I went to a liberal arts college in the late '80s and tuition there was about $13K a year. Tuition at comparable liberal arts colleges these days is in the neighborhood of $75K, so it’s in the neighborhood of a 6X increase. Which is still a fuck ton but not quite as bad as indicated by this post. However: college tuition (especially at colleges like this) is a very fluid property. They offer quite a lot of “financial aid” which is really nothing more than a discounted rate rather than any actual money changing hands, and it’s quite typical for a student to end up paying half the quoted rate. A college’s tuition can be better regarded as the maximum rate they’re going to charge kids from better-off families.
Comment on Wages never caught up with costs
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Does anyone know if college is accurate? I went about 15 years ago, and state schools were $10k/year for just tuition, $20k/year for tuition and room and board. Private schools were closer to $40k/year for everything.
I’d be pleasantly surprised if it wasn’t more than $30k a year for college now.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 days ago
hardcoreufo@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yup thats how they do it. I went to a liberal arts college like that in the mid 2000s. 20k scholarship out of 30k tuition/boarding. Next year it was up to 35k. Year after would have been 40k, schalorship did not increase. Transferred to state school no scholarship but it kept my out of pocket about 12k.
defrostedLasagna4921@piefed.zip 3 days ago
It costs me about $8K for this semester at my community college living on campus. So I think that would probably end up being $16-17K for the year.
Einskjaldi@lemmy.world 3 days ago
You can get much lower, but those are subsidized in state tuition rates for residents. That’s more 6-12k a year with the Pell grant covering community college completely if you’re low income. Same as housing, that’s completely address dependent, although it has gone up. But the lowest cost housing was more like 20k for a house in 90s. There are still houses for high 100s now.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 3 days ago
Tuition exploded in the 90s. You were already on the bad side of it. I graduated from an “expensive” private college in 1982, and it was about $10k. If I’d gone to a state school, it would have been about $3K.
idiomaddict@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Even my older sibling (ten years older) had significantly cheaper school in the early 2000s than I did and significantly more expensive than you. I honestly just expected it to keep growing at an insane rate- I hope it’s leveled out some.
Side note: I was really excited to earn $35k/year at my first office job in 2015, because I grew up with $40k in mind as the “made it” salary. I was… disappointed.
ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 days ago
My first programming job in 1996 was $35K a year. It was pretty disappointing even then.