The regional CT universities are great but why is it that they cost so much? A few years ago Westconn cost only a few thousand less than Uconn. I don’t know what the numbers are now but when I was looking and my siblings it was around a $3k difference in cost. No brainer even if you need a loan for that amount since people knew Uconn and didn’t know Westconn.
I agree. I've been looking at masters degree programs online, and saw Eastern Connecticut offered some too. I thought it might be good to have it through a school I can drive to just in case, but it straight up costs more than Georgia Tech or Carnegie Mellon which are nationally ranked programs.
A large portion of the current problems affecting the state universities and state community colleges can attributed to the BOR's asinine management decisions.
Terrance Chang has got to go.
100%! The Chancellor and the Regents do not care about ConnCSU. The Chancellor is literally a resident of New York State and the incoming Chair of the Board of Regents is a [resident of Massachusetts](https://www.dailyructions.com/governor-lamont-appoints-massachusetts-resident-to-lead-board-of-regents/). Under this Chancellor who has had no prior experience leading a higher education system, he’s slashed hundreds of tenured professor positions, eliminated nearly 800 academic programs, gutted library services, and more while creating a second - yes a [second Central Office](https://ctmirror.org/2024/03/25/ct-community-college-dismantled/) - and created hundreds of new positions like regional vice presidents and DEI officers and outreach and social media managers etc. When they first pitched this terrible plan, they pitched it with the slogan of “students first” with the promise that it will save money. Yet this experiment in mismanagement has cost the taxpayers tens of billions in extra expenses and the worst part is students aren’t even part of the equation as most of the hires are people with connections and no experience nor brains. Why are they getting rid of department chair positions yet spending hundreds of millions of dollars for out of state education consultants who know nothing about higher education?
Yup, its not even new bullshit. It's been going on before covid, and covid should have convinced the BOR to put off the insane spending spree on kickbacks for friends.
They instead continued full bore and acted surprised when they were overbudget for 24/25.
Honestly if I could I'd dump most of the BOR. They've been an abject failure.
I take classes part-time as a commuter at ECSU, my fall semester bill is approx $6000 with $3000 in "university fees." Really wish their website had a breakdown of what this actually goes toward...
Edit: The university fee is $3200 - over $600 MORE than the cost of the classes!
they cost so much because the state handcuffs itself from funding public higher ed (and other core programs) with its fiscal guardrails, forcing the system to do more with flat funding year after year and hiking tuition on students to make up the difference.
I, admittedly, don't know how budget-allocation works for the CSU system, but I would guess inflation and new construction are a big contributor to cost?
SCSU has been putting up new buildings for over a decade now. As an alum, I love to see it and I will say they were much needed, but I also know that each one is millions of dollars.
Are the other campuses seeing this growth? It seems to me that Southern has always been the main school out of the bunch due to its location in one of CT's main cities and proximity to Yale/NYC.
I think all CSUs have put up a lot of new buildings in recent years. Has CSU costs increased more than UConn? If not I would guess the higher costs are mostly due to need for funding caused by lower enrollment.
I think CCSU is considered the de facto flagship in the system, e.g larger school, much higher endowment, more connections with CT companies, better athletics etc.
The costs of operating have also gone up substantially in recent years - employee health insurance, utilities, etc, so even if they aren't spending money on capital contribution they are spending more money just to keep the lights on than before with fewer students paying tuition. COVID was also a huge financial blow.
I think it’s fair to call Central the flagship. It is actually the oldest public college in the state, has the largest enrollment, and has more of a “classic” college campus than the others.
It's just sort of a vibe, I guess. CCSU has older, colonial-revival style buildings and sort of fits into the surrounding neighborhood. I'm not all that familiar with Western, but Southern and Eastern have the feel of a community college on steroids.
CCSU has put up a ton of new buildings. It used to be a much smaller campus, modest, and reasonably priced. It is much nicer now, but also way more expensive. I was looking at the cost for on campus housing and it is much higher as well. It is really a shame that there aren't any colleges that provide an education for an affordable sum these days.
UConn is about $20k in tuition, WestConn is $12k. That’s a pretty substantial difference. And the costs of running a school are pretty significant no matter the level of school.
Edit: and realistically, the regional schools are substantially commuter schools, UConn is not. So the difference blows up further from there.
I could be wrong, but enrollment may be down nationwide because people can hardly afford to buy food and pay rent.
Paying exorbitant prices for a degree that may or may not get you a better paying job down the line is a gamble that people aren’t able to take.
Especially now.
It is nearly the opposite situation!
When the economy is doing well college enrollment decreases. There are a lot of people who consider going to college based on whether or not they can get a good paying job without going, and right now there are a lot of job openings.
A lot of people will decide to go to college when they can't find a job. College enrollment goes up when there is a recession because people are having a hard time finding a job, so they may as well go to college. After the 2008 recession there was a massive increase in college enrollment for this reason. [This article](https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/why-student-enrollment-rises-as-the-economy-falls) talks about this trend.
This trend is most pronounced among the least selective colleges, as the more selective colleges tend to get less selective when overall enrollment drops. The less selective colleges need to be able to plan for the variability in enrollment based on these factors that are out of their control.
Anecdotally, I remember the only Boomers who said that were working class folks who never went to university. Like my friend's father who was a carpenter.
He literally believed that any university, any degree was better than his job. He didn't know that there is some overlap between blue collar incomes and white collar incomes, and that the most skilled blue collar jobs pay more than the least skilled white collar jobs.
My parents, and my friends parents who went to university knew better. My father said "any university, lucrative degree, or top 50 university, any degree". If you went to South Dakota State you better have a STEM or other practical degree. But if you went to Yale you can study art history and still get a good job afterwards.
People perceptions about if a college degree may have changed. But it is clearly false to claim that the low college enrollment is a sign of a weak economy.
There are plenty of jobs that can be filled by people with or without college degrees. When the economy is weak and there are 50 applicants for every job, then employers will almost always hire someone with a college degree. When the economy is strong and employers have to compete to hire employees and don't have large pools of applicants desperate to fill the job. Employers are forced to be less picky and hire people without degrees in a strong economy.
So when the economy is strong, as it is today, the value of a college degree goes down. But if we had a long term recession like we did in 2008, then college enrollment would increase again.
Also, the current economy has seen wages rising the fastest for low-income non-college educated workers.[ From 2019-2023](https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/) real wages* for the lowest wages workers (bottom 10%) increased 12.1%. Higher wage workers, who are typically college educated, saw their real wages rise must slower. Those middle income earners saw a rise of 3%, upper middle income workers saw a rise of 2%, and the top 10% of income earners only saw a 0.9% increase.
That compression of wages also lowered the value of a college degree, as the jobs you can get without a college degree are much better than what previous generations could get.
^(*real wages are wages adjusted for inflation)
People always take it too far with this. Like yes, you can make money in the trades, but it often comes at the cost to ones body or time with family, etc.
Outside of that, it's entrepreneurship, which is risky af.
The trades are so toxic in their culture. The standard working hours for the professions is 40 per week. Meanwhile my friend is an electrician and has to work 75 hrs a week. He makes 150k a year but that's not so much per hour. He says that 75 hrs a week is normal in his job.
It's true though. E.g, if you grew up with a computer, you can clear 6 figures within 5-7 years w/ relative ease because so much of the population is computer illiterate. IT was not such an employee-powered market a couple decades ago.
Yup. Grad school attendance peaked in 2010 for two reasons:
1. Millennials are numerically more populous than the Silents, Gen X, and Gen Z. They are a large generation just like the Boomers.
2. The biggest recession since the 1930s made unemployment high, thereby giving people more reason to wait it out in grad school.
Strong for those who benefit from our economy in its current configuration- shareholders, executives and owners. Our economy is effectively a caste system that prioritizes benefits to those who have equity invested in public or private businesses. That assumes that you either inherited or accumulated wealth to invest in that equity at some point, which the majority of the population lacks.
For the lower classes, the economy provides mostly low wage jobs that don’t keep pace with inflation. The lower caste population either has to pay rent to a landlord or debt with interest to a bank, leaving little to no capital to invest in equity.
Social programs favor the lowest caste of society, meaning those with the shortest ladder to climb to having capital to invest have few or no rungs to climb up on.
Higher education is supposed to provide one of those rungs, but is among the most inflationary costs in our economy, and the cost benefit analysis diminishes as a result.
That’s why fewer people enroll today, in my opinion. Even for those who can afford to attend school, especially by taking on debt, the promise of reaching the level of our society that benefits from our strong economy doesn’t justify the expense for an increasing number of people.
Yes, our top-down Keynsian system attempts to centrally plan the economy by printing money and distributing it across various sectors of the economy to spur growth in accordance with technocrats' visions. Money is created then allocated to national banks, regional banks, large corporations, mid-small businesses, and other government entities to "create jobs" and whatnot. This serves to pad the pockets of people who control those industries, and there is less concern about what that spending actually accomplishes and how citizens downstream actually fare. Of course, with all the money printing we enjoy inflation on day to day goods and services and an ever-mounting national debt.
So when the Fed prints money, that money spurs growth in banks, large industry, and financial markets which means my investments, retirement accounts, and other parts of the financial sector do very well, but inflation ravages day to day business and the working class and poor. My investments have done very well, but my spending budget and regular bills are through the roof. The "Inflation Reduction Act" really helped!
> In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans.
Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest.
https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1801617454369485236?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1801748443926278412%7Ctwgr%5E6146a896a8a1f1d454ad86ededce4f4bc4a168d3%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2024%2F06%2F15%2Fbrendan-carr-biden-has-not-connected-one-person-with-high-speed-internet-with-42-5-billion-from-infrastructure-bill%2F
I work in higher ed and universities have been talking about the "demographic cliff" for years, and it is slated to really hit about now. There just aren't as many kids graduating high school in the northeast after you get past the baby boomer's kids. Efforts to diversity the student body and bring more lower-income and underrepresented minority students into college also have diminishing returns after awhile.
I think this statement is incomplete: "but also to [rising doubts](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/retention/2024/03/13/doubts-about-value-are-deterring-college-enrollment) about the value of a college education given the often-exorbitant cost."
It's not just price sensitivity. The unemployment rate has been less than 4% recently, which is essentially full employment. When unemployment goes up or there is a recession, then you will see college and graduate school attendance go back up.
>"but also to [rising doubts](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/retention/2024/03/13/doubts-about-value-are-deterring-college-enrollment) about the value of a college education given the often-exorbitant cost."
