Dear God.
NYU, my undergraduate alma mater, now charges $45,200 in tution and fees. George Washington University, where my sister goes, charges more than $49,000. For NYU Law, it’s $61,485.
The Times article points out that raising tuition can perversely increase a university’s popularity, since applicants assume that higher rates equal a better education. What the article doesn’t discuss is graduate school, and how these astronomical tuition rates put it out of reach even for many middle-income students.
Obviously, a $45,000-a-year investment turns a private college education into wishful thinking for many lower-income students. Even state colleges aren’t exactly priced at bargain-basement rates. If a student’s parents don’t have the money for college and aren’t willing to take out loans (something that I would assume is more common in lower and middle-income families), or think that the student should pay for his/her own education, an NYU graduate leaves Washington Square close to $200,000 in debt. What are the chances that said student will decide to take on another $200,000 debt by going to graduate school?
I’m at NYU Law because I didn’t have any educational debt after getting my BA. I wouldn’t have considered it if law school was going to put me close to half a million dollars in the hole. But the $200,000 is worth it to go to a school that is nearly guaranteed to secure me a job after I graduate, and that offers loan forgiveness programs if I decide to pursue a public interest career. The pay-off is just about guaranteed.
The same can’t be said for a whole lot of undergraduate programs, save for the very top schools and a handful of business programs. Lots of my friends, who are intelligent and hard-working, have graduated college and are working jobs that they’re far over-qualified for, if they’re employed at all. These are kids who went to great schools — top-tier schools, “very competitive” schools.
The ones whose parents paid for undergrad are looking at grad school. The ones who paid for it themselves are trucking ahead.
Point being, these ridiculously high tuition rates don’t only serve to block lower-income people from accessing higher education (although they most certainly do that, too). They further help to reinstate the cycle of wealth in this country, by giving upper-middle and upper-class people far greater access to the graduate programs which will secure them stable and well-paying jobs (and which are increasingly necessary in this economy), and giving middle-income people a misleading sense of security in their education, only to allow them to graduate and realize that a BA just isn’t worth what it used to be. Lauren explains this far better than I can.
So these astronomical tuition rates — and the many cuts to federal education aid — leave low-income people as disenfranchised as always, while simultaneously helping to prop up the upper class and contribute to the shrinking of the middle class.
But raising tuition scores colleges prestige points. So why the hell not?
Obviously, the colleges themselves, all non-profits, aren’t getting rich. I don’t see much chance of forced tuition cuts. Clearly, the answer is more and more financial aid, both need and merit-based. Of course, the higher the tuition, the greater the need!
And by financial aid, I don’t mean loans.
I work at a community college (actually, several community colleges).
Believe it or not, many of my students are taking out loans.
In fact, one of these colleges had a serious drop in enrollment after changing the timing of the finanacial aid payments. Students just couldn’t afford it. This seems even worse to me now that I’ve moved to the East Coast–I thought it was bad when the tuition for community colleges doubled in Northern California, but that’s still cheap compared to here. It absolutely amazes me. To carry out their mission, community colleges need to be accessible to EVERYONE who wants an education, and ought to be affordable without any financial aid to a person who works minimum wage for twenty hours a week (since it’s really difficult and often counterproductive to be a full-time student and work more than that), if not free. But states don’t want to fund it.
I really believe in community colleges and the good that they do, but the provision of access goes down as price goes up. It’s horribly sad and frustrating.
Oh you’d be surprised. John Sexton, the president of NYU, earns close to a million dollars a year. I think he’s a very good president and deserves to be well-compensated, but when NYU tuition is some of the highest in the country and we have a pretty decent endowment (despite administrative excuses), that seems excessive. Our executive vice president makes even more. We also rank in the top 10 private schools with the highest salaries paid to professors (although it’s notable that the gender gap in the salaries at NYU is 12%).
Point being, someone is making a whole lot of money here.
That does indeed seem excessive. I should know better, Jill; non-profit doesn’t automatically mean “not wasteful.”
Certain admins in colleges can be very, very well-paid.
The tuition does increase prestige, which goes on to increase renown by some magical process, which increases the quality of reserach done at the institution (so I understand). The whole point of this being that the person who brings these attractive opportunities to the university gets eventually paid a load.
And the meanwhile, students are getting screwed. Why should a brilliant poor kid have to pay out his/her ass for years for this?
I noticed you failed to note the graph that appears at the side of that article that shows the net (private, 4yr) college price being somewhere in the $25000 range, rather than the $45000 range. While that’s still phenomenally expensive, (and I’m not sure if that includes loans or not) it’s also significantly less than $45000.
