What I want to know is why college tuition is rising at such a rate. Health care premiums rise because the cost of health care itself rises; but what about education? What costs are rising so fast that the universities have to increase their tuition at such a rate. They should already own all of their building. They make the students buy their own books. On campus students are charged extra for housing and the kids have to buy their own food. So what on earth is causing the universities to have to increase their tuitions at such a rate? Can it be, could it possibly be, the salaries the colleges pay their professors?
If we want to talk about predatory practices, colleges are a good example.
- You are forced to take classes you don't want and don't need in order to satisfy the individual college's requirement -- and you have to pay the college for this priviledge. That sounds remarkable like racketeering to me.
- If you transfer from another school, the classes you didn't want to take don't transfer to the new school and you must take more useless classes to replace the last batch.
- You have to buy ridiculously expensive text books which you find when you try to sell back at the end of the year are actually worthless because of a new addition.
- You have to fight with 4,000 other students to get the class you do want only to find when you get there that the teacher doesn't speak English. Or at least you think he doesn't. It's hard to tell if what he is speaking is a foreign language or just so heavily accented that it's indeciferable.
- You have to pay for the priviledge of this up front and there is no refund for a class given by a professor you can't understand.
- When all is said and done you have paid $160K - $280K for an education that will qualify you for a $30,000 per year salary.
Forget banks, forget credit cards, forget insurance companies, let's go after the institutions of higher eduction for robbing us blind and using our money to indoctrine the children.
Excellent post. The primary reason that health care is villified by liberals and not higher ed is that funding for the health care system is primarily in the hands of the private sector, whereas higher ed funding has been mostly absorbed by the public sector.
ReplyDeleteEven the private schools peg their tuition rates to the public rates, since the government shovels money out with ever higher piles of cash for kids to get their ever more meaningless liberal arts degrees: whatever the student loan or grant limit is that year, that is exactly the amount the institution (public or private) will jack up their tuitioin rates, thus gobbling up each and every dollar the government shells out to make education more affordable. Duh.
The book scam you point out is one that particularly galls me, Karen. Professors mandate that you buy their text (written by them) for their mandatory class (or you don't graduate), and no - you can't obtain it anywhere other than the campus bookstore. $208.57, please. WHAT!!??!!, you gasp. Oh, wait, plus tax @ 7.5%, your total will be $224.21, will that be VISA or Mastercard? There is no other place to buy it, not online, not at Walmart, you are held hostage by whatever the prof and the bookstore choose to gouge you for.
Talk about highway robbery. And you nailed it: once the term is over, you try and sell it back and the professor has already inked a new text, yours is worthless, unless you want to use it as a door stop.
Quite the scam the liberals have going for them. We should take notes on how this is effected, they are quite skilled at it.
I always thought the college book store was a rip off, a racket. But a very interesting take on the university systems. It seems to me that if getting a college educ. becomes 'standard' in this society, is it really all that valuable? I mean, if 'just anybody' can get the gov't issue college diploma, what good is it really? Don't they say in general that a thing's value is determined, in part, by how hard you have to work for it??
ReplyDeleteEntitlements. Driving our country into the ground.