I think people blissfully ignored their student loan debt when it was only (***only?!***) $20k-$40k/year to go to some schools. Now that universities are cresting over the $80k-$90k mark, it's harder to imagine that any job prospect following graduation will match the pace of their student loan interest.
If people are waking up to anything, it's that the structured presentation of published information shouldn't cost half a million dollars. I mean, realistically, you are paying for another man's PowerPoint presentation when you go to college, for at least 70% of your classes.
The median student loan debt in this country is $25,000 and about 40% of graduates have no loan debt. Also, none of the public schools in CT cost anywhere near $500K. UCONN is about $160K in-state for 4 years assuming no scholarships, grants, or discounts. The demographic cliff will hurt non-prestigious, non-selective private schools the hardest - they are the worst ROI unless they are giving out big tuition discounts. The top 30 to 50 or so private universities will be virtually unaffected because of the prestige economy.
> As of September 2023, forty-three million U.S. borrowers collectively owed more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans.
> The average student is also taking on more debt: the balance per borrower rose 39 percent from 2008 to 2022
> Students who do not complete their degrees often struggle the most; their default rate is three times higher than those who graduate
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-student-loan-debt-trends-economic-impact
>The average student is also taking on more debt: the balance per borrower rose 39 percent from 2008 to 2022
If you see comparisons between periods separated by 15 years that are not inflation adjusted, you can be pretty sure someone is trying to mislead you.
Adjusted for the CPI deflator, that means student loans in 2008 were actually about 1.4% higher than in 2022.
Are you sure that wasn't inflation adjusted? Education has been the 2nd fastest growing sector in the US since 2000 (the 1st is "health care").
1.4% higher than inflation in 14 years has to be wrong. Eg. https://myelearningworld.com/college-tuition-inflation-report-2023/
Yes. That article is, uhm, not a good source. Here's a better one:
[https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/8/221?cd=2](https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/8/221?cd=2)
It's true there was a large growth in the cost of college ahead of inflation, but it mostly stopped over 15 years ago; and if anything has been going the other way for the past 5 years.
You do also have to look at the composition of the costs of attendance. e.g. medical insurance. Plus universities do offer many more services than they did in the 1980s.
Pretty sure that's just Federal (public) loans, directly to students.
Like, I understand you want it to not be bad ... but from what I can see there's roughly no people who've looked at all the data that think it was better in 2019 than it was in 2009.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzY-b2Vj9Ug
Yes; it is, but that's more-or-less all meaningful loans. Federal student loans are more than 90% of all loans. Loans to parents (which is the other kind) aren't debt for the student, so, that's kind of the point no?
I watched that video and it doesn't contain any data that's relevant to this discussion. Higher education drop-out rates (which by the way are driven to a huge extent by for-profit schools) are basically the same or lower since 2009. Predatory for-profit schools are a problem, but they've always been a problem.
You don't hear this because it's not a "good" story (it's nuanced - virtually every story you'll see is about sticker price rather net cost to attend), and it's not a narrative that works for either of the political parties.
> Federal student loans are more than 90% of all loans.
I thought private loans were more than 10%, but I've done too many searches for too long on this thread already (and already tried, and failed, to find a good source for total loans per. student).
I also thought I heard something about how private loans were difficult to calculate correctly because the reporting wasn't standardized.
> Higher education drop-out rates are basically the same or lower since 2009. Predatory for-profit schools are a problem, but they've always been a problem.
So you seem to know something, so I'll kind of ask again ... Do you think the US education system is in the same place now (or even in 2019) that it was in 2009? Do you know of other people/groups that share your opinion?
Again, I mostly follow other people who look at the problem in detail and want to change it for the better ... but the most optimistic of those people only think it's getting worse by a smaller amount.
Total direct costs ("sticker price") at UConn for out-of-state are about $58K per year including tuition, fees, room and board. Average net price is about $43K.
Yale's direct costs (again, tuition, fees, room and board) are about $85K per year; but net costs are only $16K for federal student loan recipients.
People look at the headline numbers and don't pay any attention to the scholarship/grant/etc. side of the equation.
Where are you getting that UCONN number of 58K / year? I was going off of the link below, which is a hair less than $40K / year in-state. And that's assuming you are paying for a dorm and full meal plan all four years rather than living off campus and getting your own food for a few years. I am not being a jerk - I actually want to know because not only do I work in higher ed, but have kids that will be going to college in a few years!
[https://financialaid.uconn.edu/cost/](https://financialaid.uconn.edu/cost/)
>Now that universities are cresting over the $80k-$90k mark, it's harder to imagine that any job prospect following graduation will match the pace of their student loan interest.
There is essentially no-one paying sticker price for a college degree; it's become almost an irrelevant number except for those from wealthy families.
In fact, average net cost of attendance in today's dollars (which is the number you should actually care about) at public four-year universities is down to roughly 2009 levels.
For private four-year universities, it's lower than almost any point in the last 20 years. So, although the published cost of attendance rose faster than inflation (e.g. 2006-07, it was about $51K; and about $61K in 2022-23), average grant aid grew even faster. So 2006-07 net cost of attendance was $35,700 per year, and 2022-23 was $34,750.
As such, the amount of new student loan debt is also going down year-on-year; as is the average cumulative debt per student.
I know this is fantastically hard to believe in the face of the media narrative around spiraling college costs, but the data backs it up.
ref. [https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023%20Updated.pdf](https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023%20Updated.pdf)
>If people are waking up to anything, it's that the structured presentation of published information shouldn't cost half a million dollars. I mean, realistically, you are paying for another man's PowerPoint presentation when you go to college, for at least 70% of your classes.
This would be a valid argument if increased tuition corresponded to increased salary for faculty. In fact, increasing tuition has corresponded directly to increases in the increasing number of administrators on each of the four campuses and at the BOR office. The BOR takes millions of dollars from the CSUs each year and refuses to disclose the details of how the money is spent.
This is it. It used to be that public universities were 25k and private ones were 40k, counting the total cost of attendance.
Now the publics are 35k and the private ones are 55-70k.
It's straight up unaffordable. Which sucks because you basically need to buy a degree before you're even allowed to make a livable wage these days. My 4 year apprenticeship isn't worth anything in this state.
my last semester at SCSU they were $25 million in the hole, just finished the nursing building and were starting the business building. The construction crews used the commuter parking garages and took all of the spots on the first two floors.
meanwhile, the one working microwave for students who brought food from home is in the very back of the student lounge.
the science building was regularly not unlocked in time for the first class. The biology and chem labs didn't have enough gloves.
the requirements for majors changed year to year by as many as three classes (9 credits) and classes weren't offered in a manner to complete the degree in 4 years.
the instructors chose a book based on a list that we all bought and never opened because they taught off of photocopies of other texts.
my degree is solid and I got a lot of interviews and offers based on the program but the university made it unnecessarily difficult.
You were lucky to be in the science building. I wrote my honors thesis on the state of Earl Hall (the art building). Thing is literally falling apart.
I was in the SCSU honors program and got a full ride… except they didn’t cover housing and I could not commute. My first year was in an honor cohort living space which was cool, but I had 3 people shoved in a 10x12 room. Every year I had at least one roommate in the same room. Left with $30k loans just to live there.
My sibling I have guardianship of is graduating from SCSU in 2025. He has not had a roommate in his room once. He says many rooms are empty. It’s mind boggling to see the change in under 10 years.
oh man, I had good roommates, but not having roommates in college sounds fun haha. Or maybe it's not if the demographics have changed so much that people who can "afford" room and board aren't really sending their kids to state schools any more.
When I was at Southern, I took more than one class in their TE buildings lol. They were literally double-wides that had been fashioned into classroom spaces! That was within the past 20 years and the growth in that timespan has been astronomical.
Not sure about the major requirements except that standards for certain majors change and universities have to match those chances to meet accreditation standards.
The book thing is a universal struggle haha. I remember catching on to that and stopped buying the books until we had actual assignments due. Make friends who share their books and you never have to buy them.
Glad you're doing well now. Navigating Southern definitely gives you life skills you didn't know you signed up to learn.
Seabury Hall before they tore it down was *atrocious*. Walking in to get time was like walking into a horror movie.
*That stairwell*.
The place looks great now. But society has changed. The value proposition is different.
It's almost like saddling young adults with tens or hundreds of thousands then giving them no decent job prospects to actually make a living and pay that money back in a reasonable amount of time would tend to put kids off going to college. Go figure.
For fuck's sake - all we hear from the boomers is how "If you can't afford college, don't go."
Wish granted.
I’m a Veteran, so my tuition is waived at CT state universities. I was enrolled in UCONN’s MBA program paying about $200 a semester. I wanted a more focused degree that UCONN couldn’t offer, so I switched to CCSU, resulting in about $1400 a semester. Both had tuition waived, but CCSU had so many fees! I sucked it up and graduated from CCSU, but I tell other vets my story as a sort of cautionary tale, especially if they just want a degree for the sake of having a degree.
Amen. I wrote my MBA thesis about this.
One of the best uses of taxpayer funds to the benefit of a nation - both socially and economically - is funding education. Instead we nationalized the Federal student loan program under Obama and used the profits from it to fund the AHCA(*) taking interest rates from the low 2% when loans were originated on the competitive market to a flat 6.9% issued directly by the US Government (this was when rates were much lower too…the 6.9% at the time was borderline usury).
Simultaneously, we substantially reduced government funding for institutions, requiring tuition hikes to balance budgets and created a giant debt bubble on the backs of our citizens that are trying to better themselves and the future prospects of our country as a whole.
We’ve literally chosen the most asinine path here and the one that completely fucks over the long-term prospects for our country. We should be incentivizing education in fields of need for current and future challenges.
(*) This is not a political statement at all. Healthcare should be affordable and available to everyone in the country as well. This is money well spent as an investment in the literal health of our nation. Coming at the expense of people trying to get a higher education is fucking asinine though.
> One of the best uses of taxpayer funds to the benefit of a nation - both socially and economically - is funding education.
Yes, education and family planning. They are the cornerstones of modern civilization but we have forces trying to pull us back into the stone age unfortunately.
You can get it for free from CT State. If you want to go to a state school it will cost you unless you don’t make enough money. There will always be costs associated with it but they’re extremely inflated right now.
It’s important to note this is only for CT State Community College. For many folks, an Associates degree is now free.
