This article ignores basic economics. If tuition were "free", (being paid by someone else in other words), the demand for college would increase dramatically and so would the costs.
You fix that by setting entry standards appropriately. Works OK here.
When I went to university, in England in the 80s, not only did I not pay fees but there was a maintenance grant (although well-off parents were supposed to make a contribution to that). Fewer people went to university then than now; it was competitive. One effect was that students felt an obligation to work hard not only because it was in their interests (which as always it was) but also because the taxpayer was paying. One was, in effect, employed by the state, albeit at a subsistence rate. Today's students often have difficulty reconciling "I'm paying for this so I'm entitled..." with "in order to learn I'm obliged...".
I concur wholeheartedly.
I wish that more schools WOULD 'comp' students whose combined profile places them at "highly likely to graduate" because the pricing in the US is now at a point where a good many of those students are being forced to sign on to a life of basically debt servitude to ATTEND college.
The "best bargains" in higher ed now-- setting income levels aside momentarily and just looking at sticker pricing-- are often 10-20K annually. That is resident tuition and very bare-bones living expenses.
People who are at/above the federal poverty line do not get much help meeting those expenses outside of need-based scholarships, and the majority of THOSE are small dollar values-- $500 here, $1000 there, and often non-renewable, so each year is another round of stressfully cobbling together monies.
My family is NOT wealthy by any means, and our "estimated EFC" is between 16K and 30K annually, depending upon the institution's own calculations. Realistically, we can afford to write checks
nearly up to that lower boundary-- by being very careful indeed and paring expenses. But there's simply no feasible way that we COULD come up with 30K a year without selling our house.
Okay, so assuming that a college costs 50K annually...
that's a gap of at least 20K (assuming that we COULD write a check for 30K). DD doesn't qualify for a Pell grant, barely qualifies for work-study (say, $1000), and then there is another $5500 in subsidized student loans annually. The rest? UNSECURED debt, either hers or ours.
It's fairly grim, honestly. If you aren't a low-income household living in a low-cost-of-living area, or a VERY high income one (top 2%), this is a serious problem.
We estimate our out of pocket cost for DD to attend undergrad at one of the nation's "best buy" public universities is going to run about 30K, unless she gets lucky and pulls in a 4y renewable "presidential" full-tuition,
merit-based scholarship-- the institution offers about 60 of those a year to the top students in their incoming class of 4000 students. We estimate her odds of that are about 25-40%.
And she will be living
at home. We've got something close to that amount saved for this purpose-- which places us in a much better position than many families of similar income and SES.
There's simply no way that we COULD cover the costs of a place like HMC or MIT without debt (unacceptable to us personally) or a second working parent (which was the plan).
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