Yes i think that colleges them selfs are to blame for the mess that industry is in. Number one reason I think this is because i am an out of state student I go to colorado state university. CSU has just decided to raise out of state tution to 30 thousand a year. WHAT THIS IS CRAZY! Want to know why i think this is crazy? This last monday CSU put on a FREE concert from COMMON, who they spend 90 thousand dollars to get him to come to CSU for a FREE concert. So they are rasing out of state tutition to pay for junk like a rapper who thinks he is god. Free anything is always good but not when the equipment inside the classrooms are always broken. When you have college students using overheads because they are more reliable over powerpoint presentations because none of the projectors ever work. Thats a problem that out money should be going to. Not a $90,000 free concert.
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Agreed. That is crazy, college tuition prices go up every single year. I mean it's a slightly insignificant difference from year to year, but on a span of 5 or even 10 years its pretty crazy. I was filling out a payment plan paper for my school yesterday and I got pretty worried about how much debt Im going to be in after I get out of school. Sometimes, I want to think if its even really worth it to be approx. 100,000 dollars in debt after 4 years for some people, if the job they want to have wont even pay them very well. =/
College costs are only likely to get higher. Colleges are definitely to blame for rising costs, but those rising costs are encouraged by rising government aid. Subsidies to colleges and to students give schools an incentive to raise tuition and prevent them from dealing with economic inefficiencies that lead to the problems you mentioned.
Economics 101: inflate demand and you will increase costs.
Economics 101b: subsidize a service and you will inflate demand
I haven't the slightest clue as to the breakdown of CSU's costs, but I'd be willing to argue that they didn't get that 90 thousand from tuition. I know at UCCS, we have lots and lots and lots of fees (some even through our parking permits, which thankfully are being reduced next year... for housing students, anyway). With 7,000 people on campus, it's very easy to get a large sum of money from a very small fee. I think CSU has more students than we do.
It's the Board of Regents that decides the tuition for Colorado schools, though. So blame them, not the colleges themselves, unless you are complaining about Room and Board costs, not tuition itself.
I find it hard to believe that tuition went up from $16K to $30K, though.
~C
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Well that's a good point. College costs go way beyond tuition, but I think the source of the problem remains the same. If students were using their own dollars to pay for college, schools would be forced to lower their fees and economize or risk losing their students.