Why College Is So Expensive In America

College in America: It's four years of all-nighters, keg stands, ethnically diverse welcome pamphlets, Pinterest-perfect dorms, and crushing student debt. I have $69,812, $47,000, $90,000, $35,000, $350,000, $60,000 in student loans. My minimum student loan payment is $1,000 a month. It should take me about 10 years to pay it back, I'll be about 36, 45 years old, I don't know how old I'll be when I pay it off. I was actually on Penn State's campus and I saw that I had a lot to pay and it was overwhelming. I didn't know how to do it, I never saw such a big number. I just went to school for a few months and found out that it wasn't what I wanted at all, and now I have this extra forty thousand dollars that I have to pay and I really have nothing to show for it.

If I wasn't paying off this student debt, my goodness, I would just invest all my money. I feel like I will have a roommate for the rest of my life because my debt is so big. You can't point at someone and say, "This person made your student debt so much more

expensive

," it's the whole system. So why is

college

so

expensive

? It's worth it? Higher education today is made up of three main sectors. Everyone makes money from tuition, but where they make the rest of their income varies. Public schools are your state schools like SUNY or Iowa State.

They get money from the government. Private for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix or Capella University make money from shareholders. And private nonprofits are those like Yale, an American university, that get much of their money from donors. More on that later. But choosing a university hasn't always been so complicated. In 1636 the first university in the United States was founded. You may have heard of it before: Harvard University For hundreds of years,

college

in America was a pretty exclusive club to join. But we've come a long way since the first class of just nine men graduated from Harvard in 1642.

In 2018, more than three million Americans were expected to receive a college degree. The demographics of American higher education have been completely transformed. In 1944 the soldier G.I. A bill was signed into law giving veterans money to attend school. The Soldier The Bill of Rights also addresses the end of money. That's how it is. Registration is in charge. Funding is provided for laboratory fees, including books, supplies and equipment. A few years later, nearly half of Americans enrolled in college were veterans. You can't underestimate the G.I. Bill. This educated a whole generation of men and some women too.

And it opened doors to people who hadn't even thought they could go to college. Private Bill changed the aspirations of American families. But not everyone was able to take full advantage of the bill's benefits. It was significantly harder for women and people of color to get tuition money and enroll in college due to widespread discrimination from both schools and banks. Dateline Russia 1957. At one point in history. In the 1950s, a small satellite the size of a beach ball launched into space by the Soviet Union had a major impact on the American education system. The first Sputnik.

People were worried about this clash between the Soviet Union and the United States. And suddenly it became popular to study science and mathematics. It was patriotic. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement helped further open the doors to give women and people of color access to higher education. In those years, students at the University of California schools paid less than a thousand dollars in tuition. There is no registration if you were a resident. But with the 70s came the taxpayers' revolt. If you want something, you pay for it. Don't expect me to pay for it. It's your problem not mine.

And what happened was the student loan process blew up. And then came the U.S. News and World Report. It was one of the luckiest or most ingenious editorial decisions in history. In 1983, U.S. News and World Report published a list of the best universities in the United States. It became a largely data-driven ranking. Each of the criteria used by the U.S. News depended on name recognition, traditional quality, prestige and, above all, wealth. The rankings played a very important role for me. I was an athlete and so I was quite competitive. There have been plenty of new lists since the 1983 rankings, but the U.S.

News and World Report still reigns supreme. And universities are watching it very closely. If you ask them they will tell you that they don't pay attention to it. But in the conference rooms of the admissions office and governing offices across the country, I can assure you that they pay close attention to it. One thing they are paying attention to is their test grade averages. In the 1990s, colleges began raising basic tuition and using the extra money to award merit-based scholarships to kids who did well. U.S. Chief Data Strategist News and World Report downplayed test scores as a major factor in its rankings, saying it is less than eight percent of the current methodology.

