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Tag Archives: Education
What makes Education Toxic?
A comment left for a post—NC Teacher: “I quit”—on Diane Ravitche’s blog made a good point, and I posted a reply:
I think you have made a great point or at least inadvertently focused a spotlight on an important issue and why it is there. Turnover in a school or school district may be a red flag—a strong warning sign— that the school board/administration/students are not the easiest to work with or work for [another word would be dysfunctional ].
This could be extended to an entire state since each state has its own department of education that decides policy in that state as directed by the elected politicians from the governor of a state on down. Due to a need to gain votes, religious and/or political agendas tend to rule in such organizations and the winds may shift at any time.
For example, I friend sent me this about the current situation in the high school in Southern California where he now teaches.
I was a public school teacher from 1975 – 2005 and we worked together before dysfunctional administration at our high school and in our school district drove him to quit and find a job in another district that at the time was a better place to work.
But beware of the grass is greener over there syndrome because a drought will kill the green grass leaving behind sweltering heat and dust.
During my thirty years in the classroom, I worked under nine-different principals. Some were great, some good and some horrible.
The horrible ones drove teachers, counselors and VPs out of the schools where they ruled Nazi style and turnover could reach as high as fifty percent in a few years.
Good principals, who are usually a sign of good administration and a sensible school board, tend to hold on to staff.
I mean, how many people quit jobs—any job—with a boss that knows what he or she is doing; a boss that supports his workers in the best possible ways to make the work environment a place where we want to spend twenty to forty years of our lives?
My friend said of this school year (2012 – 2013):
“112 scheduling changes in the first three weeks (the classes he teaches)
“75% of the administrative team is new; a lot of chaos
“50% of the counselors are new; a lot of chaos
“We lost our department chairs, so there is no communication between the teachers and administration
[This high school, he says] “once had a top-notch academic program; however, we are falling apart at the seams; our test scores have flat-lined and they will continue to flat-line because there are just too many new faces at our school; two of our Vice Principals have never been a VP before; they’re nice people, but we have to wade through their learning curve.”
For another example: at the high school where I taught for the last sixteen of the thirty years I was in the classroom as a teacher, we had one new teacher quit at lunch on his first day on the job with two more classes to teach after lunch. During the lunch break, he walked in the principal’s office, tossed his room keys on the desk and said, “If they won’t show some respect for me and attempt to learn, then I refuse to teach them.”
I know from experience, that district did not do a good job creating a positive, supportive educational environment for its teachers because I worked in that district for thirty years. Instead, it was more of a combative environment that did not offer the support teachers wanted or needed to teach.
It is a fact that teachers teach and students learn. However, that is not always the case. Instead, teachers in a toxic educational environment often struggle to teach while too many students make no effort to learn.
Elected School Boards and the administrators they hire should support an environment where teachers may teach and students will learn, and we can learn from two of the best public educations system in the world: Finland and Singapore.
In Finland, the teachers have a strong union and the teachers make the decisions in a supportive educational environment and it works. Parents start teaching children how to read at age three but the first year of school is at age seven.
In Singapore, merit rules. Students must compete academically to earn where they are tracked and the system is heavily tracked based on performance. There is no self-esteem driven educational environment; there is corporal punishment and students may be publicly beat with a bamboo cane if caught breaking strict-rules built to support a merit based education system.
Why can’t we in the United States learn from Finland and Singapore?
Discover What is the Matter with [American] Parents these Days?
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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Focusing too much on the gods of football, baseball and basketball
I agree with a post I read at the quiet voice that there is too much of an emphasis in America’s public schools on sports and not enough focus on academics. But is that the fault of the public schools or the fault of the parents and the English speaking culture?
There is a vast difference between the US public education system and other countries such as Finland, China and Singapore. Because of those differences, to be fair, we cannot compare the results of US students with those countries unless we separate the genetically modified chaff from the organic grain and also compare apples to apples.
