It's impossible to work your way through college nowadays. Update (3/29/14): I’ve written up an analysis of national tuition cost trends in a new blog post. It turns out that Michigan State University’s tuition situation isn’t uncommon! Earlier today, I ran across a conversation about how the cost of tuition at Michigan State University (MSU) has changed over the years. I had just finished talking with my grandpa over the phone, and he had spent the latter half of the talk extolling the virtues of working your way through college (without family support), so I was rightly annoyed on the topic already.
The creator of the discussion pointed to the historical trends for MSU’s tuition, and in another comment pointed to the Federal minimum wage trends. Modern students have to work as much as 6x longer to pay for college than 30 years ago What we see is a startling trend: Modern students have to work as much as 6x longer to pay for college than 30 years ago. It’s impossible to work your way through college nowadays, revisited with national data. Last weekend, I wrote a brief rant about how it’s far more difficult to work your way through college nowadays than 30 years ago. Some folks took it for a scientific study rather than the rant it was, and criticized it for only looking at Michigan State University’s tuition trends.
In response, I decided to run a proper analysis of national public university tuition data. With the help of some of my awesome Twitter followers, I managed to find a comprehensive data set of the in-state tuition costs for all public 4-year universities in the U.S. from 1987 through 2010. Combining that data with the Federal minimum wage trends from before, we get the chart below showing the number of hours a student would have to work on minimum wage to pay for 1 year of public university tuition in the U.S. To save you the data wrangling, I’ll provide the data set here. Hours worked on minimum wage to pay for 1 year of public university tuition in the U.S. Could a minimum-wage earner in 1978 earn enough in a summer to pay a full year's tuition? | PolitiFact. Everything was better in the old days, apparently -- including the chore of paying for college, at least according to a social media meme sent to us recently by a reader.
The meme -- created by OurTime.org, an advocacy group for young Americans -- said, "In 1978, a student who worked a minimum-wage summer job could afford to pay a year's full tuition at the 4-year public university of their choice. " Really? We figured this was worth a look. First, the minimum wage. Starting on Jan. 1, 1978, the minimum wage was $2.65. Someone working at the minimum wage for 13 weeks, and 40 hours per week, in the summer of 1978 would have ended up with $1,378 for their labors. For the tuition they would have faced in the 1978-79 school year, we turned to figures from the National Center for Education Statistics, the federal government’s repository of education data.
So the meme’s claim is correct except for a few caveats -- two minor and one more significant: Our ruling. Colleges are full of it: Behind the three-decade scheme to raise tuition, bankrupt generations, and hypnotize the media. The price of a year at college has increased by more than 1,200 percent over the last 30 years, far outpacing any other price the government tracks: food, housing, cars, gasoline, TVs, you name it. Tuition has increased at a rate double that of medical care, usually considered the most expensive of human necessities. It has outstripped any reasonable expectation people might have had for investments over the period. And, as we all know, it has crushed a generation of college grads with debt.
Today, thanks to those enormous tuition prices, young Americans routinely start adult life with a burden unknown to any previous cohort and whose ruinous effects we can only guess at. On the assumption that anyone in that generation still has a taste for irony, I offer the following quotation on the subject, drawn from one of the earliest news stories about the problem of soaring tuition. Oh, we would take quite a lot, as it happened. But somehow nothing ever gets done. Phd-job-crisis-640x4627.gif (640×4627) Professors Prank Their University to Protest Crappy Education System. While I wholeheartedly agree with this, and with all sorts of ways in which funding for higher education is being misspent (the university I work for is presently overhauling the student athletic facilities at a cost of 20 million dollars. This would not by itself be a problem, but they just did it six years ago, haven't paid off that loan and the facilities are gorgeous), there is another reason higher education is suffering.
We have forgotten that our job as professors is not to teach students WHAT to think, but HOW to think. I am tired of my colleagues laying the blame at the feet of High School Teachers... whether it is true or not that High School is failing students to think critically and analytically (or if that's even their job), if they aren't doing so by the time they reach us, it is out job to address that. Yeah, I don't think it's that professors have forgotten that.
Oh... office hours. The greatest neglected resource of higher education. Kansas illegally underfunds poorer school districts, court rules. Wading into a battle being fought in state capitols across the nation, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled Friday that disparities in the public funding of school districts violate the state constitution. The court ordered Kansas to cure these disparities by July 1 and asked a lower court to evaluate how much the state should be investing in public schools.
It was not quite the slam-dunk ruling that school funding advocates had hoped for; the court did not set funding levels, as a lower court had. But education advocates, who have been battling the Kansas Legislature on school funding levels for more than a decade, cheered the ruling nonetheless. "It's a good day to be a Kansan," said Annie McKay, the executive director of the Kansas Center for Economic Growth, which advocates for state funding for services.
Legislatures in many states, including Kansas, began reducing school funding in 2009 during the economic recession. The lawsuit, Gannon vs. Alana.semuels@latimes.com. Why Aren’t We Rude to Grown-ups the Way We Are Rude to Kids? Everyday Sociology Talk: Annette Lareau on Social Class and Parenting. California Dumps STAR Test - Schools - Fremont, CA Patch. Governor Brown signed legislation that eradicates the STAR test and brings winds of change to California's public school system Written by Vanessa Castañeda Students in California’s public schools no longer have to take the infamous exit exam called the STAR test. Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation on Tuesday that upgrades the state’s educational standards with the aid of modern technology. AB484, authored by Assemblywoman Susan A.
Bonilla (D-Concord), facilitates the creation of a roadmap that will enable educators to determine how much knowledge students are absorbing and adjust their lesson plans accordingly. "This is one of the most important and revolutionary changes to education policy, and California is the right state to lead the way," Bonilla said in a statement. The bill creates a new system called the Measurement of Academic Performance and Progress, which sets new learning targets for educators to reach based on grade levels. The Shadow Scholar - The Chronicle Review.