On the other hand, my father paid $1500/year for college tuition in the early 70s, then $1800/year for law school. Completely affordable on a summer job.
The bachelor’s degree is the new high school diploma. :(
Is it ever. And the colleges know that damn well, which is why they can charge outrageous tuition with impunity.
I’d like to know the relation between skyrocketing tuition and the scandalously low workload of most tenured professors.
The tenured (and untenured) professors I know (and I’m around them pretty much every day) seem to be working quite a bit. When they’re not teaching undergraduates, they’re advising and teaching graduate students, working on committees, doing their own research and writing and so forth.
Given the state of faculty salaries at my institution, any increase in funds sure as hell isn’t going to them.
What Linnaeus said. I teach part time at the local state U (and was a grad student before that) and I’m around tenured and untenured profs quite a bit as well. All the profs I know are busy with departmental related work (teaching, writing, advising, etc.) pretty much all the time.
I went to a private 4-yr college for undergrad, came out with a mere 17K in loans (made up the remainder with scholarships and grants, except the grand or so we had to come up with every semester.) I graduated in 1998, and tuition’s gone nowhere but up, but it’s probably still well below NYU or Duke. Central Pennsylvania isn’t all that expensive, and the atmosphere of a 4-yr school is appealing to various professorial types, some enough so that they’re willing to get paid less (in a lower cost-of-living location) to avoid the publish-or-perish world of Major Research Universities. It’s a trade off.*
Contrast that with UNC Pharmacy, where I paid about $3500/semester for 4 years, for a damn good education (USNews ranked us #3, after UCSF and UT Austin.) Then again, Carolina is among the lowest tuition rates in the country for in-state students. But there’s always grumblings about tuition hikes and faculty salaries… and the poor cleaning ladies and cafeteria workers get ignored, while the administrators get raises.
*I took a job for the county that pays about 66% of what I would have made working in a retail pharmacy (which is still a good bit of money, regardless.) But the hours are much better (no evenings, weekends, or holidays), and it’s much less stressful: no insurance companies to argue with, no people coming and screaming at you about how much their medicine costs and why doesn’t their insurance pay for it… and we only have about 25% of their prescription volume. (Which is to illustrate that lifestyle or work environment can overrule pecuniary interests for some people.)
Hmph.
And we were told that our college would rank higher (and make our degrees worth more) if more alumni would donate more. Because I’m not going to be paying them enough already over the next fifteen years.
Tell me about it. Its worse as an international student:
Applying to Hopkins Med, from Canada, if by some god given chance I get in, I have to deposit, before the first day of class, the total amount for my tuition and living expenses upfront into an ‘escrow account’. Last years total was 250 000$ American… upfront! Who could ever be expected to mobilize that amount of money in such short time?
It is ridiculous. As my friend said, it only ensures that sons of doctors can become doctors!
On the other hand, med tuition at McGill in Montreal, for American kids is 60 000 (25k for in province) for the whole degree… paid out leisurely over four years…. So it is possible, with sufficient government initiative, to keep tuition down and keep the quality of education high..
Just like jacko said… being from Canada these numbers make my head spin.
I go to Ottawa U, and my current yearly tuition for undergrad is something like $4,500. Now, Ottawa U isn’t spectacular but it’s still a decent school. In Quebec, tuition is something like half that for in-province students. If I spoke French, moving there would be pretty damn tempting, as apparently you only need one year residency to have ‘in province’ status. Oh, and OSAP (the Ontario student assistance program) is pretty good.
Couple that with our free health care and generally lower cost of living, and that means that even a shit-broke secretary such as I can afford to finance my own way through school while supporting my unemployed partner. Of course, I’m lucky in that I found good roommates and my job has drug and dental benefits, which definitely keep the costs down even more, but even without that I could manage it on minimal loans.
I think I’d probably have just given up on life if I had to live with that kind of debt burden to get an education :/
Not to mention the fact that academic “merit-based” scholarships at top-tier universities favor students who complete the most AP/IB/college-in-highschool courses in high school – in other words, upper-middle and middle class students in private schools or high-acheiving public districts.
WRT Hugo – Private colleges trade on their reputations rather than their profits. Many colleges are spend millions of dollars a year on useless aesthetic and technological improvements, hoping to impress the highest-acheiving students when they come for campus visits and interviews. (Google “Kraus Campo” for a particularly egregious example.)
I’d like to know the relation between skyrocketing tuition and the scandalously low workload of most tenured professors.
