Both my kids are in college right now. Both leveraged city college to eliminate ~ 2 years of 4 year school tuition. Both are working FT as well. If things go as planned...they will graduate with 50K in student loans each. We supplement them with food and other life expenses.

Going to college w/o researching and accepting any grants, awards and assistance is like going into the hospital with no insurance. There's the price and then there's the price. My stepdaughter pulled at least 20K out of thin air while in college. Money laying around untaken. I'll bet she didn't write more than 30 requests.

12 bicks a credit hour. Books, fees, and tuition was just under 400 for 16 hours.

I worked full time night shift.

there are lots of grants if you fit into the right groups.
But a white upper-class male? Forget it.

"Public-private partnerships." In other words, using taxpayer money to build something. If it is successful, a private entity keeps the profits. If it fails, taxpayers bail it out and assume ownership. In other words, not capitalism.

I shared an apartment with three other guys. We had one bathroom and a small kitchen/living room. The apartment came with crappy beds, dressers, desks, couches, and two undersized parking spaces. We were charged for 12 months rent but were only allowed to occupy it for 9 months, unless we "waived" the right to have it cleaned. Rent was $880 a month or $220 per person. No utilities were included.

The private/public apartments have individual bedrooms with individual bathrooms, big screen TV's, hot tubs, one parking space per bedroom, mini bars, and the complexes generally have their own gyms and rec rooms. They run around $1200 per resident, or $4800 for a 4 bedroom apartment. Students just either have their parents pay for it or run up student debt to pay for it. The "old" style apartments are mostly gone.

OU high end housing

https://kfor.com/2018/08/13/ous-high-end-apartments-have-low-occupancy/


Last fall, the campus introduced the residential colleges, Dunham and Headington apartments. The university said they were modeled after Yale.

The apartments have rates close to $4,000 for a two bedroom and more than $6,000 for a one bedroom with a bath, per semester.

"I think there's a lot more they could be doing with that money," Nees said.

The apartments are only 70 percent filled - a waste of money, according to some students.

"It's just more money that the university has to spend on building it, not really worth it in my opinion," said Kristen Clason.

The newest apartment, Cross, is only 28 percent occupied.

The college system is broken. Yearly college tuition increases have exceeded inflation for years. College’s don’t have to compete with one another based on tuition costs since the government provides student loans and subsidizes the college’s with our tax dollars. It’s a vicious cycle that we parents need to break. College’s increase tuition to pay for tenured professors who can’t be fired, who work less, earn more, indoctrinate students with liberal view point and teach that free markets are evil.

I see too many coworkers complain about their own college student loan debt and not having money to set a side for their children’s education nor contributing more than 5% to their own 401k’s. They support Bernie Sanders and the idea that college should be free. These same folks have new car payments, buy lunches and or Starbuck’s daily, support their college’s AD thru football season tickets and have $150 monthly cable bills. It’s too easy to fall back and rely upon government than to take personal and familial responsibility. We need to break the government dependence cycle and teach fiscal responsibility, planning and sacrifice. Drive old cars without a payment, cut the cable cord, take lunch to work, eliminate credit card debt. Read the Millionaire Next Door or Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It’s not about how much you make as it is about what you do with it. Pay you and your family first rather than the new car or furniture dealer. Set aside college tuition money when your child is born via 529 plan. When start a job, immediately enroll in 401K. Sounds simple and common sensical, but it’s the exception, not the norm. At 8% yearly return your money will triple every 24 years. Nope, not a financial planner, just want to control my families destiny.

Imagine how college’s would change if every state stopped sending your tax dollars to the state universities and they had to compete like every other business?

^^^
Well said.

Agreed. Very well said.

You hit all the right wing talking points. Sounds like you’ve been indoctrinated well. What college did you go to? Most of them teach that the plural does not need an apostrophe.

explain to me the wisdom of working your whole life to gain equity in order to give it back to a college so your kids can....work their whole lives to gain equity which they can give back to a college so their kids can....

my earnings potential is limited by me. not the college I attended. it's limited by where I choose to live and which corp I decide to pledge my life to.

cracks me up when I hear parents talk about the small boutique school their kid attends for $40k per year with an expectation that I'll be impressed----yet it's a school no-one has ever heard of! these schools are writing their own history and selling it to idiot parents. a young man could **** and drink his way from one end of Europe to the other and back again for 1/4 of what some colleges are charging these days for a degree and probably be worth more as an employee than most graduates.

IMO an awful lot of parents out there are failing to apply basic math the the college proposition.

I don't think it's the parents not doing the math. Most parents do the math and say, 'I'm out!'. So the kids fall prey to the big education/government complex.

Easy money, easy terms and an empty promise of higher lifetime earnings. Well not so much a promise as much as a lure. If the government stopped issuing guaranteed student loans the cost of higher ed would plummet, enrollments would crash, education quality would improve.

Won't happen. It's too genius of a racket, the incubation of liberalism would diminish and the direct conduit of young prople from college to government would get restricted.

After all, who in their right mind could possibly be against education?

Problem is the liberal arts, which have exploded over the years, is not education, it's indoctrination. A distinction the big ed/government complex does not want to be made.

If I didn't get free classes as a work benefit, my just completed Batchelors of Applied Science in Software Dev would've cost me $10k out of pocket. Our BSN, networking, and various management degrees are about teh same costs - maybe $1k off either direction due to different book costs, etc.

I would go out on a limb, and say that was taught in high school.

Back on topic:

Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and others collect massive amounts of data on you, even when you attempt to "opt out" of the few places they give you a choice. They run this information through predictive models and sell the resulting "insights" for huge profits. This information is often used to control your behavior without your consent or knowledge. You have no choice in this matter. You cannot see everything they think they know about you. You cannot stop it.

And it doesn't matter if you are on-line or not. The subtle but massive influence exerted on the billions of people who are on-line will necessarily bring you along.

Resistence is futile, even if you do recognize what is happening. This has been developing for 20 years or so. People born in the late 80's, early nineties and later have no idea and even if they do, don't seem to care or have accepted their powerlessness over it.

If you went to college you'd know that punctuation and grammar are taught in grade school, unless of course you were enrolled in a remedial English course at the university.
Usually those courses are reserved for the football players.

Google has also started grooming our children with Google Classroom and Google Docs. Our public school system has gladly taken Google up on all the free classroom/organizational software to make life easier for the teachers. Most all of our grade-school kids' schoolwork is done via Google classroom.

I have a problem with the fact that every paper written, work submitted, graded, etc. will be indexed/stored/sold by them. Our children are already being profiled. It boggles my mind that people don't see/realize that, and are not more upset about it.

And yes, I always tell my son, as he's about to download something for "free", that someone, somewhere will be making $ from that transaction.

I'm not a carmudgeon - just worry about future of ours and our children's privacy.

The huge majority of the young people have absolutely no fear of mass manipulation. They are under the impression that 'it can't happen here' as part of their grooming. As I've said many times, the socials do not bring people together, they isolate people.

The argument that somebody is making money from offering free downloads is ineffective. People end up with something they want that's free that they think should have cost them money. They have no idea that 'cost' involves much more than simply money.

Money is becoming an abstraction; numbers on paper or on a screen. The screen has more value than money. If you've got a screen, who needs money?

One of my issues is that I am willing to pay for many of these products to protect my privacy. I cannot buy most of them. The only way I am allowed to acquire them is by trading my privacy.