Trade jobs might not have the status as someone with a degree but you can make just as much if not more on some cases.

The early 80s were when the US govt under Reagan switched its emphasis from grants to loans. Suddenly colleges didn't have to look to the US govt for funds anymore; they could get students desperate for a better life on the hook.

Before Reagan, states covered approximately 65% of the cost of college, and the fed govt covered another approximately 15%. Now, though, those numbers are reversed, as students cover approximately 80%.

I wonder how much the income of a college graduate has outpaced that of a high school graduate in the same amount of time?

This is the total cost, not just tuition.

>(tuition, fees, room & board, books/supplies)

[removed]

The state component is really important. The schools I've been able to find the data, the actual cost of instruction per student has risen very close to inflation since the 1980s. States have all increased their education budgets every year, because you can't decrease education spending, but not nearly as fast as inflation and increasing enrollment. Schools have to raise tuition to make up the difference.

Somewhere along the way, the political view of college changed from 'a well educated and highly skilled population benefits the whole state' to 'college education is a personal privilege.'

[deleted]

it is unshakeable debt. So every lender in the world wants in. Plus every corporation in the world dreams of life long wage slaves. And they get them drowning in debt even before they enter the working world. If that is not porn for an economist or CEO I don't know what is.

Because of government-garanteed student loans. Plus a lot of american colleges are more resorts than schools now. Hey,top 10 colleges with waterparks!

We need to rethink that higher education should be like now that everyone has basically access to all of the world's knowledge in their pockets. Universities make no sense to me anymore.

• in countries where education is not desired *

https://www.clevelandfed.org/publications/economic-commentary/2012/ec-201210-the-college-wage-premium

These data show that the college wage premium increased rapidly through the 1980s and early part of the 1990s, rising from 40 percent to upwards of 70 percent. Since the late 1990s, the premium has experienced a much slower rate of growth, drifting at times below and above 80 percent.

I remember that time. Reagan was surrounded by people who thought that way. They viewed anyone who needed help to become educated as a drain on the system. It was amazingly myopic.

It's a great system. For the schools and the lenders.

Not so much for the borrowers.

You can make a good living with trades, rivaling degree programs, however, they take s toll on the body, and your earnings potential is less than with a degree.

[removed]

>everyone has basically access to all of the world's knowledge in their pockets. Universities make no sense to me anymore.

Okay. Call me from the moon.

So why isn't anyone taking on Big College?

Not as unshakable as one might think for private student loans. Granted that'll need some years to propagate to the rest of the district courts.

Federal student loans are owed to the government itself and handled via private/public sector servicers, banks aren't chomping for those though since there's no real in for them to begin with.

Dude, my son is 20 making $120k because he got his CDL and drivers are in high demand. Fuckin schools were on his ass about college but he just wants to drive. Good for him.

ya don’t say? I’m the ground meat in that curve

started actually before that, with Nixon, if you can believe that

“If you borrow money for school, you pay it back just like I did and all my friends did.”

I’ve made 317 payments since I graduated college and still owe approximately 54% of how much I initially borrowed. Granted at one stretch of time I had to hold off payment Bc a disability and bankruptcy but you know… no big deal.

I was too young to remember. But I have no reason to doubt you. I just remember what Reagan did.

These self-focused people. Sacrificing us all at the altar of the rich.

>rivaling degree programs

Greatly depends on the degree. They are not created equal.

Because the government has backed almost every college loan so colleges can continuously raise prices without worrying about reducing demand.

Yeah, don't get me wrong I believe we need to encourage more people to enter the trades and general blue collar work. But we also shouldn't pretend is just as cut and dry as just earnings. My best friend from high school didn't go to college and worked for FedEx right off the bat. He paid his dues and ended up making really good money for a while, but we're both in early '40s and he's got a myriad of health problems and it's getting harder and harder for him to want to work while my work is steadily getting easier in life. I feel like the hardest I ever worked was in my late twenties to mid-thirties, both workload wise and the mental stress of proving myself... Since then it's been smooth sailing, I would be glad to continue doing what I'm doing for about as long as possible.

My friend is not a great example oh how to do things because he's lived beyond his means and perhaps miscalculated or just chose to ignore the reality that is kind of work would get tougher as he got older. However, I've got an uncle who retired with the post office early, and lived very modestly, invested his money, etc. He has a hell of a good retirement for a guy who never got a formal education. I honestly don't see my friends retirement after FedEx to be that great based on things he talks about.

