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College Tuition III
August 17, 2007 - 7:49am
The interesting thing I note is that Sven keeps bringing up the figure of "$5000" as an easily-attainable, covers-the-cost-for-a-year figure.
I suspect that (a) Sven is forgetting about the fall in the value of money since the 1970s (just allowing for inflation would make that $15000 today), and (b) Sven is mixing up bottom-tier state university costs with the more desirable top-tier type universities where tuition can run into the tens of thousands per term.
Just to give some ballpark figures when I was at Michigan State recently, I happened to pick up a newspaper regarding tuition fees, and the ballpark figure quoted for the major state unis in the Appalachians + Midwest was around $7500-8000 per term.
That does not include residence fees and that does not include transportation or the like.
Fidel probably hammers away on this too much but even so he brings up an excellent point - if Turkey, a nation not otherwise known for much of anything except a hugely overinflated lira (I do believe one euro equals a million lira [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img] ), can nevertheless offer educational opportunities to students who can prove they have the academic skill to go, without charging them money for it, why can't Canada?
People used to offer the same old retreaded arguments back when universal childhood education was being bandied about. The stuck-in-the-mud conservatives at the time used to insist that it did something for a kid's moral character to have his parents sweat and scrimp and slave away to send him or her off to school.
Never mind the rather convenient fact that keeping poor kids out of school meant more servants for the rich, because they wouldn't have any other way of making money.
[ 17 August 2007: Message edited by: DrConway ]
anyways, didn't follow the other threads, so I dunno if this CUP piece I saw in the McGill Daily was discused elsewhere:
http://www.mcgilldaily.com/view.php?aid=6236
It’s amazing how durable an ill-founded idea can be when it appeals to the biases of the conservative policy establishment.
How else can you explain the persistence of the claim that universal funding of college and university amounts to a subsidy of the rich, paid for by the poor?
It is true that the children of higher-income families are more likely to participate in postsecondary education than the children of lower-income families. Data provided in Bob Rae’s report show that students from the highest-income 25 per cent of families made up 31 per cent of postsecondary students in Canada; students from the lowest-income 25 per cent made up 20 per cent of postsecondary students.
But you can only get from there to the conclusion that the poor are subsidizing the rich when postsecondary education is funded publicly by ignoring the tax system. This assumption implies that the money to pay for post-secondary education is found on trees, rather than raised from a real-world tax system.
[ 20 September 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
[img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img] [img]biggrin.gif" border="0[/img] Sorry, but as someone who in the near future may be cutting a check at least ten times that amount, I think not.
This is true. In the U.S., a state school can now run you $18,000 a year or more. And that assumes that you are an in-State resident. Some, like the SUNYs in New York, are a less.
still to come: residence and board bills, 2nd term, 3rd term tuition, and on and on to ... well, about $12-14,000 total by next spring
my son lucked out when Quebec gave him resident status -- born there, lots of relatives, but not a resident in over a decade
int'l students at McGill pay a flat $15,000 Cdn tuition, non-Quebec Canadian citizens $5,000
[ 20 September 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
http://www.staffordloan.com/federal-student-loans/
http://tinyurl.com/24udlo
more than in Europe where tuition is low or no
[ 20 September 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
Josh: It's up to $18,000 now.
For a New Jersey resident, full-time tuition + mandatory fees at Rutgers add up to $10,614 for the 2007-2008 academic year.
Of course, you have to find food and shelter, as at any university. Not to mention clothing, books, toothpaste, bandaids, maybe a computer, the occasional movie, thousands of cups of coffee and hundreds of pints of beer.
[edited to fix link]
[ 20 September 2007: Message edited by: Martha (but not Stewart) ]
And those U.S. states with the highest educational achievement tend to live in "blue have-states" across the North-Eastern and Northern U.S.
But there's a reason why more European kids don't feel the same pressure to go to college and take advantage of free tuition. And it's because they can live on a waiter or waitress' wages. And the U.S. and Canada, one-two, own the largest percentages of low wage workforce of any developed country.
The U.S. used to enjoy double returns on higher ed with attracting college educated immigrants from less developed countries looking for a better life. Those well-educated immigrants often-times worked hard and obtained advanced degrees and tend to contribute to the economy. Today the numbers of well-educated immigrants to the U.S. is, I believe, tapering off somewhat. And Canada has just experienced an exodus of well-educated immigrants and second generation Asian-Canadians return to Asia since the late 1990's. And a Ryerson Polytech study says it's because there is more opportunity for them in China and India and emerging economic powerhouses in the Pacific Rim of countries compared with here.