As a public high school teacher in California for thirty years (1975 – 2005), I taught four periods of English and one period of journalism for several years in addition to being the advisor of the student run high-school newspaper. One year, my journalism students were invited to write a series of pieces for a European magazine called “Easy Speakeasy“, headquartered in France. “Easy Speakeasy” expressed interested in the sports programs in US schools because we were told that these programs did not exist in France and other European countries. Sports in Europe were mostly outside of the public schools sort of like Pop Warner Football in the US.
Pop Warner was founded in 1929, continues to grow and serves as the only youth football, cheerleading & dance organization that requires its participants to maintain academic standards in order to participate. Pop Warner’s commitment to academics is what separates the program from other youth sports around the world. In fact, studies show that kids involved in sports that require them to maintain their academic grades above a 2.0 GPA graduate in higher numbers than students that do not participate in sports. Europe has programs similar to Pop Warner and I understand this is the only place students in Europe may participate in organized sports because these programs do not exist in European schools. In Europe and most countries, the focus in the public schools is academic and vocational—no sports, drama or music programs as in the US.
I can only guess that “Easy Speakeasy’s” editors invited my journalism students to write for their European publication because the high-school newspaper I was adviser for had won international recognition several years in a row from Quill and Scroll out of the University of Iowa.
In the English classes I taught there was a lot of chaff and only a little grain but in that journalism class, I taught the organic cream of our high school—students willing to be at school as early as six in the morning and stay as late as eleven at night to produce the high school newspaper—while many of my English students did not bring textbooks to class, do class work or even consider doing homework. Instead, there were students in my English classes that waged an endless war against academics disrupting the educational environment as often as possible.
Who do we blame for this educational environment in the United States?
Quill and Scroll offers academic scholarships. There is another organization called JEA (the Journalism Education Association) that also awards academic scholarships related to writing/academics. I know this because one of my journalism students earned a JEA scholarship. I required my journalism students to compete at the regional, state and national level in JEA academic writing competitions.
In addition, in most of the world there are two tracks in high school: academic and vocational and students in those countries may graduate from high school either with a degree earned in the academic or vocational. For that reason, comparing graduation rates in the US with other countries does not count because in the US we only graduate through academic programs but still graduate a higher ratio of students through the academic track than any other country on earth.
Then there are children in the United States that cannot read and are functionally illiterate. When we compare the US to all other English speaking countries, the rate of functionally illiterate children is about the same telling us that this is more a product of a culture that does not value learning and reading as much as countries such as Finland where the majority of parents start teaching his or her children how to read at home by age three so those children can already read when they start school at age seven.
But in the US, many parents leave it up to the schools to start teaching children to read at age five or six and only those children that were taught by his or her parents start out on track and move ahead.
Then there is the fact that the US may be the only country on the planet that mandates children stay in school, no matter what, until age sixteen to eighteen. In China, for example, there are about 150 million children in the grade schools but only about 10 million that remain in high school at age 15.
When the International PISA test is given in countries around the world, that test is given to a random sample of fifteen year old students. That means in the US, because almost every fifteen-year old is still in school, America’s students are being compared to the very best in countries such as China where students that are not the best academically have left the system by the time the PISA people show up.
However, when we filter out the chaff and leave only our most proficient students—for example: the journalism students that I taught—and compare them to the most proficient students of other countries, this being apples to apples, the US students beat every country in the world in every academic area tested. You will never hear these facts from the critics of public education in the US.
Discover The Legacy of the British Empire on Literacy
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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A Teachable Moment with “Gifted Hands”
If you are a teacher or a serious parent more concerned about his or her child’s future as a working adult than a child having fun and/or being entertained all of the time, then this may be a teachable moment.
But first, 43% of adults at the lowest level of literacy lived below the poverty line, as opposed to 4% of those with the highest levels of literacy.
In addition, in 2010, the unemployment rate for adults that did not have a high school diploma was almost 16%. However, for adults with a Bachelors degree or higher (that means a college education), that unemployed rate was 5%.
In addition, since 1992, the unemployment rate for workers with a BA or better averaged 3.31%, but for high school dropouts the average was 8.84%. The lowest unemployment rate for college graduates was in 2001 at 1.5%, but it was 6% for high school dropouts the same year.