Times have changed.

I have a cousin who did this and earned enough money to pay for an advanced degree this way. Now he has a great job teaching at a university overseas.

[deleted]

The market regulating itself at its best.

That's not the reason.

Higher education is the classic example of Baumol's Cost Disease. There's very little productivity gain in higher ed - you have the same x students in a classroom being taught by an instructors as you had 50 years ago. But other parts of the economy have seen substantial productivity gains, meaning that other industries pay a lot more for the skills/education that a university professor has, which means universities need to pay way above normal costs to get professors.

Apple brings in nearly $3M in revenue per employee - including retail workers. They can afford to pay hundreds of thousands per year for a PhD engineer, which means a university needs to pay hundreds of thousands. Meanwhile, the productivity of that engineering professor hasn't changed at all, so tuition goes up faster than inflation because everyone else gets more from that worker relative to inflation.

The availability of college loans isn't a factor at all from the university side. What is a factor in public education is the degree to which states have cut off funding.

There's another challenging dynamic to understand. A public university is only subsidized for a specific number of in-state students. The university can't add more students than that number because the state won't pay for them. But the university can add more out-of-state students because they pay their full tuition, and the state pays none of it. This is actually good for state residents over a longer scale because out-of-state (usually foreign) students end up paying for the growth - new buildings, etc. which the state can then make available to in-state students by increasing their enrollment limit. But residents in the state feel like the out-of-state students are stealing seats from the in-state ones. They aren't, the university has no ability to change that (the legislature does, though). But it also means that if you have a scholarship and don't care if you are in the in-state or out-of-state tuition pools, the university can't take you in an out-of-state seat if you are in-state. If you leave the state, the school can take you.

Federal college for all legislation would *dramatically* reshuffle the playing field for in-state students for the better. But out of state students getting into prestigious public schools would get a LOT harder.

Retired uni administrator.

The more I learn about Nixon and Reagan, the more I hate them

Because of democrats pushing "guaranteed" government loans for tuition. Colleges exploit, raise tuition, guaranteed loans go out regardless of cost, students bare the brunt of the corruption. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Democrat students somehow blame Republicans for not voting for "free tuition" LOL!

> Retired Uni administrator

Sounds like most administrators I’ve had to deal with

It's pretty obvious that it's one of the reasons driving up cost. You can't have the government guaranteeing these loans and it not affect price at all- that's just basic supply and demand.
Also, as a former college administrator you know exactly where that extra tuition money is going, and it's certainly not to the professors. I don't know where you worked, but I've never heard of a professor making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars off salary alone. Most of the professors with marketable expertise get money from research grants and consulting. Your point about engineering and tech jobs causing salaries to rise is completely untrue, and thats why professors are bailing out at record rates for private industry. Their salaries at university can be in the six figures, but most don't go much above that mark (of course, there are exceptions). Wages actually haven't risen that much for the average professor since the 1980's.
It's the administrators who are making in the mid six to seven figures, and we have more of them per school than ever. But since you're a former administrator, you must be aware of that, no?

[deleted]

I also just want to call this out as I do on related posts.

After defaulting on student loans for 9 months, the US Dept of Edu buys them from Sallie Mae (large lender) and puts on huge amounts of interest. If you still default, they sell it to collections agencies, ones that don't give a shit about your income, that add even more interest.

The US will never have free upper education because poor people borrowing money is profitable to them.

And before anyone gets shitty about it being my own fault, I knew nothing about finance and never had money growing up. When it was offered, I took it. They didn't ask me to talk to anyone about it and actually wanted me to get my mom to take out a loan for me. I still owe 50k on 24k worth of loans from 2007 and earlier.

Do both, hedge your bets, get a trade straight out of high school, live life, find your story, complete college with a focus and tenacity learned from your trade. Enjoy life.

100%. I work at a hospital as a Sterile Processing Tech III and my base pay is $19.56. I majored in Anthropology and would not have any kind of related job had I gotten my bachelor's.

[deleted]

Are you just paying the minimum? You need to get more aggressive with those payments.

the other question is how has inflation outpaced gov inflation numbers over the last 40 years.

