I went to B.U. back when it was only $30k/year for tuition/room/board. They used to charge the rich kids with low grades full price, and then gave us poors with better marks tons of financial aid and scholarships (I got out with only $18k debt since I worked 30hr/week while in school; woot!).
Then they built fancy new sky-rise luxury dorms, a new athletic center with olympic-sized pools, tons of other amenities not needed for education, and now the price is closer to $70k/year.
I blame the universities for this crisis as much as anyone else. Pay the profs, buy lab equipment and books, and let the kids enjoy living with a stranger in a shoe-box.
“College Financial Plan, Using Income and Asset Shifting Strategies to Increase Your Financial and Merit Aid and Lower Out of Pocket Tuition Expenses.”
In other words, a bootstrap. A verrrry, verrry fancy bootstrap.
My family is by most measures rich. Not obscenely, we have to work, but we’re very well off. This is almost entirely on the back of my father-in-law working very hard in the now shuttered steel mills of West Virginia and my mother-in-law investing very wisely to pay for my wife’s education all the way through medical school. They gave us a huge leg up and my wife working hard continues that. I fully expect to pay 100% out of pocket for my son’s education from pre-school all the way through post-graduate work if he chooses that path. It’s paying forward the gift given to us. It’s the right thing to do. I have nothing but scorn and disrespect for those in similar or better situations as I not doing the same thing.
As a previous non-rich kid with no college savings (parents gotta pay the bills) and 3 other siblings in college at the same time, I salute you for your level-headedness. Now with a well paying job and 2 kids graduating HS in a decade I want to support them as much as possible too, be it college, trade-school, or something else.
College tuition is fucking broken. When my son went to college I made enough to not qualify for much aid but not enough that those monthly payments didn’t really hurt.
And yet, I didn’t use what means I have to take aid from families less fortunate than myself. A broken system doesn’t excuse being shitty to our fellow humans.
I’d be right there with you, if these programs weren’t capped, but they are. That means every one of these people who took an undeserved slot kept someone out who needed it more.
@Mangochin
You may want to look into how those public universities are spending money. In Mass they employ more than half of the highest paid state employees. They have spent over four billion dollars on new buildings, and they have dozens making over one million dollars per year before perks. All while raising tuition costs on poor students. They are just as culpable for the awful trend as anyone else, and the taxpayer writing them bigger cjhecks would and has done nothing to alleviate student costs.
A lot of that is a function of access to easy money from the student loan industry. Much like how wild mortgage loan-writing spurred construction booms regardless of actual demand for housing.
Actually the schools started relying on the easy student loan money because of the lack of taxpayer checks coming in.
Or—just spitballing here—maybe all public colleges should be free in the first place regardless of how much money a student’s parents have in their bank accounts.
And if you were a selfish prick who cut off your son at age 18 I’d hope he’d still get those opportunities, because a student’s success shouldn’t depend on their parents’ ability or willingness to pay for an education.
Poor and/or (especially) black, but use a fake address so your kid can stand a chance? Jail and forced loss of custody for you.
Rich and (most probably) white? Create a legal fiction and save $$$ all while your child takes cash intended for someone else. Technically you no longer have custody, but realistically, nothing has changed. Insist that someone who gives a false address is a heinous cheater who deserves to be behind bars.
What’re the penalties for tax fraud again? Every such claimant ought to be referred for IRS review. Every parent who surrendered custody must also not claim selfsame kids as dependents. Reciprocity my friends. Reciprocity.
Lake county voted overwhelmingly for Obama and then for HRC, and the County Board has a slight Democratic majority. Deerfield used to be famously reactionary (painfully, when I worked for Democratic candidates there), but District 10 is now a fairly safe Congressional seat for Democrats. The University system was gutted by downstate Republicans, by Bruce Rauner (who in 2014 won in every district outside of Chicagoland, mainly in the south), and by Hawaii transplant Linda Lingle (sorry about that).