After I bought a copy of “Gifted Hands” at Costco recently, we watched the Ben Carson story. It was a film based on the life of a real person and the mother that made a difference in his life. Not once in the film was it suggested that it was the responsibility of any of Carson’s teachers to turn off the TV in Carson’s home and for his mother to tell him he had to visit the library and read books instead of watching TV.
In fact, the teachable moment may be to watch the film “Gifted Hands” (the entire film is embedded—second video—in this post and it has Spanish subtitles), then discuss who and what made the difference in Ben Carson’s life. Then have the child write a one page essay about what he or she learned about the importance of reading instead of watching TV.
Ben Carson’s mother had a third grade education and she got married at age 14 to later discover that her husband was a bigamist. For me, the teachable moment was when Carson’s mother turned off the TV and told her two sons that they were going to check books out of the library, read them, and then write a report of each book to be read out loud to the mother. She could not read but she could listen.
Ben Carson: An extraordinary Life – Conversations from Penn State
In the previous embedded video, at 6:32 minutes, Carson says once he started doing a lot of reading, he stopped hating poverty and realized that he didn’t have to stay in that lifestyle. He could change his life to anything he wanted it to be by working for it.
Note: I love using the word WORK to describe what we do as adults to earn money legally.
In one scene, Carson is being given an award for being the top student in his mostly white school and a teacher embarrasses him when she tells all of the white students in the room that they allowed themselves to be beaten by a fatherless black student living in poverty.
What that teacher did was uncalled for—it was cruel and racist. However, she told the white students they were lazy and could have easily beaten Carson for the academic honor he earned. She should have criticized the parents of those white students for letting their children watch too much TV.
The message I learned from this film pointed out exactly how to encourage students to learn to read and work hard in school to earn an education—not more laws that hold only public school teachers responsible for the education of a child.
Studies show that the average American child talks to his or her parents less than five minutes a day and spends more than 10 hours a day outside of school watching too much TV (on average three hours a day outside of school) in addition to playing video games, listening to music, social networking on the Internet, hanging out with friends, sending text messages, etc.
You may be able to watch the movie here. I found this link on You Tube, and it has Spanish subtitles.
There was another scene in the movie with a science teacher. When Carson was the only student in the class to answer a question, the teacher kept Carson after school, because when most teachers see an opportunity to help a motivated student, he or she does help. Teachers can only help students that help themselves and it is up to the parents to do the rest.
Carson’s mother had a third grade education but her son’s went to college. Today Benjamin S. Carson is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at John Hopkins Children’s Center. His brother is an engineer. Through reading and an education, this family left poverty and the high risk of unemployment behind.
Answer this question: If Carson’s mother had left that TV on, do you honestly believe he would be where he is today?
Discover What is the Matter with Parents these Days
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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A Short History of America’s Middle Class – Part 1/3
There are many ways to prove that America’s public education system is not a failure and is an INCREDIBLE success. This time, I will offer the rise of the modern American middle class as an example:
Today, the definition of the middle class in America is complex. In 1951, sociologist C. Wright Mills studied and wrote about the formation of a new middle class of white-collar workers—does not refer to Caucasians but to the type of work—described as mostly highly (college) educated, salaried professionals and managers (roughly 15 – 20% of households today). Then there is the lower middle class consisting mostly of semi-professionals, skilled craftsmen and lower-level management (roughly one third of households).
Another way to measure the size of the middle class in the US would be subtract Americans that live in poverty in addition to the top five percent. In 2010, fifteen-point-one percent (15.1%) of all persons in the US lived in poverty. That adds up to 47.4 million people.
Then annual-household earnings of $100,000 or more puts those Americans above the middle class. In 2005, an economic survey revealed that 5% of individuals in the US earned six-figure incomes exceeding $100,000 annually—that is 15.7 million people leaving 250.9 million Americans in the Middle Class.
A simple definitions says, “The middle-class commonly has a comfortable standard of living, and significant economic security.”