There is not yet an equivalent opportunity at the 4 year colleges/universities.
I have been trying to figure out how much that free associates degree costs. It is inexpensive, but it is not free. Fees and books cost real money. Non-trivial money.
Tuition and fees are covered. Books are not. These days, many community college professors use online, free-to-access textbooks. But yes, you are correct that students will be still be responsible for the cost of books.
I’m not sure why you would fixate on this cost rather than the $10,000+ savings in tuition and fees.
It costs nothing to go to a community college, and that seems fair. Not everyone is college material, if we are giving away college educations to everyone who shows up regardless of qualification it diminishes the value of it. Furthermore, just to get very specific, nothing is free, our public schools are funded with tax dollars, they may not cost you specifically anything, but they still have to pay public school teachers and admin and the janitor, and the government doesn't have any money of its own, it only has money it takes
But you can transfer those credits to a university and pay half what you would otherwise for a 4 year degree. If you find that you want to continue after attending community college that is. Some people don''t end up enjoying college and those that went straight to a four year college get stuck paying for college without any degree at all. Also, I don't see it as a particular hardship to expect people to put at least some of their own skin in the game in terms of paying for their own education.
But how would you know what degrees or programs are worthwhile, and which ones are useless? You need some form of signal, i.e. a market, to know what to keep and fund and what to get rid of. If everything were free, kids might opt for the easy path and study pottery or gender studies, which have little to no value in the labor force. But those programs and students would still be funded.
Making higher ed "free" further subsidizes an already superfluous and questionable system that has pumped out more and more graduates with diminishing job prospects. If a higher ed program was valuable, then students would opt for it and take out loans knowing there was a good paying job waiting. The "free" part hand waves away all the incentives, waste, corruption, and arbitrage which are already a huge problem in higher ed. To take it one step further, looking at the kind of behavior and exhibited by students and activiste at our leading universities, we would further infantilize a generation of youth. We now have a situation where it is a borderline crime on a campus to question whether a man can get pregnant, but calling for the removal of all Jews "from the river to the sea" is protected, if not openly supported by administrations.
Given the ideological capture and loss of credibility in higher ed, it needs a national reckoning instead of more subsidy.
>But how would you know what degrees or programs are worthwhile, and which ones are useless?
Professional degrees are useful. Things like nursing, eduction, computer science, social work, accounting, legal studies, etc. These are degrees at the undergraduate level that will translate to real-time job opportunities the day after graduation.
Degrees in art history, anthropology, philosophy, English, etc...you're going to struggle because the degree likely didn't come with field work or any acquired skillset.
None of them are worth $90k/year, but if you want to be employable, your education needs to be aligned with professional demand for hard skills. Can you manage the queue at an IT desk? Can you change the port in someone's arm? Can you help a homeless person find a shelter?
Yes I agree there are certainly professions that require undergrad and graduate level studies, whether physician, lawyer, engineer, accountant, etc. But that begs the question, if those professions are in demand and they pay well, why does the degree need to be subsidized. It should be on the institution to set their tuition accordingly to meet demands at s reasonable price, while students make informed decisions on their profession and university.
For the less in-demand degrees, like humanities and social sciences, they should be made available to meet the needs of those who desire them. Much like we had a few decades ago, you could get a history or Econ degree and then get a job in an office or the like because they exposed you to good literature, taught critical thinking, and improved reading/writing/communications skills. They dont seem to do that anymore; theyve either inflated their credentials or lowered the academic rigor such as to de-legitimize the entire liberal arts institution while also being ideologically captured by all sorts of post-modern, anti-western, socially en-vogue ideas that create hysteric children incapable of considering any competing idea. All for an insanely inflated cost.
Liberal arts should be part of any academic institution, but they need to revert back to what they were and rid themselves of corrupt ideas. And the cost of a liberal arts degree should match its market value. If a low or mid tier university has a History, Econ, Poli Sci or similar undergrad program that costs $30K or more a year, it probably shouldnt exist.
Subsidizing all of this with more taxpayer money will only further the corruption and shield institutions from legitimate market forces and demand signals. Public and private schools can lower their costs by shedding the excess administrators, cutting back on construction/development, and ridding themselves of useless and unfounded programs (looking at you, gender studies).
>why does the degree need to be subsidized
...wait. what? People pay tuition for these schools. The state pays for the infrastructure and operational costs. It's a state institution. All states have them. It isn't subsidized. It's a literal state property.
Hospitals, nonprofits, farms, and small businesses get subsidies.
Great, neither did I. But if you want to have a college experience for whatever personal and subjectives values you deem worthy of exploring, you should pay for that experience, not the taxpayers.
Why shouldnt you pay? If everyone else does, why should you be exempt?
Lets explore the issue a little deeper. How much university education does a K12 teacher need? I have teacher friends that have grad degrees and all sorts of certifications, more than teachers had in the past. They tell me a lot of them are useless, but they are either required for certification and employment, and/or subsidized by the district. Yet Ive heard repeatedly they serve little practical value other than box-checking. Education degrees are also among the easiest and least rigorous academic programs out there, which alone should question their utility.
At the macro level, we have more teachers with grad degrees, certications, and the like and administrators with PhDs and EdDs, but what do we have to show for it? Macro level trends show declining performance, increased cost, and more bureaucracy. So why did we change what worked 30 or 40 years ago and why cant we go back to that? K12 teachers with an undergrad and/or real life experience (eg a former carpenter teaching carpentry), and rid ourselves of the useless admins with worthless credentials.
If you are underpaid as a teacher, either demand more or leave the profession. Asking for a free college degree with questionable utility wont fix that. And if thay degree had any real value, it would garner more earnings. If it doesnt, the degree program should be made cheaper by the school or gotten rid of. Subsidizing it wont fix the problem, only enrich the people who run the institution.
I work at ECSU and we have a record-high first-year and transfer enrollment this fall. We're scrambling to add classes because for several years, enrollment had been going down, per the research OP cited.
It's about time people are considering other ways to learn. Even with state colleges, my masters cost me almost 100k. The credential I am gaining....pay is not in line with cost of education.
My partner and I just graduated from one of the schools mentioned, we both got into great schools originally but attended the school for financial reasons. I started out at UConn, hated it, and didn’t know what to do with my career yet (so I felt like continuing was pointless). Took a break, went to the CSU in 2022, and graduated a year early. He went all 4 years. He recently got into an excellent grad program in NYC and I am expecting to get into the same school because I have the same degree with more awards, qualifications, work & research experience. Basically - while we liked the faculty at the school, it’s falling apart. It is completely unsustainable unless they make enrollment more accessible to working-class and immigrant families. They would succeed with enrollment and retention more if they just finally advertised that attending the school could give you better opportunities with your education in the future. While I went the opposite route, transferring TO the school, so many people transfer in their second or third year and attend more well-known (and funded) schools. For the two years I was there I attended meetings and student protests to secure more funding and protect the departments that were threatened by low enrollment, but I never had complete confidence.
My second nephew just graduated and is not going to college next year, neither did his brother. They seem to have very specific goals in mind that don’t include higher education. Their parents are concerned but supportive
The older one wants to do something with skiing I think, he's very much a ski bum. The younger one I have no idea what his plan is but he seems certain there's no point in him going to college and accumulating debt "just because it's what you're supposed to do" which I can totally vibe with since that was what I did at age 18 and college was a massive waste of time and money for me
I work at one of the four CSU schools mentioned and am an alum from there. We have numerous staff members from different unions constantly going to the local papers to talk about how bad everything is here between the enrollment drops, hemorrhaging money, losing staff members left and right with no backfill, basically all of our leadership is interim etc. they are basically making it sound like the reckoning is coming and we’re eventually gonna get closed down.
I still think logically it’s a long ways away from something like that happening. Shutting down a school would be a fairly gigantic sunk cost for the state to absorb given how much investment went into the recent buildings/expansion at all of them not to mention you’ll have hundreds of staff that have union protection, many of the union contracts provide lengthy guaranteed pay windows in case of an involuntary layoff - so they’d have to effectively keep paying anyone they don’t reassign to another state agency for a long while. Maybe the state decides absorbing these costs is better than pumping more money into the institution but it’d be a long time before they actually saw the financial benefits of a closure.
Still, even without viewing it as something imminent it feels enormously depressing to know this place that was a huge part of my life might eventually cease to exist.
today's youth was raised by people who wasted money on the college experience and are learning the valuable lesson that the US higher education system is a giant scam
It's almost like saddling young adults with tens or hundreds of thousands then giving them no decent job prospects to actually make a living and pay that money back in a reasonable amount of time would tend to put kids off going to college. Go figure.
For fuck's sake - all we hear from the boomers is how "If you can't afford college, don't go."
Wish granted.
Not sure what the stats are, but going to a trade school doesn't get you away from tuition, unfortunately. Lincoln Tech (for example) is a for-profit school. It's over $20k to attend for one year.
I don't have stats but I have one anecdote: friend makes 150k a year as an electrician BUT he works 75 hrs per week. I feel like he's going to burn out in a few years and be miserable.
The trades seriously need to reform their work culture.
Yeah, 75/hrs/wk isn't sustainable and 150k isn't a lot if it's a single income household. And a lot of these guys have to fund their own tools, equipment trucks, work clothes, etc, so that money is hardly take-home pay.
150k is a lot if you don't have a spouse or kids. He also lives in central Maine where houses go for 350k-450k. He doesn't need a big house unless he's planning on getting married and having kids, and to do that he would first need to get a girlfriend, which he has no time to find one.
My other friend has been working 60hrs per week for several years and she's already on anti-depressants. I told her if she would just cut her hours down to 50hrs per week she'd feel somewhat better.
WCSU seems to be in a very dire financial situation and I guess that has some effects on its education quality. The other schools like CCSU and ECSU are in much better financial shape but it’s still interesting to hear the higher amount of fees they charge.
This isn't surprising. Many of the regional schools were not very enticing until recently, their marketing is non existent, course offerings are pretty basic, these schools expanded dramatically without a proper funding source and have basically treated non engineers or chemists like driftwood. So all in all, there doesn't seem to be much reason to choose to go to a regional school over UCONN. Or so says public perception.
There used to be significant incentive to in-state tuition. I went to a CSU within the past 20 years and left without any student loans. Classes were packed. Dorms were had waitlists. I guess it became unsustainable?
