College Tuition in 18 years from now: $130K A YEAR private, $41K a year public

[Zalatix]

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/college-tuition-look-18-years-131235673.html

What College Tuition Will Look Like in 18 Years
By Stephanie Landsman | CNBC – 6 hours ago

It's not just the nation heading for a fiscal cliff.

Soaring education costs could end up rupturing your nest egg-and bring your child to the brink of bankruptcy before he even gets his first job.

Even the top one percent may get a panic attack from the latest projected tuition rates.

Campus Consultants Founder and President Kal Chany figured out what college will likely cost by 2030 based on inflation rates. He wrote the book "Paying for College Without Going Broke."

The findings? In 18 years, the average sticker price for a private university could be as much as $130,428 a year (See chart.) The situation isn't much better if you go the public route. Sending your child to a state university could set you back at least $41,228 a year.

[pnwmom]

1. I remember when my youngest was born and they were predicting

about $50K a year at private colleges -- which has happened, right on schedule.

So these predictions should be taken very seriously.

[renate]

2. goodbye, America, it was nice to have known you

I just don't see how America could remain one of the top economic powers in the world, let alone #1 or #2, if this happens to education here while other nations are making it a priority.

[riderinthestorm]

3. 2012 costs for the University of Illinois, a public school, in-state tuition is $30,000.

http://admissions.illinois.edu/cost/tuition_freshman.html

If you base the future price on the past 25 year history, the cost will be much higher than $41k in 2030 if we're already seeing $30k for in-state public university kids today.

College will become a luxury item that only the very elite can swing... taking us back 150 years when privilege bought your station in life, and merit or intelligence weren't part of the equation.

[riderinthestorm]

4. So why does this drop like a stone, especially when student loan debt is such a hot issue on DU?

Hearing real numbers and seeing how much it really is costing to get a college degree now is too difficult for those who want to blame the students for their debt instead of our deeply flawed funding for higher education system?

An evening kick...

[Zalatix]

5. I haven't the foggiest. Perhaps you have a pretty solid point.

Whose side are we on about this issue, the students or the those who are blaming the students?

[riderinthestorm]

6. There's a solid contingent of DUers who blame the students

They've taken the "wrong major" or they were stupid about borrowing or they didn't read the fine print or they went to a too expensive school....

Thanks gawd we haven't had any go to Mitt's extreme "they should have simply cashed in their stock portfolios...." but some of the finger pointing at students is pretty bad.

The fact is that college is now pretty damn well unaffordable. If your career choice requires college you have to go into debt these days and a lot of it if you don't have parents or family to support you.

And its only going to get worse. If we don't howl and make it a big issue now (when it already IS basically unaffordable), well, your OP demonstrates that pretty soon we are going to have an even bigger crisis.

[Zalatix]

8. "they should have simply cashed in their stock portfolios...."? We'll get there in due time.

[Puzzledtraveller]

10. This one baffles me too.

I wonder if it is from the mistaken beliefe that institutions of higher learning can do no wrong in that noble pursuit. The univeristy heads and academia having some natural immunity from blame. We see a similar thing when it comes to health care also. It has to be collusion between the institutions and the lenders, the colleges and the banks.

[sendero]

7. Like housing costs.

... college costs are seriously constrained by what can be afforded. When it gets to the point that people wno't make these huge college loans to 90% of folks, college costs will moderate.

[Zalatix]

9. We've hit that point several times over with college. The problem is this.

Employers demand college degrees, and are demanding them in greater percentages as time goes on.

People who simply cannot college degrees, 2 decades from now, will simply be culled from the workforce. They won't get access to even very many minimum wage jobs.

That's the end result of a perpetual employer's market.

[sendero]

22. We'll.

.... see.

[FarCenter]

11. Most higher education will not be done by colleges and universities as we know them

All the basic introductory courses can be delivered over the net using standardized, low-cost courses and automated testing.

[Zalatix]

12. Teach to the test. Hooray. What exactly will people actually LEARN???

[Fumesucker]

15. I'm starting to think that open source educational software should be developed..

You can teach any number of people just about anything with the right software/video/audio/ai feedback/teachermail/live help.

The limitation to what someone can learn is more their curiosity than any other single thing, the curious person with web access can learn a great many things and far more could be done to help them.

[FarCenter]

18. Free or low-cost courses are starting to be delivered

Stanford offers more free online classes for the world

Stanford University is introducing five free online classes this month, following a successful pilot last fall that drew more than 350,000 participants around the world.

...

Three classes will launch on March 12 – Design and Analysis of Algorithms, Natural Language Processing and Cryptography. Two more, Game Theory and Probabilistic Graphical Models, are scheduled to launch on March 19.

Demand has been strong; total enrollment in the five new classes is nearly 335,000.

Last fall, 356,000 people from 190 countries expressed interest in one or more of the first three classes offered, and approximately 43,000 successfully completed a course. Participants came from as close as Stanford's Palo Alto campus and as far away as Ghana, Peru, Russia and New Zealand.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/march/online-courses-mitchell-030612.html

[Gidney N Cloyd]

19. Florida State is working on some low-cost online course content that would make them

cheap to deliver by partner colleges and virtually eliminate the text book cost to students.

The weird thing to date, though, is how the big online "colleges" with little brick and mortar overhead to figure in are still bleeding the students. So it's not all about fancy buildings, big name faculty, and the latest technology driving costs. There are other factors at play...

[FarCenter]

20. A lot of it is "value pricing" the credential represented by a degree from college XYZ

The other factor is that they want to price online high in order to make money to support the bricks and mortar campus.

But a few of the more prestigious institutions are experimenting with non-degree credentials.

[FarCenter]

16. The tests ensure that students watched the lectures, did the exercises and studied the materials

My recollection is that most courses had a quiz weekly, a test every few weeks, and mid-quarter and quarterly exams. The latter were typically 2 hours long. Some courses also required turning in lab reports and homework.

Don't colleges and universities require this anymore?

[Zalatix]

17. In my day, colleges also had projects which encouraged some level of innovation, too.

What I'm reading here, with lectures, exercises and tests and whatnot, is just rote memorization.

Rote memorization is not all of what constitutes learning.

[Fumesucker]

13. Once the mind/computer barrier is overcome we'll just access the needed skills electronically..

Eventually the brain mechanism will be puzzled out and interfaced, beyond that it's really pointless to speculate what will be done with it other than for purposes of entertainment, ie science fiction.

[merbex]

14. My stomach just dropped for my kids and their future children

We have one more semester for my youngest at a public university - our oldest knows now that they SHOULD have gone to our state's public university.

Those figures seem very accurate from what I remember was projected 21 years ago when we had our youngest.

Beyond sucks....it is outrageous.

[ceile]

21. I really believe that my family's next generation will be the first

since the 50s to NOT go to college. My nephew is 6 and the twins are newborns. I don't see how my sis and her hubby will be able to afford it. Heck, I know I won't be able to send my kids (when I have them) because of my own crushing student loan debt. Of course I hope they all get a higher education, but it's so discouraging when you see #s like that.