What Happened to College

College

Attending college was usually considered a good idea, good for the student, good for the community, good the country, good for society as a whole.  An educated person is exposed to different ideas, different cultures, different viewpoints.   The college experience helps expands a person's capacity to learn, experience new things, and solve the challenges of the modern day. The college experience creates an improved person that can help make a better life for themselves and their family helping contributing to a better society.

This noble idea of educating the citizens for the betterment our society seems to have been corrupted along the way.  Excellent programs such as the GI bill enabling veterans to go on to college, community colleges enabling inexpensive access to higher learning, or state schools providing lower cost access to residents are excellent programs that many used to improve their opportunities in life. 

The U.S. college educational system was and is the best in the world, but what has happened recently is a corrupting of the system.  The excellent idea of providing low cost student loans to enable student to attend universities has been highjacked by the very same universities to escalate tuitions to outrageous levels.  Now the local private universities with a student population of ~2000 students is routinely charging $50,000/yr for tuition, similar to Ivy league schools. 

While colleges have been raising their tuitions at a dramatic rate well above the 3% levels of inflation, their enrollments have skyrocketed.  Colleges are seeing record freshman classes despite these ridiculous tuition rates.  Why?

What happened?  Has worldwide demand from students around the world created a more limited supply at our colleges.  Are there more applicants for the limited spots are our U.S. universities. Perhaps.  But  due to this demand, the colleges have learned that they can raise tuitions for their limited slots and demand does not drop so the price keeps increasing to foolish levels. The problem appears to be access to money or funding.  Easy financing creates excess.  Similar to housing, credit cards, auto loans, and now a college education. 

A good idea has been corrupted where the schools, banks, lending institutions, and government have created a collusive environment where the schools inflate tuitions, the government and banks provide funding, and the students and families foot the bill.  Yes, students and families knowingly enter into these arrangements,  our culture has promulgated the benefits of education and rightly so.  We can agree that educating our children is good for all of us. 

Back in the mid 1980's, you were able to go to an outstanding university for under $5000/yr, you could work to pay some of the tuition, and borrow to pay the difference.  You could do this on your own and get by.  Today, that same university is 25,000 and it is doable to work and borrow to pay the costs, but it is much more challenging, and at most institutions untenable. 

One of our national goals should be to provide affordable access to a college education for all our citizens. We have seen the political influence of the educational funding conglomerate in having Bankruptcy laws mutated to forbid educational loans from being discharged in bankruptcy.  So, a multi-billion dollar corporation can wipe it's debts clean, but a person struggling cannot get rid of their student loan debt.  Fascinating, interesting, sad.  This illustrates how the system has been hijacked, corrupted, and focused on generating excessive profits than in providing reasonable funding to higher education. 

We can and must change the system.  With the advance of technology, high speed internet and video, we have new way low cost to deliver courses and knowledge.  We can provide universal access to higher learning in a much more economical format while keeping the principles intact. We must make changes.  We are taking our college educational system which is a national treasure and undermining its very reason for existence. 

With Love,

Coach K

Tom Kaufmann

CoachKaufmann.com