College Used to be Free — So Cut Millennials Some Slack.
… or, compared to today, it was so close to free, you might as well round down to zero. Don’t believe me?
The country’s $1,560,000,000,000.00 ($1.56 trillion) in student loan debt is now a front-and-center issue — particularly with the 2020 election looming and the clown car full of Democratic candidates jockeying for position on the issue. The average debt balance in 2017 for graduates was $26,900 for public four-year schools and $32,600 for private nonprofit four-year schools. For graduate school, the student debt balloons into six-figure monstrosities that are so depressing, I’m just punting on them entirely. (Don’t click on this link.)
In Washington, the proposed policy responses range all the way from making it easier for creditors to take money directly from the debtor/grad’s paycheck (Wow! Thanks!), to eliminating student loan debt entirely and making college free, following the pattern of various European countries. Other proposals involve partial debt forgiveness and free college for students below certain income thresholds.
Nationally, support for these “free college” proposals is mixed. However, the data consistently shows greater support among younger Americans and greater opposition among older Americans.
I’m not saying you have to support free college. I’m not saying you have to support forgiving student debt. But if the country is going to have this debate, we need to at least attempt get on the same page about what “paying for college” used to mean compared to what it means today. Put bluntly, if you’re went to college decades ago for 1/20th (or 1/100th!) of what it costs a student today, try to truly process how staggeringly different the financial landscape is today.
Here’s what I mean:
College for $7.50 per week.
To put things in perspective, let’s look back at the data and see how much college cost for someone who’s 60 years old today….which whisks us back to the 1980s.
In 1980–81, the tuition and fees to attend public college was $1,819 per year. Before you say to yourself, “That’s sounds pretty cheap, but $1,819 was worth a lot more back in the 80s,” that figure is in TODAY’S DOLLARS, adjusted for inflation. The real cost at the time was $653 per year.
Read those numbers again, and let them sink in. Using today’s dollars, that figure for tuition and fees comes out to roughly:
- $910 per semester ($326 per semester in 1980 dollars).
- $152 per month ($54 per month in 1980 dollars).
- $35 per week ($12.50 per week in 1980 dollars).
Now think about this one. For 1980–81, the tuition and fees for a 2-year college was $1,120 per year in today’s dollars (a whopping $391 per year in 1980–81 dollars). So using today’s dollars, the tuition and fees come out to
- $560 per semester ($195.50 per semester in 1980 dollars).
- $93 per month ($32.58 per month in 1980 dollars).
- $21.50 per week ($7.50 per week in 1980 dollars).
Once again, that’s $21.50 per week (current dollars) or $7.50 per week (1980 dollars) to go to college.
When college costs the equivalent of two movie tickets per week…. Congratulations, that’s free college, you Marxist! No reason to feel guilty about it. Going to college for the cost of a case of beer was an amazing deal while it lasted!
College for $750.00 per week.
Now let’s jump back to present day. It’s not an apples to apples comparison, but the $7.50 per week, 1980–81 figure immediately reminded me of Texas A&M, my wife’s alma mater. Today, for out-of-state students, to pay the $39,688 in tuition and fees, you’d have to pay almost exactly 100 times that 1980–81 figure — more than $750 per week.
Overall, the 2017–18 tuition and fees average for all institutions is $12,615. That breaks down to:
- $6,307 per semester
- $1,051.25 per month
- $242.59 per week.
Notably, none of this includes any of the MASSIVE expenses for room and board, books, or any other living expenses. (Lazy Drafting Note: Factoring in differences in room and board would have veered into examining the decade-over-decade increase in cost of living, which involves factors outside of the narrow purview of college costs — so I skipped it, and wrote this excuse instead.)
So, feel free to support or not support free college. However, if you went to college for $7, $15, or $35 dollars per week, as opposed to $800… consider standing in the shoes of a 23-year-old who’s $50,000 in debt when you weigh whether reforms are justified.
