How do you feel about how we are leaving the future generations of Americans? Lots of debt? Sure, we know that we must. Lots of conflict? The world has always had conflict, and we have been subject to attack before. Well-prepared to meet the challenges of the future to defend the country, grow the economy and pay off our debt? Okay, we get a failing grade even if we can explain the other horribles above.
A January 2009 report entitled Trends in College Spending –Where does the money come from? Where does it go? funded by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Delta Project (www.deltacostproject.com) examined data supplied annually by all U.S. colleges and universities to the Department of Education to see what was really happening to college education. In world where training for the future is mission critical, it is most interesting to see what they found.
Bottom line, students are paying more – as I have pointed out in an earlier blog, the cost of a college education since 1982 has more than tripled the comparable increase in cost of living – and getting less. With state deficits rising, even before the current meltdown, students were and are picking up a much greater share of the cost of their educations than ever before, and the colleges and universities are actually contributing less to the “teaching” part of a post-secondary education.
Summarizing a portion of the study, the January 15, 2009 New York Times noted: “In 2006, the last year for which data is available, students at public colleges and research universities paid about half the cost of their education — defined as the cost of instruction, student services and a portion of spending on operations, support and maintenance. That is up about 10 percentage points since 2002. At community colleges, students covered about 30 percent of their education, up from 24 percent.
“At private institutions, the increases were less steep, but students cover a greater share: at private research universities, students paid 55.8 percent of the cost of their education in 2006, up from 55.3 percent in 2002. At private colleges that offer bachelors degrees — essentially, liberal arts colleges — the student share went to 63.5 percent in 2006 from 57.7 percent in 2002. At those that offer masters’ degrees, it went to 83.6 percent in 2006 from 75.5 percent in 2002.”
Think about the impact of this report as we step into the worst economic decline since the Great Depression, one in which credit is virtually impossible to get (federal student loans cap out at $31K, a fraction of what it costs to get even a bachelors degree), where home values (which were once used to generate “forced savings” extracted to pay for college educations) are completely eroded, where college endowments have shrunk funds available for financial aid, where state deficits and cutbacks have sliced off massive support for state colleges and universities, and where part-time jobs traditionally held by kids “working their way through school” have vaporized.
Exactly who is going to be generating enough future value to pay back all of this debt we are incurring to get us out of this mess? Untrained, undereducated adults?! Or are we going to step up and realize that we literally have to train those who will live in the future just to have one?
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