And that "We've seen that schools do better in rankings if they emphasize and perform well in areas of student outcomes, such as graduation and retention rates. He also said they further reduce the weight of SAT scores and ACT. Tuition costs at both public and private universities have doubled since the late 1980s, even when accounting for inflation. Still, more Americans are earning college degrees, but funding. state for public universities has been less affected in higher education in 2017 than in 2008. And that means students are spending more The tuition they pay is a big source of income for universities. year when most state schools made more money from tuition than from government funding If you're in the state legislature and looking for money, the university system is one of your biggest costs.

Then when you realize, we cut them 2 percent last year, they didn't close. percent. What happens is that you pass the buck. It goes from the taxpayer to the student. The average student graduates with about $37,000 in total student debt. The United States has 1.5 trillion dollars. I had the mindset that I was going to go to college and then I was going to go to grad school and get my PhD. I thought I would get through it and then come out the other side with a job and then I could pay for it. But that didn't go as planned.

Rachel Brandt earned her undergraduate degrees in mathematics and economics at Iowa State. She then moved to New York to pursue her master's degree in economics. She left graduate school after the first semester to better cope with the mental health issues she was experiencing. I thought I would just retire and be fine. But a couple of weeks after I withdrew, I received an email from the school saying I owed them $6,000 immediately. And that was hard. So I didn't know how I was going to pay for that. And that was very stressful. Three, four, five, six, seven different student loans that need to be repaid at different interest rates.

The number continues to increase. I'll pay $867 in rent a month and that's about how much I'll have to pay in loans. I look at my bank account every day and it's really scary. Rachel is far from the only one who didn't finish the degree she started. Only about 57 percent of college students complete their degree in six years. One option students turn to looking for a more flexible and sometimes more affordable path to earning a degree is for-profit colleges like the University of Phoenix or DeVry University. The industry has been in flux, but today just over 900,000 students attend for-profit colleges in the United States, many of whom use federal loans to help cover the cost.

I feel like I want to do something practical that clearly leads to a specific job. They suggested the Art Institute of New York City. Now, I'm really sorry that it was because it turned out to be a terrible financial experience. Even though for-profit colleges are only a small fraction of all colleges in the U.S., for-profit students default on their student debt at a much higher rate. Chyna is a first-generation college student from New York who studied web design and interactive media at the Art Institute of New York City when it was for-profit. I dropped out of school, that was something I could have learned myself using tutorials.

For-profit schools date back to colonial times. Not everyone could attend institutions like Harvard, so entrepreneurs saw a business opportunity and began teaching reading, writing, and business skills*** for a fee. Benjamin Franklin was a big fan of for-profit schools and the practical skills they offered. In 1994, the University of Phoenix's parent company, Apollo Education Group, went public, laying the foundation for today's for-profit educational corporations. But this big business approach to education has not been without controversy. With so much money at stake, many turn to schools that show the best numbers and the best chances of landing a new job when they graduate.

But can you believe what some of those for-profit colleges tell you? When I went there for the so-called tour, it was basically a sales pitch. That should have been a red flag, but it wasn't because I was 18, I didn't have parents who completed college, you know, being a first-generation student it's like I didn't have the discernment to leave those kinds of schools alone. . The Art Institute did not respond to a request for comment. However, the director of the Cato Center for Educational Freedom defended the for-profit system, saying nonprofits make a lot of money, too. They just distribute it differently.

He said traditional universities often use it to "make the lives of the people who work at them more comfortable." He also said that everyone in higher education is almost certainly profit-driven and there is little evidence that people at for-profit schools are any less focused on the best interests of students. Since Chyna left, the Art Institute of New York City along with 43 other Art Institute campuses have closed. There are a number of lawsuits against various campuses. However, Chyna cannot qualify for loan forgiveness because she left college right before the deadline. And she feels trapped. Since she has not paid off her student loans in full, she cannot obtain her academic record, which she needs to apply to public schools.

