wirehead-wannabe replied to your post: College Costs are Poorly Reported On
Not sure this explains the fact that people can no longer pay for college by working over the summer, though
A couple things.
One is that that post was running things back to the mid-eighties at the earliest, because that’s when I have numbers for. That’s plenty long enough to talk about trends now, but doesn’t say much about conditions relative to 1950 or whenever.
(Compare: The US has had medical cost growth similar to European medical cost growth for quite a while. But our growth was way bigger in the 70s so we now have a much, much higher base).
Second, a lot of this depends on what you mean by “work your way through college”.
Back of the envelope, if you work twelve weeks over the summer, forty hours a week, earning ten dollars an hour, you make \$4800. According to the college board data I linked, the average net tuition and fees at a public four-year in-state college are \$3770. That leaves a thousand dollars a year to buy textbooks.
Well, and housing and food and entertainment and…
But of course lots of people also do part-time work during the semester. (This might be violating the original terms, but I’m just playing around with numbers here). So assume 30 weeks during term where you work 10 hours a week; that gives you another \$3000, so we’re up to about \$8000.
Playing around with the UC Riverside financial aid calculator (picked semi at random as a good but not stellar state school, and also has a net cost calculator that is not impossibly painful), if your parents’ income is \$40k/year and yours is \$8k/year, the estimated net cost is \$11.5k/year (with on-campus housing; if you can commute in it gets down to \$8300).
So you’re not quite paying your way through college with a job, but I left ten weeks on the table, and you graduate with like $15k of debt. Unless you can commute in, in which case you graduate basically debt-free.
But I suspect most of the “I worked my way through college” stories are commuter-type stories, and also did work on weekends and such, so I think this is pretty comparable. But it probably does mean you have to opt out of a lot of extracurricular/social life/resume-padding type activities, which sucks.
Basically, I suspect what people expect out of “college” when they say the words is not what happened in a lot of “I worked my way through college” stories.
But also, it probably is genuinely harder–I’m not arguing that college hasn’t gotten more expensive faster than inflation; I’m arguing that that’s somewhat to be expected, and not nearly as dramatic as reporting makes it sound.
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sigmaleph said: mathjax is making some small sections of these posts look funny when viewed on your blog, by the way
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