If I had an atom of gold for every second since the big bang I would now have £0.0038 worth.

If the mods and I get 5 cents for every player who claims to have left the site and comes back or creates another account to play because they "run out of points," the site would be funded until 2050. :)

This forum is so nice now .... I bet some of you guys are lovin' it .....

I know a guy who can get you some fine ocean-front property in western Nebraska, but only if you act now!

I know my name.

I know what I don't know.

I know what I do know.

As we know, there are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

I know that the cost of college textbooks has risen by 812% in the past 30 years, which happens to be significantly higher than the rate in the rise in the cost of college tuition, which is higher than the rise of healthcare costs and housing costs. All four of these are growing at a rate significantly greater than the rate of inflation. And, of course, I'll never be able to afford any of these four things.

Thanks Obama.

I know I am glad to not be american and to have almost free education and health care. Just emigrate bo_sox and you'll be able to afford all 4 and more!

I know that I think therefore I am.

I know that my redeemer lives. :-)

I don't know shit about the Congo ...

There are things known and things unknown, and in between are the doors.

I know that if it were my choice, Braillard, I would have long ago.

"I know I am glad to not be american and to have almost free education and health care."

Economics must not be taught out there, huh? It's not free; someone always pays for it. Or did you think college professors and doctors were enslaved in your country?

Because that's fucked up. You're proud of slavery?

Free at the point of use, dumbass.

Oooh, Duff, can you say more stuff like that? We need more interesting lunatics.

Damn Duff, I thought quiet people were inherently smart people. I have *no money*. Literally I have $400 in my pocket and that is all I have. So yeah, someone should pay for it, but not me. I have a right to an education and it should not cost me for the rest of my life.

I'm fortunate enough to have supportive parents that can afford to send me anywhere in the country, and they would happily throw up a few bucks a year in taxes so that my situation wouldn't be a privilege.

Where are you from Duff? Maybe you are so rich and capitalist that you think learning economics is buying stock, selling it the next second and getting a bunch of money for it.. or even better, maybe you think it is buying a company, selling it for scratch an pocketing the money to buy a yacht?

It was free for me when I was a student, and now that I work, I pay for it through taxes... That allows equality of chances and care (to some extent of course... rich kids still get into better schools... and rich people still get better health care... but at least it evens out the odds)

Sometimes it is frustrating because I do pay a lot of taxes but when I broke my knee, the hospital, the operation, the scanner, and everything must have cost me less than 200 euros!! And my five years to get my engineering degree cost me less than 2 500 euros!! (and gets me a gross salary of about 35 k euros the first years with about 20% taxes; so about 28 k euros before income tax)

Bo, can't you go study abroad? It would cost your parents less, no? I heard that Obama only finished paying for his studies a few years ago and that in the US, universities are so expensive, that the job you can get with your degree isn't paid enough to honor your debt, is that true?

And with that I go back to the OP : I don't know if what i think i know is true

My initial reaction to all the "Occupy" protests was that it was a complete waste of time. They were, but one of the protesters said something like "I was told that if I worked hard, got an education, I wouldn't have to cook burgers all my life. I did all that, I'm buried in debt, and now I would take a job cooking burgers, if I could get one."

He's totally got a point. When I went to university in 1990, you couldn't exactly "work your way through school", but the expenses and debt were reasonable. Now, education costs are crazy. Health care, the same way.

@Braillard: Yes, student debt is enormous, and it is a "special" kind of debt. Normally when an American goes bankrupt, they lose all their money, but their debts are cancelled. Student debts are an exception - they are never cancelled. It's crazy.

Young people today (for once) do have a point when they say they're getting screwed.

Wow, it's hard to accept... I wouldn't even start any studies in those conditions, I would just start working without a degree and try to work my way up by self learning on the internet...
Is anything being done to stop this non sense?

If only USSR had won the cold war, we would all have the same free education about how Stalin is the best and we would all be too hungry to think about undergraduate studies ;-)

There are plenty of excellent schools students can go to without leaving with 100k indebt. The only reason schools can charge so much is because people think a fancy name is worth an additional 40k a year.

^the above applies to the middle class. Access to education for below middle class is a serious issue in the US.

Ha ok that makes more sense, but it is still a problem because if schools with fancy names can charge over what their students can then reimburse with the jobs they get, it means that mummy and daddy are paying the extra 40k/yr needed... That will only get rich kids in those school, and everybody knows not only rich kids are smart (I would even argue the contrary).

Anyway I don't understand why libertarians always say that the market will regulate itself when it clearly doesn't or over period of times so long that it either doesn't really work or it creates crazy bubbles. Schools should themselves find it dumb to overcharge, but they don't give a shit because they are able to fill up their classroom even with the really high rates.. which shouldn't even be possible if self regulation actually worked...

the jump between the two paragraph is because i forgot to ask why wouldn't the federal government do something about that and my self answer was that americans and schools would claim they are free to do what they want and the government would just be against so many lobbies that they would just give up

Braillard, maybe you are not aware of this, but a large driver of the increased cost of universities in the US is that the government subsidizes the process with things like Pell Grants and Stafford loans. These allow students to borrow well beyond their means to pay for college which in turn drives costs up significantly above where they would be in a "market clearing equilibrium" scenario. Whether this is good or bad is left to the individual, I had some of these loans and they do definitely open up college to a larger segment of the population. But eh do come with the consequence of artificially inflated demand for college and subsidized funding, both of which drive prices upwards.

Honestly, I don't know how most Americans put up with the wealth divide given that the poor don't have adequate health care. In my opinion, Obamacare was a step in the wrong direction.

European kids would never put up with this level of mistreatment.

