For the record, I’m not American nor live in the US, but I have a 19-year-old son who started attending the University of Chicago this year, studying economics. Just the tuition itself is $70k. My husband and I are lucky enough to be able to afford it - I still believe it’s an outrageous amount of money to attend college.
Because people are still paying it. That’s how you set the price of things. If people are paying 70k why would you sell it cheaper?
If you can charge for something mandatory (minimum requirement for a decent job, house, healthcare) then you can set whatever price you want for it. You just need to push it to the limit of what people can finance to keep paying for over their whole lives.
because america is the land of profit over humans. its just that simple.
its ingrained in the entire country. if some rando at the top isnt profiting, it must be killed. its the problem with healthcare. its the problem with government (congress). its the reason we are entrenched in a 2-party hellscape.
And if the university of Chicago is that “Chicago school of economics” then this kid is going to come out the other end repesting close to what you said, but as a positive. :(
Is that just America though? Are there other countries where profit isn’t king?
I’m pretty confident the French wouldn’t stand for “rule by profit”
I’m afraid I don’t have good news…
not that im aware of.
america was founded on this crazy idea of ‘rugged individualism’. that ‘socialism’ is inherently evil. its every man for themselves, and anyone not rich is so because they arent doing it correctly.
its also the reason why even a class full of dead kindergartners is ok as long as we get to keep our guns.
Because Reagan defunded public secondary education. And then instead of fixing that in the late 90s/early 00s, they made school loans non expungable and federally guaranteed, so schools didn’t need to keep their prices low and competitive anymore.
It always goes back to Reagan…
This is the real answer I was looking for in the comments.
Edit: it always goes back to Reagan.
Why did unions lose their power? Reagan threatened striking ATC workers with firing if they didn’t return to work immediately. Suddenly striking workers could be fired.
Why did weed become a life sentence drug? Reagan.
Who demonized the poor on welfare, calling them welfare queens? Who is Ronald Reagan, Alex?
Deregulated Wall street, banking and commerce sector, too.
If there’s a glaring problem with the USA, there’s a very good chance it dates back to RR.
Jesus Christ, so many people don’t know the real history of what happened while this is the real answer.
To add on to Ronald “Fucking” Reagan defunding universities, he did it because as governor of California he absolutely hated the anti-Vietnam War protests happening on University of California campuses and thought a good way to limit attendance of ‘rabble rousing’ (re: poor) students was to take away their funding. Conservatives nationwide saw this and thought ‘that’s great, we should do that, too.’ and they did.
Thanks Ronnie. You’re the unwanted microwaved dog shit that ruined America 40 years and your stink is still smelled in full force to this day. I didn’t believe in hell, but I hope they made a special one just for you.
Yep, this needs to be higher. Since student loans are guaranteed and pushed on all students, universities have been spending oodles of fucking money to justify higher tuition costs, which justifies bigger loans that can never be discharged. The banks win, the schools win, the student lose both academically and financially.
Public universities could actually have stricter requirements on who could go to college, because if it’s already funded by taxes, you don’t want to be throwing money away on students who will fail out of the degree path they’re trying to pursue.
Finally, two words: “Legacy Admissions”
secondary --> tertiary?
Sure, I guess post-secondary is the term usually used
I just wasn’t sure if reagan did anything with HS budgets and how that connected with college prices. That guy was such a cancer on the country. Maybe we should just stop electing shitty actors altogether
While true overall, University of Chicago is an elite private school with a hedge fund sized endowment with vast majority of students coming from families who pay 70k with two checks two weeks before each semester starts.
This how they stay elite.
If we can reason and communicate effectively then we’re much harder to exploit.
Education is priced above the balance of supply and demand because in wider scope it’s more profitable to deny access.
Denial of access to education is a very good way to leave many people with violence as their only practical means of change.
Administrative bloat. At my university, if my lab lands a grant, 60% goes to the university and only 40% is used for actual research. There’s a long chain of people whose jobs are to answer emails, and they all need to be paid.
Greed. Come on were you really expecting a different response?
US universities engage in price discrimination between different students.
For public schools, there is different tuition between in state and out of state students. There are also some state government programs based on merit and financial considerations.
For well endowed private schools, the universities will provide scholarships based on a variety of reasons. For students from rich families, those families are generally paying full price and there generally is the implication of additional donations.
This is the reason. Every public school, like University of Chicago, has non-resident pricing that’s typically two to four times higher than in-state resident tuition. Source: used to work at a state university.