Serious question: Has financial aid also increased over the same time period? Nobody ever seems to include that in their analysis. Its a pretty big part of how many pay their college tuition, especially at public universities.

Agreed. I have no data on the faculty vs administrative ratio from 50 years ago to today, but at my college just in the last decade or two, the number is pretty telling, and is a peek into where that increased tuition money is actually going. I can assure everyone that it isn’t dumped into faculty salaries!

And it's amazing (and terrifying) how many Americans seem to be ok with it.

I love the fact that it's the government's fault, like they threatened the universities to rise tuitions, and not the greedy university administrators

I think on America we only care about feeding the college machine. If you are in high school and don't plan on going to college, the guidance counselor has nothing for you. I went to high school in both the USA and in the UK. In the UK it's 5yrs, and in your 4th year you start going to apprenticeships a few afternoons a week where you start to learn a trade, car body repair, brocklayer, plumber, etc.. after 2yrs of that, you finish school, and they take you on as an apprentice.

I wonder how much upward pressure on price the increase in enrollment causes. I imagine the percentage of women going to college has shot through the roof since 1980.

[removed]

“They could get students desperate for a better life on the hook.”

Replace students with homeowners and life with house, and this is what I think is happening in the real estate industry. Agents selling buyers a pipe dream of being able to afford more expensive homes than they truly comfortably can.

Agreed. I live to see public funding in comparison to tuition increase.

This is what happens when Governments try to make things more affordable.

As late as 2000, there was a note posted on the women's room of my uni's chemistry building reminding men that it's a co-ed campus (for 40 years) and men's rooms were 1 floor up or down - they'd swapped alternate floor restrooms rather than add women's rooms. The costs of increased enrollment and diversity don't show up in instruction, but in physical plant, construction, and elsewhere. So does the increasing luxury of campus accommodations. Compared to the 80s, every building now seems to have its own coffee shop; quad dorm rooms are virtually unheard of; exercise facilities; crafting/maker spaces; etc.

Those things definitely go into tuition, fees, and residence costs, which is why (I think) it's important to separate the actual cost of instruction. One might imagine, as powerpoint and smart boards have replaced overheads and chalk, that instructional costs would inflate to accommodate all the new technology, but that doesn't seem to be so. At least in the few places I could find instruction itemized. Faculty salaries (broadly) have just kept pace with inflation.

Growing enrollment has really allowed state governments to mask their slow but steady per capita defunding of higher education.

It's politically unpalatable. Spending on children and the elderly is very difficult to challenge. You have to cut from the working class even if it makes a lot of sense to resume student debt payments and to cut the loan budget.

If you look at the number/ percentage of people that pursue a post secondary education it has increased dramatically since 1960. I’d be curious to see if the grants would have been sustainable as they were.

[removed]

[deleted]

I have a really good plumber, he's been working on my home and rental property for over 10 years and I trust the hell out of him. We've traded life stories and he's made the same comment about apprenticeships, that is how he learned the basics.

His opinion is but the problem is on both sides, quality youngsters these days aren't that interested in doing something like that but also most successful plumbers don't want to bother because there's not much long term incentive. That used to be that you could train up a young guy and he would be an asset to you for years until he was ready to be in his own business but nowadays everybody wants instant gratification.

I can't disagree, I went through a corporate banking training program myself and by the time it ended I was already applying for other jobs with my new and improved resume rather than wanting to stick around. My old bank's training program still exists but it's really been reduced to a one week crash course rather than a month out of state.

He's told me his own son is a teenager and not showing much aptitude for college life and says he'd like to follow his dad's footsteps. Says he is torn because he'd love to trade up his son but only if his son puts his best foot forward, just like he's also willing to fund his college education but it would piss him off to watch his son just party it up and graduate with an easy degree.

Not saying shenanigans aren’t going on, but one thing that always gets left out of these posts is how much more it cost to operate a college than 40 years ago. IT infrastructure is stupid expensive to build and maintain.

It's important to note that college tuition isn't going up because they're being greedy jerks. It's going up because the government subsidized education heavily during the cold war, out of fear that the Russians were going to outpace us in space and with technology. Our current prosperity is a result of that investment.

Over the decades, the federal and state governments have cut these subsidies, down from 75%+ to 10-15% for many institutions. Schools are struggling (state school budgets are public for your review), and it's not because the professors and staff are living large.