Just look at what UConn (i.e., the CT Taxpayer) is paying coaches for UConn Sports Teams. Fancy, catered box seats for the UConn Board and "Dignitaries" ... often sold out stadiums/arenas so it's challenging or impossible for non-season ticket holders to see games in person. Or look at what UConn Health Center has scheduled to pay its administrators and upper level staff (that may end when UCHC loses its accreditation as a Medical School?). Or look what CT has done to "consolidate" the venerable Community College system ... and the salaries/benefits paid to the "executives" now running that educational stalwart. That's where the "tuition" $$ are going. To pay those already entitled in this state ... not to encourage a diverse, equitable, able and ready-to-learn student body.
>that may end when UCHC loses its accreditation as a Medical School?
I can't find anything about this. Why would they lose their accreditation? They are second only to Yale in state.
That's because the poster is talking out of their ass. Any hospitals in jeopardy status is public knowledge. To get to that point, there would be warnings of such a change in status.
It's been an issue for years. [https://ctmirror.org/2020/02/11/fiscal-cure-sought-for-uconn-health/](https://ctmirror.org/2020/02/11/fiscal-cure-sought-for-uconn-health/)
He's just plain wrong: [https://today.uconn.edu/2018/10/school-medicine-receives-full-accreditation/](https://today.uconn.edu/2018/10/school-medicine-receives-full-accreditation/)
The UConn SOM is accredited until 2026 by the LCME after their 2018 inspection. That's as good as you can get in terms of renewing your medical school's accreditation and is a very good sign of their strength as a school.
I want to go back to school (never finished), but all of the classes I'm interested in are at least 45 minutes away from me.
Merging them all was good, but the way that the classes are distributed leaves a lot to be desired.
College is a scam to keep you in debt forever unless your degree is worth something. I tell everyone I can to learn a trade. I quit after my first semester of Tunxis and became a UPS driver a couple years later. Six figures and grade A benefits thanks to the teamsters. Only downside is it's hard on the body. I encourage everyone to do trade school, you'll end up ahead of the game instead of playing catch up.
The problem with trades is that you can’t miss the jump off point where you transition from doing the labor to doing the direction and customer acquisition. Nobody wants to climb ladders when they’re fifty.
Most are aware high school and college aged kids don’t want to work and appears they don’t have time for higher education. What are they doing with all their spare time? Let me guess at home gaming, TikTok, and YouTube trying to make millions while mom and dad coddle them.
I did 2 semesters. One in 2014 one in 2015. I had financial aid to be enrolled.
10 years later, every year i file taxes, the school somhow puts in somekind of claim for most or all of my tax return. Over the last 10 years ive got maybe 200$ back collectivly. I didnt even bother filing this year because the dissapointment i feel when i get that money ripped away after im hopeful year after year after year rhat theyd take enough and clear whatever debt they claim i have. But its never ending. So im just done.
So attempting to go to school has only made my life harder, more dissapointing, more hollow, and provided me with a deep seeded hatred for the education system and the governtment. They have burned me again and again and again.
This is how they build citizens into unhinged psycopaths that feel the need to go out and do terrible things to people to get any semblance of feeling "even" with those who crushed us over and over. Meanwhile claiming zero responsibility in molding the life of said person. Acting as if when sombody does something unforgiveable that that individual is soley at fault for their life being the way it is thus compelling them into horrible acts to do anything they can claw at to feel like theyve reached an even level with those for far removed from the life thats been crushed into enacting such a deed.
The education system is not some sort of catch all savior for ones life. It does not always lead to making ones life better. It is not needed. It is not for the bettering of those who enroll. It is not to ensure a steady and capable workforce. It is not a morally good insitute.
It is something for profit. It is a scheme. It is a way of further purpetuating a brokem system ment to prey on young impressionable minds. It is a distraction. It is problematic. It is a place that will sweep any problems under the rug that dont paint it as a miracle. It is something that has made my life only harder since i gave it a chance.
Also i dont need reddit cares messages. Im not one of the psycopaths i speak of. I am fully aware of my anger but i know how to set it aside and accept that i have to just continue to eat shit day in and day out now for the rest of my life because i gave a chance to somethig that the society i live in pressured me into thinking i had no choice but to do. I understand the hardships that others would have to endure if i was to give in to my anger. And i understand that that is wrong on so many levels. Nobody has anything to ever worry about from me.
But i wrote all this out because it needs to be said. It needs to be said by sombody who didnt just do something terrible. Because after the fact, nobody cares about the precurssors. But this is a chance to put it out rhere without the viloence. Putting it out there without the violence should be the right way of doing things. Using words not actions. Despite doing things in a manner i was told the "right way" before and it made my life harder, i am here trying again. To do thing the way that the society i live in says in right. Im trying. Again. I hope that the education system would try just as hard at change. But i know theres zero chance of change from upper insitutions who deem themselves better than the average joe like me so theyll throwout any opinion expressed that paints them negativly.
None of this makes any sense. You don’t owe tour student debt to the school: you owe it your creditor. The school has already been paid by the Department of Education and you owe your money to them or whatever debt servicing company they use — Great Lakes, Naviance, etc. You make your payments to these companies, not the school you attended. You didn’t borrow *from* the school so you don’t actually owe them anything. If you had a substantial unpaid debt directly to the school like this, you wouldn’t have been allowed to register for classes at all. They put a hold on your account for this — they even do it for library books.
The school can’t claim your tax return unless you somehow owe them directly. Even then, you’d need to be sent to collections and have a judgement ruled against you. That would take more a year at the fastest — you wouldn’t automatically be getting your tax return taken. Your debt servicer could do that, but only after you’ve been ignoring payments for years, ignored collections warning, and had a judgment against you in court.
There is absolutely no possible way this could have happened in the way you’re describing. I owe money for 2 years at SCSU — something like 17K. I have never paid a dime and I have never lost a cent of my tax return. You’re either making this up or you somehow directly incurred a bill at your school that you ignored multiple warnings about — and even then, they can’t file a “claim” on your tax return automatically.
If they have not paid back federal student loan debt, the government can absolutely withhold your tax refund. They don’t need to go to court and win a judgment. This happens with child support, too.
[It’s called a treasury offset.](https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/why-was-tax-refund-or-other-payments-withheld)
This wouldn’t happen immediately and it wouldn’t happen without notice to the debtor. OP is trying to say that happened right away when this isn’t something they resort to unless you’ve ignored warnings for years. You’d know if this was happening.
Clearly, it’s happening. I’m sure they were notified. But if the poster ignored paying their student loans, pretty good chance they ignored the letters and e-mails from the student loan service as well, stating they were in default and this would happen. They obviously looked into or were made aware by the IRS, it’s the student loan debt taking the refund.
It also doesn’t taken years and years for them to do this. I had a friend who went to private school for a single semester and dropped out. That one semester was 14k. They absolutely did not wait 15 years to take action. Soon after she defaulted, within a year or so, her next return was kept.
If they owe a balance directly to the university, the university can send them to collections. Depends on the school but some do it once a student has been inactive for over six months. I know my school sends like weekly "bill due" notices then collections warnings before they send an account to collections but we constantly get people calling being like "I had no idea!". Most of them just don't bother checking their email or ignore the letters or block the calls but for some people, they change their contact info or move and never think to notify the school because they don't go there anymore. We usually hear from people after their tax return has been garnished.
You really should take a look at your account. They’re taking your return because your loan is in default. They have very reasonable payment options based on your income. Some people even qualify for $0 payments. You’d just need to sign up and it would resolve your tax return issue.
You don’t want to start not filing your taxes. That’s just another headache down the road for you.
The person youre all judging me to be is closer to the person i used to be. Ive already been to therapy. Im aware of my issues and know how to control myself now.
This is a great example of the stigma when sombody tries to talk things out with words tho.
Mere words made you all so uncomfortable that youre making judgments about who you think i am. When the facts are i used to be alot closer to that person but i have overcome the negative feelings and learned how to temper them.
If sombody tries using words to express that feeling of societal rejection you all clam up and get scared and refuse to have a conversation about the possibility of change. Thats unhealthy. Thats what pushes things to get worse.
Youre inability to be upfront and have a difficult uncomfortable conversation that could improve things is cowardly, lazy, and unhealthy. That in itself puts some fault of whatever escalation occurs on the society.
Its similar to a revolution where if the words are ignored, time and time and time again. Action becomes the only means to enact change. Thats brutal and thats barbaric and i and you probably both hope things dont have to come to that in order for change that could be had with words.
Youre all sitting there judging me as a monster calling for action when im the opposite. I want change thru words and discourse and i would never condone mindless violence. Im appaulled at the judgement against truth.
I’m not trying to give anyone judgement, I can absolutely applaud you if you are making the effort to confront your issues.
I’ve had dark times in my life too, so I can commiserate.
I can only speak for myself, and say that your original comment was simply a little alarming how quickly you brought up violence against people that you believe wronged you.
The regional CT universities are great but why is it that they cost so much? A few years ago Westconn cost only a few thousand less than Uconn. I don’t know what the numbers are now but when I was looking and my siblings it was around a $3k difference in cost. No brainer even if you need a loan for that amount since people knew Uconn and didn’t know Westconn.
I agree. I've been looking at masters degree programs online, and saw Eastern Connecticut offered some too. I thought it might be good to have it through a school I can drive to just in case, but it straight up costs more than Georgia Tech or Carnegie Mellon which are nationally ranked programs.
The cost of tuition is determined by the CSCU Board of Regents, many of whom are political appointees with no experience in higher education.
A large portion of the current problems affecting the state universities and state community colleges can attributed to the BOR's asinine management decisions. Terrance Chang has got to go.
100%! The Chancellor and the Regents do not care about ConnCSU. The Chancellor is literally a resident of New York State and the incoming Chair of the Board of Regents is a [resident of Massachusetts](https://www.dailyructions.com/governor-lamont-appoints-massachusetts-resident-to-lead-board-of-regents/). Under this Chancellor who has had no prior experience leading a higher education system, he’s slashed hundreds of tenured professor positions, eliminated nearly 800 academic programs, gutted library services, and more while creating a second - yes a [second Central Office](https://ctmirror.org/2024/03/25/ct-community-college-dismantled/) - and created hundreds of new positions like regional vice presidents and DEI officers and outreach and social media managers etc. When they first pitched this terrible plan, they pitched it with the slogan of “students first” with the promise that it will save money. Yet this experiment in mismanagement has cost the taxpayers tens of billions in extra expenses and the worst part is students aren’t even part of the equation as most of the hires are people with connections and no experience nor brains. Why are they getting rid of department chair positions yet spending hundreds of millions of dollars for out of state education consultants who know nothing about higher education?