For a better idea of how many Americans enjoy significant economic security, we may want to take a glance at the Great Depression.
During the Great Depression (1929 – 1942), the highest unemployment rate reached almost 25% in 1933, then started to improve. Unemployment at its worst, means more than 75% of working adults in America were still employed (possibly defining significant economic security). It took thirteen years for unemployment to recover to the level of 1929. In 1940, unemployment was 15%. In 1941, unemployment was 10%. By 1942, thanks to World War II putting Americans in the military or back to work manufacturing weapons, unemployment dropped to 5%.
However, life in America was not always the way it is today and working to gain an education, with an emphasis on work, has mostly been the big game changer.
For example, before 1860, America had few cities and they were mostly small. The vast majority of people lived on farms and small rural towns. In fact, in 1800, ninety-four percent (94%) of Americans lived on farms or in small towns near farms.
Then by 2000, seventy-nine percent (79%) lived in urban population centers (cities and the suburbs of cities).
In 1850, the average age of death in years was 39.
By 1900, that average was age 49.
In 1970s, it was age 70, and life expectancy in 2010 reached age 78.3.
Life expectancy has also been linked to education. Those with more than 12 years of education—more than a high school diploma—can expect to live to age 82; for those with 12 or fewer years of education, life expectancy is age 75.
Continued on September 27, 2012 in A Short History of America’s Middle Class – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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Literate and College Bound – Choose Wisely
There is a lot of good information on the Internet about future, good paying jobs. For example, “The Best Paying Jobs of the Future: Knowing which jobs will be in high demand and pay the most is a good place to start.”
The jobs listed were: Biomedical Engineers, Diagnostic Medical Sonographers, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, Physical Therapists, Dental Hygienists, Audiologists, Medical Scientists (Except Epidemiologists), Veterinarians, Occupational Therapists, and Optometrists.
Of course, this means the young person must be a lifelong learner and literate and that means about twenty-four percent of adult Americans may be locked out of these jobs, because they were poor students, for whatever reason (usually due to environment, lifestyle and parents–not teachers), and are doomed to face a higher risk of unemployment and/or low pay.
Whose fault was that?
A. teachers that are responsible to teach
B. students are responsible to learn by doing the class
and homework and reading daily seven days a week
C. Parents are responsible to make sure his or her student reads daily at home,
studies and does the homework.
For example, when I was still teaching (1975 – 2005), I assigned a half hour of reading (or longer) a night, because if young people do not read outside of school, the odds of achieving an adequate level of literacy are small. For that daily half hour, my students could read anything they wanted: books, magazines, newspapers, but the students had to keep a log and summarize how much time they read and what it was about. About five percent of my students bothered to do this.
Some never brought the textbook, paper or a pencil and/or pen to class—these students often felt that just showing up and warming a seat was enough to earn a passing grade so he or she could graduate. I don’t know how they thought the teachers were going to get those skills and knowledge in their brains—maybe with a toilet plunger placed over the nose, eyes and mouth?
However, an old friend of mine believes college is a waste of time and feels that if an adult cannot read, it was a teacher’s fault. I do not agree. Instead, I believe it is all about the choices young people make such as avoiding reading and studying while in school as a child and teen. No matter how great a teacher is, he or she cannot force students to learn.
The equation is simple: teachers teach + students learn + parents support both = education and literacy.
This is a bit off topic, but I attended a meeting once where we learned that sixty-percent of college freshman (all high school graduates) did not read and write at the level needed to start college and had to take remedial English/writing classes (this university had five levels of what is known as bone-head English) before being allowed to take real college classes. This may explain why half of students that start college drop out before earning a degree. It gets frustrating when you cannot understand what you are reading and professors keep writing FAIL grades on essays/papers.
Over the last few years, this old friend and I have argued about this topic often via e-mail. For proof that I am right about making choices, I refer you to these two articles from Kiplinger (click on the links for details).
WORST College Majors for Your Career: Anthropology, Fine Arts, Film and Photography, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Graphic Design, Studio Arts, Liberal Arts, Drama and Theater Arts, Sociology, and English (my BA was in journalism but I ended up teaching English and reading for thirty years).