This feeds into the student debt explosion, and why it's not a fair comparison to suggest that a 60-year-old having paid for their subsidized education is the same as a 25-year-old swimming in debt.

Housing (land ownership) is an entirely different, but more fundamental, issue. See Henry George.

Most trade jobs I worked would require a lot of overtime to make what I do as a graduate and none of them had benefits.

>Trade jobs might not have the status as someone with a degree but you can make just as much if not more on some cases.

Any Foreign country positioning themselves to compete with the US in the next 50 years would have to love this line of thinking. A country that prioritizes trades over college education will not be able to compete with China(for example)

I'm not saying to prioritize trades over a college education. I'm saying it's an option many people overlook. Overall, we need a balance of high, mid, and low level workers.

Thank you for your incredibly insightful comment. Absolutely life-changing.

I think the college model we have is all about sales, and selling the college experience, when it should be about getting the skills to fill a position in business...somewhere. All the other ancillary football and basketball stuff is nice, but why am I paying for that? When the highest paid state employee is the football and basketball coach, there's a problem.

All those new deans and administrators aren't free! I read somewhere that Stanford, for example, as more administrative staff than actual students.

Time to turn off the money faucet. Stop government backed student loans.

Um I believe public universities and community colleges are part of the government, right? Likely taking direct orders from the government banks on how to help the banks maximize revenue. But they've over done it. Bet they never imagined a growing movement that questions if going to college is even worth it anymore. Many schools are seeing declines in enrollment.

Except that public education doesn't set its own price. The legislature does. And if you look at the difficulty of getting into many schools (median GPA of incoming students at my campus was a 4.2) that suggests that tuition is priced well *below* demand. We had 120,000 application for 4,000 seats. We could have doubled tuition and still found enough qualified students. Clearly we were not responding to market dynamics. College loans *should* cause universities to expand because they make college more affordable. The state doesn't have a profit motive here. They do have an educated workforce motive, so their drive is more students completing degrees, not more profit from students, because there are no profits from students. Not even at privates. Their endowments don't come from excess tuition but from donors.

I worked at a UC. So top tier research university. We absolutely paid faculty hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially in market competitive disciplines. I've been involved in retention pay increases of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The professor does not get salary in that way off of grants. They can build in 3 months of salary into a grant (most faculty have 9 month appointments) and at some institutions can use a grant to buy out their teaching. But in most cases the salary is coming out of the larger pool of money of state subsidy, tuition, grant overhead, and external funding sources. In the case of medical faculty, there is also usually a clear split between the teaching institution and a hospital/clinic.

And you're right that the faculty aren't the sole driver of that inflation, but they also aren't the sole source of rising costs. A blackboard and a bunch of tablet chairs are no longer adequate for teaching. We record lectures, transcribe them for accessibility, we have large technology budgets and support around instruction. Lab costs have skyrocketed because again, students still take up the same amount of space as they did 50 years ago, but what's in the lab has changed. A basic computer lab is $1000/sq ft to build. A STEM lab is often 5 times that much. It's not enough to give our EEs a soldering iron and a handful of analogue meters like the 1960s, now it's a programmable oscilloscope at $50K per station, because the market these students are going into has also changed. That lab needs tech support, and the harder we run the institution, the more those costs go up. Want to keep that lab occupied 40 hours a week - you'll need at least two techs available to keep the equipment running and the lab configured as needed. You can't have one tech working from 7AM to 10PM 5 days a week. We could run the lab less, but now we need another lab, that's another $5M to build.

Building and securing a semi-public wireless network that spans multiple square miles is incredibly expensive. Universities typically have their own cellular infrastructure as well. How good are the people who do this? Apple used to hire our techs to design and setup their infrastructure for product announcements back when they were operating out of rented facilities. They were the best you could get, and they aren't cheap. But students losing network access in the middle of an exam, or during a class is a bit of a calamity.

And as you saw last night if you watched the coverage, you saw a quite good response to an active shooter. Universities have to now massively overspend on police and training. Classroom costs skyrocket when you incorporate active shooter safety issues into their design, which we now do on all new constructions. Universities also now invest heavily in other emergency planning. When covid broke out, we had N95s. We had shipping containers full of them, because we have fires here, we are prepared for potential chemical and biological attacks, because we are in a high target terrorism area. We have equipment to do search and rescue for a campus of 50,000 people after an earthquake, emergency food and water and all that.

