College Tuition Costs Soar: Chart of the Day
By Michelle Jamrisko and Ilan Kolet Aug 18, 2014 6:01 AM ET
The cost of higher education has jumped more than 13-fold in records dating to 1978, illustrating bloated tuition costs even as enrollment slows and graduates struggle to land jobs.
The CHART OF THE DAY shows that tuition expenses have ballooned 1,225 percent in the 36-year period, compared with a 634 percent rise in medical costs and a 279 percent increase in the consumer price index.
Some for-profit schools such as Corinthian Colleges Inc. have collapsed amid enhanced federal scrutiny, and three of the nine worst performers in the Russell 3000 index (RAY) are education companies. Yet university degrees are hardly on sale. The student loan debt burden threatens to overwhelm younger Americans, who already are finding a tougher labor market compared with their older counterparts.
“Some schools are effectively limiting cost increases by bigger tuition discounting, but on the whole college presidents have not adjusted to a fundamental shift in attitudes toward the value of a high-cost education,” said Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity in Washington. “Colleges are too slow to reinvent themselves,” particularly as enrollments are waning, said Vedder, who is a Bloomberg View contributor.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-18/college-tuition-costs-soar-chart-of-the-day.html
Everythiing that goes up, must come down. This chart illustrates why a lot of colleges are going to be in major financial difficulty in the next 10 years. Think about what kind of business you could set your child up in for $250,000. People are going to start to realize that they are better off learning a trade, starting a business, and being their own boss than come out of college with a tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and struggling to find a job which could evaporate at the drop of a hat as technology continues to displace real people. If I was a college president and I was looking at major construction plans (read that as debt) I would be very uneasy.