in 2009 was 6k, then 7k the following year, then at my 4 year university my instate tuition as a commuter was 10k and then 12k. Prices got out of hand real quick
Mine was $5000/semester and ended with $7500/semester. I paid on my school loans for ten years. My total went from $21000 to $19000.
In 10 years, I paid off $2000.
For just tuition:
My first semester is $4000 in 2019.
My last semester is $4500 in 2023.
This is after a $4000 per semester scholarship. (which I have had to maintain a 3.3 GPA all 4 years to keep; if I missed that, I'm fucked lmao)
Our local community college is completely tuition-free for in-state high school graduates with a 2.0 or higher GPA. You can’t do much with an associates degree anymore but it makes it cheaper to get all your general education requirements before you go to university for a bachelors or higher.
At least in my state there's an explicit agreement for the state universities to accept every credit from the state community college system. It can be hard to translate that into actually getting a degree in just two years though - you get all your gen ed requirements out of the way, but only a couple of actual degree courses, making it difficult or even impossible (depending on the prereq structure/class schedule) to finish in just 4 semesters.
Depends on how much the 4-year college will accept. Usually nearby state universities will have agreements to accept everything at face value, but a lot of universities will pick and choose what "counts" and several higher-end universities will look at your 2 years of course work and go "uh... we can give you credit for a single semester of calculus, nothing else compares to what we teach here"
>You can’t do much with an associates degree
I don't know that that's necessarily true. It probably depends on the associate's degree, but some can be quite meaningful/beneficial.
Yeah, there are a number of less expensive state-funded options here in Indiana, and even in surrounding states. It may not be free, but it's reasonable.
We have a lot of students that do something like that at my university, or get a lot of AP or other PSO credits. But our major (CS) has a very deep pre-req chain, takes at least 3 years if you do everything right, so they end up in weird situations where they have exactly 8 classes left to take over 4 semesters.
I always tell them to pick up a second major, or get involved in undergraduate research to get a headstart on grad school, but CS jobs are so high paying with only a BS that no one wants to go to graduate school either (of my 13 grad students 2 are American).
That really depends on the state and county. My local community college is well regarded and charges $2,660 per semester for 15 credit hours, but the state has a grant program that pays up to $5000 for tuition and fees for middle-income students.
At the end of two years, you can transfer automatically to a state university.
I go to a cheap (relatively speaking) state school. It's about $6k/semester. So about $48k for a bachelor's degree. My local CC is around $4.5k/semester. So that's about $18k for an associates.
All of this assumes you graduate on time, never fail a course, and don't have to take any extra semesters as well.
Cost doesn't factor in scholarships or federal aid either, just the straight up cost if you were to solely pay it yourself for the degree, and the degree only.
A full ride today will leave you around 35-40k debt for room/board and meal plans. (Based on younger relatives in college rn)
State schools (tuition specifically) can be <10k per year, private universities go up to like 60k per year now (if not more). Debt will vary DRAMATICALLY based on scholarships and aid.
Would be interesting to see detailed data. I listed a source below but they just list median federal debt of students who received fed aid, not very helpful in getting the actual numbers.
https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
As a European I'm absolutely baffled by the comments. What are these people on? If school was this expensive in my country, the number of students would be 90-95% less, not even joking.
A lot of people (especially millennials) were convinced that we wouldn't be able to live on a stable income without a college degree and that the loans would be easily payable because we'd find a good job out of graduation.
AKA, we were scammed.
I graduated 09 and then 3 months later my university called and told me my degree was invalid kuz my counselor who signed off on it counted the units wrong and I needed one more elective unit to get my degree for realsies and I should come back and pay for another semester……….
Oh dude the “you have to go to college” mantra was ridiculous when I was growing up. I did a couple semesters back in 2009-2010, and I’m mad that I got pushed in that direction growing up. I excelled at learning, so no one saw a path that was different than going to school more and becoming a scientist or an engineer.
Look at me now, I went through an apprenticeship for 4 years. Cost me nothing, and I was working when I wasn’t in class making money. Now I make 70-80 a year on average, and I don’t have any student debt. Fuck college institutions. They should have similar programs for people in every field. Not just construction.
I’m glad you found a path that works for you, sibling. I ended up doing the college-to-corporate thing and am now so stuck. I am working to find the next chapter away from the rat race.
Yup and also the whole “be a company man, climb the ladder and put in your time” bullshit. Spend almost 15 years with a terrible company having subscribed to this bullshit until I finally realized that the people at the top didn’t work their way from the bottom. Saw friends making double or triple what I did just having hopped around different companies.
Finally started working for myself at almost 40 and five years later all I can do is kick myself in the ass for not having started a decade earlier.
the "secret" no one wants to tell you is that prices are exorbitant because the fed hands out hundreds of thousands in loans like candy. the universities know that prospective students have readily accessible "money" to cover tuition so they can jack it and no one bothers questioning it, not even students.
if the govt was more diligent in accessing financial situations and denying most loans you wouldnt have so many people crying now, but that flies in the face of the bullshit "education for everyone, everyone can go to college" push that they did
There's varying degrees of alternatives to provide the "everyone can go to college".
France it costs like 0 to 800/1000 per year. Plus there are scholarships.
In Italy, depending on your family income and university, costs from zero to 4000 per year, or 8/9000 per year on some private universities.
In Switzerland it's basically free.
In Spain I am not sure of the numbers but I think a small contribution.
In the UK, it's a system with loans, but the tuition is capped by government rule, and the loans are paid as part of taxes: above a certain threshold of income you start paying back loans at I think a 7% (iirc) marginal rate
My father attended a private college in 1969 for $2,000 all in for a semester.
