I would apply but I am most likely not qualified. All I have is a lowly bachelors.
College costs
- Thread starter 2005jettatdi
- Start date
Parents often create their own the financial problems by letting their kids go to whatever school they choose and paying for it.
We told our kids they can go wherever they choose but we're only covering tuition and living expenses equivalent to attending the University of Delaware. My daughter was insistent on going to Lehigh...we told her fine, but you'll be staring down the barrel of $80,000+ in student loans. She chose U of D and loved it. Lehigh is an engineering school...she was a bio major.
Went on to Penn Dental to incur student loans probably 5xs the $80k.
We told our kids they can go wherever they choose but we're only covering tuition and living expenses equivalent to attending the University of Delaware. My daughter was insistent on going to Lehigh...we told her fine, but you'll be staring down the barrel of $80,000+ in student loans. She chose U of D and loved it. Lehigh is an engineering school...she was a bio major.
Went on to Penn Dental to incur student loans probably 5xs the $80k.
edyvw
$50 site donor 2026
That is what is required.I would apply but I am most likely not qualified. All I have is a lowly bachelors.
The wealthy and upper 5% are defaulting at accelerating rates, all indications are that they now file more often than their poorer counterparts on a per capita basis.
You can’t run a 1 dimensional economy for very long.
Below is old but it’s exponentially worse now than even a few months ago.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-defaults-from-high-earners-in-hit-to-economy
I paid mine off in February of this year. Only $14,000 in loans. It was tough. I worked extra hours to get ahead of it which made the balance drop off considerably.
edyvw
$50 site donor 2026
Yes, that too! We have family members and friends who are basically addressing their own insecurities by using kids.
Our friends wanted to send their kid to Stanford, and they were so excited, except the kid was not. One day, he just showed up at home and said: I joined the Army.
ERAU, Engineering college, $1251 per trimester, fall, spring, summer A+B.
Included off campus dorm (the cheaper one) and one meal per day (lunch), 5 days per week.
CPI calculator comes out to $4,200 today. Or $12,600 per year.
Off topic note. One of my professors was the N. Korean pilot who defected in a Mig 15 fighter (American name Ken Rowe). He and I got along very well, as he had interest in my various projects.
Included off campus dorm (the cheaper one) and one meal per day (lunch), 5 days per week.
CPI calculator comes out to $4,200 today. Or $12,600 per year.
Off topic note. One of my professors was the N. Korean pilot who defected in a Mig 15 fighter (American name Ken Rowe). He and I got along very well, as he had interest in my various projects.
I teach at two community colleges in SoCal, and the majority of new hiring announcements are for non-teaching positions. Deans of this and supervisors of that.
I think that's the way forward these days. Get enough training or experience to get your foot in the door without going into hock up to your eyeballs, then utilize employee tuition reimbursement for the rest.
I have not seen this since I left a Fortune 500 25 years ago. I have asked my friends and they all say same.
Maybe its just my industry. We do lots of industry specific training - so maybe they don't feel formal courses are worth it.
Meals are part of the dorm cost. They are not free and student can choose to live in the dorm or outside apartment. The meals are catered from big companies like Sodexo and Guckenheimer, just like your office cafeteria. You pay for it just like an apartment and an office cafe / meal plan with number of meals per quarter.
What is your alternative to that?
AZjeff
$50 Site Donor 2023
So the student has no skin in the game but every resident of California does like it or not?
edyvw
$50 site donor 2026
A lot of companies have that, government agencies for sure. That is one way to get people interested in getting a certain job, because nothing says excellent paycheck like an average job in the county.
While everyone is talking trade schools, this and that, no one is going for it. So, there is a lack of knowledgeable workforce period!
edyvw
$50 site donor 2026
Some might say we had a sufficiently skilled workforce when taxpayers subsidized education far more than they do today.
I say make them pay. We can always make things in China.
Community college is much lower cost as they don't have research, sport league program, and a lot of the cost is based on property tax. Instructors are not tenured and can just be master degree, good enough for lower level courses and GE. Also no dorm so much smaller land to maintain, and many students just live at home for 2 years so it is much cheaper.
This is how a real university program should be at least at the lower level.
The tuition costs increase in aggregate
https://edworkforce.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=412173
The results speak for themselves. IMO, if we don't value education, we are handing the future to China.
I remember in the late 70's and 80's when so many young men came back from the military and filled electronics tech classes at West Valley JC. These guys were the lifeblood of Silicon Valley companies. The business and programming classes at DeAnza changed my life.
I support education as a critical investment.
