Oof ouch owie
Oof ouch owie
Yes and no.
They sort of have shareholders in their Board of Trustees whose goals are to see the school grow. They also have shareholders in the form of their upper administration whose goals are usually to increase their own salaries.
Really the problem with universities though is the lack of any market pressure with no regulation to back it up. Student loans are federally guaranteed to never default, which means universities are guaranteed payment as long as students sign up. They have zero market incentive to actually reduce any costs or optimize efficiency as a result, because fuck them kids, they’re gonna get paid no matter what. It creates a poor feedback loop where the school’s budget balloons, tuition is raised to make up the difference, students take out more loans, rinse, repeat.
First of all, I’m not in the US so I can’t say anything about how it works there, I only know the rules that applied to me (I live in a small European country).
If you can’t afford to pay your monthly payment, you submit an income statement. If they agree you make too little then they either lower the monthly amount or don’t have to pay at all, depending on income. If your income increases you have to start paying again. The payments (if you can afford it) are so that the loan is paid back in 15 years. After 15 years whatever is left of your balance is forgiven. The loan also had a 0% interest rate. Also, part of the loan would be converted into a gift if you managed to graduate within a certain time frame.
Same here in Germany. But let’s see, how long that will be. Wiith CDU and it’s little dirty and stinky brother already waiting for their turn to come and destroy everything which makes the future seem not completely damned. Alongside with all welfare-goodies (leftover from the nineties).
Argh.
College is very expensive in the US, with the average “in-state” school costing $26K for someone who lives on campus and $56K for a private institution. Since a majority of undergraduates are teenagers with virtually no savings, they take on loans to pay for college. Also unlike traditional loans where you can declare bankruptcy, there’s really loans are very difficult to get forgiven.
There obviously a lot more to it, but that’s the gist in three sentences.
So back in the mid 1900’s in the USA tuition cost a fairly reasonable amount (about 8-10 percent of a minimum wage income could be budgeted for school, depending on which one you went to) but from 1970-2020 we saw an explosion of college tuition that didn’t match inflation/CoL/income.
So now in order to budget for a public state school you need to allot about 40% of your minimum wage income for tuition. OR you can sell your life to the military and potentially die that way (if you’re even medically able and willing) in addition to the previously mentioned “go into debt until you’re 60” method that we currently use.
Somehow, while costs have been skyrocketing the quality of schooling has been going downhill for awhile now as funding gets reallocated to the things that make the most money which is just sports essentially (also why it’s so damn expensive.)
Even more fun:
The sports cost money unless the team is popular enough to move merchandise.
Education isn’t even the highest priority for a college anymore, it’s the teams they can use to make MORE MONEY.
Unless it costs you money and you never make any! Guess we’ll just pass that cost onto the students as well, fuck 'em.
I was using the metric of state MW where I live compared to tuition at a public state college with in-state tuition.
Your results may vary, if you live in a state that has no state MW I don’t know how you’d ever be able to afford it without enlisting or having wealthy family.
Sovereign citizen? 🤣 You think my lazy comment that even calls itself so (via “idk if this works”) means I’m on a sovereign citizen conspiracy?
Lately man I tell ya, Lemmy is on another fucking level. One minute I’m a crazy vegan and the next I’m a sovereign citizen. What is wrong with people
Calm down buddy, nobody called you a sovereign citizen. The comment above yours is just saying that trying to renounce citizenship but not being able to emigrate (since nobody else wants us) would leave only the option of sovereign citizenship, which obviously doesn’t really work or solve anything.
Stop looking for something to feel offended about and read properly.
Don’t worry, lenders must assume some risk, that’s why we use bankruptcy -
Oh, right.
I mean, it’d be ludicrous to do anything else, since education is demonstrably a net economic and societal gain.
What kind of monstrous system would try to debt trap college students?
Most jobs that pay a living wage now require you have a degree, or HR won’t even let you interview.
It is a requirement, and the cost of college has increased much faster than inflation.
Being forced to take on a major loan to have a decent job is something people should complain about.
I mean, we weren’t forced into it. We were just told we’d be homeless (or some other stand in for poverty) if we didn’t.
Now a lot of people with loans are in poverty because of them. We weren’t forced into them is only technically true.