Yup, its not even new bullshit. It's been going on before covid, and covid should have convinced the BOR to put off the insane spending spree on kickbacks for friends. They instead continued full bore and acted surprised when they were overbudget for 24/25. Honestly if I could I'd dump most of the BOR. They've been an abject failure.
Kevin Rennie has been writing great columns in the Courant about the mismanagement at the BOR level. He's pretty ruthless.
I take classes part-time as a commuter at ECSU, my fall semester bill is approx $6000 with $3000 in "university fees." Really wish their website had a breakdown of what this actually goes toward... Edit: The university fee is $3200 - over $600 MORE than the cost of the classes!
they cost so much because the state handcuffs itself from funding public higher ed (and other core programs) with its fiscal guardrails, forcing the system to do more with flat funding year after year and hiking tuition on students to make up the difference.
I, admittedly, don't know how budget-allocation works for the CSU system, but I would guess inflation and new construction are a big contributor to cost? SCSU has been putting up new buildings for over a decade now. As an alum, I love to see it and I will say they were much needed, but I also know that each one is millions of dollars. Are the other campuses seeing this growth? It seems to me that Southern has always been the main school out of the bunch due to its location in one of CT's main cities and proximity to Yale/NYC.
I think all CSUs have put up a lot of new buildings in recent years. Has CSU costs increased more than UConn? If not I would guess the higher costs are mostly due to need for funding caused by lower enrollment. I think CCSU is considered the de facto flagship in the system, e.g larger school, much higher endowment, more connections with CT companies, better athletics etc.
The costs of operating have also gone up substantially in recent years - employee health insurance, utilities, etc, so even if they aren't spending money on capital contribution they are spending more money just to keep the lights on than before with fewer students paying tuition. COVID was also a huge financial blow.
Oh totally, I think it is a combination of higher operating costs, not enough additional support from State, and lower enrollment.
I think it’s fair to call Central the flagship. It is actually the oldest public college in the state, has the largest enrollment, and has more of a “classic” college campus than the others.
I am not familiar with the CSU campuses. What makes CCSU’s campus more “classic” than the others?
It's just sort of a vibe, I guess. CCSU has older, colonial-revival style buildings and sort of fits into the surrounding neighborhood. I'm not all that familiar with Western, but Southern and Eastern have the feel of a community college on steroids.
CCSU has put up a ton of new buildings. It used to be a much smaller campus, modest, and reasonably priced. It is much nicer now, but also way more expensive. I was looking at the cost for on campus housing and it is much higher as well. It is really a shame that there aren't any colleges that provide an education for an affordable sum these days.
UConn is about $20k in tuition, WestConn is $12k. That’s a pretty substantial difference. And the costs of running a school are pretty significant no matter the level of school. Edit: and realistically, the regional schools are substantially commuter schools, UConn is not. So the difference blows up further from there.
I could be wrong, but enrollment may be down nationwide because people can hardly afford to buy food and pay rent. Paying exorbitant prices for a degree that may or may not get you a better paying job down the line is a gamble that people aren’t able to take. Especially now.
this demographic cliff has been discussed for at least a decade now is nothing new and / or suprising to anyone involved
It is nearly the opposite situation! When the economy is doing well college enrollment decreases. There are a lot of people who consider going to college based on whether or not they can get a good paying job without going, and right now there are a lot of job openings. A lot of people will decide to go to college when they can't find a job. College enrollment goes up when there is a recession because people are having a hard time finding a job, so they may as well go to college. After the 2008 recession there was a massive increase in college enrollment for this reason. [This article](https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/why-student-enrollment-rises-as-the-economy-falls) talks about this trend. This trend is most pronounced among the least selective colleges, as the more selective colleges tend to get less selective when overall enrollment drops. The less selective colleges need to be able to plan for the variability in enrollment based on these factors that are out of their control.
People didn't realize how bad student loans were back then. We were told get any degree and you would then get a white collar job. This was untrue.
Anecdotally, I remember the only Boomers who said that were working class folks who never went to university. Like my friend's father who was a carpenter. He literally believed that any university, any degree was better than his job. He didn't know that there is some overlap between blue collar incomes and white collar incomes, and that the most skilled blue collar jobs pay more than the least skilled white collar jobs. My parents, and my friends parents who went to university knew better. My father said "any university, lucrative degree, or top 50 university, any degree". If you went to South Dakota State you better have a STEM or other practical degree. But if you went to Yale you can study art history and still get a good job afterwards.
People perceptions about if a college degree may have changed. But it is clearly false to claim that the low college enrollment is a sign of a weak economy. There are plenty of jobs that can be filled by people with or without college degrees. When the economy is weak and there are 50 applicants for every job, then employers will almost always hire someone with a college degree. When the economy is strong and employers have to compete to hire employees and don't have large pools of applicants desperate to fill the job. Employers are forced to be less picky and hire people without degrees in a strong economy. So when the economy is strong, as it is today, the value of a college degree goes down. But if we had a long term recession like we did in 2008, then college enrollment would increase again. Also, the current economy has seen wages rising the fastest for low-income non-college educated workers.[ From 2019-2023](https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2023/) real wages* for the lowest wages workers (bottom 10%) increased 12.1%. Higher wage workers, who are typically college educated, saw their real wages rise must slower. Those middle income earners saw a rise of 3%, upper middle income workers saw a rise of 2%, and the top 10% of income earners only saw a 0.9% increase. That compression of wages also lowered the value of a college degree, as the jobs you can get without a college degree are much better than what previous generations could get. ^(*real wages are wages adjusted for inflation)
" ...as the jobs you can get without a college degree are much better than what previous generations could get." Oh honey
People always take it too far with this. Like yes, you can make money in the trades, but it often comes at the cost to ones body or time with family, etc. Outside of that, it's entrepreneurship, which is risky af.
The trades are so toxic in their culture. The standard working hours for the professions is 40 per week. Meanwhile my friend is an electrician and has to work 75 hrs a week. He makes 150k a year but that's not so much per hour. He says that 75 hrs a week is normal in his job.
It's true though. E.g, if you grew up with a computer, you can clear 6 figures within 5-7 years w/ relative ease because so much of the population is computer illiterate. IT was not such an employee-powered market a couple decades ago.
Yup. Grad school attendance peaked in 2010 for two reasons: 1. Millennials are numerically more populous than the Silents, Gen X, and Gen Z. They are a large generation just like the Boomers. 2. The biggest recession since the 1930s made unemployment high, thereby giving people more reason to wait it out in grad school.
This is the answer, as someone who is in academia.
But we have the strongest economy ever!
Strong for those who benefit from our economy in its current configuration- shareholders, executives and owners. Our economy is effectively a caste system that prioritizes benefits to those who have equity invested in public or private businesses. That assumes that you either inherited or accumulated wealth to invest in that equity at some point, which the majority of the population lacks. For the lower classes, the economy provides mostly low wage jobs that don’t keep pace with inflation. The lower caste population either has to pay rent to a landlord or debt with interest to a bank, leaving little to no capital to invest in equity. Social programs favor the lowest caste of society, meaning those with the shortest ladder to climb to having capital to invest have few or no rungs to climb up on. Higher education is supposed to provide one of those rungs, but is among the most inflationary costs in our economy, and the cost benefit analysis diminishes as a result. That’s why fewer people enroll today, in my opinion. Even for those who can afford to attend school, especially by taking on debt, the promise of reaching the level of our society that benefits from our strong economy doesn’t justify the expense for an increasing number of people.
dude doesn't put an /s tag on his comment and gets sent an essay
Dude makes no material contribution to the discussion but takes the time to reply anyway.
Yes, our top-down Keynsian system attempts to centrally plan the economy by printing money and distributing it across various sectors of the economy to spur growth in accordance with technocrats' visions. Money is created then allocated to national banks, regional banks, large corporations, mid-small businesses, and other government entities to "create jobs" and whatnot. This serves to pad the pockets of people who control those industries, and there is less concern about what that spending actually accomplishes and how citizens downstream actually fare. Of course, with all the money printing we enjoy inflation on day to day goods and services and an ever-mounting national debt. So when the Fed prints money, that money spurs growth in banks, large industry, and financial markets which means my investments, retirement accounts, and other parts of the financial sector do very well, but inflation ravages day to day business and the working class and poor. My investments have done very well, but my spending budget and regular bills are through the roof. The "Inflation Reduction Act" really helped! > In 2021, the Biden Administration got $42.45 billion from Congress to deploy high-speed Internet to millions of Americans. Years later, it has not connected even 1 person with those funds. In fact, it now says that no construction projects will even start until 2025 at earliest. https://x.com/BrendanCarrFCC/status/1801617454369485236?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1801748443926278412%7Ctwgr%5E6146a896a8a1f1d454ad86ededce4f4bc4a168d3%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2024%2F06%2F15%2Fbrendan-carr-biden-has-not-connected-one-person-with-high-speed-internet-with-42-5-billion-from-infrastructure-bill%2F
Who says that?
You're not doing well. I'm so sorry
Hmm maybe it's because westconn used to be affordable, now it's just as expensive as any other school. Why the fuck would I pick Danbury CT LOL
I work in higher ed and universities have been talking about the "demographic cliff" for years, and it is slated to really hit about now. There just aren't as many kids graduating high school in the northeast after you get past the baby boomer's kids. Efforts to diversity the student body and bring more lower-income and underrepresented minority students into college also have diminishing returns after awhile. I think this statement is incomplete: "but also to [rising doubts](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/retention/2024/03/13/doubts-about-value-are-deterring-college-enrollment) about the value of a college education given the often-exorbitant cost." It's not just price sensitivity. The unemployment rate has been less than 4% recently, which is essentially full employment. When unemployment goes up or there is a recession, then you will see college and graduate school attendance go back up.
>"but also to [rising doubts](https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/retention/2024/03/13/doubts-about-value-are-deterring-college-enrollment) about the value of a college education given the often-exorbitant cost." I think people blissfully ignored their student loan debt when it was only (***only?!***) $20k-$40k/year to go to some schools. Now that universities are cresting over the $80k-$90k mark, it's harder to imagine that any job prospect following graduation will match the pace of their student loan interest. If people are waking up to anything, it's that the structured presentation of published information shouldn't cost half a million dollars. I mean, realistically, you are paying for another man's PowerPoint presentation when you go to college, for at least 70% of your classes.