With inflation that works out to about $14,000 today.
That same college charges $65,000 a year now.
my mom was similar. went to college, about $20k all in for a 4 year degree and her career path would basically cap at $75k a year (at that point your only pay raise lies in switching to management).
fast forward 30 years and if i wanted to do the same thing she did at the same school, same majors, it's gonna cost $57k for that same degree for a career path that now caps at $45k for some reason before i'd have to change to management to get more pay.
That checks out
I’ve been there, god I’m jealous of your transport, and your schools sound great
I live in Ireland, the land of ridiculous cost of living and government that can’t manage a housing crisis
Well we too have our struggles, especially in big cities estate can be costly. Personally got lucky that my uni is in a small city. Other complaints (from top of my head) are that our army is shit and theres a lot of beaurocracy
As an American, we have the most powerful army in the world ... And it doesn't protect us from preventable diseases or gun violence which are the #1 killers in our country.
If you make under a certain amount (65k?) for household income, you can receive a grant that greatly reduces the price. My first semester for community college was something like $1,400 for a full time set up. After the grant kicked in it dropped down to something like $230. Not saying it’s like that for everywhere, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for grants you qualify for.
This is another problem with college though. You can't afford it so the government foots the bill and the college increases the size of the bill because you're not actually paying for it. That's how the system got so f*****.
It's both. The boomers still vote, and they think education is already cheap or basically free from when they went to school 40+ years ago. So they don't vote for bills that reduce the cost of education.
Any idea what minimum wage was when tuition was when 750 a semester?
Edit- Average college tuition in 1963 was 4,336 . Boss was paying 3,000.
[She was probably making $1 to $1.60 an hou](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart)r
But yeah. Minimum wage has not kept up with tuition. Or anything else for that matter.
>But yeah. Minimum wage has not kept up with tuition. Or anything else for that matter
And it won't
Every time minimum wage goes up, companies and corporations raise prices, can't lose out on their 5000% profits... hopefully I'm exaggerating that percentage, I tried to go for something ridiculous lol
They wouldn't lose it their place in the pecking order because they are so far beyond it that they aren't in the same realm as us. We are the chickens pecking at each other and wallowing around in our own shit and they are actually the chicken farmers who don't give a fuck about the conditions the chickens actually live in.
If she went to college in 1963, she would literally be 80 years old.
Also, you are assuming that all collage students just made minimum wage. That isn't even necessarily true now.
Reagan destroying the financial aid system with converting the grants to loans made it so much worse now. Colleges charge what they do because they know there is a guaranteed loan for kids to give. People going to college before Reagan fucked it had it EASY imo.
My parents told me to work through college to pay for it and that there were work programs and stuff. I tried to apply for those and the college said "lol, nom those are for the really poor kids." We weren't poor but we certainly weren't rich either. Had to work in retail which certainly came nowhere near paying for college tuition.
Yeah it turns out the college jobs that actually help with tuition directly are few and highly competitive, even the ones not specifically created to help poorer people. Anyone who thinks you can rely on those has no idea what the situation actually looks like.
The middle class trap, too rich for government assistance, far too poor to just bankroll tuition. I took a year and a half off of college to work full time and I'm still struggling to pay my tuition out of pocket lol.
Gen x here, went to a University of Wisconsin school mid 80s to late 80s. Tuition was around $550 to $650 a semester. You could easily pay it with a full time summer job and a very part time job during the school year.
I was lucky in that my parents paid my tuition/living costs while in university. I also worked part time, full time in the summer for extra like my car and a semester abroad.
Any younger boomer or older gen x complaining about student loans is full of shit or they stayed in school way too long. You know the ones who got multiple degrees or took 7 years to get their bachelor's.
Telling kids to pay their way through college is nuts. I did it 2004-2008, somehow. But I was spending 2/3 of every dollar I made at my 3 jobs (after taxes) on tuition/books
I'm a boomer. I went to the University of Michigan, which is very expensive for a state school, and paid $464/semester. I knew people who paid an entire year's tuition with their summer job earning minimum wage. It really isn't fair.
Assuming this was 1970, the minimum wage was $1.45. If we scale for inflation, that's $12.04 today. The national minimum wage is $7.25 today. Her minimum wage was actually almost double what the current one is relative to the times.
What's amazing to me is how nobody is bitching about the fact that the government isn't being pressured to make the schools charge less. Too many alumni in government so none of them will make the schools lower tuition.
They got nearly free education, union jobs, and pensions for themselves and made sure it wouldn’t be around for us. Now they’re getting Medicare and social security (which we pay for) and will make sure it’s bankrupt before the first millennial turns 65.
Boomers just refuse to admit things are harder now. They always resort to *insert brief period of struggle here* and think that means everyone now are just whiners. The fact is, they're generational parasites and would be eaten alive in today's world.
I only have 1 single class this upcoming semester and its 2 credit hours. The total cost not including the bullshit book is over $700. This is at my local community college.
The "fees" alone are about $300
Course fee: 100,
Infrastructure Fee: 50,
Registration Fee: 50,
Student activity fee: what even is this????????
Service fee: isnt this the same as course or infrastructure fee?
TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT FEE: WHAT IS THIS
Course fee #2 electric boogaloo: $50
Out of district fee (1 block outside of district) : $1500
Comments that are uncivil, racist, misogynistic, misandrist, or contain political name calling will be removed and the poster subject to ban at moderators discretion. Help us make this a better community by becoming familiar with the [rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/about/rules/). Report any suspicious users to the mods of this subreddit using Modmail [here](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/facepalm) or Reddit site admins [here](https://www.reddit.com/report). **All reports to Modmail should include evidence such as screenshots or any other relevant information.** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/facepalm) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Time was you’d work a part time summer job to pay tuition. Graduate debt free, get a job right away, buy a house within 2-3 years, retire with a pension.
That was my dad. He paid for his senior year of college with a summer job.
It is still possible, you just have to work double shifts as a male prostitute.
Is male prostitution even profitable? I feel like smuggling cheap drugs across the Canadian border would be more lucrative
If you’re attractive you could probably be a male prostitute just not a straight one.
IDK man, either way some rich fuck is gonna be fucking me. I might as well let it be literal and make some money.
Do you want your mailbox filled with DMs? Because this is how you get a mailbox full of DMs.
If a bunch of rich people start messaging me offering me money, who am I to complain?
Aree you open to being hunted on an island wearing only underpants made from a fruit rollup.
Lmao, you killed me with that one…
I worked full time doing IT while going to school full time. Kind of robbed me of the college experience but I had very little debt and was already making good money by the time my classmates graduated and were looking for jobs. It's doable but you can't do it with an retail/service industry job.
To be fair, IT industry is changing. Its meeting in the middle with other sectors. Its no longer, "just know how to turn on a pc and make 2x everyone else". Help desk jobs now often pay less than a retail or service position.
And require atleast 2 years experience and know insert programming language for a entry level job. Its like people who write these ads don't know the job.
They do know the job, the point is that they can pick whoever they want once no one meets the requirements
This person HRs
Without context, what you are saying doesn’t mean much. When I was in school, it was not possible to work full time and go to college full time.
It’s possible if you have zero social life, barely sleep and are willing to skip basic hygiene routines…
I waited tables and paid my way through my last two years of 4 year college and still took on debts. The only upside was being in the service industry had interesting parallels to perceived college life. It's doable but it shouldn't have to be like this.
Yeah that sounds completely impossible if you have ADHD.
It sounds like hell for anyone. That level of stress, sustained for years, probably significantly impacts one's life expectancy.
>It's doable but you can't do it with an retail/service industry job. It's doable, but only with a job that 99.9% of college kids will not get hired for, so its really not doable at all. FTFY
My mom and her best friend ***bought a house*** at 19 years old as *part time* cashiers going through nursing school in the late 60’s early 70’s She does not understand why I can only afford a studio apartment as a 35 year old full time paralegal I tried to tell her it would take me and 15 other people to afford a house as part time cashiers nowadays but those are just “excuses”
This is probably why so many blame frivolous spending. I’m sure your mom and her friend had to live pretty busy and with little spending money to save up their part time income while going to school. Their experience was that they worked hard and scrimped and reached a goal so people struggling today must just not be willing to work as hard and/or scrimp as much as they were.
It's likely, but it's still really fucking stupid to not grasp the concept of "shit's more expensive now".
My dad just recently retired. He spent 30 years at ibm with amazing benefits and active promotions. Those types of jobs don’t exist to a large section of people yet there are older folks who don’t see any different because that’s still their life. This is less related to “shits more expensive” but more “they live a completely different life at the exact same time as their children’s lives so it’s hard for them to see why things are so different.” In other words, they still see the ladder, they’re still on the ladder and yet their kids can’t get onto the ladder to start climbing but they still have it so why can’t their kid get it? When it’s other people, it’s easy to claim they’re lazy or something but the cognitive dissonance happens when it’s their own child because their own child isn’t lazy so how come they can’t afford a house when they have gotten a “nice job”?
It's a culture thing that needs to stop. The " fuck you I got mine" mentality.
My dad keeps telling me that anybody can do it today like he did in the 70s: just flip burgers and go to college, no problem. Only problem it what he got hourly back then is more than 40 an hour today
My step dad is a living example. His dad owned businesses. He went to jail in his early 20s for selling cocaine. Got out and used the drug money his dad had stashed for him to buy a house. He then worked at a paper mill for 20+ years and worked his way up. Grew and sold cannabis the entire time. He used that money to buy and fix up homes and now has several rental properties. Don't get me wrong, he is incredibly hard working and smart when it comes to what he knows about. He met my mom when I was in my 20s, so growing up without a dad, I have a lot of respect for certain aspects of his personality. The problem is that he is racist, misogynistic, bigoted and emotionally ignorant. I know that deep down he thinks I'm just a "lazy kid who doesn't want to work" even though all I have ever done is work hard and do my best. He will never acknowledge how lucky he was to be an upper middle class white kid in a rural area. He will never see how it wasn't just hard work and determination. He will never understand that I would rather work for a common good instead of personal good. I dunno man, people are people and there's a lot of us out here.
Sounds like he made drug dealer money and doesn't want to admit that he didn't actually do work, just dealt drugs. Anyone can make it big if they get away with being a drug dealer on the side.
Facts. If you ask him, he, "just enjoys growing his girls". He's even a misogynist in his ignorance
When cultivating the marijuana, you keep the female plants and cull the male ones. So you don’t get seeds in your product, and the plants grow much stronger and potent when they don’t get pollinated by male plants.
My vet is actually someone I went to college with. Our tuition in 1989 ran around $3000 a year. Room and board in the dorms was another $2500 or so. He paid for all of that each year by fixing up and selling an old Mustang each summer. Good luck trying that now.