I don’t know about tenured vs. non-tenured, but science and engineering PhDs are taking a major pay cut to work in academia versus what they would make in industry.
What the article doesn’t discuss is graduate school, and how these astronomical tuition rates put it out of reach even for many middle-income students.
This may be true of medical and law school, but science PhD students are almost always funded (tuition waiver/stipend).
Actually, the class system seems most in effect in some of the lowest-paying fields, like publishing and journalism, where you often can’t even get an internship unless you’re an undergrad (and, by implication, able to forgo a paying summer job.) That’s why I left journalism for a science PhD program in the first place.
As Jill said, “non-profit” doesn’t mean “not getting rich.” The money goes somewhere.
I remember when I was in law school, a report came out showing which schools and colleges were net contributors and which were net drains. The law school was one of the biggest net contributors, since the costs were low — the buildings had all been donated in the 1920s, for example, and some additions had been largely paid for, and there was very little in the way of equipment expenditures (I think the moot court setups were pretty much it, other than the computers). So far more of our tuition dollars were going to other parts of the university than were coming back. The dental school was a big net drain — equipment intensive, not a big source of revenue like the hospital and med school. And even with the huge subsidy from the university and, oh, the law school, their tuition was still $10K a year more than ours.
Jill;
why do you think John Sexton is a good President, when what you describe is the plan you describe (which makes you cray) is one that he has overseen, excecuted and advocated for? Paricularly when the other side of the coin is defunding revenue draining departmetns (like women studies, american studies, history, and all the departments under “area studies”, busting the grad student and clerical union, reinstating sweatshop clothes and operating as a club/front for NYC developers? Why is he a good president again?
I mean, I dont know what the number is up to, but in Sexton’s first three years, he raised tuition nearly 15%. It forced several of my closest friends to drop out of NYU and go elsewhere.
State schools sure as hell aren’t getting rich. They’re barely holding the line, many suffering cutbacks and laying it on the backs of adjuncts. Why? State support has gone down in droves. Thanks to everyone wanting lower taxes, the state colleges took the cut – most of them severely. New York used to pay about half the operating costs of SUNY schools, but it’s now down to a quarter, and the general dogma is that it’s going to go down even more in the next decade. The only way to make up for it is to raise tuition. It’s the same old thing – if you want everyone to have access, the cost has to be spread out among everyone. Take that away, and it costs more.
Federal support has also gone away – Pell grants and Stafford loan amounts have actually gone down in inflation-adjusted dollars, and with the increase in tuition cover a lot less of the total amount. I forget the real numbers, but it’s something like a third of what they covered when first instituted.
Don’t blame the schools too quickly – I’m full-time at a state school, and we have fucking photocopy limits each month to minimize costs, can’t replace any faculty members who leave no matter how much of a hole in the curriculum is created, are in debt to the state because they’re giving us more than they planned to, and that’s after tuition was raised. The state just keeps giving less and less from what they historically supported the schools at.
Oh, and one other thing – I do think college should be affordable, but I’m not exactly sure why just saying “students have to take out loans to pay for college” is such a rallying point. Almost everyone has to take out a loan to buy a car, too, but I don’t see any griping about that, and a car isn’t going to increase your lifetime earnings the way a college degree can.
I have problems with a lot of what Sexton has done — including all the things that you mention. He’s an incredibly problematic president. However, he has done some very good things for the university. While he was dean of the law school, he was instrumental in turning it into a top-five institution. As the university president, he’s raised quite a bit of money for the school, and has made NYU a more competitive and a more well-respected institution.
Obviously prestige isn’t all that matters, but it does make a degree from NYU more valuable. And that counts for something.
I also think that, despite his many faults, Sexton isn’t a bad guy. He’s trying to manage a massive university with tens of thousands of students and all kinds of competing interests. I think he really dropped the ball on a lot of issues, but I respect his willingness to at least hear people out and try and do the right thing, even when he’s wrong.
Yup. The funding system also works worst in professional schools that lead to those kind of jobs. My heart doesn’t really bleed for the poor, poor law school student, because the average lawyer makes a veritable fortune (far more than the average professor, by the way) and therefore law students will be able to pay off their loans. And academic grad students are often funded, or at least should be. The people who get screwed are those who go to journalism or education or social work school, because those programs are funded like professional schools, but the eventual jobs don’t pay well like being a doctor or a lawyer does.
On the other hand, it’s more expensive to live in New York than pretty much anywhere else in the country. That’s not the whole story: as I understand it, NYU plotted an elaborate strategy about ten years ago to increase its prestige by buying up a lot of big-name professors. That’s part of the reason that salaries are unusually high. But I don’t find it scandalous that people get paid more in areas where the cost of living is high.
