Friday, April 2, 2010

Combatting the high costs of college with... Loans?!?

One of the amazing things about college costs is that they go up, year after year, faster than inflation. I suspect this is due primarily to the ever-increasing ratio of administrators to teachers, and the pension and healthcare costs associated with all these non-student-facing folks, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is that college is becoming so expensive people cannot possibly save for it or work their way through it.

So, how does the government help? Pressure schools to reduce costs (like they do with some industries)? Encourage non-traditional education or alternatives to 4-year schools? Naw... They offer to loan students money. Lots and lots of it. Take a look at this chart:


Careful, that's not a ten-year chart, that's a two-year chart.

See this blog entry for some good information on this topic.
Colleges can keep raising prices, despite the recession, because the government keeps lending students more money to pay them.
According to a report cited by Anne Marie Chaker in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, the government will lend students $75.1 billion to pay for college this year, up a spectacular 25 percent compared with last year.
But the extra credit isn’t benefiting students. It’s just inflating the price of their education, burying them under a bigger pile of debt despite stagnant wage growth and poorer employment prospects.

And remember, student loans are not discharged in a bankruptcy. Indentured servants had it better...

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