<story><title>A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe</title><url>http://profoundlydisconnected.com/cnn-viewer-has-questions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quaunaut</author><text>&amp;gt; Think about it. Universities get to decide how much money to charge their students. Likewise, parents and students decide if they can afford to pay it. It’s a pretty simple proposition. But when the government suddenly makes hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans readily available — under the popular (and voter-friendly) theory that “everyone should go to college” — we see an unintended consequence.&lt;p&gt;Well that&amp;#x27;s also ignoring the point that colleges used to get the majority of their funding from States, and almost every major University now has the majority(and sometimes a &amp;gt;90% majority) of its funding coming from other sources. College used to be subsidized by society, and now it just isn&amp;#x27;t subsidized, and in his argument that entire position is ignored.&lt;p&gt;Like most subjects this is a much more complex problem than either side lets on, but just because Mike Rowe is eloquent in his response doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that it isn&amp;#x27;t ignoring rather large portions of the facts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mjn</author><text>I looked into this a bit for the University of California system, and that did indeed seem to be the issue in that case. Tuition has gone up, but &lt;i&gt;less&lt;/i&gt; than state funding has gone down. In other words, the university is getting cheaper to operate on a per-student basis, but nonetheless getting more expensive to attend, because of a large shift in who pays (from taxpayers to students). The historical public funding levels were around $25k-$30k per student, in present-day dollars, while today the state kicks in a bit under $13k per student: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.kmjn.org&amp;#x2F;misc&amp;#x2F;uc_funding.txt&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not entirely due to the increase in student population, either, although that&amp;#x27;s part of it. If you look at just the total funding column, it&amp;#x27;s gone down since the &amp;#x27;80s, despite the state&amp;#x27;s increasing population and GDP. Someone should double-check my numbers, but last time I looked into this I remember a back-of-the-envelope calculation that California used to put ~0.3% of state GDP into the UC system, and now puts in only about 0.1%.</text></comment>
<story><title>A CNN Viewer Has Questions for Mike Rowe</title><url>http://profoundlydisconnected.com/cnn-viewer-has-questions/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>quaunaut</author><text>&amp;gt; Think about it. Universities get to decide how much money to charge their students. Likewise, parents and students decide if they can afford to pay it. It’s a pretty simple proposition. But when the government suddenly makes hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans readily available — under the popular (and voter-friendly) theory that “everyone should go to college” — we see an unintended consequence.&lt;p&gt;Well that&amp;#x27;s also ignoring the point that colleges used to get the majority of their funding from States, and almost every major University now has the majority(and sometimes a &amp;gt;90% majority) of its funding coming from other sources. College used to be subsidized by society, and now it just isn&amp;#x27;t subsidized, and in his argument that entire position is ignored.&lt;p&gt;Like most subjects this is a much more complex problem than either side lets on, but just because Mike Rowe is eloquent in his response doesn&amp;#x27;t mean that it isn&amp;#x27;t ignoring rather large portions of the facts.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pachydermic</author><text>Also, because the US has an increasingly unequal income distribution, that makes a college degree relatively more valuable. In addition to the social-status factor it certainly still seems to pay off despite the increased tuition (&lt;a href=&quot;http://priceonomics.com/is-college-worth-it/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;priceonomics.com&amp;#x2F;is-college-worth-it&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;My point is simply that maybe college costs so much more now because it&amp;#x27;s just worth it. It used to be that you could still do alright without a college degree, but a ton of manufacturing jobs have moved overseas and there&amp;#x27;s a ton of downward pressure on peoples&amp;#x27; wages who don&amp;#x27;t have engineering and computer jobs.&lt;p&gt;Just to be clear, I&amp;#x27;m not saying that this is &lt;i&gt;the&lt;/i&gt; reason why college is so expensive these days, but I think that it&amp;#x27;s a point which isn&amp;#x27;t brought up enough.&lt;p&gt;I think there&amp;#x27;s a tendency to say: &amp;quot;oh well not everyone can have these high-paying jobs&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;college isn&amp;#x27;t right for everyone&amp;quot;, etc. which Rowe also says. Maybe that&amp;#x27;s true, but we certainly seem to have a shortage of qualified people in this country. Seems to me to be a failure of the educational system and while it makes sense not to saddle yourself with tons of debt for a degree if that degree won&amp;#x27;t help you pay off the debt, I don&amp;#x27;t think encouraging people not to get a higher education is a good idea either. Now I&amp;#x27;m just rambling - I just wanted to point out that that attitude is a sign that something is wrong.</text></comment>