Because having a ton of debt limits your post-collegiate options and ensures that only rich kids will be able to go into many important but relatively-poorly-paid fields, such as the culture industries. Do you really want a society where all the journalists grew up with lots of money?
I’m not sure what this is in reference to… the last line of my post, where I wrote “why the hell not” raise tuition astronomically? If so, I was being sarcastic there.
Jesus H. Christ on a crutch. My education in Australia cost me $3000 a year and we have a national system whereby you can defer payment until you’re making at least $25 000. And then you don’t pay interest, just indexation against the cost of living.
I could never have afforded to go to university in the States, and I come from a middle class family by Australian standards.
Damn right, Antipodean Kate. I rail against the current fees in Oz and am concerned for my children’s education, but thank fuck they won’t be getting their (first, at least) degrees in the US.
I know, I’m just saying that the relative cost of many major purchases, such as cars and houses, have also gone up exponentially to the point that people can’t afford to get them without incurring massive debt, but I don’t see anywhere near the same degree of concern about that. My dad was able to buy a house on a salary that, inflation adjusted, was about two thirds of what I make now, and I can barely scrape by my house payment, and I bought at the bottom end of a cheap market. My car cost more than a state undergraduate degree, and I didn’t get a very good car, either. Where’s all the outrage about how people have been priced out of decent housing? One good book (The two income trap) that didn’t get nearly the press it should have, but college tuition cost is in the news every few months.
I’m one of those lower middle class kids who opted against going to grad school. I didn’t come out nearly as bad as others, ‘only’ 20K in debt at a top-tier school due to grants and scholorships. Since I didn’t make very much for over 10 years, there was no way I was going to take on more debt until I had paid off the existing debt. My wife is still over 50K in debt from nursing school. She’d like to get a masters too, but it will be a while before that happens.
Hey C. Diane,
“Ray Bucknell! |=)
Quoted for truth. However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this is because employers are demanding a higher educational standard. Working at a state school, I’ve gotta say that for at least the bottom 20% of incoming freshman have learned only the following from high school:
1) Do not piss in your pants.
2) Do not throw your feces at the instructor.
Of course, this is a minority of students, but consider for a moment that colleges, even state schools, reject some students. Why, then, do I have students who can’t reliably choose to walk on the correct side of a crowded hall way (right side, people! Just like driving!), much less use paragraphs and punctuation at all (forget “properly”) even in a paper they’ve supposedly proofread. Feh.
However, I should also note that some of these students wind up doing well. Maybe they just decide to buckle down and learn something once it becomes clear that they’ll have to in order to pass… but my pet explanation is that our high schools are not geared toward educating students, but toward breaking them.
sorry for being unclear–i meant to point out that the skyrocketing tuition at NYU is a core component of Sexton’s strategy (remember the “Enterprise University”?)to consolidate NYU”S shift from being a commuter school for middle class and working class kids in NYC to a “prestigous” and selective institution for families nationwide who can pay, but cant quite make the cut for Columbia/Harvard/Yale/whatnot. Prestigious and selective menas throwing the poor people out. I dont understand how you can support Sexton and not see that this tution thing, which upsets you so much? well–he’s the main guy for that.
LJ Oliva (Sextons predecessor) may have been an old drunk with a goiter, but at least he was fairly ineffectual.And obviously creepy. Its like Richard Nixon vs Bill Clinton; They are both conservative jerks, but one seems nice, and one established the Environmental Protection Agency.
I think Sexton’s hugs and “I-feel-your-pain” pose is dinengenous and pretty insulting to NYU students and workers in the instances I’ve encountered it. It seems like he was a decent law school dean (though I dont know) who went on to become NYU’s first neoliberal president.
A lot of my classmates entered NYU with a full ride, but when Sexton raised tutition their scholarsips didnt increase, so the left 20-30k in debt. or they left without their degree. Some of them work at NYU now–they need to have the highest paid jobs you can get with a BA at NYU just to cover the debt/cost of an NYU BA.
awesome.
Oh and as for getting rich–I dont know about other schools but at NYU there is no endowment (which justifies downward pressure on wages and upward pressure on tutition) but its becuase NYU invests its resources in various real estate schemes across NYC. The NYU board is practically a private club for the cities most powerful developers.
ADAs and public defenders and city attorneys make shit money. I know; I’ve done that work. And NYU is the exception rather than the rule in terms of loan forgiveness for students going into public-interest jobs. In fact, Michigan’s lack of a good program for loan forgiveness is the main reason I *didn’t* go into a public interest job right out of law school — I just couldn’t afford to.