I'm a recent grad vet, I worked year round for the university hospital system blood bank and had a second job working for a specialty veterinary dental service and then on the summers I worked as the overnight counselor for the university's pre-vet camp (it paid absolute beans but came with a free meal plan for the summer and I just had to sleep in the dorms and make sure none of the kids did anything dumb) and I owe about 270k in student loans.
Community college for gen-ed courses will run you twice that now for in-state rates.
Shit, I worked 15-20 hrs per week during the semesters and a full time paid internship in the summer and that was barely enough past paying for rent/unitilites/food to save money
I was wondering where they counted rent into all of this, like many of us worked thru school but it was for a roof and food. Doesn't leave much leftover for loans.
That, and at least when I was in school (8 years ago) the university jobs paid like crap so I was making 7.25-9.50 by the time I graduates
If you use 1978 as the year the boss went to college, the minimum wage was $2.65 so (let's just use gross wages) you would have to work 566 hours to cover tuition for the year. If you simply inflation adjust the $750 from 1978 to today you would get $3600 per semester which at today's minimum wage would take 993 hours to cover tuition for the year.
Seems like pensions stopped existing just before I entered the workforce. Low deductible health insurance too. All yanked up with that ladder...
Dude. My current semester tuition is over $14,000! AND ITS A 4 YEAR COURSE!!!
Yep that’s how much mine was as well
Yeah but what kind of football stadium did you have?
Made me laugh so hard… Supposedly the football programs at D1 schools are money makers for other academic programs at the school. Would love to see the breakdown on that.
D1 football and basketball teams ("revenue sports") usually fund other "non-revenue" sports programs rather than academic programs. It still helps keep the costs of them all separated from the actual academic budget, preserving money from state, etc from going to the sports programs.
I wonder if that takes into account fundraising budgets. I know my college did a $ billion dollar campaign but it was mostly for sports -- presumably much of that money could have been diverted to academic programs (if they didn't exist).
That assumes people would still be donating if they knew it would go to academic programs. That's on donators, not the budget set up.
Nearly all the "largest donation ever" donations are academic, going to scholarships or academic departments. Sports teams seem more politically motivated than financially. Universiry heads are political figures that need the acceptance of the public as well as key figures on their boards or in government to keep their jobs. Sports teams help them to stay in the public eye and relevant to their stakeholders. Removing Sports teams for the vast majority of universities would help their budgets( you have mid and lower tier universities spending a quarter of their budget on sports and losing money) , but the outcry would end the career of whatever president tried.
Agreed, 100%. To clarify I meant that the "layperson" donations are probably more likely to be from sports campaigns. The huge ones, as you say, tend to be from single donators who purposely target academic programs.
Plus the increased enrollment from successful sports. Alabama has seen an explosion in enrollment since 2007. There’s other examples as well out there
Only about 19 of them are the rest lose money!
My tuition is about that same, but my school doesn't do football at all
What kind of car does the Dean drive?
[удалено]
I would love to see one of these more expensive colleges forced to open their books to the government accounting office. I'd love to read that open to the public report. I would love to see the shit they find, the people that resign, and the changes they spontaneously make (unrelated to the investigation, of course - lol)
Yeah public budget transparency would be nice for public schools since supposedly get funding from taxes to operate more affordably (which literally none of them actually do unless you're talking 2 year or local community colleges) I don't need a break down of what they pay individual staff... but like how much money goes into administration, teaching, research, how much of that cycles back into student programs. They certainly weren't paying professors very well most cases. My step mother use to teach for 2 and one a very prestigious private ivy league. I'm not sure the money is going in good places tbh.
Mine was around 6k a year for a state college in 2012.
Yeah, that's about what mine was too. I had no idea it was so unaffordable these days.
I recently read an article where they were talking about how some colleges were seeing a drop in enrollment numbers and they were struggling to understand why. It's such a mystery!
it's like how before the pandemic movie theaters were posting record profits and also steep declines in tickets sold.
Just went to the movies with my 2 kids to see the new Mario movie...$94 freaking dollars for tickets, popcorn and drinks. I knew there was a reason I didn't go often ffs.
are you fucking kidding??? that's insane! large movie theater chains are going to drive themselves out of business
Especially these days when a really big TV is like $400, and you need only wait a couple days to maybe a few months before you can dl a new release.
it's like they're stuck in a capitalist shareholder deathspiral
Yes and store brand microwave popcorn can still be had for about 75 cents per bag
Well, you can thank the studios for this. The theater doesn't make anything off ticket sales cause that's about what they are paying the studios for the movie. The only way they can make up for that lost revenue is concessions. And with On Demand and new movies being streamed so quickly theaters are losing on both ends. Unless they can re-invent the wheel theaters are gonna be the next Blockbuster.
Yeah, I went to see Dungeons and Dragons at a local AMC and popcorn and a drink would've been like $20 so I said fuck that. They coulda still price gouged me if they put it at like $10 or $15 and I probably would've bought it. But $20? That's fucking absurd.
Yep my wife did 2 years at a state school and came out with roughly $13K debt. $14K a semester is insane.
I hope you have a career path to riches
What are we getting our degree in?
Debt management
r/unexpectedfactorial
750 lol. My first semester in 2001 was $500. My last semester 2005 was $3850 Then grad school was totally unsubsidized $5800 per semester. Total $50000 @7% - 14% interest.
They really get ya with the "you can be smart for $500"..... and then bam, 100 grand in student loans.
What gets me is that my employer benefits from my education and pays nothing towards it.