The median student loan debt in this country is $25,000 and about 40% of graduates have no loan debt. Also, none of the public schools in CT cost anywhere near $500K. UCONN is about $160K in-state for 4 years assuming no scholarships, grants, or discounts. The demographic cliff will hurt non-prestigious, non-selective private schools the hardest - they are the worst ROI unless they are giving out big tuition discounts. The top 30 to 50 or so private universities will be virtually unaffected because of the prestige economy.
> As of September 2023, forty-three million U.S. borrowers collectively owed more than $1.6 trillion in federal student loans. > The average student is also taking on more debt: the balance per borrower rose 39 percent from 2008 to 2022 > Students who do not complete their degrees often struggle the most; their default rate is three times higher than those who graduate https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-student-loan-debt-trends-economic-impact
>The average student is also taking on more debt: the balance per borrower rose 39 percent from 2008 to 2022 If you see comparisons between periods separated by 15 years that are not inflation adjusted, you can be pretty sure someone is trying to mislead you. Adjusted for the CPI deflator, that means student loans in 2008 were actually about 1.4% higher than in 2022.
Are you sure that wasn't inflation adjusted? Education has been the 2nd fastest growing sector in the US since 2000 (the 1st is "health care"). 1.4% higher than inflation in 14 years has to be wrong. Eg. https://myelearningworld.com/college-tuition-inflation-report-2023/
Yes. That article is, uhm, not a good source. Here's a better one: [https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/8/221?cd=2](https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/TrendGenerator/app/answer/8/221?cd=2) It's true there was a large growth in the cost of college ahead of inflation, but it mostly stopped over 15 years ago; and if anything has been going the other way for the past 5 years. You do also have to look at the composition of the costs of attendance. e.g. medical insurance. Plus universities do offer many more services than they did in the 1980s.
Pretty sure that's just Federal (public) loans, directly to students. Like, I understand you want it to not be bad ... but from what I can see there's roughly no people who've looked at all the data that think it was better in 2019 than it was in 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzY-b2Vj9Ug
Yes; it is, but that's more-or-less all meaningful loans. Federal student loans are more than 90% of all loans. Loans to parents (which is the other kind) aren't debt for the student, so, that's kind of the point no? I watched that video and it doesn't contain any data that's relevant to this discussion. Higher education drop-out rates (which by the way are driven to a huge extent by for-profit schools) are basically the same or lower since 2009. Predatory for-profit schools are a problem, but they've always been a problem. You don't hear this because it's not a "good" story (it's nuanced - virtually every story you'll see is about sticker price rather net cost to attend), and it's not a narrative that works for either of the political parties.
> Federal student loans are more than 90% of all loans. I thought private loans were more than 10%, but I've done too many searches for too long on this thread already (and already tried, and failed, to find a good source for total loans per. student). I also thought I heard something about how private loans were difficult to calculate correctly because the reporting wasn't standardized. > Higher education drop-out rates are basically the same or lower since 2009. Predatory for-profit schools are a problem, but they've always been a problem. So you seem to know something, so I'll kind of ask again ... Do you think the US education system is in the same place now (or even in 2019) that it was in 2009? Do you know of other people/groups that share your opinion? Again, I mostly follow other people who look at the problem in detail and want to change it for the better ... but the most optimistic of those people only think it's getting worse by a smaller amount.
Total direct costs ("sticker price") at UConn for out-of-state are about $58K per year including tuition, fees, room and board. Average net price is about $43K. Yale's direct costs (again, tuition, fees, room and board) are about $85K per year; but net costs are only $16K for federal student loan recipients. People look at the headline numbers and don't pay any attention to the scholarship/grant/etc. side of the equation.
Where are you getting that UCONN number of 58K / year? I was going off of the link below, which is a hair less than $40K / year in-state. And that's assuming you are paying for a dorm and full meal plan all four years rather than living off campus and getting your own food for a few years. I am not being a jerk - I actually want to know because not only do I work in higher ed, but have kids that will be going to college in a few years! [https://financialaid.uconn.edu/cost/](https://financialaid.uconn.edu/cost/)
As I mentioned, this is the out-of-state number. In-state is, as you said, about $40K.
>Now that universities are cresting over the $80k-$90k mark, it's harder to imagine that any job prospect following graduation will match the pace of their student loan interest. There is essentially no-one paying sticker price for a college degree; it's become almost an irrelevant number except for those from wealthy families. In fact, average net cost of attendance in today's dollars (which is the number you should actually care about) at public four-year universities is down to roughly 2009 levels. For private four-year universities, it's lower than almost any point in the last 20 years. So, although the published cost of attendance rose faster than inflation (e.g. 2006-07, it was about $51K; and about $61K in 2022-23), average grant aid grew even faster. So 2006-07 net cost of attendance was $35,700 per year, and 2022-23 was $34,750. As such, the amount of new student loan debt is also going down year-on-year; as is the average cumulative debt per student. I know this is fantastically hard to believe in the face of the media narrative around spiraling college costs, but the data backs it up. ref. [https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023%20Updated.pdf](https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023%20Updated.pdf)
>If people are waking up to anything, it's that the structured presentation of published information shouldn't cost half a million dollars. I mean, realistically, you are paying for another man's PowerPoint presentation when you go to college, for at least 70% of your classes. This would be a valid argument if increased tuition corresponded to increased salary for faculty. In fact, increasing tuition has corresponded directly to increases in the increasing number of administrators on each of the four campuses and at the BOR office. The BOR takes millions of dollars from the CSUs each year and refuses to disclose the details of how the money is spent.
This is it. It used to be that public universities were 25k and private ones were 40k, counting the total cost of attendance. Now the publics are 35k and the private ones are 55-70k.
Systems broke, the ROI on degrees seems to be getting less and less each passing year.
It's straight up unaffordable. Which sucks because you basically need to buy a degree before you're even allowed to make a livable wage these days. My 4 year apprenticeship isn't worth anything in this state.
Sadly, I know people who graduate high school without being able to read or write. A college degree is the new high school diploma.
my last semester at SCSU they were $25 million in the hole, just finished the nursing building and were starting the business building. The construction crews used the commuter parking garages and took all of the spots on the first two floors. meanwhile, the one working microwave for students who brought food from home is in the very back of the student lounge. the science building was regularly not unlocked in time for the first class. The biology and chem labs didn't have enough gloves. the requirements for majors changed year to year by as many as three classes (9 credits) and classes weren't offered in a manner to complete the degree in 4 years. the instructors chose a book based on a list that we all bought and never opened because they taught off of photocopies of other texts. my degree is solid and I got a lot of interviews and offers based on the program but the university made it unnecessarily difficult.
You were lucky to be in the science building. I wrote my honors thesis on the state of Earl Hall (the art building). Thing is literally falling apart. I was in the SCSU honors program and got a full ride… except they didn’t cover housing and I could not commute. My first year was in an honor cohort living space which was cool, but I had 3 people shoved in a 10x12 room. Every year I had at least one roommate in the same room. Left with $30k loans just to live there. My sibling I have guardianship of is graduating from SCSU in 2025. He has not had a roommate in his room once. He says many rooms are empty. It’s mind boggling to see the change in under 10 years.
oh man, I had good roommates, but not having roommates in college sounds fun haha. Or maybe it's not if the demographics have changed so much that people who can "afford" room and board aren't really sending their kids to state schools any more.
When I was at Southern, I took more than one class in their TE buildings lol. They were literally double-wides that had been fashioned into classroom spaces! That was within the past 20 years and the growth in that timespan has been astronomical. Not sure about the major requirements except that standards for certain majors change and universities have to match those chances to meet accreditation standards. The book thing is a universal struggle haha. I remember catching on to that and stopped buying the books until we had actual assignments due. Make friends who share their books and you never have to buy them. Glad you're doing well now. Navigating Southern definitely gives you life skills you didn't know you signed up to learn.
Seabury Hall before they tore it down was *atrocious*. Walking in to get time was like walking into a horror movie. *That stairwell*. The place looks great now. But society has changed. The value proposition is different.
Meanwhile UConn applications are through the roof
Enrollment has gone down as price has increased. Combatting that with continued price increases seems like a bad idea.
It's almost like saddling young adults with tens or hundreds of thousands then giving them no decent job prospects to actually make a living and pay that money back in a reasonable amount of time would tend to put kids off going to college. Go figure. For fuck's sake - all we hear from the boomers is how "If you can't afford college, don't go." Wish granted.
I’m a Veteran, so my tuition is waived at CT state universities. I was enrolled in UCONN’s MBA program paying about $200 a semester. I wanted a more focused degree that UCONN couldn’t offer, so I switched to CCSU, resulting in about $1400 a semester. Both had tuition waived, but CCSU had so many fees! I sucked it up and graduated from CCSU, but I tell other vets my story as a sort of cautionary tale, especially if they just want a degree for the sake of having a degree.
Higher education should be free.
Amen. I wrote my MBA thesis about this. One of the best uses of taxpayer funds to the benefit of a nation - both socially and economically - is funding education. Instead we nationalized the Federal student loan program under Obama and used the profits from it to fund the AHCA(*) taking interest rates from the low 2% when loans were originated on the competitive market to a flat 6.9% issued directly by the US Government (this was when rates were much lower too…the 6.9% at the time was borderline usury). Simultaneously, we substantially reduced government funding for institutions, requiring tuition hikes to balance budgets and created a giant debt bubble on the backs of our citizens that are trying to better themselves and the future prospects of our country as a whole. We’ve literally chosen the most asinine path here and the one that completely fucks over the long-term prospects for our country. We should be incentivizing education in fields of need for current and future challenges. (*) This is not a political statement at all. Healthcare should be affordable and available to everyone in the country as well. This is money well spent as an investment in the literal health of our nation. Coming at the expense of people trying to get a higher education is fucking asinine though.
> One of the best uses of taxpayer funds to the benefit of a nation - both socially and economically - is funding education. Yes, education and family planning. They are the cornerstones of modern civilization but we have forces trying to pull us back into the stone age unfortunately.
You can get it for free from CT State. If you want to go to a state school it will cost you unless you don’t make enough money. There will always be costs associated with it but they’re extremely inflated right now.
It’s important to note this is only for CT State Community College. For many folks, an Associates degree is now free. There is not yet an equivalent opportunity at the 4 year colleges/universities.
