College has always been expensive, but it’s more painful than ever right now. In 1980 the cost of a four year degree was a little over $10k per year. In 2020 it was a little under $29k, a 180% punch in the face…I mean increase.
Sure, inflation has boosted the cost of everything (including breathing), but there are some things specifically affecting higher education that have made it worse. Let’s look at some of the biggest.
Here are Five Fast Facts on why college is so expensive:
- 📝 Admin Up - An interesting trend over the past 25 years shows that colleges have added more administrators than teachers and twice as many admins as students. Maybe they need some more math teachers…
- ↩️Money Redirected - From 2010 to 2018, institution spending on student services (like counseling, child care, or health services) rose by 29% and spending on admin rose by 19%. These are good things, but when compared to spending on actual teaching rising only 17%, it makes you wonder about priorities.
- 🤦 Unrealistic Expectations - Too many students are willing to spend huge amounts of money (or take on huge debt) to get degrees that won’t get them good Paychecks. This allows colleges to charge more for everything. Is a college degree really a golden ticket to paradise if it only gets you into a minimum wage job??
- 💰 Non-Tuition Funding - Public colleges get roughly half of their funding from state and local governments. This amount changes depending on market conditions, recessions, and other world or regional events. The average education funding per student in 2020 is still 6% lower than before the Great Recession in 2008, and that means colleges pass on the extra costs to students. Of course they do.
- 💻 Techie No Helpie - For many industries, technology improvements bring efficiency improvements, and that means lower costs. Not so with education! The benefits from better tech are pretty limited when it comes to a lecture hall and delivering the same content year over year. But could tech at least make it more interesting? Asking for a friend.
🔥Bottom line: The good news is that the trend of skyrocketing college prices has slowed in the last couple of years - from 2020 to 2022, prices have dropped almost 2%. It can’t have anything to do with the fact that COVID shutdowns forced everyone to migrate to online programs, can it? Nah, surely a little virtual competition wouldn’t rock the industry with a bit of capitalism like that, right?
What do you think about the rising costs of higher education?
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