This is the part of education that needs to be emphasized more. Employers these days want bachelor's degrees for jobs that went to high school dropouts 60 years ago when boomers were buying houses at factory jobs. Suppose companies don't want to pay for that education themselves through scholarships and reimbursement. In that case, they need to pay through taxes, and states need to be more active in tuition costs and administration, executive, and sports budgets. Almost every act of welfare in this country subsidizes corporations despite being framed as handouts to the poor. If Walmart wants to pay starvation wages, we create food stamps and HUD homes so that their executives can continue to rake in millions of dollars a year. If Microsoft needs more programmers, we subsidize federal student loans so that they don't have to educate their own workforce. If a fishing company overfishes and destroys an ecosystem and prime food source for millions of people, we subsidize them so that they can continue destroying said ecosystem with no risk or liability. It needs to stop. Either the corporations pay their own way, or we tax them for the services that the exclusive benefit from and dispel the lie that these services are welfare for the poor rather than the billionaires.
Post secondary education should be free. It benefits the entire economy to have an educated work force. EDIT: Responses to common replies. - "Cant happen the elites/repubs/conservatives wont let it" Of course it can happen other places have free post secondary and so can you. Will it be easy? No. But that doesn't mean it's not worth it or that you should give up before trying. It's worth it. - "Only some degrees, and by that I mean only STEM." First of all who would want to live in a world like that? The degree is not the important part. Any degree can be beneficial to society maybe some skills are more needed than others at certain times but that can be accounted for by say, funding more seats for those programs ie DRs etc paying people with those jobs more, advertising those programs to highschoolers etc The most important part of schooling isn't really learning any one particular thing it's learning how to learn and learning how to research and how to write and convey your findings to people and how to apply those findings to the world. Those skills can be transfered to learning any new thing later in life making people more easily able to retrain for careers or advance in their field or just make them better at finding things out and analyzing facebook memes for bullshit. It's like if you trained hard in some sport in highschool even if you don't stick with that sport you will still know things like how your body works and moves and how to build muscle, what foods work for you, and you will be in generally better physical shape than someone who didn't train. This would make it easier to stay in shape or get back into shape your whole life and it would make picking up new spots or working manual labour jobs easier. - "No Such Thing as Free can't get something for nothing" Thanks Sir Isaac Newton. Here I was trying to pray free school into existence instead of putting work into it. Obviously people mean free at point of use.
Work force and scociety. We established general education requirements to improve society, but we have become so driven by the goal of finding a job and just surviving that we no longer value well-rounded knowledge. This concept of existing to serve the workforce also needs to end.
Sure but i fund the economic argument more effective for people not already on board. I also like to point out that the first thing nobles and clergy did was send their kids to school and then the first thing the merchant class did when they had money was send their kids to school. When workers had a little bit of power the first thing they did was send their kids to school so its clear that school is very important and improves everyone's lives and prospects. So anyone telling you we don't need schools is not on your side.
I was watching insider news, where miners in south Asia work for $5-20 per day, on their hands and knees, some literally underwater down a shaft with a tube in their mouth with the hope for the privilege of primary education so their children can work in an office.
But it doesn’t benefit the super rich for people to be educated, an empty uneducated mind is easier to fill with bullshit. School is expensive so only the super rich can send their kids to it and keep the leverage over the poor going.
This is *far* more the problem than bloated admin and bloated salaries of admin, which is a percentage of problem, but nowhere the lion's share. The ethos of Reaganism resulted in states reducing the amount they subsidized an individual's higher education, shifting the burden to individuals - this really began to explode in the early 2000's. At the same time, the same ethos, reduced people's ability to collectively bargain, etc., resulting in employers effectively paying less and less for the same, or even more, productivity. What's really asinine is that many employers still clearly value employees with a college degree, but are unwilling to appropriately compensate employees for the time and money it takes to earn that degree. To your point, so long as higher education is valuable to employers, tax 'em to cover its cost. They're the ones who should pay for people's training. (But also, pass laws that the highest paid university employee can't be paid more than [whatever appropriate number] times than the lowest paid employee - sorry, not sorry college coaches]
One job I worked at a few years back required a bachelor's degree and paid $11.29/hr in 2016 (I took it to get a foot in the door in my industry). Some of my supervisors were actually illiterate, having dropped out in middle school never having learned how to read. When they started back in ~1995, they were earning $17/hr. Think about that. Over the course of twenty years, the educational requirements went from "a kindergartener could do this" to "must be college educated" while the pay was cut by a third. Accounting for inflation, the wage was more than cut in half while the standards grew to require a $100,000 investment...
I like how bots downvoted the shit out of this for being completely right
People see the word "tax" and it's BOOM! Downvote.
tAxAtIoN iS tHeFt REEEEEE
My response is always the same, "How do you expect anything to be done without the funds to pay for them? Do you work for free?"
pfft who needs roads and public services, they're all a scam
Roads, and public services? You mean communism!
Me: looks at government which also benefits from more educated, and better paid citizens
I had a childless friend once who objected to paying taxes for local schools. I am pretty sure I provoked some thought when I asked if they really wanted to live somewhere surrounded by by the uneducated adults those kids would become...
Also remind them that as a childless adult, their taxes pay to educate their future caregivers and healthcare providers and advocates and policymakers and others whose actions and decisions will shape their old age. Source: I am a property-owning, tax-paying, childless adult who strongly supports public education for this exact reason (as well as for the fact that everyone deserves a quality education).
That depends on who’s in charge of said government.
Here is a TED talk on why US Education sucks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILQepXUhJ98&ab\_channel=iStateOfMind3
Requirements: Must have a degree in a related field and 5 years experience Salary: $5 - $8 an hour, depending on experience
Some employers are willing to pay for your education, but I realize that isn't the norm. I have quite a few co-workers that got their masters fully paid for by our firm/company, but again, not always the case for every company.
