Surprising that a liberal rag like Rolling Stones magazine would publish such vitriol against their golden child. This is a long but worthwhile and eye opening read. Credit goes to Armakraut for texting me the link.
http://m.rollingstone.com/politics/news/ripping-off-young-america-the-college-loan-scandal-20130815
Hell I figured out that back in college. It doesn’t take a genius to see the racket. Sadly, many of my fellow students did not believe it. They were the ones that would sign up for loans out the wazoo, down to even laptops and ipads, and sign up for classes that they would then drop out of once the book/class suppies fund disbursment occurred. They thought they were being so smart, getting that book money and dropping out of class and getting beer money on the loans. Lots of them also took out private school loans that make the interest rates on fed school loans look like nothing.
I expect the reason why is because they are going to push, along with the liberals, for LOAN FORGIVENESS at the taxpayers expense.
All it did was lower the value of a 4-year degree, and saddle people with huge debt. I would back a program if it only went to HARD SCIENCE, ENGINEERING degrees, but not liberal arts/basket weaving, etc…
The government decided to get into financing homes, and home prices skyrocketed.
The government decided to get into health care, and and the cost of medical care skyrocketed.
The government decided to get into student loans, and college tuitions have skyrocketed.
And on, and on.
Spot on. It doesn’t even live up to their own war cry of “everyone deserves a quality education.” Sure. But thirty years ago you could pay for an entire semester with a summer job as a waiter in a diner. Schools did their own financing. But schools didn’t have nine figure athletic facilities, administrators weren’t paid like executives, and so forth.
I’d like to see how some of the larger universities would react to being told that accepting any government student loans meant that they could no longer patent genes or sell their work.
Oh if only this would ever happen, must be rough not having to budget money towards the most important research…when the money is seen as free they can fund even the most pointless shit imaginable. One part, aside from tuition that still pisses me off to this day, is the ridiculous amount of $ students have to fork out for textbooks. Not only are they incredibly over-priced, but you’ve got tenured professor dickmouth who apparently NEEDS the newest revision of a textbook EVERY semester (even more ironic when the subject is history/music/some other class that hasn’t had anything groundbreakingly new in 100+ years). I once paid $200 for a precalc textbook that came with a disc for a precalc computer program, day 1 professor tells the class “you won’t need the book ever, just that disc that came with it.” That was nice to hear, almost as nice as the fact that you couldn’t return the book or even sell it back without the disc…which you could buy by itself on Amazon for like $40.
Luckily, I’ve had more than my fair share of profs who when this happens have made separate study guides/homework assignments/solution sheets so students can use both editions because they recognize what a cluster **** college text books have become.
College textbooks are the biggest scam out there. Pay $150 for that book and when you go to resell it “Sorry new version is out” you now get maybe $10.
That is about it. Have known some college who will say that they will pay X amount for a used text book, making it sound pretty good, when you go to return them they go, “Oh ,the spine is bent, there are pages Dog eared, OH NO you wrote in it!” And then go its only worth $20 and we are being kind, then they turn around and mark it for $120 while new ones are $150-160. Hell I had a college one semester refuse to buy back book demanding that the students donate them. I sold them online and the ones that didn’t sell ended up getting used for target practice.
I lucked out with a few professors who were as fed up with the shit and who did the texts for classes in a way that made them either free, or very cheap. One comp professor I took had wrote his own text book so he could give them out as PDFs.
Agreed. Having just graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Business Management a couple years ago, I can personally attest to everything that has been said in this thread. Books and all of the “class fees” and everything they tack on is the biggest scam. Luckily I was smart enough to work part time through school to pay for it as I went, so I didn’t get sucked into the student loan scams, but I have many friends who graduated with thousands (sometimes even hundreds of thousands) of dollars in debt. Even with a doctor or dentist income, it takes a LOT of years to pay that kind of money off. College education is just a huge business, and they find every way possible to nickle and dime the students.
Yep. When you get down to it…the actual tuition is the cheap part.
The books, lab fees, parking permits and various extras really make a college education crazy expensive.
I don’t know how some of them do it.
-brickboy240
Same, but back in my day, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, were was no such thing as “PDF.” They wrote their material and had it bound at Kinko’s. I took a graduate-level government class on African government, we had a lecturer from Nigeria who actually wrote some of their at-the-time new constitution, and our textbook had outdated info regarding their old constitution. He made the bookstore buy back that particular book and he wrote all of the material from then out.
I absolutely hated that when I was an undergrad, about as much as watered-down Scotch, root canals, and Rosie O’Donnell all put together. It was a little better in grad school, but not much.
When I started as a professor at a local college, I asked if I could teach a class without a text book. All I got was a blank look from the head of the department. “But what will the students use to learn from?”