I’ve been in grad school for several years now, and I’ve racked up a debt that’s at least $80K. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.
This is the kind of thinking that has resulted in our Prime Minister saying Quebec has the lowest tuition rates in North America as though that was a BAD thing.
In our university’s RPG club we had people from all over the damn political spectrum. Some a-hole law student actually said that he approved of tuition hikes keeping people out of university because now that education was available to all (gross exaggeration, BTW) their degree wasn’t worth shit. Yeah, I love careerists who go to have an higher education in order to sell themselves on the job market rather than, I don’t know, wanting to LEARN.
Let’s just say that I got some shaddenfreude when the tech bubble burst and all my Comp. Sci. colleagues who had no interest in computers besides as a get quick rich scheme got screwed. I got by until the market got back on its feet, doing a job I liked, while they had to redraw their plans for a 30 y-o retirement on dot-com money.
car;
You are completely right. Housing costs are an underlying and assumed factor here–if my rent were cheaper I wouldnt care about the debt, and if I could afford to buy i wouldnt be flushing what little earnings I make down the toilet.
Hey Em
I went to an even smaller school than that ;) but I think we played Bucknell in sports (though we were Div 3).
I think I’d probably have just given up on life if I had to live with that kind of debt burden to get an education
The cheapest four-year school I could find around here would’ve run me about $9000/year (a couple of years ago; it’s probably gone up) for an undergrad degree in computer science.
The highest-paying job I’ve ever had pays $14 an hour, plus the occasional bonus. Working full-time, I’ll make something like twenty-four, twenty-five thousand this year, after taxes.
I have too much responsibility at work to be able to go back to part-time. Hell, even working forty hours a week, I regularly spend another six or eight hours a week working at home in my increasingly theoretical off-hours, because we have nobody else who can solve many of the problems I have to deal with.
If I could make the money I’m making now, while working twenty hours a week, I could probably afford to go to school without going into a huge amount of debt; I’d need to move into a tiny-tiny apartment, sell a bunch of stuff, and eat ramen for years, especially considering that each semester is $4500 up front, but I could probably do it.
The trouble is that no one is going to pay me $28 an hour for anything. Without a degree, I’m unlikely to do much better at any point in my life than I’m doing right now, especially in a field where it’s truly said that you have to have a degree to do anything interesting at all. Even if I could find a job that paid thirty an hour, I very much doubt it’d be something I could do part-time and get enough done to be worth paying.
And, on the other side of the coin, if I do go into the gigantic mountain of debt (gigantic compared to the ~$2000 which is as indebted as I’ve ever been , and which took me years to pay off), I doubt I’d be able to find a job on the other end paying highly enough that I’d ever be able to pay off the school debt, so I’d have a life of fruitless debt service to look forward to.
Yeah, I’ve basically given up. I just don’t see any way to do it that won’t condemn me to be paying a bank for the rest of my life, assuming any bank would deign to lend me the money in the first place, and that’s more than I’m willing to pay in exchange for a piece of paper that says I’m worth another ten or fifteen grand a year.
BlackBloc, ugh, thank god we’ve finally got an opposition leader now… hopefully Harper will be out on his ass soon.
People always need plumbers. If I were starting all over again, I’d definitely consider the trades.
I am a person who got screwed by:
Duke Financial Aid
Sallie Mae Servicing
and,
perversely,
My own parents (although not on purpose).
I am roughly 80,000 dollars in debt. Perhaps even more. I have an English degree, I am not getting paid well, and I am so, so fucked. My monthly payments are through the rough, I am frantically consolidating, and not sleeping very well at night.
Although I have recently gotten American citizenship – the best course of action for me now is to leave the country and get a job abroad, where my Duke English diploma has greater value. This is what I hope to do within the next 6 months. This is the only way for me to pay off my loans in a timely fashion.
I’ve heard of people killing themselves because of ridiculous student loan debt.
In recent months, I have to say, I’ve thought about it too (not because I was actually planning anything like that, but because life, post-college, is hard enough… Especially since I, like many recent graduates, was not able to afford health insurance for the past 6 months, and hence received no psychological aid of the sort that I’ve had in the past).
zuzu — indeed. My uncle is a mechanic, his wife is a hairdresser (at an Aveda salon), and their son went to college for a semester and dropped out for HVAC school, because there’s better money in that. We’ll always need HVAC techs and mechanics, even if the technology changes.
