My president.
35 Facts That Prove Higher Education Has Become A Corporate Scam
The Student Loan Debt Bubble
1. After adjusting for inflation, U.S. college students are borrowing about twice as much money as they did a decade ago.
2. According to the College Board, college tuition is absolutely soaring. The following comes from a recent CBS News article….
Average tuition and fees at public colleges rose 8.3 percent this year and, with room and board, now exceed $17,000 a year, according to the College Board.
3. Average yearly tuition at private universities in the United States is now up to $27,293. That figure has increased by 29% in just the past five years.4. In America today, approximately two-thirds of all college students graduate with student loan debt.
5. In 2010, the average college graduate had accumulated approximately $25,000 in student loan debt by graduation day.
6. According to the Student Loan Debt Clock, total student loan debt in the United States will surpass the 1 trillion dollar mark in early 2012.
7. The total amount of student loan debt in the United States now exceeds the total amount of credit card debt in the United States.
8. Over the past 25 years, the cost of college tuition has increased at an average rate that is approximately 6% higher than the general rate of inflation.
9. Back in 1952, a full year of tuition at Harvard was only $600. Today, it is $35,568.
10. The cost of college textbooks has tripled over the past decade.
11. One survey found that 23 percent of all college students actually use credit cards to pay for tuition or fees.
12. According to recent Pew Research Center polling, 75% of all Americans believe that college is too expensive for most Americans to afford.
13. College has become so expensive that it is causing many college students to do desperate things in order to pay for it. For example, an increasing number of young college women are actively advertising on the Internet for “sugar daddies” who will help them pay their college bills.
14. The student loan default rate has nearly doubled since 2005.
15. Approximately 14 percent of all students that graduate with student loan debt end up defaulting within 3 years of making their first student loan payment.
The Quality Of College Education In America Stinks
16. The typical U.S. college student spends less than 30 hours a week on academics.
17. According to very extensive research detailed in a new book entitled “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses”, 45 percent of all U.S. college students exhibit “no significant gains in learning” after two years in college.
18. Today, college students spend approximately 50% less time studying than U.S. college students did just a few decades ago.
19. 35% of U.S. college students spend 5 hours or less studying per week.
20. 50% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to write more than 20 pages.
21. 32% of U.S. college students have never taken a class where they had to read more than 40 pages in a week.
22. U.S. college students spend 24% of their time sleeping, 51% of their time socializing and 7% of their time studying.
23. Federal statistics reveal that only 36 percent of the full-time students who began college in 2001 received a bachelor’s degree within four years.
Not Enough Jobs For College Graduates
24. Only 55.3% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 were employed last year. That was the lowest level that we have seen since World War II.
25. According to the Economic Policy Institute, the “official” unemployment rate for college graduates younger than 25 years old was 9.3 percent in 2010.
26. One-third of all college graduates end up taking jobs that don’t even require college degrees.
27. In the United States today, there are more than 100,000 janitors that have college degrees.
28. In the United States today, 317,000 waiters and waitresses have college degrees.
29. In the United States today, approximately 365,000 cashiers have college degrees.
30. In the United States today, 24.5 percent of all retail salespeople have a college degree.
31. The percentage of mail carriers with a college degree is now 4 times higher than it was back in 1970.
32. Right now, there are 5.9 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 that are living with their parents.
33. According to one recent survey, only 14 percent of all Americans that are 28 or 29 years old are optimistic about their financial futures.
34. Record numbers of Americans are going to college, but incomes for young American adults just keep falling. Since the year 2000, incomes for U.S. households led by someone between the ages of 25 and 34 have fallen by about 12 percent after you adjust for inflation.
35. Once they get out into the “real world”, 70% of all college graduates wish that they had spent more time preparing for the “real world” while they were still in school.
So is going to college always a bad idea? Of course not.
But it is a huge gamble.
(via laughinacorner)
“[C]olleges and universities continue to raise tuition far faster than inflation and churn out ever more indebted graduates, two reports released by The College Board today show. With states struggling to balance their budgets, the sharpest tuition increases this year were at public colleges;…
"We are watching the beginnings of the defiant self-assertion of a new generation of Americans, a generation who are looking forward to finishing their education with no jobs, no future, but still saddled with enormous and unforgivable debt. Most, I found, were of working-class or otherwise modest backgrounds, kids who did exactly what they were told they should: studied, got into college, and are now not just being punished for it, but humiliated – faced with a life of being treated as deadbeats, moral reprobates."
— David Graeber at the Guardian, in the best piece I’ve read yet on Occupy Wall Street (via judyxberman)
(via loveyourchaos)
"our generation was told to go to college and get an education and then you get to have this american dream but instead we go to college and no amount of education is enough and there’s no jobs and whatever the american dream was is long gone and all we get to have is massive debt and no prospects and i don’t… i don’t even know who to be mad at about it."
— missparker(via replicarters)
(via loveyourchaos)
Over the past 20 years, college costs have more than doubled. Median income, however, has stayed about the same.
(via loveyourchaos)
They keep re-running the commercial where Dwight Howard and LeBron James have a shooting contest, only to have Larry Bird eat their lunch while they’re distracted. Why are they running it incessantly during the NCAA Tournament? Because it’s actually an argument to stay in school: college graduate Larry Bird snookers the prep-to-pros, thanks to his Indiana State education.
Burger King is going to come out with a response ad where Robbie Hummel loses a shooting contest to Tyler Hansbrough after Hummel tears his ACL.
(via sportscentr)
"I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it."
—
Kurt Vonnegut (via therocktoyourbottom) (via feistyfeminist) (via masculinetoast) (via kalemason) (via somerset) (via loveyourchaos)
I’ve often wished, myself, that I knew more about the diversity of the well before I did.