The original idea was probably to encourage people to stay within their state and boost the state economy, but greed from the admins kinda changed the nature of things.
Given that state taxes heavily support higher education, it’s not the craziest idea in the world to give lower tuition to those who’ve been paying those taxes their whole lives.
The University of Chicago is private. The University of Illinois Chicago is public. They have the added issue the people definitely use the names interchangeably because they don’t know there’s more than one.
When I worked at the state University, we had lists to check that stuff. Sometimes it’s obvious, other times, not so much. Good catch!
Tuition is also higher for international students.
The politicians of the US took massive payouts from the banking industry in exchange for commodifying anything and everything that people need. Back in
20082005, Biden himself took a $250,000 bribe from MBNA to make it illegal to escape student loans even in bankruptcy.MBNA didn’t even exist anymore in 2008. It was bought out and subsumed by Bank of America in 2006.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBNA#Mergers_and_acquisitions
If you have information on that bill/law post it. I’m curious what it actually said.
Good lord you need work on your reading comprehension, or did you just look at the headline and ignore the very first line of the article?
Hunter Biden was working and being paid as a consultant for MBNA and had no direct ties to any kind of lobbying. That’s just what consulting work is. How much was paid never gets disclosed, especially to the public.
Is there other shetchy shit? Sure, but direct bribery from MBNA isn’t one of them and now we’d have to veer off into a discussion of campaign finance and corporate contributions to politicians in a post-citizens United world.
Be accurate in your criticism or nobody will take you seriously.
I’m shocked that you’d make the typical overly generous assessment of actual bribery to excuse any and all of your team. /s
Do some more research. This is just the tip of the fucking iceberg. Biden has a long track record of quid pro quo besides this event that you clearly are purposely looking the other way on.
I could literally show you video of Biden accepting a bribe and you’d find a way to excuse it.
https://oversight.house.gov/the-bidens-influence-peddling-timeline/
https://reason.com/2023/09/18/theres-plenty-of-evidence-of-corruption-around-biden/
https://www.propublica.org/article/bidens-cozy-relations-with-bank-industry-825
https://www.congress.gov/116/meeting/house/111100/documents/HHRG-116-JU08-20201202-SD006.pdf
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/30/does-joe-biden-have-a-corruption-problem/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/93954519
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/11/biden-bankruptcy-president/
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/9/24/20879735/hunter-biden-trump-corruption-outsider
Yup, you 100% need to work on reading comprehension. I never said nothing sketchy happened, actually I explicitly said other sketchy shit did and does happen, I’m saying the specific example you originally pulled did not support your argument.
The article you pulled, in the literal first sentences said that Hunter Biden was paid as a consultant by MBNA in 2005, 3 years prior to the article and that the consultancy, despite being legally above board, doesn’t look good and happened at the same time a bill favoring credit card companies was passed.
That’s not a direct bribe to Joe Biden in exchange for a favorable bill as you described it.
But instead I’m the shill for Biden because you have done a shit job defending your own point with an article that explicitly contradicts your point in the very first sentence. All I did was read the fucking article and point out it doesn’t say what you think it said.
Again be accurate in your criticism, back it up with anything that doesn’t immediately contradict your points because at this point, I highly doubt you even read a single article you posted in your last reply.
Nobody knows. Serious, there are a lot of factors people will point to in here. Some of them are real factors, but every time I dig in I discovered that they do not explain everything. Prices have gone up much faster than inflation for decades even after accounting for government subsidies.
A lot of folks are overlooking one of the largest factors, unlimited student loans for whatever.
As long as people have access to an ever increasing amount of money to use for tuition, it is in those institutions’ interests to rise their prices to extract as much as possible.
Whereas other countries tend to subsidize their education at source, that is to say, by funding the schools directly which somehwat obviates the price gouging aspect.
Depends on the school but yes it’s ridiculous. For a while it seemed like everyone was encouraged to attend college but now it seems like trade schools are coming back in a big way. I think people realise they aren’t going to get anything useful for the time and money they put in for the jobs they want
Public school teachers often vilified blue collar work like trades, saying things like pay attention otherwise you’ll end up as some plumber. Now the trades struggle to find good candidates partially because everyone considers them as bad jobs or “poor people jobs” despite many trades providing decent salaries and often needing a good mix of knowledge and physical skills.
Because it’s worth it!
lol jk
Student loans have dulled price-point as a major consideration for choosing a school. So they compete on other non-academic stuff that tends to raise the tuition like sports, amenities, and prestige.