[ 20 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
uh, lemme tell you something on that score, from recent experience:
you CANNOT be a student at a N.American university anymore without a computer, new ones are often needed, and for a kid in stats /finance /economics like mine, the fancier the better
for my son, there is a site called "mymcgill" that posts everything -- EVERYTHING -- he has to know: his course selections, class cancellations, financial statements, an in-house e-mail system, marks, etc etc.
so, indispensable, plus every course has electronic reading lists and so on
as for the $$$ element:
after studying a Dell flier in the paper, we settled on a $900 laptop, went to a FutureShop downtown Montreal and, guess what?, with add-ons add-ons add-ons, warranty for service, + GST+PST, total = close to $2,000
and to think: late 1970s, I still got away, with some profs, handing in hand-written term papers and essays [img]eek.gif" border="0[/img]
black Bic pen = 49 cents [img]smile.gif" border="0[/img]
.
[ 21 September 2007: Message edited by: Geneva ]
My experience is also quite recent -- indeed, it is current. (1) At the University of Toronto, in the humanities and many sciences, you can get by with the computer clusters in Robarts Library. You can access all online materials, if you can stand to read them online then you can read them right there, you can print things off (for 10 cents a page, which can get expensive), and so on. Presumably there are similar computer clusters at McGill. The Robarts clusters are open all night. (2) You can get by with a second-hand computer from a few years ago, which you can buy for about $400 at the shops up and down College Street. For example from this shop, you can get a used IBM Thinkpad A31 for $399. This was state of the art in, say, 2004, and is adequate for the needs of most students, unless they need fancy graphics. (This computer will easily show movies, etc. Editing movies might require something fancier.)
Of course, I cannot speak for your son's needs, but I can speak for my own needs and the needs of my friends. Most students have computers vastly more powerful than necessary for their academic work.
I'm including room and board.
you are probably right, and he is probably watching The Matrix on-line even as we speak ...
Mind you, if the kid's away at school and his PC breaks down, and that happens sometimes, it's always nice to have parts and labour warranty on the thing.
[ 21 September 2007: Message edited by: Fidel ]
If we include room and board in the cost of going to such and such a school, then we should reckon that it costs a middle class family $10K (give or take) per year to send a teenager to the local public high school.
Free tuition for all = Equal access to PSE for all
This just isn't the case. Free tuition means nothing if you can't find a way to feed and house yourself.
But wouldn't free tuition help more than hurt from a student's situation?. I can picture how kids might bandy together and share rent and food costs. They can't share tuition and book fees with GST though. And Howard Hampton mentioned last night during the debate that colleges and universities are trying to make up funding shortfalls by upping ancillary fees.
So now there are more than just sky-high tuition fees that are making PSE a hard bargain for Canadians: 1. rising tuition fees 2. cost of living while studying(rent, food, transportation, books, ancillary fees/technology fees etc)
Because I think handing half of Canadian kids what amount to significant student loan debts so early in life isn't fair either. Not all of those kids are going to find high paying jobs. Why not cover tuition for basic three year BA degrees, and let them pay for the honour's extension and advanced degrees in those same fields of study as a reward for pursuing higher education?
That could change if lower-income kids could have free tuition and living stipends. Watch your premises!
No, education should be free for all because higher education has become a social need, just like K-12 and health care and roads. Society benefits from university-educated citizens, and so it should finance its own need.
In addition, society should provide bursaries, fellowships etc. so that no one is excluded for financial reasons.
One problem with saying, "the rich can afford tuition, why should we pay", is that the underlying assumption is that those who can afford it should have ready access to all the educational facilities they want, just because they have the money.
We don't let rich people pay to use the public highways or for treatment in an emergency ward, even though they can afford it - because we know that leads to two-tier health care. Likewise in education.
If it is said that, "scarce funds for university education should be directed in the most efficient manner", that's fine, let's subsidize living costs - but not variable tuition based on income.
Same answer: a large percentage of the people who get that money would be people who didn't need it.
If debt is the problem - and I agree that it is, and that it is getting worse - the answer is debt-relief programs. Not giving a tuition break to those who are already graduating without debt.
[ 21 September 2007: Message edited by: Stephen Gordon ]