I just recently sent our youngest two back to college. They each paid over $900 for books this semester including paper books and e-books that are non-resellable. Our oldest daughter in a evening part-time master's program paid over $400 for her books. (sigh)
As I pointed out to you, and everyone else, if you construct that plot using the actual inflation rate experienced by ordinary citizens, including colleges and universities, the tuition rate tracks the inflation rate almost exactly, actually it is slightly lower, on average, than the real inflation rate. If you care to do this, go to shadowstats.com for the correct CPI figures. I did not plot the data but I did do the calculation months ago and put them on ET for all to see. I compared the the results of using the official government inflation figure with the result of using the shadowstats rate and posted it, along with a detailed account of the calculation method and the data sources. I used Official government sources for tuition data, and I used both official government and shadowstats.com data for the inflation rates. I'm not going to repeat that here. It takes some time to do it, and it is a bit of a bother. If I get time, I'll try and track down the post for you.
You're making a fool out of yourself, is what you are doing. I don't think you even bothered to read read my original post. I'll tell you what it is about. It's about tuition increases in U.S. colleges and universities. Your graph of medical and text book costs is only loosely related to the thread topic. However you have unwittingly offered support for my remarks in italics which point out that college tuition has just barely kept pace with actual inflation. (It hasn't quite kept up with it actually!) For that, I thank you. Lucrum, using your graph of textbook, medical, and other costs, has cleverly drawn our attention to reality. None of us are experiencing, in our daily lives an inflation rate as low as 2.4%! -- AND THAT RIDICULOUSLY LOW INFLATION RATE IS THE RATE YOU WILL HAVE TO USE TO GET THE GEE WHIZ GRAPH OF TUITION INCREASE THE MEDIA IS FIXATED ON. [which is the same graph shown in the post immediately above this one.] <FONT COLOR = "FF0000"> When you use the actual rate, which has been running 3-8% depending on time period, you will find that tuition has simply tracked the real inflation rate. </FONT> It's that simple folks!!!
Are you really this retarded in real life or just play that role here on ET? Why don't you graph college tuition rates over personal income over the last 3 decades and get back to me. And let me help you out there with a basis course in statistics analysis. When you analyze data, especially broad data, it is not going to give you a sufficient result. It would be like me looking at how cheap real estate prices are in Detroit and thinking I can scoop up some good deals in Malibu, CA. Education costs is highly sensitive to it's location and demand. I gave you an article from CA that showed tuition rates going up substantially more then your 3% to 8%. You ignored that. Good for you. Most state universities, the ones that middle class families tend to send their kids to, have seen dramatic increases in costs. Many Ivy League schools have not seen the same increase because one, their base lines are much higher from what we are comparing them to and their endowments are usually substantial. Not to mention the amount of aid that goes to those schools is substantial, especially for minority students. State schools are a much better barometer to use for looking at actual costs. When I was growing up, state schools were considered cheap and parents did everything they could to get their kid into a private school or even out of state upper level school if they could afford. State universities were always the fallback choice and very cheap. This is how state universities got the reputation for being primarily party schools. You went to state to join a frat and get drunk, the tuition was cheap and it brought in a lot of the bottom of the barrel types. Now today, the middle class can only dream of getting their kid to a state school. The avg tuition for a University of IL or or Ohio State or University of TX is out of reach for the middle class. And in a funny way, most state schools now have lost their party school status. Do you want to explain why today the middle class can't afford to send their kids to a 4 year state university if tuition rates are going up at the rate of inflation? Do you want to explain how in the 1950's the GI Bill paid for the ENTIRE 4 year education of the men who served in WWII and today the GI Bill won't even cover the costs of two years of community college? Do you want to explain why for 40 years in this country our parents were able to go to school and work a part time job and pay for the tuition and graduate with next to zero debt. Today student loan debt is over a trillion dollars and students owe 50k to 150k in debt upon leaving school. Can you explain that? Can you think for yourself or are you going to link me to another website that "supports" your point of view. I just want to know if you have any original thoughts here or are you going to copy and paste some more thoughts to me.
I don't know about this, Piezoe. My alma mater has increased tuition well over 100% in just 10 years. It appears sharply reduced government contributions are largely to blame. I don't yet know how much rising grant and scholarship money has offset it, though.