Aaron.. ouch. I can’t imagine being able to pay a cent more for tuition that I currently do. They raised tuition here by 4.5% at my school this year, which hurt, but was livable. I’m really afraid they’re going to raise it again next year though.
I can’t imagine what would happen to me if I lived in the States atm… I for sure would have had to quit school back in September when my brother got sick because none of us could have afforded to pay for it, and now my mom has cancer, which if my brother’s week in the hospital hadn’t done me in, having to help her pay for cancer treatment would have.
I’m just mentioning this because tuition isn’t the only barrier to lower middle class and working class kids being able to get an education, there are a whole slew of other barriers. Public health care is probably the next most important to affordable tuition, if not more important, because you can’t afford school if you have to help pay for your parent’s or siblings hospital stays. Besides public healthcare, as someone mentioned upthread (too lazy to look) it’s hard to get into a good Uni there if you don’t come from a good enough highschool.
I’m actually kind of depressed now, thinking about that. And thankful.
BlackBloc, I think that, given the grants available, our tuition costs are higher than other province’s. But then, we have a lower cost of living.
Posts like this make me dislike the system of mixed public and private universities more. On the one hand, saying ‘Just go to a public school or don’t bitch about 6 figure debts for undergrad’ is not entirely unreasonable (I made sacrifices so I wouldn’t go into debt (not that it would have been 6 figures, more like low 5s) — if you won’t make some sacrifices, you need to accept the results). On the other hand, if something like that happens, the split between the haves and the have nots will grow even more.
Natalia,
I was more thinking about how suicidally depressed I was over the prospect of not being able to go to school when I got myself into the screwed up situation I’m in… but the inescapable debt burden would definitely been just as bad if not worse :/
wolfa,
I dunno, Quebec’s tuition looks really low to me, to the point where I was considering moving to Montreal for a year before going to school. Way lower than Ontario’s at any rate. I think Nova Scotia has the highest tuition rates, but I might be wrong.
Agreed about the real estate schemes, but NYU does indeed have an endowment. Sexton whines that it’s too low, but NYU does have an endowment — to the tune of $1.5 billion. It’s not up there with Harvard, but it does exceed the endowments of most other universities of NYU’s stature.
As for Sexton and the tuition hikes, agreed. And I don’t support the tuition hikes. But I do support other things that he’s done, including his efforts to raise money from outside sources, which he’s done a very good job at, as well as how effective he’s been at making an NYU degree more valuable. Kind of like your Bill Clinton example — he’s far from a shining president, but I’ll take him over the past four other guys any day.
“People always need plumbers. If I were starting all over again, I’d definitely consider the trades.”
Me too. A friend of mine set out to become a field biologist but now owns a heating & air conditioning business with a partner.
Didn’t mean to sound like I was. The bigger problem, like you said, is lack of aid. But many schools could do a better job of keeping tuition lower.
That’s not what I’m saying. I don’t think taking out loans is a bad thing. I do think it’s questionable, though, when an education costs close to a quarter of a million dollars — and can top half a million if you go to grad school.
Yes, journalists and social workers get screwed, but as Zuzu said, DAs and public interest lawyers aren’t exactly getting rich. NYU has a loan forgiveness program, but it’s not exactly generous — you have to be living off of very, very little in order to get even a portion of your loans forgiven. And most law schools don’t even offer that. Law students, at least those from elite schools, are pretty systematically pushed into firm work as a necessity.
And keep in mind that there are a whole lot of law schools out there, and while NYU may set me up with a well-paying job, that isn’t necessarily true of most of the other schools.
So only the people who can easily afford it should be able to go to private schools? And the rest of us should either go to public schools or suck it up?
Look, I could have easily gone to the University of Washington, which has a very good law school, and saved myself a whole lot of money. But the fact is that I wouldn’t have gotten as well-paying of a job as I’ve gotten from going to NYU, and my degree simply wouldn’t be worth as much. I’d have a much harder time coming to New York from UW and trying to get either a good firm job or a good public interest job (and perversely, the jobs in NY that pay $30,000 a year can be a whole lot more competitive than those that pay $130,000). I could have gone to a public school for undergrad, but that almost certainly would have had an effect on where I got in to law school — I don’t think I’d be at NYU Law if I had gone to UW undergrad, even if I had done reasonably well.
It sucks. And I’m not trying to whine, because I’ve made my choices and I’m perfectly satisfied with them. My point is that I’ve had a lot of privilege in being able to even make the choices that I have. Most other people in this country don’t have these opportunities because of their income level. And that’s pretty fucked.