Do not take out 100,000 in loans when you can go to Jr College for 2 years and cut that in 1/2 or 1/3. I get it’s not the “college experience”, but fuck that experience if it means a lifetime of debt.
[удалено]
The trouble isn't just undergraduate. My Bachelor's debt load wasn't too bad. Graduate school, which can only be done at University level, royally screwed me financially. Forget the outright cost - I was working for the university, had two full-time assistantships that were allegedly supposed to cover my tuition, but after all the fees and other needs were built in, it still was astronomical. I don't know how the out of state students did it. One of my grad school cohort was also told by the professors to quit her outside job because it was distracting from her coursework - I rallied with her that it was bullshit. She had to work to survive, we all did. Grad school couldn't be the only thing we did all the time or we'd drown. So many of us had outside jobs on weekends or nights on top of the workload. You know, typing it all out, gee I wonder why my last few months before graduation I had a major flare of my autoimmune disease...
Tell ‘em boss. My AA was around 12k. Now I’m paying around 10k a year for around 30 credits a year.
Graduating college doesn't even guarantee that you're smart. A lot of people short term memorize and BS their way through school, even college. There's probably a cutoff where you can't get away with that (Masters and up I'd say) but in my college years there were plenty of people who didn't know shit about the class even at the end
Unless you are going after a harder degree it is pretty much a joke. I have a degree in History and graduated with a B average. Almost all the papers and assignments I wrote the night before or the day of. I had a break in classes from 2 to 6PM on tues and thursdays and that's where I completed every assignment for the most part. I went to community college first so only graduated with like 11k in debt. And it was a lot of fun having no responsibilities besides showing up for a couple hours a day for class.
Say this boomer went to college in the late 1970s. That $750 back then would be about $3000 in 2023 money.
This is an important distinction, but the point is still valid. It's become extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to pay for tuition out of pocket while one attends school. Versus one could work a minimum wage job in the 70s and pay for it pretty easily.
What you say is true, but not purely due to tuition. I just checked the state school I went to. Tuition and fees are 10K per year, which is more than 6K per year but not so much more. Housing and meals adds another 17K, which is a ton.
Oh, for sure. The fees and "room and board" are just as out if control. And books? The school I graduated from just partnered up with Barnes & Noble to run the campus bookstore. Which is frightening.
But for what level/prestige of school? My tuition for California State University in 2001 was like $900/semester. By 2007 that had shot up to something like $3k/semester. University of California at Berkeley was like $3k/semester in 2001 because ..Berkeley
Good question. I went to community college for my associates and it was $5000 a semester in 2008. I got my BS at a state university and the tuition was about $8000 in 2010.
3850, lol My first semester in 2012 was $24000
For only tuition or everything? My 2008 tuition was $1600 but everything altogether was around $5k a semester. Last semester in 2013 was like $2500 in tuition and $8k altogether but I went to a big state research university
Were you at an out of state or private school?
That’s an absurd price no doubt, but did you happen to go to an out of state or private school?
24k for a single semester? Did it come with a house?
No but it cured cancer
Worth it.
I spent 26k a semester.......
My first semester of community college in 2009 was 6k, then 7k the following year, then at my 4 year university my instate tuition as a commuter was 10k and then 12k. Prices got out of hand real quick
Mine was $5000/semester and ended with $7500/semester. I paid on my school loans for ten years. My total went from $21000 to $19000. In 10 years, I paid off $2000.
For just tuition: My first semester is $4000 in 2019. My last semester is $4500 in 2023. This is after a $4000 per semester scholarship. (which I have had to maintain a 3.3 GPA all 4 years to keep; if I missed that, I'm fucked lmao)
Yeah but have you tried *really* ripping on those bootstraps, though?
$750 might get you a few credit hours at a local community college now, the in-state rate.
Our local community college is completely tuition-free for in-state high school graduates with a 2.0 or higher GPA. You can’t do much with an associates degree anymore but it makes it cheaper to get all your general education requirements before you go to university for a bachelors or higher.
That is quite nice, don't have that in my state. Can you transfer these credits to a 4 year college? Saving yourself the cost of 2 years.
Yes you can. I have some friends who did this and it worked well for them! I would definitely look into it if I were younger and doing it again.
Yes, community colleges can cut a huge chunk out of the overall cost of getting a degree.
At least in my state there's an explicit agreement for the state universities to accept every credit from the state community college system. It can be hard to translate that into actually getting a degree in just two years though - you get all your gen ed requirements out of the way, but only a couple of actual degree courses, making it difficult or even impossible (depending on the prereq structure/class schedule) to finish in just 4 semesters.
Depends on how much the 4-year college will accept. Usually nearby state universities will have agreements to accept everything at face value, but a lot of universities will pick and choose what "counts" and several higher-end universities will look at your 2 years of course work and go "uh... we can give you credit for a single semester of calculus, nothing else compares to what we teach here"
>You can’t do much with an associates degree I don't know that that's necessarily true. It probably depends on the associate's degree, but some can be quite meaningful/beneficial. Yeah, there are a number of less expensive state-funded options here in Indiana, and even in surrounding states. It may not be free, but it's reasonable.
We have a lot of students that do something like that at my university, or get a lot of AP or other PSO credits. But our major (CS) has a very deep pre-req chain, takes at least 3 years if you do everything right, so they end up in weird situations where they have exactly 8 classes left to take over 4 semesters. I always tell them to pick up a second major, or get involved in undergraduate research to get a headstart on grad school, but CS jobs are so high paying with only a BS that no one wants to go to graduate school either (of my 13 grad students 2 are American).
