Like I said upstream of here:
That’s the problem.
You can’t go anywhere to borrow $40,000 to cover room and board for two years while in an unpaid internship, at the end of which you would owe only $40,000 even if you could not get a related job.
But if you want to borrow $350,000 funneled by the feds through a bank and a college to wind up in the same place, they’ll shovel the dollars at you.
I didn’t say it costs nothing. I asked, what exactly does it buy? It certainly would be a good idea to analyze some college budgets and find out what goes where.
Tuition has gone up much higher than the costs of other services (with the exception of health care, which may have some of the same drivers) and not a whole lot of that increase has gone into the pockets of those who are actually doing the educating.
No, the problem is not that different types of education don’t provide equal opportunities for debt; its having education (which benefits society for people to get) require either wealth or debt.
Are you lumping together public and private institutions? Cuz that would be, you know, apples and oranges.
At “public” ones, a huge driver in the rise of tuition costs is the steady withdrawal of state funding, which has shifted the burden of paying for such educated citizens from the state to individuals. At many public schools, it’s become pretty ridiculous to still call them “public.”
It has also meant that professors often spend much more time grant writing than ever before. Some profs end up doing that to the detriment of their work that gets them tenure.
And, I’d guess that this labor probably often falls most often to women in departments, too.
One third of the schools on this list are state schools.
Not to speak for @milliefink, but her point is that although they are “public” they are far less public due to the rising cost of tuition and that’s due to the major drop in public dollars funding these universities, not because of luxuries.
I once taught an American girl who wanted a career in Hollywood as a producer. She went to a trade school and actually learned the technical skills to be a film and TV producer. I think it was a 1-2 year course. She got hired right after she finished and has been working steadily ever since in her chosen field, making good money. People graduate from University taking useless degrees with no marketable skills and once they discover this reality, instead of actually getting marketable skills, they go back to school to expand their useless degree. Then they demand the government pay back their student loans. Insanity.
My nephew is starting his apprenticeship to be a machinist. A company grabbed him as soon as he started the program and basically promised him decades of future employment, the demand is so high for skilled workers. For the majority of people, university is useless and teaches you nothing.
A major problem also is that too many companies demand university degrees for jobs that do not require them and then moan that they can’t find competent workers. Luckily, it seems that more and more companies are realizing this and getting rid of many of these requirements.
In the US (and Canada) the MD is still an undergraduate degree. It’s often required that you have another undergraduate first but it’s still undergraduate. The residency and fellowships are post graduate though.
Technically the MD itself is an undergraduate degree. Although it is more comparable to professional programs in structure. The requirement for residency and fellowships afterwards are the postgraduate program. To be extra confusing MD PhD programs are a mix of graduate and undergraduate programs in one but applications are through the graduate program.
Learning to think and to have a better grasp on things like writing, researching, and making arguments are all useful skills. Understanding a complex world and how it got to be so is critical to modern citizenship. Being well-read and having a working knowledge of art and culture from around the world helps you to understand others and have a great sense of empathy for others. All of that is what you can get out of a university education if you don’t just treat it as “job training.”
We are more than cogs in a machine making money for someone else, which is really a major part of what working is about.
So you think only some people should be allowed to learn critical thinking skills or writing skills?
Getting an education is not just about the bottom line. It’s about learning and growing as a person. One can certainly do that outside of a university, but to act like the things you do learn with a liberal arts education is “not useful” is just right wing horseshit talking points to ensure that the vast majority of people don’t get access to a good university level education and think for themselves rather than just believe whatever lies they are told by the elite class.
It took me 10 years to pay off my loans (after I made partner - at which point I was like ok man, time to pay those loans off). But I made similar choices about living in expensive areas, enjoying life when work allowed it, etc.
I’m glad you like where your current firm and group. I really really like my job and have for the most of the past 25 years, even if I don’t like every minute of every day - especially those minutes late at night or on holidays. But many lawyers don’t and not liking your chosen profession must be even more miserable when you have a non-dischargeable $200k Sword of Damocles hanging over your head.
I try my best to make my group a good place to work within the guardrails of biglaw - but I also try to remember when I see others that don’t pay what I view as enough attention to junior lawyer “care and feeding” that you don’t make partner in a law firm by being a good manager and those people might well be doing their best (even if it’s in my view not good enough).
Some of us have done that. I’ve been on budget committees for my own institution several times over the decades, and have looked at the budgets of dozens of other institutions in the process. Universities fund a lot of services (not just classroom teaching) through a large number of revenue sources, and it is easy to draw conclusions that are way off the mark as a result of looking at the budget through a reductionist lens.
For sure there are some big issues with the way cash flows through many institutions, and some of the things that have become institutionalized in many big American universities raise serious internal ethical questions, but for the most part tuition and other funding sources are spent on things that support the core mission(s) of the campus, and don’t just go to line someone’s pocket or fund frivolous puffery. (Occasionally a campus puts a grifter in charge – we did that once – and then any number of wasteful things can happen, but it is unusual.)
This can’t be said too often. The main value of the work you do in pursuit of an undergraduate major lies in the training in reading, writing, and reasoning you are doing, independent of the nominal subject matter.
The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce puts out regular reports on salary distribution by major, and while some majors do considerably better than others, some of the lowest salaries are for very applied skill-oriented majors, and even majors like Business Management and Administration don’t do much better than general social science and humanities majors.
What nonsense is this? No, unequivocably, an MD is not an “undergraduate degree.” You have to have a college degree to enroll in med school, which is the definition of a postgraduate program
none of this at all
*post-bachelor’s
Sure, this doesn’t include room and board, but neither did your calculation. (Keeping a college looking like a college isn’t cheap.) Also, materials and upkeep for labs, libraries, and faculty research support are definitely a thing.
Further, they might not have elite caché, but budget options exist. Even for the ones with an expensive headline amount there is this:
While an institution like Yale University in Connecticut, for instance, advertises a sticker price of $57,700 for tuition and fees in 2020-2021, the average cost to students last year after receiving need-based grants was around $18,000.
The function of this setup is to soak the rich kids.
Dittoing the objection of others that adjuncts do not make $160K. Here is some data:
An average of $160K is only tenuredfull professors at doctoral granting institutions.
Anyway, now you have some better numbers and sources of costs.
(Associate profs are tenured)
The chart (and article in general) misses the biggest detail that non-academics don’t get, though. Less than 25% of college courses in the US are taught by someone in a tenure-track* position. More courses are taught by lecturers, adjunts, instructors, and grad students. Many of them make <50K, get lousy benefits, and have zero job security. How much a full pressor makes is a misleading stat to focus on considering they make up a very small and declining percent of academia
*(for anyone unfamiliar) a job that has or is eligible to get tenure
Speak for yourself; the actual numbers on that say the opposite. Happiness and satisfaction are higher among college graduates later in life.
