Today it’s near impossible to work your way through college
By Svati Kirsten Narula, Atlantic
A lot of Internet ink has been spilled over how lazy and entitled Millennials are, but when it comes to paying for a college education, work ethic isn’t the limiting factor. The economic cards are stacked such that today’s average college student, without support from financial aid and family resources, would need to complete 48 hours of minimum-wage work a week to pay for his courses — a feat that would require superhuman endurance, or maybe a time machine.
To take a close look at the tuition history of almost any institution of higher education in America is to confront an unfair reality: Each year’s crop of college seniors paid a little bit more than the class that graduated before. The tuition crunch never fails to provide new fodder for ongoing analysis of the myths and realities of the American Dream.
Last week, a graduate student named Randy Olson listened to his grandfather extol the virtues of putting oneself through college without family support. But paying for college without family support is a totally different proposition these days, Olson thought. It may have been feasible 30 years ago, or even 15 years ago, but it’s much harder now.
He later found some validation for these sentiments on Reddit, where one user had started a thread about the increasing cost per course at Michigan State University. MSU calculates tuition by the “credit hour,” the term for the number of hours spent in a classroom per week. By this metric, which is used at many U.S. colleges and universities, a course that’s worth three credit hours is a course that meets for three hours each week during the semester. If the semester is 15 weeks long, that adds up to 45 total hours of a student’s time.
Perhaps this is one more reason why LTCC should become a 4-year college offering Baccalaureate degrees.
I doubt that it will be less expensive at LTCC than at any other Calif State College.
One of the huge differences now, compared to when I went to College in the 1960′ is the increased number of non teaching employees. California schools, (and I expect most other states too, since this is NOT just a california problem) have administrative “Deans”, Directors of this and that and more vice presidents than a bank, many at high 5 and 6 figure salaries plus large benefit packages.
The same structure is often duplicated at each school, as opposed to some centralization as it once was.
You just can’t add all the non academic costs without charging the students for them.
Particular to California, is tons of rules that the state govt (thru the education codes) applies to each school, which is clearly non academic, but still costs money.
The once first class, as good as it gets, california college system is now a bloated inefficient, top heavy mess. Their most recent plan to pay for it all and keep the salaries rolling is to recruit more foreign students, most if not all on some form of govt paid for plan or scions of rich foreign families, all paying large out of state fees.
This, of course falls to the detriment of homegrown California residents like our kids.
We need a major change.