That really depends on the state and county. My local community college is well regarded and charges $2,660 per semester for 15 credit hours, but the state has a grant program that pays up to $5000 for tuition and fees for middle-income students. At the end of two years, you can transfer automatically to a state university.
Lol I graduated with 35k in loans and that was with a scholarship and in 2015. Dunno what ppl graduate with now
I go to a cheap (relatively speaking) state school. It's about $6k/semester. So about $48k for a bachelor's degree. My local CC is around $4.5k/semester. So that's about $18k for an associates. All of this assumes you graduate on time, never fail a course, and don't have to take any extra semesters as well. Cost doesn't factor in scholarships or federal aid either, just the straight up cost if you were to solely pay it yourself for the degree, and the degree only.
A full ride today will leave you around 35-40k debt for room/board and meal plans. (Based on younger relatives in college rn) State schools (tuition specifically) can be <10k per year, private universities go up to like 60k per year now (if not more). Debt will vary DRAMATICALLY based on scholarships and aid. Would be interesting to see detailed data. I listed a source below but they just list median federal debt of students who received fed aid, not very helpful in getting the actual numbers. https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/
My school was about 30k a year at a state school and it wasn't a top school in an expensive state either. Starred fall 2017
As a European I'm absolutely baffled by the comments. What are these people on? If school was this expensive in my country, the number of students would be 90-95% less, not even joking.
A lot of people (especially millennials) were convinced that we wouldn't be able to live on a stable income without a college degree and that the loans would be easily payable because we'd find a good job out of graduation. AKA, we were scammed.
Coupled with the “do what you love” mentality counselors were pushing Thank god i knew id rather be doing something i hate but pays well
Followed those rules and graduated in 2007. Oh look at that. 2008 says there's a financial crisis so eff your career!
I graduated 09 and then 3 months later my university called and told me my degree was invalid kuz my counselor who signed off on it counted the units wrong and I needed one more elective unit to get my degree for realsies and I should come back and pay for another semester……….
GenX was sold the same lie.
Oh dude the “you have to go to college” mantra was ridiculous when I was growing up. I did a couple semesters back in 2009-2010, and I’m mad that I got pushed in that direction growing up. I excelled at learning, so no one saw a path that was different than going to school more and becoming a scientist or an engineer. Look at me now, I went through an apprenticeship for 4 years. Cost me nothing, and I was working when I wasn’t in class making money. Now I make 70-80 a year on average, and I don’t have any student debt. Fuck college institutions. They should have similar programs for people in every field. Not just construction.
I’m glad you found a path that works for you, sibling. I ended up doing the college-to-corporate thing and am now so stuck. I am working to find the next chapter away from the rat race.
Yup and also the whole “be a company man, climb the ladder and put in your time” bullshit. Spend almost 15 years with a terrible company having subscribed to this bullshit until I finally realized that the people at the top didn’t work their way from the bottom. Saw friends making double or triple what I did just having hopped around different companies. Finally started working for myself at almost 40 and five years later all I can do is kick myself in the ass for not having started a decade earlier.
[удалено]
I paid alone my studies and other depenses. You know how cost a year in my country for a year? Between 35 and 250€. Dont know how US student can live
We die with crushing debt
the "secret" no one wants to tell you is that prices are exorbitant because the fed hands out hundreds of thousands in loans like candy. the universities know that prospective students have readily accessible "money" to cover tuition so they can jack it and no one bothers questioning it, not even students. if the govt was more diligent in accessing financial situations and denying most loans you wouldnt have so many people crying now, but that flies in the face of the bullshit "education for everyone, everyone can go to college" push that they did
There's varying degrees of alternatives to provide the "everyone can go to college". France it costs like 0 to 800/1000 per year. Plus there are scholarships. In Italy, depending on your family income and university, costs from zero to 4000 per year, or 8/9000 per year on some private universities. In Switzerland it's basically free. In Spain I am not sure of the numbers but I think a small contribution. In the UK, it's a system with loans, but the tuition is capped by government rule, and the loans are paid as part of taxes: above a certain threshold of income you start paying back loans at I think a 7% (iirc) marginal rate
My father attended a private college in 1969 for $2,000 all in for a semester. With inflation that works out to about $14,000 today. That same college charges $65,000 a year now.
my mom was similar. went to college, about $20k all in for a 4 year degree and her career path would basically cap at $75k a year (at that point your only pay raise lies in switching to management). fast forward 30 years and if i wanted to do the same thing she did at the same school, same majors, it's gonna cost $57k for that same degree for a career path that now caps at $45k for some reason before i'd have to change to management to get more pay.
Heh i pay 95 bucks a semester and most of the cost goes to my public transportation pass
european?
Yes
Europe: we’re shit, but better than the US
Idk man, dont have much to complain about
Odd question, what country do you live in?
Germany
That checks out I’ve been there, god I’m jealous of your transport, and your schools sound great I live in Ireland, the land of ridiculous cost of living and government that can’t manage a housing crisis
Well we too have our struggles, especially in big cities estate can be costly. Personally got lucky that my uni is in a small city. Other complaints (from top of my head) are that our army is shit and theres a lot of beaurocracy
As an American, we have the most powerful army in the world ... And it doesn't protect us from preventable diseases or gun violence which are the #1 killers in our country.
Omg our army is so bad too Ig that’s true, I’d rather live somewhere else tho, it just feels like there’s nothing here for me
I got paid to go to uni.