I told her “They will learn from me. I’ll talk during class, they will write stuff down, and we’ll test that.”
I was told I had to have a textbook. “No, the students cannot just listen to you.”
I asked if all the students were required to have a specific level of reading ability and comprehension to enroll. I was assured this was the case. I asked if they could just buy a book and read it to learn, why did they have to come to class and pay money?
She said that “The faculty offers valuable insight and skills that will assure them of success in their future fields.”
And I asked “So why am I not qualified to teach them without a book, if I have valuable insights and skills?”
Silence. A pursing of lips and narrowing of brows. “That’s not how this place works.”
College is a racket, boys and girls. I saw the light, and really don’t recommend it to very many people anymore.
One of my undergrad degrees is in accounting. The fraud and auditing classes have actually been useful to me as a computer geek. But I honestly could have picked that up by reading and an apprenticeship. Which is what I do now. I tend to interview and hire a fair number of former military folks, and then mentor them until they are fierce Viking raiders of the computer sciences.
And the “There was this time on leave…” stories tend to be a lot funnier, too.
Borrowing money to do all the above is insane.
This is the sort of stuff people need to be hearing and reading, instead of the pointless drivel being handed out by high school guidance counselors.
Those books are borderline criminal. I had a professor, to this day my favorite professor (for many reasons), who REFUSED to use the curriculum textbook, which cost $150. Why? Well, he’s one of the leading scholars in his field, he did months of research and articles for this textbook over a summer and through a sabbatical. What did he get for almost a year of full time work? $200. That was it. They came out with a whole bunch fees for resources and other charges that they deducted from what they promised to pay him, until only $200 was left.
The problem with colleges is that they no longer have prestige. If anything, they have a stigma. Unless you know from the day you signed up for your first classes EXACTLY what you want to do and how you’re going to do it, college is seen as a pointless way of wasting time and money while putting off growing up. Very true for many people, but it seems that being a college grad carries almost the same red flag as someone with a criminal record: When you apply for a job, if it’s outside of what you studied, it says that you’re immature, don’t plan for the future, and can’t be trusted with important decisions.
I majored in history, though I originally planned to major in psychology with a concentration on forensics and profiling. I was told that history was where my gift lay and I should just major in what I feel I would find the most interesting because most employers would just want to see that I finished college and wouldn’t care what I studied unless I was going to be an accountant, teacher, etc. Being young and impressionable, I decided to go with history. I suppose I could be a teacher, but every job, volunteer and paid, that I’ve had in the education field has failed miserably. I honestly don’t see myself ever able to find any kind of job in any field anywhere, except maybe minimum wage work, and I only had a 2.9 GPA so there’s not a grad school in America that will accept me. And I also owe thousands of dollars. Basically, I was an idiot and as a result, I’m poor and doomed.
My advice to any young people, stay away from college, and have your future planned out before you turn 21. Colleges will screw you over and give you nothing, no common sense, no experience, and no education beyond theory, to help you with your future. Or else you’ll end up like me.
Because all those fees, in addition to the tuition, is paid by the student loans and scholarships/grants. The colleges aren’t stupid, they know they aren’t going to get the money out of a student in cash up front, but when the financial “aid” includes allowances for all that stuff suddenly the colleges decide that they can go “Oh, we’ll just put all that on your account so your financial aid can pay for it”. Ergo, either your scholarship pays for it or you get raped for it later with monthly payments…
I wised up and didn’t buy books before class after the first semester. I ended up buying just about all of my books used online from Amazon and other sources after attending the first couple of class sessions to find out whether the prof was going to use that book or not or if I could skate by with a different edition. Saved a bundle.
If you were so inclined, back in the pre-everyone has a computer with internets and can plagiarize Googled content and wikipedia to write papers days, the university library usually had the books for all courses reserved so you can read them there. When I was in college, back in the above mentioned paleolithic era, I would finish my night job as a mechanic at 05:00 and go to the library to read the textbooks on the way back to my house before school and my day jobs. I never bought one book after I figured out how to just use the library’s books.
I was also able to finish college with a degree and a fairly good lump of savings from working several jobs. There was a point where the whole idea of “working my way to to pay for college” became the realization that the more I work, the more I earn and college was just a minor expense. Granted, I did not have the fun on mommy and daddy’s gold card like many people I know, but I finished with a degree and also with zero debt.
Last edited by interfan; Today at 01:41. Reason: bad spelling, 10 years of college down the drain.
:lol:
I figured this out really quick. It really helped that my roommate and I were going to the same classes and were majoring int he same field.
College itself is a big money game. Locker fees, parking passes, books, classes required that have nothing to do with your degree… Then it all increases. LOL.