Education is affordable in the US if your expectations are in line with your situation. If you're not 'rich', then you can get a perfectly solid and respectable education at a local university (assuming you don't live in farm-land) -- and not a community college, but a real local university. You live at home, go to school at nights & weekends, and work during the days.

College kids do this all the time and graduate with no/minimal debt. I did this.

The problem about the high cost education is what abgemacht referred to -- people have to have a particular University Brand so they can wear the colors, get the school logo on their key chain and license plate. Let alone the cost for room and board to live on campus -- or even off campus but away from home in order to get the "college experience".

Just get a job, build your resume, get the piece of paper and move on. The job world doesn't care the name of the college. As long as you can speak clear sentences and know not to wear black shoes and brown belt you're ok.

And if you're an engineer, you don't even have to worry about speaking clearly. Or the belt, for that matter.

Just mumble and raise hands. Repeat.

No i didn't know that Yaleunc, thanks for the piece of info.

Bo_sox, i didnt knew Obama was the power behind the scenes for 24 years before he got President :) :)

Education is not a Market, it is an investment..

Die Hard is awesome

@Abge ... in the United States there may be some, but not many. Even the cheapest in-state institutions (Central Oklahoma is something like $6000/year for in-state students and that's the cheapest state school I know of off the top of my head) are still more expensive than the most upscale schools "with a fancy name" are in other countries. For students in Canada, the University of Toronto, one of the best schools in the world, is around $6000. For EU/UK students, Oxford's tuition ranges from £6-9K, depending of the income of the family paying. For the National University of Singapore, tuition for undergrad students that are citizens in Singapore varies based on the program but the only two that exceed S$11,650 are medicine and dentistry, which are significantly more expensive. That's how this should work. IU asks for $10,000 for in-state students but they ask another $10,000, and more for students that want more than the basic dorm package, for room and board, and unlike Canada and the UK (I have no idea about Singapore), the government here doesn't do nearly as much to help out. $20K per year for four years is far too much debt to put on someone's shoulders, not before they have a career, but before they even know *if* they're going to have a career or how that career is going to pay off for them, especially considering that the most rewarding careers anymore require more than just a four-year degree, rendering many undergrad degrees just as useless as high school diplomas are in the real world. Bring that down to $20K total, maybe even up to $30-40K if necessary, and that's reasonable. People will still complain but at least they won't be in debt for 20 years for a four-year degree.

Private institutions ought to be able to charge the highest competitive rate possible. Harvard should charge over $50,000 a year for tuition if people will pay it.

@bo

I'm clearly not arguing that schools in the US are cheaper than schools in Europe. I'm also not arguing that no education reform is needed in the US. What I'm arguing is that students/parents choose colleges based on the name of the school regardless of its ROI. I 100% agree that state schools should be cheaper, but that doesn't justify spending $60k+ at a private school if your expected salary after graduation is under $40k. If going to a private school is going to put you $100k+ in debt then you should *not* go to a private school.

Oh, I got it. I interpreted that.. badly...

Private school is a serious choice. A lot of people send their kids to private schools without understanding how serious of a choice it is. When kids go through their whole juvenile lives in private schools, the idea of a public school is awfully scary. I went to a private high school that was a split between former public students and lifelong private school students and that seemed like a trend. Even if they had to pay themselves, they were willing to do it.

@abgemacht I agree with your calculations. But it's a disgrace that so many college and university programs are ripoffs, particularly when they're targeted at people who are barely adults and cannot easily discharge the debt in the future.

@tend

I agree that it is a very large decision to place solely on a 17/18 year old. High school counselors need to be much better and parents need to be better informed and more realistic to help students make the right choice that won't trap them in debt for most of their working lives.

Asking parents to be more realistic is probably the most unrealistic solution to this problem. It is not going to happen. Maybe when I'm a parent or of a parent's age that will be easier because we'll all be so used to getting screwed over and do everything we can to prevent it.

You'd think that by the time you're a parent of a teenage that you'd never forget being 60k+ in debt and how much that sucked. Most parents want the best for their kids. It baffles me that this is still acceptable, generation after generation. As the prices keep increasing I would hope this rectifies itself... and it only will by students choosing the smarter lower cost option instead of expecting parents to chip in and remortgage their house, "help" them apply for student loans, and give the hype of name brand schools since the day they start walking.

Yeah, I'd think so too, but there are very few parents of college-age teenagers that were in that kind of debt coming out of school so we don't know yet. The bottom line is that parents coming out of each generation have grown up and fought for all of these noble issues and then their fire just seemed to go out by time they all got to the age where they controlled the system.

The problem won't rectify itself. Harvard and Princeton will always be Harvard and Princeton, and kids that go to school wearing a suit jacket will always want Harvard and Princeton, or Stanford, or wherever. The only way this problem is going to be solved is if the government finds a reason to do something about these practices.

"by the time you're a parent of a teenage that you'd never forget being 60k+ in debt and how much that sucked"

For students whose parents did not get a university degree, there's nothing to forget, because they never knew.

As for the "generation after generation" thing, I don't think that's true. I went to university not quite "a generation" ago and the cost was nowhere near as exploitative as it is now. A generation prior to that, it was even less burdensome.

As bo_sox48 points out, university costs have escalated in a way disproportionate to everything else. This is a new and worse problem, not some generationally recurring one.

The government should focus on making state schools better, not interfering with what private schools do.

Yeah, they should, and that's why there's no reason to be optimistic about it.

Bo, you should go study in Belgium. There it is free. If you are European that is :)

I know this is the greatest non-apology ever, from Luis Suarez:

"I spoke to my psychologist and he said I had to face it and say sorry. I did"


They say his mind is a complete blank while he is "biting."

Do you think his mind is completely blank?

I know all soccer players' mind are completely blank