BEST College Majors for Your Career: Medical Assisting Services, Managing Information Systems, Construction Services, Medical Technologies, Electrical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Treatment Therapy Professions, Transportation Sciences and Technology, Nursing, and Pharmacy and Pharmacology.
Why doesn’t anyone ever tell us how many people fail when chasing frivolous dead-end dreams?
In conclusion, if you learned how to be a life-long learner and you are literate because you did the reading and work your teachers assigned K – 12, then you may be in college or a college graduate with a BA in one of those WORST college majors. If so, you may remember that your parents, friends and some teachers/school counselors encouraged you to follow your dreams and do what you wanted to do—this usually means having fun and chasing after a dream. When chasing dreams, a few succeed but many do not.
If your dreams did not materialize, are you still having fun? I want to know.
Discover The results of parenting gone wrong
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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The Cultural Legacy of the British Empire on Literacy – Part 2/2
The Importance of Literacy
A Literacy at Work study, published by the Northeast Institute in 2001, found that business losses attributed to basic skill deficiencies run into billions of dollars a year due to low productivity, errors, and accidents attributed to functional illiteracy. Source: Functional Lieracy.Wiki.org
In Conclusion: I taught in California’s public schools (1975 – 2005) and was teaching English and reading when the educational system was changed dramatically from the top down (ignoring the protests of classroom teachers at every step—teachers were not part of the decision making process) starting in Washington D.C. in 1983 with the publication of A Nation at Risk. The next step was the 1989 education summit that involved all fifty state governors and President George H. W. Bush followed more than a decade later with the adoption of national education goals in the year 2000 under his son, President G. W. Bush.
Before these changes, most of the public schools identified students that were falling behind in literacy (mostly because the parents of these students were not part of the education process of learning to read and write) and were then moved into learning tracks and different classes with goals designed to deal with the challenge of parents not reading at home.
In the early 1990s, when the English/Reading department at the high school where I taught was told that tracking was going to be abolished and all students, no matter his or her reading abilities, would be placed in grade level classes working out of grade level textbooks (this meant students reading at second or third grade would be reading out of textbooks written at ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth grade), the English and reading teachers protested and managed to hold off these changes for about three years before the politicians (elected school boards and the adminstrators hired to work for the school board to run the district) forced the end of tracking.
About the same time, a program called The Whole Language Approach to Reading and Writing was implemented and again the teachers protested but were forced to comply or else.
The foundation of this program was reading for fun outside of the schools with parent support (you may already have guessed how this worked out). Student and parents were told that children had to read a minimum of thirty minutes or more a day outside of school hours, seven days a week besides doing the school work and homework assigned by teachers. A decade later, it proved to be a total failure and was cancelled. California, where I taught, had ranked near the top in literacy when this program was launched. A decade later, California was almost dead last compared to all other states.
Parents make the difference – mine did, and I learned to enjoy reading at home.
The average functional illiteracy rate as reported by the UNDP of the six dominate English speaking countries that were once part of the British Empire and have Caucasian majorities with roots mostly to the United Kingdom was 19%.
Adjusted for errors and/or under reporting, the average percentage changes to 30.7%, more than 10% higher than the United States. It doesn’t matter which average we use in this comparison of cultures that are fundametally the same. The Untied States is one percent above the average reported by the UNDP but 10.7% lower than the corrected average.
The US is either ranked fourth in literacy according to the UNDP or first after we adjust for errors and/or under reporting.
Does that sound as if the public education system in America is broken?
Return toThe Cultural Legacy of the British Empire on Literacy – Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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Student College Loans – Evil or Not? Part 5/5
Harvard University was the first to set up student loans in 1840 but these loans didn’t become mainstream until the 1960s? Source: Free from Broke.com
Did you know that in 1986, President Reagan eliminated student loan interest as a tax deduction. For 10 years, student loans were not deductible until President Clinton once again allowed the interest to be deductible in 1997 (Forbes). However, Clinton only allowed the student loan interest to be deductible for the first five years the loan was in repayment; in 2001, the law was changed to allow the interest to be deductible for the life of the loan.
