Why Is College In Texas Getting So Expensive?

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• The cost, at least to the student and her family, has FAR MORE THAN DOUBLED, in just the past 50 years or so, moreso than anything else in our economy.

  When I first attended UT in 1970, it cost $100/semester. In 2010, while attending UT again for graduate school, I wrote a check to them for almost $5000, for one semester.

  Go figure. This is outrageous.

• Why Is College In Texas Getting So Expensive?

  Because the uneducated consumer thinks it worth the cost.

  Arising from implication that "getting an education" involves something more than what everyone else learns upon leaving school, namely--that a lot of people go to school.

  In short, "getting" schooled" by way of "getting" taken is indeed "getting" expensive.

• PROBLEM: People with college degrees who cannot put their diploma to use.

  SOLUTION:

  PROBLEM: People with college degrees who cannot solve the above problem.

  SOLUTION:

  PROBLEM: "Social Justice" "Gender Equality" "Fact & Thought Crime"

  SOLUTION: People with college degrees who cannot put their diploma to use.

• Actually....the whole public school system for the last thirty years has been designed around getting people who should have never graduated high schoolinto the university system.

  Mission accomplished.

  Now a degree costs three times more and is worth three times less.

  It’s so sad to see the deterioration of our college system as the extreme left continues its complete take over. Not everyone is college material. Yet now we have debt ridden "graduates" with worthless degrees wanting someone else to pay for their own bad choices.

  • It's not the extreme left that is pushing less than qualified students into college. It is people and corporations skimming money from the process- lenders, private student housing (many campuses have limited housing so students live in private student housing), and the university when students take courses several times. "Advisers" actually finesse the students to keep trying, until the grade point is low enough to terminate them.

• Three words: Third Party Payment. Healthcare, government spending, military. and college tuition have all skyrocketed in the last 20-50 years. Some blame inflation and the purchasing power of a dollar but it is our own fault.

  Whenever a product or service is purchased by someone for use or consumption by someone else but paid for by another it breaks the basic supply/demand cost curve. Simple economics tells us there is a price point at which no one will buy a product. Who wants to pay $50 for a burger? $11 million for a toilet seat? The answer, of course, is no one but it does happen when we are not the one ultimately footing the bill.

  Tuition is similar to healthcare. We do not shop for services. Insurance will pay for it or we just get a bigger loan. As consumers, we do not adhere to evaluating the cost/value proposition because we are not paying. Sure, doc, run that extra $12,000 test. Sure Mr. Advisor, I'll retake that class to see if I can improve my GPA. Oh darn, looks like I partied too much and I'm going to fail that course, better drop it and try again next semester.

  Since we don't behave as responsible consumers, the providers are free to ask whatever they want and when we can no longer afford it we take out loans. Shame on us.