Reply to How do most middle to UMC families pay for college?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]We save for it from the moment our children are born.  And frankly, we don't have more children than we think we can pay for.  (I'm not trying to be inflammatory or say that you had too many kids.  I'm saying I would have had more kids if I had more money.)[/quote]

This is WILD! I would say the majority of people I grew up with paid for college themselves - yes took out loans, some quite substantial. Exactly zero of them wish they hadn’t been born instead of going into some debt! [/quote]

No idea how old you are, but I don't many UMC people that had to pay for college entirely themselves...even in the 1980s or 1990s.

Now, my Greatest Generation father did pay for it himself even though he grew up relatively well-off and his father was college-educated.  However, you could attend Harvard in the 1950s for literally like $500 total (tuition, room & board for a full year), when the average HHI was like $4,000.  It wasn't that huge of a lift even back then and he never had to take out any loans.

If the [b]relationship between tuition and household income stayed the same,[/b] Harvard would cost a total of $10,000 today.[/quote]

I think [b]proponents of the new bill believe that by capping total borrowing, tuition will come down?[/b] [/quote]

They're delusional. To achieve a relationship between tuition and household income that is the same, you would have to increase household income.

College costs have increased (partly due to state disinvestment, partly due to bloated mid-level admin, partly due to health care costs) far faster than incomes have risen. There isn't much to strip out of the cost unless states choose to re-invest in higher education, and that isnot going to be done in response to this bill, because the federal government has also handed other massive new costs to states.

What will happen far more often is that institutions will close outright. We are at the edge of a demographic cliff, as well.

[/quote]

Your post is, to put it politely, [b]a bit clueless. [/b]The biggest growth area in higher education in the last 25 years has been the bureaucracy, not the teaching staff. And there's no question that unlimited cheap loans is part of the problem because schools could raise tuition knowing Uncle Sam would be there to dish out loans to anyone who asked for it. This bill is a step in the right direction. I don't like the administration's overall war on colleges but this is one area I fully support. If schools need to retain students, they need to be realistic about their own expenditures and costs and there will be losers (higher edu bureaucracy, lots of programs that really don't need to exist) but the winners will be a more cost effective educational model. [/quote]

Regurgitating the heavily-investigated (and often debunked) Bennet hypothesis does not establish you as an expert. Here is a summary of the findings for and against it, for those interested: https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/history-of-student-loans-the-bennett-hypothesis

And nobody said anything about growth in teaching staff--I said health care costs, which are attached to all staff who receive benefits. A large--and growing--proportion of teaching staff do not.

At any rate, we're about to engage in a whole-of-nation test of Bennett's proposition, and I guess we'll see what happens. I don't expect good things. [/quote]

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