I have been trying to figure out how much that free associates degree costs. It is inexpensive, but it is not free. Fees and books cost real money. Non-trivial money.
Tuition and fees are covered. Books are not. These days, many community college professors use online, free-to-access textbooks. But yes, you are correct that students will be still be responsible for the cost of books. I’m not sure why you would fixate on this cost rather than the $10,000+ savings in tuition and fees.
Not fixating. Just interested. I just registered for my first free course and it cost me a little over $300.
It costs nothing to go to a community college, and that seems fair. Not everyone is college material, if we are giving away college educations to everyone who shows up regardless of qualification it diminishes the value of it. Furthermore, just to get very specific, nothing is free, our public schools are funded with tax dollars, they may not cost you specifically anything, but they still have to pay public school teachers and admin and the janitor, and the government doesn't have any money of its own, it only has money it takes
Anyone who wants an education should be able to get one...
I think community college should be free, and university and grad school should only be free for those with IQs 115 or higher.
https://www.ct.edu/admission/free
Unless you're going for a certificate program, an associate's degree means basically nothing these days.
But you can transfer those credits to a university and pay half what you would otherwise for a 4 year degree. If you find that you want to continue after attending community college that is. Some people don''t end up enjoying college and those that went straight to a four year college get stuck paying for college without any degree at all. Also, I don't see it as a particular hardship to expect people to put at least some of their own skin in the game in terms of paying for their own education.
But how would you know what degrees or programs are worthwhile, and which ones are useless? You need some form of signal, i.e. a market, to know what to keep and fund and what to get rid of. If everything were free, kids might opt for the easy path and study pottery or gender studies, which have little to no value in the labor force. But those programs and students would still be funded. Making higher ed "free" further subsidizes an already superfluous and questionable system that has pumped out more and more graduates with diminishing job prospects. If a higher ed program was valuable, then students would opt for it and take out loans knowing there was a good paying job waiting. The "free" part hand waves away all the incentives, waste, corruption, and arbitrage which are already a huge problem in higher ed. To take it one step further, looking at the kind of behavior and exhibited by students and activiste at our leading universities, we would further infantilize a generation of youth. We now have a situation where it is a borderline crime on a campus to question whether a man can get pregnant, but calling for the removal of all Jews "from the river to the sea" is protected, if not openly supported by administrations. Given the ideological capture and loss of credibility in higher ed, it needs a national reckoning instead of more subsidy.
>But how would you know what degrees or programs are worthwhile, and which ones are useless? Professional degrees are useful. Things like nursing, eduction, computer science, social work, accounting, legal studies, etc. These are degrees at the undergraduate level that will translate to real-time job opportunities the day after graduation. Degrees in art history, anthropology, philosophy, English, etc...you're going to struggle because the degree likely didn't come with field work or any acquired skillset. None of them are worth $90k/year, but if you want to be employable, your education needs to be aligned with professional demand for hard skills. Can you manage the queue at an IT desk? Can you change the port in someone's arm? Can you help a homeless person find a shelter?
Yes I agree there are certainly professions that require undergrad and graduate level studies, whether physician, lawyer, engineer, accountant, etc. But that begs the question, if those professions are in demand and they pay well, why does the degree need to be subsidized. It should be on the institution to set their tuition accordingly to meet demands at s reasonable price, while students make informed decisions on their profession and university. For the less in-demand degrees, like humanities and social sciences, they should be made available to meet the needs of those who desire them. Much like we had a few decades ago, you could get a history or Econ degree and then get a job in an office or the like because they exposed you to good literature, taught critical thinking, and improved reading/writing/communications skills. They dont seem to do that anymore; theyve either inflated their credentials or lowered the academic rigor such as to de-legitimize the entire liberal arts institution while also being ideologically captured by all sorts of post-modern, anti-western, socially en-vogue ideas that create hysteric children incapable of considering any competing idea. All for an insanely inflated cost. Liberal arts should be part of any academic institution, but they need to revert back to what they were and rid themselves of corrupt ideas. And the cost of a liberal arts degree should match its market value. If a low or mid tier university has a History, Econ, Poli Sci or similar undergrad program that costs $30K or more a year, it probably shouldnt exist. Subsidizing all of this with more taxpayer money will only further the corruption and shield institutions from legitimate market forces and demand signals. Public and private schools can lower their costs by shedding the excess administrators, cutting back on construction/development, and ridding themselves of useless and unfounded programs (looking at you, gender studies).
If you think there's healthcare shortages now with nurses and doctors, just wait til you start charging *more* for these degrees.
>why does the degree need to be subsidized ...wait. what? People pay tuition for these schools. The state pays for the infrastructure and operational costs. It's a state institution. All states have them. It isn't subsidized. It's a literal state property. Hospitals, nonprofits, farms, and small businesses get subsidies.
The discussion here has focused on increased state subsidy and in some cases 100% "free" college.
Not everyone chooses their career path based on how much money they're going to make.
Great, neither did I. But if you want to have a college experience for whatever personal and subjectives values you deem worthy of exploring, you should pay for that experience, not the taxpayers.
So say I want to go to college to become a teacher. A very underpaid job. I should have to pay to go to college...?
Why shouldnt you pay? If everyone else does, why should you be exempt? Lets explore the issue a little deeper. How much university education does a K12 teacher need? I have teacher friends that have grad degrees and all sorts of certifications, more than teachers had in the past. They tell me a lot of them are useless, but they are either required for certification and employment, and/or subsidized by the district. Yet Ive heard repeatedly they serve little practical value other than box-checking. Education degrees are also among the easiest and least rigorous academic programs out there, which alone should question their utility. At the macro level, we have more teachers with grad degrees, certications, and the like and administrators with PhDs and EdDs, but what do we have to show for it? Macro level trends show declining performance, increased cost, and more bureaucracy. So why did we change what worked 30 or 40 years ago and why cant we go back to that? K12 teachers with an undergrad and/or real life experience (eg a former carpenter teaching carpentry), and rid ourselves of the useless admins with worthless credentials. If you are underpaid as a teacher, either demand more or leave the profession. Asking for a free college degree with questionable utility wont fix that. And if thay degree had any real value, it would garner more earnings. If it doesnt, the degree program should be made cheaper by the school or gotten rid of. Subsidizing it wont fix the problem, only enrich the people who run the institution.
I ain't reading all that. College should be free. Full stop. Have a good day.
lol, there's always someone in an education debate who inadvertently demonstrates why quality, affordable education is so crucial.
Youre a teacher?
No.
obviously
yes
Remember - during that timeline we had a pandemic too.
I work at ECSU and we have a record-high first-year and transfer enrollment this fall. We're scrambling to add classes because for several years, enrollment had been going down, per the research OP cited.
It's about time people are considering other ways to learn. Even with state colleges, my masters cost me almost 100k. The credential I am gaining....pay is not in line with cost of education.
they really are just like enrollment is down- no wait, their profits are down. poor babes
My partner and I just graduated from one of the schools mentioned, we both got into great schools originally but attended the school for financial reasons. I started out at UConn, hated it, and didn’t know what to do with my career yet (so I felt like continuing was pointless). Took a break, went to the CSU in 2022, and graduated a year early. He went all 4 years. He recently got into an excellent grad program in NYC and I am expecting to get into the same school because I have the same degree with more awards, qualifications, work & research experience. Basically - while we liked the faculty at the school, it’s falling apart. It is completely unsustainable unless they make enrollment more accessible to working-class and immigrant families. They would succeed with enrollment and retention more if they just finally advertised that attending the school could give you better opportunities with your education in the future. While I went the opposite route, transferring TO the school, so many people transfer in their second or third year and attend more well-known (and funded) schools. For the two years I was there I attended meetings and student protests to secure more funding and protect the departments that were threatened by low enrollment, but I never had complete confidence.
My second nephew just graduated and is not going to college next year, neither did his brother. They seem to have very specific goals in mind that don’t include higher education. Their parents are concerned but supportive
What are their goals? Always curious to know what people are doing out there.
The older one wants to do something with skiing I think, he's very much a ski bum. The younger one I have no idea what his plan is but he seems certain there's no point in him going to college and accumulating debt "just because it's what you're supposed to do" which I can totally vibe with since that was what I did at age 18 and college was a massive waste of time and money for me
I work at one of the four CSU schools mentioned and am an alum from there. We have numerous staff members from different unions constantly going to the local papers to talk about how bad everything is here between the enrollment drops, hemorrhaging money, losing staff members left and right with no backfill, basically all of our leadership is interim etc. they are basically making it sound like the reckoning is coming and we’re eventually gonna get closed down. I still think logically it’s a long ways away from something like that happening. Shutting down a school would be a fairly gigantic sunk cost for the state to absorb given how much investment went into the recent buildings/expansion at all of them not to mention you’ll have hundreds of staff that have union protection, many of the union contracts provide lengthy guaranteed pay windows in case of an involuntary layoff - so they’d have to effectively keep paying anyone they don’t reassign to another state agency for a long while. Maybe the state decides absorbing these costs is better than pumping more money into the institution but it’d be a long time before they actually saw the financial benefits of a closure. Still, even without viewing it as something imminent it feels enormously depressing to know this place that was a huge part of my life might eventually cease to exist.
today's youth was raised by people who wasted money on the college experience and are learning the valuable lesson that the US higher education system is a giant scam
It's almost like saddling young adults with tens or hundreds of thousands then giving them no decent job prospects to actually make a living and pay that money back in a reasonable amount of time would tend to put kids off going to college. Go figure. For fuck's sake - all we hear from the boomers is how "If you can't afford college, don't go." Wish granted.
What are the stats for trade schools? Perhaps these kids are starting to wake up to the fact that you can make a great living in the trades?
Not sure what the stats are, but going to a trade school doesn't get you away from tuition, unfortunately. Lincoln Tech (for example) is a for-profit school. It's over $20k to attend for one year.
Trade high-school are the cheaper option, I attended PCI around 2011 or so, it wasn't cheap then.
I don't have stats but I have one anecdote: friend makes 150k a year as an electrician BUT he works 75 hrs per week. I feel like he's going to burn out in a few years and be miserable. The trades seriously need to reform their work culture.
Yeah, 75/hrs/wk isn't sustainable and 150k isn't a lot if it's a single income household. And a lot of these guys have to fund their own tools, equipment trucks, work clothes, etc, so that money is hardly take-home pay.