NONE of these things were in budgets 25 years ago when I started. Some is that the safety issues have dramatically increased - guns, fires. Some is that the expectations have changed - earthquakes, etc.

I just retired 2 years ago and I was a pretty high level administrator and made less than 6 figures (cost was over 6 due to benefits) and for some of my time I had to generate my own salary. That's a LOT of administrators. We expanded into community education programs - summer camps for K-12 students, things like that. We hired a bunch of administrators for those programs. Why? Because there was no way to cover the costs of our needed growth without additional revenue. Our administration cost growth was in areas where they were expected to raise their salary. Yeah, you have high level institution administrators, but they aren't as expensive as you might think. If one of those 6 figure salary faculty becomes a slightly higher 6 figure salary administrator, and you hire a 5 figure adjunct to cover their classes while they are administrator, you haven't increased your costs by that administrators salary, just by the delta from their teaching salary plus the cost of the adjunct. Our university had about the same budget as Twitter did have in revenue. What would you expect CEO pay for that company to be? They aren't small organizations.

If you think wages for professors haven't risen that much, it's because of how universities have abused the adjunct system to make it appear that way. Rank and file faculty make good money. Depending on discipline, they make very good money. You don't think doctors at a top research hospital aren't making near 7 figures? They are the faculty.

But IT infrastructure spending effects all industries including those not tripling their costs. In other words, it’s already factored in.

It was a single example, not an exhaustive list. And I clearly said it’s not the full reason. At most schools IT accounts for 5-7% of their operating costs. I just would like to see the rise in operating costs included in a breakdown like this to really see a full picture.

Thanks to constantly updating/expanding tech and tech support for curricula and bloated administrative salaries no doubt.

Its moreso that housing production has dropped significantly since the great recession, its on the way back up but not nearly fast enough.

whatever you subsidize you get more of that, they subsidize loans so loans balloon. earlier they used to subsidize education so we got more of that. it really is that simple.

Hear me out, guys - capping student loans based on the earning potential of graduates with similar degrees could be a game-changer! 💡🎓👨‍🎓 No more crushing debt, no more feeling trapped in a career just to pay off loans. And how about we add some accountability to the schools and the government? Let's face it, no one should be able to rack up $200K in loans for an art degree without government guarantees.

College administrators are just business owners. The students are told it doesn't matter how much it costs, just take out as many loans as you need. Getting that bachelor's degree in liberal arts will pay itself off immediately. Don't worry about the $50,000 in debt. They can raise their prices as much as they want it seems. There's no obligation to actually use any of the increased tuition for the college. They can just keep raising the price and keep raising the administration's salary. At the end of the day it's all about how much money the administrators can make. The actual education, the teachers, the curriculum, is all part and parcel to their money-making scheme.

But you increase the toll on your body, and your chances of serious harm increases immensely.

Furthermore, if you harm your body too much, you become worthless in your field (and this might sound a bit harsh but I’m making a point)

Depends on the trade and you can always start company and hire people. Some college level jobs can be hazardous too.

Are those private loans because that’s 26 years worth and undergraduate federal loans are forgiven after 20 and graduate forgiven after 25…

https://studentaid.gov/manage-loans/repayment/plans

I've been saying this for years. The issue isn't people who want to pay back loans. The issue is affordability, and kids are being told they must go to college if they want a good job. But the absolute lack of oversight has allowed tuition to skyrocket while wages stagnate. My father and I both graduated from the University of Houston. When he went in the mid-90s, classes were $250 each. When I went in the mid-2010s classes were near $700 each. That's an average increase of 9% a year.

For this wondering, my father got his degree in his late 30s.

Don't forget the unnecessary sports programs that provide absolutely no educational value. Over 95% of all college sports programs spend more than they make and are not self-sufficient.

I should’ve clarified: I’ve made 317 payments but my loans are split between subsidized and unsubsidized. So it’s technically only like 150 payments then i consolidated last year. Not enough coffee this morning sorry. So it’s really only like 160 payments I’ve made.

Edit: I’m also a govt employee so I only have 27 more months and they’re forgiven (hopefully) Bc PSLF. But we’ll see

Thank you.

[deleted]