Thursday, February 18, 2021

Biden not enthused about bailing out large student loans. Why has college gotten so expensive compared to so many other things in society?

Biden isn't real enthused about forgiving large amounts of student debt beyond maybe $10,000 of debt. There is a question of how many needs we can meet all at once and how much money we can print.

My own take on this is that there has been a growing gulf between a large segment of professional level salaries and the wages of a huge segment of the workforce.

This makes paying for college more of a burden. Even quite a few graduates, from college (especially in the arts), are not able to find high paying professional jobs to pay back large debt.

The cost of college, itself, has gone way up in recent years. It's been pushed up by the rising salary scales of professionals and colleges competing against one another to retain what they see as competent faculty; especially the star faculty and administrators. Positions at other universities and industries threaten to pay more stripping an institution of its most talented workforce.

At the same time, state supported colleges have seen a decrease in the percent of their operating budgets that the state pays for so they have had to rely more on raising tuition to meet their budgets.

Back when I was in college, state supported schools were quite reasonable in tuition. That was back in the 1970's. I was able to dabble into a lot of less practical studies and had a pretty good time. Money wasn't the entire game, back then.

These days, that's a difficult thing for the economy and low income workers to swallow.

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