From the article:
“The half of our student body whose families are paying the full sticker price are paying $41,000 for something that costs $73,000,” said Suzanne P. Welsh, the treasurer. “So they’re getting a great discount.”
Repeat after me: It’s not a product! It’s not a product! It’s not a product! An education is not a product! You only find sticker prices on things like cars, homes, etc.
So, if Suzanne Welsh understands this (and I think she does), what she’s actually talking about is the degree itself. Some people are “getting a great discount” on the purchase of their credentials. Never mind all that knowledge–the important thing is that you don’t pay too much for a piece of paper with your name and the name of the institution that granted it.
Sick.
Arianna, I was talking about Jean Charest. I’m a French-speaking Quebecois. I don’t consider Harper to be my country’s PM. ;) (said he, half-jokingly)
And it’s not Harper that was in office when we fought against the FTAA in Quebec, 2001. Or when we manifested against the support of Canada to the Indonesian invasion of East Timor. The Liberal party’s leadership is not a big source of hope on my side of the political spectrum. Hell, my friends write editorials about how the modern NDP is a right-wing deviationist party that isn’t even fit to be called social-democrat, much less socialist… That should tell you the high expectations I have for the Liberals. Heh.
See, I’m used to calling the provincial leaders Premiers :P My mistake. Especially since you guys are “nation” now :P (Also half-jokingly).
I have to admit I’m pretty ignorant about Quebec politics, but nationally, while I am an NDP supporter (though I find the way it’s heading atm rather distasteful, especially since Layton went all law-and-order on our asses last election), the Liberals are still better than nothing, which is basically what we’ve got at the moment, since the Bloc is seeing fit to kiss Harper’s ass.
Jill, you misunderstood me. I said that this is an inherent problem to having a system of both public and private schools, and that my basic answer (accept the costs of the choice you make) pushes for a big(ger) split between haves and have nots, which is definitely not a good thing. In my mind, the best solution to this is an all-public system, which won’t happen in the US. The second best solution is much heavier needs-based grants available, based on the costs of where you are going to.
Arianna, yes, the tuition is lower, but there are fewer grants available, or something. I forget the details. Maybe it was that the tax here is higher.
Wolfa, Ah, I wasn’t looking at in terms of grants or anything since I didn’t get any here, either. It might be that. Quebec’s taxes are higher but I think they’re only marginally higher than Ontario (though way, way higher than say Alberta). Just for tuition cost as posted on Univeristy websites though, Quebec’s is pretty damn cheap.
Ah, yes, of course there are other Bucknellians on a “College is bloody expensive” thread. Ye tapdancing gods it’s insane!
It’s always been expensive, but now it’s gone up a lot since they’re definitely reducing the courseload for faculty (which requires more hires), potentially building a new dorm or two, potentially buying and redeveloping a neighborhood right by the school that students traditionally rent in (and that perpetually smells like Natty Light, yummy), and a bunch of other incredibly expensive things in the grandiose “Plan for Bucknell”.
Also, there’s a rumor from some MechEs that our Power Plant has had a deal for natural gas at prices from the 80s that expires soonish, so we’ll go from making a profit off the grid to paying out the bison’s behind for energy at 2006 prices. Dunno the veracity of that, but it passes the smell test.
Jill– I’m also a bit puzzled by your support of Sexton combined with your disapproval of the tuition thing; the bottom line is that what has made NYU a prestige school (which seems to be why you support him) is precisely a strategy of buying big-name professors through tuition-financed spending. If the university hadn’t done that, it would have remained a commuter school; you would have had no reason to consider it over U Wash. Remember, NYU might have a decent size endowment (1.5b) in absolute terms but it is also by far the largest private university in the country. It has over 3x the undergrads of WUSTL, a competitor, but only 1/3 the endowment.
I’m not saying the path they chose was clearly the right one, but I also don’t see how on earth they could have become the sort of school people fly across the country to go to any other way, given the resources they had at the time we’re talking about.
Hey C Diane,
I knew folks who swam for Juniata. Nice town. Small world.
I’ve got 15K in debt and we make ten dollars an hour. I don’t work, at this point, due to medical issues…the same ones that made me leave school without the B.A. It’s insane. Because, of course, I have about as much hope of paying that off as I do of winning the lottery (and if I did, that’s the FIRST bill getting paid.)
I am encouraging my sons towards trade schools. As has been said, they will always need plumbers and mechanics, and electricians.
