What happens when you find out a year of college costs $71,000

What happens when you find out a year of college costs $71,000?

When I entered college, a year of school at an elite university carried a tuition tag equivalent to about four weeks of take-home pay for my parents, a middle class couple with two incomes that when combined placed our family in about the 80th percentile of households. Room and board brought the total burden to about six weeks. Even if I had never gotten a penny of scholarship money, my mom, who was great at saving and managing money, would have had my entire college education already paid for before I ever stepped foot into a university. Even without her savvy and foresight, my parents could have lived on 46 weeks of wages if necessary. In other words, a middle-class couple could send a child to an elite college with a minimum of sacrifice and without fear that either they or their child would have to incur crippling debt.

The income level for an American family in the 80th percentile today is about $100,000, which is about $75,000 take-home, after deducting for taxes and social security. In other words, both parents would have to donate just about all of their pay for the entire year to send a child to NYU for that year. Today's equivalent of my parents makes about five times what my parents actually made back then, but the tuition at my alma mater is 40 times as much (and it costs less than NYU)! The elite liberal arts education which gave me such a good life is no longer within reach for people like me with parents like mine.

The crunch is especially difficult for liberal arts majors, because no conceivable career projection can provide a return on their investment in college. If you get an degree in literature or art history from an elite private college, you cannot expect your lifetime cash flow to be more positive than if you go to work for UPS out of high school. The degree will eventually increase your earning power per year, but you'll lose the first four years of wages and you'll have payments on an onerous student loan bill which will be greater than the presumed wage increase. An elite liberal arts degree is only for those who simply don't have to worry about money. There are not so many people in that category, so the reduced demand will eventually force a reduction in supply until such an education is available in very few universities.

The times they are a-changin', I guess. As my main man, Heraclitus, used to say, "πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει."

If only I knew what that meant. My fancy-schmancy education, although filled with plenty of equally impractical elements, somehow managed to bypass Greek.