Then in 2007, President G. W. Bush, reduced the student-loan interest rate from 6.8% to 3.4%.
A few more facts to put the student, college-loan debate in perspective and what the media isn’t telling us:
The US has the 2nd highest number of higher education students in the world—4.75% of the total population. The U.S. Department of Education shows 4,861 colleges and universities with 18,248,128 students in 2007.
However, the median cumulative debt among graduating Bachelor’s degree recipients at 4-year undergraduate schools was $19,999 in 2007-08 and 65.6% of 4-year grads with BA degrees took out student loans, which means 34.4% did not.
Of the 9 million that borrowed, one-tenth (900 thousand) borrowed $44,668 or more, which means 90% (more than eight million students) borrowed less.
Graduate and professional students borrowed more, with the additional cumulative debt of a graduate degree typically ranging from $30,000 to $120,000.
How many borrowed the most?
More than 80% of students that are majoring in graduate degrees in medicine borrowed an average of $127,272, while 61.6% of those that graduated with only a BA degree borrowed an average of $23,494. Source: FinAid.org
If you recall, my $7,000 student loan in 1973 had the same buying power as $36,178.96 in 2012, and I paid it off in a decade by eventually working two jobs for three years.
That brings me back to the media. Why has the media been creepy-crawling all over how horrible college student debt is today when the facts say, “On average, most college graduates earn back enough to pay off their student expenses within a decade or so. Two studies by Baum found that graduates with a bachelor’s and no further schooling—or as the earnings literature calls it a bit too on point, a “terminal bachelor’s”—are on average able to repay their college tuition and loans, living expenses, and lost income from skipping four years of work by the time they turn 33. Private-college graduates spend more on their degrees, Baum says, but as they also have slightly higher earning power than their public-college counterparts, they still on the average earn back their college costs before age 40.”. Source: Village Voice
How about those medical students graduating as doctors with all that debt? Do you think they will earn enough to pay off his or her student loans?
Although the following site is moaning and groaning along with the national media, take a look at how much an MD earns after she starts practicing medicine: “The mean annual salary of a MD specialist is $175,011 in the US, and $272,000 for surgeons.” Source: MD Salaries.com
I’m really feeling sorry for these poor, suffering MDs. Maybe we should all chip in and help them pay off those student loans so they will have more money to spend on bigger houses and fancier cars.
In addition, I found this revealing: less than half a percent (0.05%) of those who graduate from college have student loans above $200,000—that means 99.5% do not. This may sound callous, but I do not feel sorry for these people. I paid off my student loans and so can they.
In conclusion, there is one more comparison that must be made. In 1980, the average credit-card debt in America was $670 per household, but today that number is up to $7,800 (per household)—an increase of more than 1,160 percent. If we factor in inflation, that $670 would be $1,875.90 today—not almost $8,000.
In 1980, credit card debt was less than 4% of household annual median income. That number is16% today. In fact, in 1980 through 1994, the US saving rate averaged 8%, but in 1976, the personal saving rate was 12%.
However, in October 2011, that saving rate was at 3.6%.
Where do you think America’s so called debt-ridden college students learned to borrow to get what they want? If the nation lets young Americans (or their parents and/or grandparents) off the hook for that student-loan debt, these people will never learn.
Return to Student College Loans – Evil or Not? Part 4 or start with Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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Student College Loans – Evil or Not? Part 4/5
Did you know that about half of students that start college leave before they graduate and of those that go on to graduate, only half end up working in the field he or she graduated in.
However, the average pay of a college graduate, according to the US Census clearly shows that the earnings of workers with college degrees out earn workers without a college education.
Annual median earnings (in 2010 dollars) – Source: US Census
1. high school dropout = $26,313 (based on 4.2 million workers)
2. high school graduate = $37,237 (21 million workers)
3. Bachelor’s degree or more = $67,719 (24.56 million workers)
Now, back to the question I asked in Part 3 about the price of a car, averages wages, cost for a gallon of gas, loaf of bread, and hamburger meat.