I haven’t read the whole thread but I have a few comments to make about NYU and its history. I did my BA there, circa 1969; I was a clerical staff member (a mathematical typist at the Courant Institute) in the mid 1970s. I mention this all for historial perspective on the work it took to make NYU a better school. At the time it was considered a commuter school, local kids went there and lived mainly at home; it’s academic standing was middle of the road, not really bad but not great either. (Except for the professional schools — medical, dental and law.) At that time, NYU had a very poor endowment and was in a financial crisis. That’s when it sold the Heights campus to CUNY (for Hostos Community College, IIRC). It closed several departments. There were a number of times when they said there could be payless paydays for clerical staff. The checks came this close to not being cashable. (But they were able to get loans to cover the payroll.) Then-President James M. Hester was said to have “built 6 buildings, needed 3 and had the money for one.” And folks, the tuition at the time was about $1250 a semester… and we thought it was too high. (And if had to do it over again, I’d still go there.)
A lot of corporate companies have tuition reimbursement policies -work during the day and go to school at night.
This is working for me so far. For one year, I’ve come away with about $10k a year that I’m paying on my own in loans, and the rest is being paid for by my firm (they pay approx $30k). I attend NYU’s McGhee Division (Business Mgmt) which is a program dedicated to people like myself. At the end of 5 or 6 years (12 credits a semester), I will be relatively debt free and will graduate with a degree from NYU plus over 11 years experience. By that point, I’ll have already made some headway into some kind of management position.
Having said that, I don’t plan on staying there- I just want to be able to use them as a catalyst for a while. And granted, I have that option (Laywers, Doctors, etc do not)- so this was just a thought….
I realize that. I’ve got a slightly irrational pet peeve about the “overpaid, underworked professor” thingie. And in order to cut professors’ pay, I assume what they’d do is hire more adjuncts, who have terrible pay, no job security, and usually no benefits. In order to lower the average pay to professors, they’re not going to cut the salaries of the big names. They’re going to contract out the big survey classes to people who won’t be able to afford health insurance on what they’re getting paid.
I don’t pretend to know how to fix this, but I don’t think professors should be the scapegoat for this problem.
It’s not written in stone that private schools are more prestigious than public schools. Especially when they’re free, public schools can attract enough applicants to be selective enough to have elite status. City College used to. Berkeley isn’t free, but is still up there with Harvard and Yale (not in law, but in most other subjects). It’s all about how much the government invests in having a decent public university. That’s why there are elite public universities in California and France but not in Texas or England. Hell, in Germany the situation’s even reversed – the private universities are considered substandard.
More importantly Jill, that’s only $39,209 per student compared to Princeton’s $1.5M or Harvard’s $1.1M per student. It does not leave any room for NYU to create a need based (grant) financial aid program such as Princeton’s. With NYU’s campaign goal of $2.5B over the next five years I doubt NYU will be able to offer competitive financial aid for at least 15 years.
By raising tuition to cover the expense of top name professors in the past several years, NYU is banking on becoming a well endowed University by increasing the it’s prestige and the worth of it’s degree.
Agreed. I don’t think that most professors are overpaid — most of them work incredibly hard, and certainly aren’t living like rockstars. I was mostly referring to the handful of superstar professors whose name recognition leads schools like NYU to buy them West Village brownstones and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach one class every three years. These people are the exception to the rule, obviously.
Working at a university that offers tuition exemption is also an option, although obviously not practical or feasible for the majority of people. I work at a prestigious university in NYC as an administrative assistant, and I’m enrolled in a master’s program part time. My tuition is entirely paid for, except for student fees, which come out to about $1000 a month. $5-6000 a year of my tuition benefits would be considered taxable income, but my classes are related to my work, so I get them waived.
Taking classes while working at a university wouldn’t work for programs that require full-time enrollment – I wouldn’t get free law school tuition, for example – but there are many, many staff members here who get masters degrees while working office jobs. Again, I know it’s not useful advice for the majority of people, but if I were looking to get a masters degree, I’d take a look at the HR departments of local colleges or universities to see if they’re hiring. Hell, even janitors and cafeteria staff can take advantage of the tuition exemption.
Ooops, that should have been student fees are $1000 a year.
I think somebody might have already mentioned this, but grad studies in non-law/medical areas typically come with a stipend, tuition/fees waiver, and health benefits. One of my friends is getting her MFA in creative writing and her stipend is less than mine in entomology, but she still gets tuition waiver and health benefits. The thing that sucks the big stick is that when she graduates and becomes an adjunct she takes a pay cut for teaching the same classes she does as a grad student and also loses her benefits. It makes no sense for her situation to go downhill after graduation.