The companies are crying for qualified candidates; they know they have to "make them". After I finally graduated, at the age of 40, my company offered to send me to Santa Clara or Stanford for advanced studies. But I was done...
edyvw
$50 site donor 2026
Research actually pays fornitself. Grants are huge windfall and they fund a lot if things that would otherwise fall onto student. We have a lot of grants with corrections, DHS etc. We take overhead cost. No grant can be implemented unless it also pays for cost of administration to run it. Bt in reality, after we cover cost of running the grant, grant allow us also to cover other costs which would otherwise fall onto student.
Just so we are clear, only 8% of University of Colorado budget are state funds. Everything else university has to make it. People truly believe that state universities are just flooded with state money. Grants for research cover a lot of those costs.
If R1 or R2 university had % of budget like community colleges, there wouldn’t be a pressure to go for grants.
Education is common good. How much we fund it tells a lot about us.
When you account for the mandatory athletic-department fees every student has to pay, every sports program at every uni is in the red without those. The money raised by the sports programs stays within the athletic department and does not benefit the uni as a whole. Some unis have gotten slick and now don't break out these fees.
To make matters worse, many alumni and donors earmark their contributions strictly to a uni's athletic department. T. Boone Pickens was a prime example. He paid big for Oklahoma State's football stadium, which is named for him. He didn't contribute to setting up STEM scholarships for future employees to keep his oil business going. Isn't that odd!
To give an idea of misplaced priorities, when I was taking engineering at Virginia Tech, the state's best engineering school, the engineering accreditation was supposedly endangered at the time due to a lack of class space, which was not being addressed. Yet at the time VT had plenty of money to improve the athletic stadium, expand a major athletic building, and start building a new athletic dorm. Go figure.
About Phoenix University and similar schools, the word is that at a lot of large employers the HR departments routinely throw away or delete job applications and resumes from those who list a for-profit college as the source of their degree. Today's students don't know about this because no one is explaining this and the problem of unaccredited schools to them. Phoenix is accredited, but some others are not, so credits won't transfer to other institutions and nobody in the real world takes the costly degree seriously.
This gets into a pet peeve, which is that we're expecting 17–year-olds to make major life-changing decisions about uni, majors, and debt without adequate guidance. This is how you end up with people going $250,000 in debt getting a degree in philosophy or French literature. High-school guidance counselors are clueless. They tell students such nonsense as, "Get the most expensive education you can, as it will pay for itself," and "It's not what major you take, but what you do with the degree." The counselors aren't discussing useless majors or the inability to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. The kids planning to go to uni have no clue about this stuff, as I've confirmed myself in talking to some people in their 20s.
To go with that, I've seen too many stories online from parents whose kids—often a daughter, but sons do this too—received full scholarships from a state school that would have left them with little or no debt for a sensible degree, but she chose an expensive out-of-state liberal-arts college because she "fell in love with the campus" and "felt right at home there".
So there are some of the answers no one really wants to face about uni costs. Flame away.
To make matters worse, many alumni and donors earmark their contributions strictly to a uni's athletic department. T. Boone Pickens was a prime example. He paid big for Oklahoma State's football stadium, which is named for him. He didn't contribute to setting up STEM scholarships for future employees to keep his oil business going. Isn't that odd!
To give an idea of misplaced priorities, when I was taking engineering at Virginia Tech, the state's best engineering school, the engineering accreditation was supposedly endangered at the time due to a lack of class space, which was not being addressed. Yet at the time VT had plenty of money to improve the athletic stadium, expand a major athletic building, and start building a new athletic dorm. Go figure.
About Phoenix University and similar schools, the word is that at a lot of large employers the HR departments routinely throw away or delete job applications and resumes from those who list a for-profit college as the source of their degree. Today's students don't know about this because no one is explaining this and the problem of unaccredited schools to them. Phoenix is accredited, but some others are not, so credits won't transfer to other institutions and nobody in the real world takes the costly degree seriously.
This gets into a pet peeve, which is that we're expecting 17–year-olds to make major life-changing decisions about uni, majors, and debt without adequate guidance. This is how you end up with people going $250,000 in debt getting a degree in philosophy or French literature. High-school guidance counselors are clueless. They tell students such nonsense as, "Get the most expensive education you can, as it will pay for itself," and "It's not what major you take, but what you do with the degree." The counselors aren't discussing useless majors or the inability to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. The kids planning to go to uni have no clue about this stuff, as I've confirmed myself in talking to some people in their 20s.
To go with that, I've seen too many stories online from parents whose kids—often a daughter, but sons do this too—received full scholarships from a state school that would have left them with little or no debt for a sensible degree, but she chose an expensive out-of-state liberal-arts college because she "fell in love with the campus" and "felt right at home there".
So there are some of the answers no one really wants to face about uni costs. Flame away.