So for now she is enrolled in another for-profit school hoping to use her degree to apply to a master's program at a state school. I feel like all of these for-profit schools take advantage of people who are already for-profit and come from low-income backgrounds. Enter nonprofits. Amari Lilton is from St. Louis but she completed her undergraduate studies at a private university in Chicago. She now works at an advertising agency in New York City and is paying off her student debt of more than $40,000. You want to have the college dream without the student debt, because you're just getting there and you feel like I'm going to have all this independence.

I will be able to choose my own classes. I will have this freedom. I've never had it before. So you want to go to the coolest place you can. Every university wants to be the best. They want to compete with the next university. They want to attract the best students. That means they must have the best facilities to construct new buildings. And remember the discount on tuition? While the sticker price of nonprofit colleges is increasing, so is the discount rate on tuition. The price you see on a university's website is higher than what many students end up paying.

You might think that most of the money goes to the cost of running the school, but almost half of college tuition at nonprofits goes to helping other people pay for school. Amari didn't pay full tuition at her private college, but she still faces more debt than she expected. I just cried. Yeah, I just cried because I had no idea how I was going to do it. I dream about that. Always in my mind. If I want to go out to lunch and I'm just like, Oh my God, I hope this turns out well because I know they just took my money.

I just hope, I hope. I want to double my payments by the end of this year, so $2,000 a month. My objective isDon't reach 30 with debt. If I go to Wells Fargo and say I want a portfolio with all my best investments to help me, they won't take me seriously because I have $250 in the bank. So where do we go from here? I've been studying this for a long time and advocating for reforms and this is the hardest type of problem to solve because it's structural. It's all of us. It's the entire market. Jarrett Freeman ran for the New York State Senate in 2016 when he was just 26 years old.

I declare my candidacy for the New York State Senate. And a big part of his platform was education and student debt. He was actually on campus and I saw that he had a lot to pay and it was overwhelming. I didn't know how to do it. I have never seen such a large number. Americans are becoming less convinced that a college degree is worth it. In 2013, 53 percent of people thought a four-year degree was worth it. In 2017, only 49 percent of people thought this way. I think it's so ingrained in your head that you have to go to college, that college is the next step after graduating.

I think in retrospect I see that college is not for everyone. Overall, I feel a little jaded about college being worth it for everyone, or at least for students straight out of high school. Knowing what I know now, I would have even taken a few years off before going to college. There's this idea that 18-year-olds are supposed to know what they want in life. And now that I turn 25 tomorrow, I still don't know exactly what's going on. That mentality could be a problem for the future job market. It is expected that by 2020, 65 percent of jobs in the U.S. will require people to have some college education to even be considered.

So there are many jobs that require you to spend some money on school before you will get paid to work. In many cases that sum is a lot of money. Student debt is a national crisis. Unfortunately, we do not have bills on the floor that truly address that issue. The reality is that there is probably no single solution that will solve everything. Many different approaches will be needed, and different approaches are being tried across the United States. One of the proposed solutions is a revenue sharing agreement. Basically, instead of taking out loans, students could agree to repay an investor a percentage of their income over a set period of years after graduating.

The idea has support from politicians of both parties and some schools are starting to try it. In New York City, Governor Cuomo implemented a program that offers middle-class residents free tuition at select state schools. And some billionaires like Bill Gates are giving their own money to try to fix the system. And, of course, there is the idea of ​​offering free college. I don't agree with free college. I think when you give someone something for free they don't realize its value, and that's just my opinion, and I think there should be some cost associated with it. Free college is a great idea.

I fully support free college. The problem is: who is going to pay the bill? In other countries, taxpayers foot most of the bill. So instead of paying off student loans later in life, you're paying higher taxes. About two dozen countries around the world offer free or nearly free college education to their citizens. The solution probably won't be so simple in the United States, but with student debt rising and the need for a college degree becoming more important, the future of American education depends on solving this.