I’m sure it’s not the sole factor, but universities in many other parts of the world are partially subsidised by the government.
Yeah, in our country university is free if you get high enough grades in the end of high school exams and then if you maintain high enough grades throughout university. Even if you don’t the tuition is affordable for virtually everybody. Like the equivalent of ~$1k per year for most degrees with some exceptions like medicine. A kid could make that in a month working a summer job.
Then why didn’t you send your kid to school in your country? Americans do not pay $70k for undergrad tuition unless it’s a very expensive study.
(E: the OP corrected me below that theyre not from the Great North. Ill still leave this next part up to demonstrate that universities charge a lot more for international students than domestic but I acknowledge that I jumped the gun here)
The fact that you use the $ symbol, have socialized college tuition, and are not from the US makes me think you’re Canadian. I did the reverse of your situation and used this tuition fee lookup tool from UToronto to see what I would be paying for a year of medical school. Came out to a little under $46k/ for the 2025-26 school year.
Cause the quality is not the best, he wanted to go to the US, and we can afford it. Plus the US offers many more opportunities.
Sounds like you answered your own question there. Tuition for foreign students is expensive because the ones who come here almost always have family that can pay for it. Like I said above, no American is spending $70k per year for undergrad studies. The smart ones are going to community colleges, which are becoming free in some capacity across most states, building up a GPA, and then transferring to a University off scholarships.
I spent 7 years in school without paying anything for tuition, everything was covered by scholarships. I’ve known many people with the same experience
University of Chicago is a pretty prestigious school, too. Tuition-wise, it’s on par with Yale, Harvard, Stanford.
UIC is half of UofC. NIU and EIU are a quarter.
OP is asking why one of the most expensive universities in the country is expensive, and assuming that all universities in the US are that expensive.
That’s good. I’m glad there are ways for people to stay debt free or as debt free as possible. Since I always see student debt being a very big issue in the US in the news.
My undergraduate tuition at a state public university is under 10k a year. I was severely injured in the military though, so the government pays my bill.
What you see in the news is the result of predatory practices and people not being able to use their degrees in a profitable way. There’s a lot of jokes about philosophy programs and art history degrees being a pipeline to working in fast food, because often the only way to use those degrees is to get more education (more loans) so you can teach the subject.
The biggest issues I think comes from the facts that A) there are a handful of very predatory schools with huge inter/national outreach programmes and B) highschool students are pressured into choosing their college path before graduating HS, when they’re still a kid.
The kids don’t know how to actually evaluate their options and end up picking the big, expensive schools just off brand recognition alone. Lots of people fell for this trap and graduated with degrees that weren’t very competitive to state degrees and cost 2-10x more.
I think the next 10 years are going to see students’ debt at graduation decrease as community college enrollment keeps going up and the stigma of “community college” education, which was a big deterrant for a long time, goes away.
I’m actually from Romania, and for medicine at the most popular school in the country for it here, you’d be paying 15000 lei, or $3143 per year for the 2024-2025 school year as a local. https://umfcd.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/TAXE_SI_TARIFE_UNIVERSITARE/Taxe UMFCD 2024-2025.pdf As an international student studying in English you’d be paying 8500€ per year.
its the opposite of that.
its that the unsecured ‘loans’ provided to ignorant kids for schooling are immune to be disgorged by bankruptcy. so they are abused by agencies providing the loans, and the schools who know those loans are forever financed.
its taking advantage of children, basically. but its a-ok, because profit.
Not really the opposite. We used to subsidize higher education. The non expungable debt was part of the “fix” for that issue that Reagan caused
We didn’t used to fund to the tune of $70k per student though. Something just isn’t adding up, but I have no idea what.
It’s an older chart but I have no reason not to think the trend it shows has reversed since 2012. Colleges pivoted really hard in the past 30 years to offering a lot more than just classes and a dorm to attract students. Non-teaching positions have more than doubled since than 70s to handle all the “bloat and bullshit” (one of my professor’s terms, a real old-school guy who hated modern academia) that that’s come along since.
Throw in the fact that federally secured loans means that almost any 18 year old can sign off on whatever the sticker price without much thought and you get those kinds of costs for some students
Bloated administration took advantage of the guaranteed federal money that was the idiotic fix for exploding college prices after the public funding stopped. Which only made prices increase more
Agreed. The only two options right now are to either do away with federally secured loans (worse option) or nationalize all universities with efficiency overwatch programs in place (better), but what we have right now is the worst of both worlds w/r/t public-private higher education
That, and the loan system.