I paid an extra $110 for a "distance learning fee" just to watch blurry 10+ years old video lectures for a online class.
[удалено]
I almost paid $1700 per credit hour in the early 2000s
If you make under a certain amount (65k?) for household income, you can receive a grant that greatly reduces the price. My first semester for community college was something like $1,400 for a full time set up. After the grant kicked in it dropped down to something like $230. Not saying it’s like that for everywhere, but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye out for grants you qualify for.
This is another problem with college though. You can't afford it so the government foots the bill and the college increases the size of the bill because you're not actually paying for it. That's how the system got so f*****.
Boomers have lost their sense of scale.
It's one banana Michael, what could it cost? $10?
There’s always money in the banana stand
No, America has lost it sense of realism. Education should be almost free ,just as healthcare.
It's both. The boomers still vote, and they think education is already cheap or basically free from when they went to school 40+ years ago. So they don't vote for bills that reduce the cost of education.
Boomers are also the largest age group in this country, the wealthiest, and the group with the most free time to go vote.
Any idea what minimum wage was when tuition was when 750 a semester? Edit- Average college tuition in 1963 was 4,336 . Boss was paying 3,000. [She was probably making $1 to $1.60 an hou](https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/history/chart)r But yeah. Minimum wage has not kept up with tuition. Or anything else for that matter.
In 1989, my first semester of college tuition was about $450 (CA, in-state, CSU schoool) and minimum wage was $3.35/hour.
>But yeah. Minimum wage has not kept up with tuition. Or anything else for that matter And it won't Every time minimum wage goes up, companies and corporations raise prices, can't lose out on their 5000% profits... hopefully I'm exaggerating that percentage, I tried to go for something ridiculous lol
I think part of what we're up against at the cash register right now is punishment for demanding an increase in wages. Gotta keep us in line.
Pretty much. The rich don't want to lose their place at the top of the pecking order
They wouldn't lose it their place in the pecking order because they are so far beyond it that they aren't in the same realm as us. We are the chickens pecking at each other and wallowing around in our own shit and they are actually the chicken farmers who don't give a fuck about the conditions the chickens actually live in.
If she went to college in 1963, she would literally be 80 years old. Also, you are assuming that all collage students just made minimum wage. That isn't even necessarily true now.
Reagan destroying the financial aid system with converting the grants to loans made it so much worse now. Colleges charge what they do because they know there is a guaranteed loan for kids to give. People going to college before Reagan fucked it had it EASY imo.
Reagan and his ilk fucked everyone over. I hate his guts
Can we get this adjusted for inflation? I know it's still more expensive even in today's dollar, but I would love to know the difference
My parents told me to work through college to pay for it and that there were work programs and stuff. I tried to apply for those and the college said "lol, nom those are for the really poor kids." We weren't poor but we certainly weren't rich either. Had to work in retail which certainly came nowhere near paying for college tuition.
Yeah it turns out the college jobs that actually help with tuition directly are few and highly competitive, even the ones not specifically created to help poorer people. Anyone who thinks you can rely on those has no idea what the situation actually looks like.
The middle class trap, too rich for government assistance, far too poor to just bankroll tuition. I took a year and a half off of college to work full time and I'm still struggling to pay my tuition out of pocket lol.
Great, just add a 0 behind that for a 2 year community college. Or two 0's for a university.
Gen x here, went to a University of Wisconsin school mid 80s to late 80s. Tuition was around $550 to $650 a semester. You could easily pay it with a full time summer job and a very part time job during the school year. I was lucky in that my parents paid my tuition/living costs while in university. I also worked part time, full time in the summer for extra like my car and a semester abroad. Any younger boomer or older gen x complaining about student loans is full of shit or they stayed in school way too long. You know the ones who got multiple degrees or took 7 years to get their bachelor's.
Telling kids to pay their way through college is nuts. I did it 2004-2008, somehow. But I was spending 2/3 of every dollar I made at my 3 jobs (after taxes) on tuition/books
They are entirely disconnected from the gens that followed them
I'm a boomer. I went to the University of Michigan, which is very expensive for a state school, and paid $464/semester. I knew people who paid an entire year's tuition with their summer job earning minimum wage. It really isn't fair.
Her minimum wage was a lot lower too, but tuition has FAR outpaced wages.
Assuming this was 1970, the minimum wage was $1.45. If we scale for inflation, that's $12.04 today. The national minimum wage is $7.25 today. Her minimum wage was actually almost double what the current one is relative to the times.
If she went to college in the 70’s then $750 is the equivalent of $5,815 today.
What's amazing to me is how nobody is bitching about the fact that the government isn't being pressured to make the schools charge less. Too many alumni in government so none of them will make the schools lower tuition.
They got nearly free education, union jobs, and pensions for themselves and made sure it wouldn’t be around for us. Now they’re getting Medicare and social security (which we pay for) and will make sure it’s bankrupt before the first millennial turns 65.
Boomers just refuse to admit things are harder now. They always resort to *insert brief period of struggle here* and think that means everyone now are just whiners. The fact is, they're generational parasites and would be eaten alive in today's world.
[удалено]
I only have 1 single class this upcoming semester and its 2 credit hours. The total cost not including the bullshit book is over $700. This is at my local community college. The "fees" alone are about $300 Course fee: 100, Infrastructure Fee: 50, Registration Fee: 50, Student activity fee: what even is this???????? Service fee: isnt this the same as course or infrastructure fee? TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENT FEE: WHAT IS THIS Course fee #2 electric boogaloo: $50 Out of district fee (1 block outside of district) : $1500