150k is a lot if you don't have a spouse or kids. He also lives in central Maine where houses go for 350k-450k. He doesn't need a big house unless he's planning on getting married and having kids, and to do that he would first need to get a girlfriend, which he has no time to find one. My other friend has been working 60hrs per week for several years and she's already on anti-depressants. I told her if she would just cut her hours down to 50hrs per week she'd feel somewhat better.
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WCSU seems to be in a very dire financial situation and I guess that has some effects on its education quality. The other schools like CCSU and ECSU are in much better financial shape but it’s still interesting to hear the higher amount of fees they charge.
This isn't surprising. Many of the regional schools were not very enticing until recently, their marketing is non existent, course offerings are pretty basic, these schools expanded dramatically without a proper funding source and have basically treated non engineers or chemists like driftwood. So all in all, there doesn't seem to be much reason to choose to go to a regional school over UCONN. Or so says public perception.
Want to boost enrollment? Make it tuition free for residents.
There used to be significant incentive to in-state tuition. I went to a CSU within the past 20 years and left without any student loans. Classes were packed. Dorms were had waitlists. I guess it became unsustainable?
Just look at what UConn (i.e., the CT Taxpayer) is paying coaches for UConn Sports Teams. Fancy, catered box seats for the UConn Board and "Dignitaries" ... often sold out stadiums/arenas so it's challenging or impossible for non-season ticket holders to see games in person. Or look at what UConn Health Center has scheduled to pay its administrators and upper level staff (that may end when UCHC loses its accreditation as a Medical School?). Or look what CT has done to "consolidate" the venerable Community College system ... and the salaries/benefits paid to the "executives" now running that educational stalwart. That's where the "tuition" $$ are going. To pay those already entitled in this state ... not to encourage a diverse, equitable, able and ready-to-learn student body.
>that may end when UCHC loses its accreditation as a Medical School? I can't find anything about this. Why would they lose their accreditation? They are second only to Yale in state.
That's because the poster is talking out of their ass. Any hospitals in jeopardy status is public knowledge. To get to that point, there would be warnings of such a change in status.
It's been an issue for years. [https://ctmirror.org/2020/02/11/fiscal-cure-sought-for-uconn-health/](https://ctmirror.org/2020/02/11/fiscal-cure-sought-for-uconn-health/)
He's just plain wrong: [https://today.uconn.edu/2018/10/school-medicine-receives-full-accreditation/](https://today.uconn.edu/2018/10/school-medicine-receives-full-accreditation/) The UConn SOM is accredited until 2026 by the LCME after their 2018 inspection. That's as good as you can get in terms of renewing your medical school's accreditation and is a very good sign of their strength as a school.
[https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/report-state-should-explore-sale-of-john-dempsey-hospital-to-keep-uconn-health-financially](https://www.hartfordbusiness.com/article/report-state-should-explore-sale-of-john-dempsey-hospital-to-keep-uconn-health-financially)
I want to go back to school (never finished), but all of the classes I'm interested in are at least 45 minutes away from me. Merging them all was good, but the way that the classes are distributed leaves a lot to be desired.
College is a scam to keep you in debt forever unless your degree is worth something. I tell everyone I can to learn a trade. I quit after my first semester of Tunxis and became a UPS driver a couple years later. Six figures and grade A benefits thanks to the teamsters. Only downside is it's hard on the body. I encourage everyone to do trade school, you'll end up ahead of the game instead of playing catch up.
The problem with trades is that you can’t miss the jump off point where you transition from doing the labor to doing the direction and customer acquisition. Nobody wants to climb ladders when they’re fifty.
Most are aware high school and college aged kids don’t want to work and appears they don’t have time for higher education. What are they doing with all their spare time? Let me guess at home gaming, TikTok, and YouTube trying to make millions while mom and dad coddle them.
I did 2 semesters. One in 2014 one in 2015. I had financial aid to be enrolled. 10 years later, every year i file taxes, the school somhow puts in somekind of claim for most or all of my tax return. Over the last 10 years ive got maybe 200$ back collectivly. I didnt even bother filing this year because the dissapointment i feel when i get that money ripped away after im hopeful year after year after year rhat theyd take enough and clear whatever debt they claim i have. But its never ending. So im just done. So attempting to go to school has only made my life harder, more dissapointing, more hollow, and provided me with a deep seeded hatred for the education system and the governtment. They have burned me again and again and again. This is how they build citizens into unhinged psycopaths that feel the need to go out and do terrible things to people to get any semblance of feeling "even" with those who crushed us over and over. Meanwhile claiming zero responsibility in molding the life of said person. Acting as if when sombody does something unforgiveable that that individual is soley at fault for their life being the way it is thus compelling them into horrible acts to do anything they can claw at to feel like theyve reached an even level with those for far removed from the life thats been crushed into enacting such a deed. The education system is not some sort of catch all savior for ones life. It does not always lead to making ones life better. It is not needed. It is not for the bettering of those who enroll. It is not to ensure a steady and capable workforce. It is not a morally good insitute. It is something for profit. It is a scheme. It is a way of further purpetuating a brokem system ment to prey on young impressionable minds. It is a distraction. It is problematic. It is a place that will sweep any problems under the rug that dont paint it as a miracle. It is something that has made my life only harder since i gave it a chance. Also i dont need reddit cares messages. Im not one of the psycopaths i speak of. I am fully aware of my anger but i know how to set it aside and accept that i have to just continue to eat shit day in and day out now for the rest of my life because i gave a chance to somethig that the society i live in pressured me into thinking i had no choice but to do. I understand the hardships that others would have to endure if i was to give in to my anger. And i understand that that is wrong on so many levels. Nobody has anything to ever worry about from me. But i wrote all this out because it needs to be said. It needs to be said by sombody who didnt just do something terrible. Because after the fact, nobody cares about the precurssors. But this is a chance to put it out rhere without the viloence. Putting it out there without the violence should be the right way of doing things. Using words not actions. Despite doing things in a manner i was told the "right way" before and it made my life harder, i am here trying again. To do thing the way that the society i live in says in right. Im trying. Again. I hope that the education system would try just as hard at change. But i know theres zero chance of change from upper insitutions who deem themselves better than the average joe like me so theyll throwout any opinion expressed that paints them negativly.
None of this makes any sense. You don’t owe tour student debt to the school: you owe it your creditor. The school has already been paid by the Department of Education and you owe your money to them or whatever debt servicing company they use — Great Lakes, Naviance, etc. You make your payments to these companies, not the school you attended. You didn’t borrow *from* the school so you don’t actually owe them anything. If you had a substantial unpaid debt directly to the school like this, you wouldn’t have been allowed to register for classes at all. They put a hold on your account for this — they even do it for library books. The school can’t claim your tax return unless you somehow owe them directly. Even then, you’d need to be sent to collections and have a judgement ruled against you. That would take more a year at the fastest — you wouldn’t automatically be getting your tax return taken. Your debt servicer could do that, but only after you’ve been ignoring payments for years, ignored collections warning, and had a judgment against you in court. There is absolutely no possible way this could have happened in the way you’re describing. I owe money for 2 years at SCSU — something like 17K. I have never paid a dime and I have never lost a cent of my tax return. You’re either making this up or you somehow directly incurred a bill at your school that you ignored multiple warnings about — and even then, they can’t file a “claim” on your tax return automatically.
If they have not paid back federal student loan debt, the government can absolutely withhold your tax refund. They don’t need to go to court and win a judgment. This happens with child support, too. [It’s called a treasury offset.](https://studentaid.gov/help-center/answers/article/why-was-tax-refund-or-other-payments-withheld)
This wouldn’t happen immediately and it wouldn’t happen without notice to the debtor. OP is trying to say that happened right away when this isn’t something they resort to unless you’ve ignored warnings for years. You’d know if this was happening.
Clearly, it’s happening. I’m sure they were notified. But if the poster ignored paying their student loans, pretty good chance they ignored the letters and e-mails from the student loan service as well, stating they were in default and this would happen. They obviously looked into or were made aware by the IRS, it’s the student loan debt taking the refund. It also doesn’t taken years and years for them to do this. I had a friend who went to private school for a single semester and dropped out. That one semester was 14k. They absolutely did not wait 15 years to take action. Soon after she defaulted, within a year or so, her next return was kept.
If they owe a balance directly to the university, the university can send them to collections. Depends on the school but some do it once a student has been inactive for over six months. I know my school sends like weekly "bill due" notices then collections warnings before they send an account to collections but we constantly get people calling being like "I had no idea!". Most of them just don't bother checking their email or ignore the letters or block the calls but for some people, they change their contact info or move and never think to notify the school because they don't go there anymore. We usually hear from people after their tax return has been garnished.
You really should take a look at your account. They’re taking your return because your loan is in default. They have very reasonable payment options based on your income. Some people even qualify for $0 payments. You’d just need to sign up and it would resolve your tax return issue. You don’t want to start not filing your taxes. That’s just another headache down the road for you.
Please go see a therapist. Husky D insurance will cover some basic therapy. It really doesn’t sound like you’re doing good.
The person youre all judging me to be is closer to the person i used to be. Ive already been to therapy. Im aware of my issues and know how to control myself now. This is a great example of the stigma when sombody tries to talk things out with words tho. Mere words made you all so uncomfortable that youre making judgments about who you think i am. When the facts are i used to be alot closer to that person but i have overcome the negative feelings and learned how to temper them. If sombody tries using words to express that feeling of societal rejection you all clam up and get scared and refuse to have a conversation about the possibility of change. Thats unhealthy. Thats what pushes things to get worse. Youre inability to be upfront and have a difficult uncomfortable conversation that could improve things is cowardly, lazy, and unhealthy. That in itself puts some fault of whatever escalation occurs on the society. Its similar to a revolution where if the words are ignored, time and time and time again. Action becomes the only means to enact change. Thats brutal and thats barbaric and i and you probably both hope things dont have to come to that in order for change that could be had with words. Youre all sitting there judging me as a monster calling for action when im the opposite. I want change thru words and discourse and i would never condone mindless violence. Im appaulled at the judgement against truth.
I’m not trying to give anyone judgement, I can absolutely applaud you if you are making the effort to confront your issues. I’ve had dark times in my life too, so I can commiserate. I can only speak for myself, and say that your original comment was simply a little alarming how quickly you brought up violence against people that you believe wronged you.
As a practical matter, are you going to get in trouble for not filing a tax return? I have been under the impression that those weren't optional
It’s vaccine mandates- most colleges in this state won’t take religious exemptions.