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College went from being a beneficial step in a young person's life to a huge financial burden for decades into their life.
Since the 1970s, the cost of education has gone up between 400–1200%, depending on the kind of school you go to.
Can we turn it around? Only societal change — and a good hard look in the mirror — can really make college a better move for young Americans.
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MICHAEL HOBBES
Michael Hobbes is a reporter for HuffPost and the co-host of “You’re Wrong About,” a podcast that debunks historical and political myths. His article on millennials, “Generation Screwed,” was nominated for a National Magazine Award.
Before becoming a journalist, Hobbes worked in international development in Europe and Africa. He’s also an animator, filmmaker and speechwriter. Find him on Twitter at @rottenindenmark and more of his work here
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TRANSCRIPT:
MICHAEL HOBBES: Well, there's a couple reasons why college has gotten so expensive. First of all is: States are cutting higher education funding. Second thing is: supply and demand.
What we have is a crisis where to get onto the job ladder, the few decent jobs left—that have healthcare, that have security, that have a pension—they all require a college degree. So you have to go to college, basically. And yet the actual number of spaces in colleges hasn't really increased. Harvard admits something like ten percent more now than they did in the '70s, so there are more people competing for fewer spots, and that means that the colleges can just raise the price, and they'll find somebody to pay it. No matter how high it gets, somebody is out there paying it, and so they just raise it and raise it and raise it, and we keep paying it. Colleges are adding services like rock climbing gyms, extra administration, they're doing more marketing, they're doing these really expensive study abroad programs and, again, they're competing over the rich kids, they're competing over the ten percent and the one percent – the people who are not "cost sensitive". Colleges keep throwing services and throwing bells and whistles at them, and they're just paying it, because the entire economy is shifting toward marketing itself to the top ten percent and the top one percent, and those are the kids that are going to college now.
The college premium – how much extra you earn for going to college – is 70 percent; you earn almost double if you go to college, on average, than if you don't go to college.
So we're in this bind where you have to go to college or else you end up in a really bad job for the rest of your life, but then to go to college you have to go into $80,000, $100,000, more than that, debt. I interviewed somebody for the article that is paying off $311,000 in debt. I interviewed another person who was actually a bankruptcy lawyer who was paying $2000 a month in student loans after he got out of college. And so when you look at how many of us have student loans—and that we're paying them off at the time when we're early in our careers, we're not as established in our fields, we can't afford decent housing, we aren't earning very much at that time, and then we're also, on top of that, paying a couple hundred dollars a month extra—that's money we're not saving, that's money we're not putting to a pension, that's money we're not putting to a home—and that extends the period of what our parents call "adolescence", but really, insecurity—that extends our period of insecurity into our 30s and our 40s. And so if you look at any poll of millennials, more than half say they have put off marriage, they have put off children, they have put off buying a home because of their student loans. And student loans are the only form of debt that you cannot get rid of in bankruptcy, so they are literally inescapable. Even if you die, in some states your partner might actually have to pay them off for you. So this is a ball and chain around the ankle of millions of millennials, and again, it's not a choice that we made, it's the economy that we're in, that to get onto the job ladder you need to have an education.
One of the things that we forget, and especially our parents forget, is how much cheaper college used to be. When my dad was in college he worked for ten hours a week in the cafeteria, and that was enough for his tuition and a little bit of his rent. That doesn't sound familiar to anybody I know. And what has h...
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