Disproportional inflation of college costs "Disproportional inflation" refers to inflation in a particular economic sector that is substantially greater than inflation in general costs of living. This kind of inflation for medical costs in recent decades is well known. However, the inflation of college tuition and fees exceeds that of medical costs. The following graph shows the inflation rates of general costs of living (for urban consumers; the CPI-U), medical costs (medical costs component of the consumer price index (CPI)), and college and tuition and fees for private four-year colleges (from College Board data) from 1978 to 2008. All rates are computed relative to 1978. [58] "Excess inflation of college tuition illustrated" Cost of living increased roughly 3.25-fold during this time; medical costs inflated roughly 6-fold; but college tuition and fees inflation approached 10-fold. Another way to say this is that whereas medical costs inflated at twice the rate of cost-of-living, college tuition and fees inflated at four times the rate of cost-of-living inflation. Thus, even after controlling for the effects of general inflation, 2008 college tuition and fees posed three times the burden as in 1978. According to the College Board, the average tuition price for a 4-year public college in 2008-2009 was $6,585 compared to 2004 when the price was slightly above $5,000. The average price of in-state tuition vs out-of-state tuition for 2008-2009 was $6,585 for a in-state 4-year college to $17,452 for out-of-state 4 year college (collegeboard.com). The mean increase in college tuition is 4.2% annually[59] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_tuition_in_the_United_States
Why don't you criticize the data I gave, and conclusions I drew, instead of coming up with these side tracks that have nothing to do with the original subject of this thread? Here is the subject: College tuition rates relative to the government inflation rate versus the Shadowstats inflation rate, and additionally, the the several factors that mitigate the actual cost of college that David Leonhardt mentioned in his Times article. Personal income has declined in constant dollars, using the shadowstats rate, for those in the lower middle class, whereas tuition has kept pace with inflation. When you compare those two trends you have tuition in constant dollars remaining level and personal income in constant dollars going down. This results in tuition going up relative to lower middle class incomes. It seems all of the opinions you are expressing relative to the difficulty of families affording a college education are the same ones I myself have made in other threads previously.
OK, let me speak more slowly for you. You are studying population data. I'm studying sample data. Know the difference? I don't give a fuck at this point. Just google it. What's happening with healthcare, education and anything else the gov't subsidizes is that they are taking money from one group and giving it to another. As a whole, the entire pie looks relatively stable. But it's the "pieces"" of the pie that need to be examined. Yes, I'm aware of the effect grants and aid have on college costs. They go to the POOR. But that comes at a cost. By making college affordable for certain groups of people, you make it unaffordable for others. Anyone on this thread who tried to apply for a Pell Grant but had parents with too much money in their bank account knows EXACTLY what I'm talking about. I went through this shit 16 years ago. See, your study is looking at the whole. It's kind of like saying if 10 people are in a room and 9 of them make minimum wage and one guy is Elon Musk who is a billionaire and let's say he makes 1 million a year. When you study the "whole" it looks like EVERYONE is doing well. The avg is high. But when you see that its really only one guy who is "distorting" the avg, then you understand that most people are NOT doing well. So when you examine the fact that middle class income has basically declined in real dollars the last two decades. And college education prices for the "middle class" has risen substantially because they are NOT getting the grants and the aid. What instead they are getting are LOANS. Hence why we have a trillion dollar student loan crisis. I don't know how know how many graphs I have to show you that education costs even as a whole are seriously outpacing even medical costs and I think even YOU would agree that medical costs are spiraling out of control. So if you DO believe medical costs are high and you agree that college tuition is outpacing even that of medical costs then how can you think that tuition is keeping pace with inflation? It's nonsensical. When you look at data, you NEVER want to study the "mean" or the "avg". Unless you are dealing with things that have small variances. Once you actually dig down and look at the parts, you see that studying the whole makes no sense.
Your alma mater's tuition rate went up at almost exactly 7%/yr compounded annually. You didn't say what year period you were referring to but if we assume it is the most recent ten years then that's slightly above the average shadowstats, consumer inflation rate over that period. And quite a bit above the national average rate of increase for a year of private college including fees and room and board over the last 20 years, which the Times article quotes as 4%. I have been referring to just tuition while the figure in the times article refers to total average cost (tuition, fees, room and board, no books mentioned.) I think there is less wiggle room in just using the tuition figure alone, that's why I prefer to use that as a marker of college cost increases, and indeed the majority of the Gee Whiz articles in the media are referring to tuition. It is conceivable that fees or room and board did not increase as fast as the inflation rate, though it seems unlikely, and that could account for a slightly lower overall rate of increase. In any case, when I looked at just tuition alone, using the government's survey data, I found that tuition on average at private colleges , and at public institutions too, has just kept up with actual inflation (shadowstats, not government), not only over the past 20 years, but pretty much over any period of ten years or more. Those are averages, and some schools went up a little more, and some a little less. The hard fact that some of these knuckleheads can not wrap their brain around, is that the cost of college, on average, possibly excluding books, is the same today in constant dollars, based on actual consumer inflation, as it was twenty years ago! That certainly flies in the face of common wisdom. But it is so easy to lose track of inflation, and we've had plenty ever since the Nixon Shock. Until I read the Leonhardt article, I had not realized that two-year colleges (community and junior) had actually decreased in total costs over the past twenty years relative to the government's inflation rate. That means that they actually went down by a remarkable amount in cost relative to the actual inflation rate. I hope they did not suffer a comparable decrease in quality. Remarkable nevertheless. I can think of very little that has decreased in constant dollar cost, other than electronics, over the past twenty years. __________________ "Common wisdom is almost always wrong!" -- Gore Vidal