“A massive (and healthy) shift in public opinion has
occurred, with only 33 percent of adults believing a college education is worth
the cost.
A poll of 1,000 adults conducted for far-left NBC News asked
the following:
Is a four-year
college degree “worth the cost because people have a better chance to get a
good job and earn more money over their lifetime,” or “not worth the cost
because people often graduate without specific job skills and with a large
amount of debt to pay off?”
Only 33 percent said yes, while 63 percent said no.
When asked this same question in 2013, 53 percent said yes,
while only 40 percent said no.
“It’s just remarkable to see attitudes on any issue shift
this dramatically, and particularly on a central tenet of the American dream,
which is a college degree. Americans used to view a college degree as
aspirational — it provided an opportunity for a better life. And now that
promise is really in doubt,” said one of the pollsters from Hart Research
Associates/Public Opinion Strategies.
“Remarkably,” adds NBC, “less than half of voters with
college degrees see those degrees as worth the cost: 46% now, down from 63% in
2013.”
In 2005, the average tuition debt load was about $19,000.
The average as of 2024 is nearly $30,000.
Over the last 30 years, annual tuition has exploded. These
numbers have been adjusted for inflation: “public four-year colleges grew from
$4,160 to $10,740 and from $19,360 to $38,070 at private nonprofit
institutions[.]”
Why, when adjusted for inflation, would tuition more than
double at public universities and double for private?
It’s an easy answer: the federal government.
The federal student loan program hands out loans like candy.
Worse, the people making the loans (the government) face no moral hazard. If
the borrower defaults, who takes the hit? Certainly not the government. This
removes all incentive to be careful about lending the money. Therefore, if
everyone who wants a student loan gets a student loan regardless of the
prospects of it being paid back, colleges can boost their tuition costs,
knowing their customers (students) can easily get all the money they want.
Yes, the taxpayers are the true victims, but so are the
students. What does a teenager understand about debt and interest on that debt
and the indentured servitude that comes with debt? If you hand a nine-year-old
the keys to the car, whose fault is that? It’s the same principle here.
Colleges are also predators.
These mercenary “institutions of learning” know exactly what they are
doing, as far as sending kids out into the real world with a useless degree in
some dumb field like “womyn studies.” These schools enrich themselves with
lavish buildings and lucrative salaries, as their prey ends up with nothing
more than a useless piece of paper and the equivalent of a mortgage.
The solution? Common sense…
First off, it is the schools that benefit from these loans
so it is the schools that should offer the loans and face the liability of
unpaid loans. At the very least, the government should get out of the school
loan business and leave it to a private sector that faces a moral hazard.
In the private sector, the loans would be based on the
ability to pay back, meaning the actual value of the degree and not the
inflated cost of the degree, so everything would make more financial sense as a
result—tuition costs, the degrees chosen, etc.”
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