BCS leagues expanding - yeah?

I graduated from LSU in the late 1990s. Tuition was about $11,000 per year, including room and board, for out of state students such as myself. It was on the cheap side of state universities then, which is one of the reasons I went there. Most others were around $15,000 a year from what I could tell.
The last time I looked a year or so ago, LSU is now charging around $42,000 per year and I assume other state universities are still similar.
So, essentially, people are paying in one year now what they could have gotten an entire degree for just 20 years ago. That's a major problem that somebody needs to explain. You expect tuition to creep up as costs and inflation go up, sure, but to quadruple in that short a time?

 

Every journalism major should take a semester off and really rethink their options, because they’d make more from getting a CDL.

 

In-state tuition/fees at Penn State nearly tripled between 1995 and 2005. I can only imagine what it is now.

I’m so glad I did two years at a community college. It probably saved me $15,000 at the very least.

 

That was always the case. My first college roommate's dad was an engineer for one of the chemical companies in Louisiana, and he pushed his sons to go down the same track. Roommate's older brother did OK with it, but my roommate clearly didn't have it in him. Great guy, not an idiot, just really struggled with the road he was trying to go down and didn't seem to have the desire or mentality to figure it out.
We lost touch after he moved out and I'm not sure what ever happened to him, but he was definitely more cut out for building bridges instead of designing them.

 

Hell, I'm glad I graduated when I did. From all appearances, if I'd been born even five or 10 years later I probably would've been priced out.

 

I originally read that as CBD, which would not have made the sentence any less true.

 

Same, though for me it was at least $30k. That's part of the reason I react so harshly when I hear people treat community colleges and jucos like a last-chance saloon or consolation prize for students who couldn't hack it at a "real" school. It's budget-friendly and has more flexible scheduling for people who work full-time and/or care for family. Better to knock out those prereqs somewhere with professors who are there to teach and can work with students in person than have to take Biology 101 at 8 a.m. with a few hundred of your closest friends and an overworked TA who's struggling to finish their PhD. The "traditional university experience" is overhyped at best, an expensive myth perpetuated by Hollywood and university marketing departments at worst.

 

Oh, I think the university experience is a worthwhile one. You don’t need four years of it. Two is just fine.

 

That might be true. But college education was our country's method of social mobility. And I think that is being lost. One of my son's roommates at Virginia came from a blue collar family.

I met them at move-in. Nice people. The father was there in his John Deere hat unloading the pick-up. And I thought to myself I don't see enough pick-ups in the parking lot. UVA needs to be attracting more kids like this.

FWIW, my son's roommate is pursuing a PHD in engineering.

 

I had a brilliant friend a year behind me at my expensive Southern private university who was dirt poor from the projects in Coney Island, and likely on the spectrum. He couldn't dress himself. He came to me shortly before I graduated -- crying -- because he was working two jobs and just won another academic grant but losing another due to certain limits. He was bicycling 10 miles a day to a mall job to make tuition. He thought he'd have to leave school with senior year still to come. I didn't know what to tell him except to cry to the right people.

He got his CE, Masters and PhD eventually, got the fuck out of the projects, and has been a transit planner for a half-dozen agencies.

 

As some of the other posts in this thread illustrate, though... Those jobs pay well partially because people don't *want* to do them. Especially truck driver and plumber, of the ones you listed. I think it's hard to tell an 18 to 21-year-old, "Hey, you're a marginal student, you ever thought of doing a more skilled manual labor?" If you're at a four-year college, I don't think that's especially appealing.

As someone who graduated from a high school that also had a vocational program though, I do think it would be helpful if more high schools offered those opportunities for marginal students. I think plenty of students who otherwise might struggle to graduate high school or barely graduate might find those classes more interesting than "college prep."

 

The hottest jobs I know of for HS grad dudes are electrical linemen. Union gigs, you make 6 figures apprenticing, can relocate whenever you want. And these jobs ain’t going away anytime soon.