People are amazed at how expensive college is in America. For example a school I've never heard of, Collins College in Tempe, Arizona is $55,550/year according to scholarship.com.
It seems like you need a scholarship or a student loan just to go to college in the US. In this article on The Game of Life, players choose whether or not to go to college. University doesn't always mean better paying work, but it does mean more job choices.
In Ohio, they realize that some people can't afford a higher education so they are working on a tuition freeze. The schools aren't sure they can make the plan work since tuition covers over half of their operating budget. Take the example of Miami (Ohio):
Miami's already facing a shortfall of between $6 million and $7 million next year, and Hodge said Miami is on the bottom of the beneficiaries of the compact: Less than 18 percent of funding for the Oxford campus comes from the state, university figures show; nearly 70 percent comes from tuition and fees.American culture values a higher education, but public funds don't seem to reflect that culture. Public money just doesn't end up in education like it used to so tuition becomes more and more vital to universities (and that means expensive).It wasn't always this way.
Two decades ago, state support accounted for nearly two-thirds of an Ohio public university's budget, said Eric Fingerhut, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents. But that support began to erode.
So if college loans are a necessity for most students, what does that say about American culture? How much do we really value higher education?
Posted by James Trotta at April 14, 2007 2:34 PMDespite the increased need to possess a college degree--and preferably a graduate degree--in a society where manual labor is less and less needed, local and federal governments have not seen fit to properly fund this basic element of U.S. society.
Powerful moneyed interests who have no vision for the future, only immediate profits, buy the politicians and the two major parties, by their contributions to them. So we are left with an impoverished governmental infrastructure as far as the ordinary U.S. citizen is involved.
Major corporations own the predominant media outlets--TV, radio, newspapers--so that editors bow to these moneyed interests and do not make the citizenry aware of their own interests, instead aiding the moneyed interests to take larger pieces of the financial pie. We in the U.S.A. are well on our way to becoming a nation of the very rich and the very poor, without much of a middle class.
To afford college, today's students, and their families largely "afford" an education by going deeply into debt, taking out loans for this purpose. This means that the newly graduated end up being wage slaves, so as not to default on these loans, making them further amenable to the moneyed interests who buy their labor.
Posted by: Ed at April 14, 2007 10:27 PMIt's hard to believe that universities in the US could be operating on a shortfall when they pay no taxes and they mostly hier part time instructors who get paid very little. Perhaps the chancellor gets paid too much.
Posted by: Nan at April 16, 2007 10:26 PMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.