College Costs and the American Dream - Huffington Post

College Costs and the American Dream

This piece further explores what I alluded to at the end of my previous post: if the US hopes to have a strong economic future, we need to get college costs in check.

Students now are questioning whether it is worth it to spend time pursuing a post-secondary education (remember our project from the beginning of the year?).

This means that some students, and predictably more, will no longer be looking for jobs which advance our economy through innovation, but rather will take basic jobs which don't provide our nation with much potential for growth. If this becomes a large enough trend, our future will be in serious trouble.

The article has a great graph which compares the rising costs of things compared to college costs like healthcare and the CPI. Shockingly, while healthcare costs have risen by 300% since 1982 and receive a huge amount of publicity and focus, college costs have gone up 570%.

Who can blame students for giving the whole college thing a second thought?

Plus, there's this statistic: "65 percent of U.S. jobs will require some form of post secondary education by 2020."

That's almost 3/4 of the jobs in the entire nation. If individuals don't have the skills to fill these positions, where will be as a nation?

While I may explore solutions in another post, I am not completely sure what should be done to deal with the rising costs and the insane debt students are taking on. I just hope it's a problem we will seriously address as a nation as soon as possible.

What do you guys think? Is this a serious and far-reaching issue? Or is this just a trend that won't have much of an effect?

How Much Did College Costs Increase After Recession? - The Wall Street Journal

How Much Did College Costs Increase After Recession?

The article overviews a report released by the Dept. of Education which examine how much college costs have risen since the Recession. Generally, the costs have increased for both public and private schools. However, it's interesting to note that while the net cost of a public education increased by an average of $1,100 from 2007/08 to 2011/12, the average increase in the net cost of a private education during the same time period was only $200 (when adjusted for inflation).

However, the truly troubling statistic in the article is that 50% of the nation's colleges and universities are not making enough money in revenue to counter rising inflation. And so the question is, how will this affect the students?

Basically, there are only a few possibilities:

A) Institutions charge more, which hurts the student by costing them more out-of-pocket or increasing their student loan debts (which has nationally topped $1 trillion...)

B) Institutions cut costs by decreasing quality or the amount of services offered, which also hurts students, depending on what is cut.

There are other hypothetical ways which colleges could try to fight inflation. Perhaps schools would stop having school-sponsored housing? Maybe smaller colleges would join together in an effort to cut costs?

Whatever they decide to do, someone is going to lose out, whether the students, the institution, or the professors. The rising cost of a college education isn't just something that matters to college students. It will be an issue that greatly affects the economic health of our entire nation for many years to come.