The average cost of a car in 1970 was $3,450. In 2008, it was $27,958—800% increase
The average annual wage in 1970 was $9,400, and in 2008, it was $40,523—431% increase
Note: My first year as a full time public-school teacher in California (1978-79), my annual pay was $11,000. The average starting salary today is $35,760—more than three times what I started with in 1978. However, the CPI Inflation Calculator says my 1978 starting teacher salary was equal to the buying power of $56,852,66 today. I had no idea my pay was that good back then and I was still making payments on my student loan.
The average cost for a gallon of gasoline in 1970 was 35 cents. In 2008, it was $2.05—586% increase—today the average national price of a gallon of gasoline was $3.63—1,037% increase compared to 1970.
Bread was 25 cents in 1970 and $2.79 in 2008—1,116% increase
A pound of hamburger meat cost 70 cents in 1970 and was $3.99 in 2009—570% increase
The last comparison and the most difficult to find was comparing college costs between the 1970s and today, and I did not find these facts from the traditional media. I found them from colleges and the government.
What is the media trying to hide and why or is it just poor reporting?
From the University of Texas at Austin, I discovered, “Since 1970 tuition and fees at UT have risen tremendously; for undergraduates, the increase has been around 400 percent. In 1970, tuition was $50 for any in-state student enrolled in any college or school for any number of credit hours. Fees were $54 for anyone enrolled at the University. In the Fall semester of 2002, you won’t get a twelve hour course load for less than $2,300.”
From the Congressional Budget Office, I learned that “in 1970 the average tuition and required fees for full-time undergraduate students was $690. In 1986, the average cost was $2,310.”
Then from College Data.com, I discovered, “The cost for one year of tuition and fees varies widely among colleges. According to the College Board, the average cost of tuition and fees for the 2011–2012 school year was $28,500 at private colleges, $8,244 for state residents at public colleges, and $20,770 for out-of-state residents attending public universities.”
Comparing tuition and fees of public colleges from then to today shows a 1,194% increase since 1970 or a 356% increase since 1986. Private colleges cost much more as you can see but no one has to attend a private college. To keep prices down, a student may spend the first two years at a community college, then transfer in his third year to a four-year state college near his home.
Continued August 18, 2012 in Student College Loans – Evil or Not? Part 5 or return to Part 3
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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Student College Loans – Evil or Not? Part 3/5
How many college students are “deep” in debt, and what does “deep” in debt mean?
In 2007-2008, two-thirds (65.6%) of 4-year undergraduate students graduated with a Bachelor’s degree and some debt—the average student loan debt among graduating seniors was $23,186 (excluding PLUS Loans but including Stafford, Perkins, state, college and private loans).
Let’s compare that to the student loan I graduated with in 1973 when I earned my BA in journalism. It took me more than a decade to pay that loan off and eventually I worked two jobs for three years to do it.
I did not complain, moan or groan about it.
In fact, I considered myself an adult responsible for the money I borrowed after my GI Bill ran out so I could finish my college education—it took me five years to graduate, not four and although I worked part time jobs for the first three years I attended college, I decided to focus 100% on my studies the last two years and took out more than one student loan before I graduated.
In 1973, that student loan was $7,000. Compared to today’s average student loan debt of $23,186, it looks as if my student loan was a bargain.
Think again!
If you check the CPI Inflation Calculator, you will discover that $7,000 in 1973 had the same buying power as $36,178.96 in 2012.
How about a few more comparisons—in January 1975, the unadjusted average home value in the united States was $39,500—in January 2011 that average had increased to $275,700—a 700% increase. Source: US Census
Note: In 1975, my $7,000 student loan equaled about 18% of the value of the average house in America. However, the average student loan today is only 8.5% of the average value of a house in America.
How about the price comparison of a car, average wages, cost for a gallon of gas, loaf of bread, and hamburger meat?
Continued August 17, 2012 in Student College Loans – Evil or Not? Part 4 or return to Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga.
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