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#collegecosts today One of our readers got the joyous news that their son had been accepted at Occidental College in Los Angeles. I pointed out to his wife that former President Barack Obama began his academic career at that college before he transferred to Columbia University on the way to Harvard Law School.
Many of our readers have children who are students at colleges like UCLA, U.C. Davis, Northeastern University, Tulane University, Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine, etc. I have been aware of the high cost of tuition at private colleges (Harvard@$90,000 per year, for example.). Two of our readers have a daughter who is finishing her freshman year at Terra Nova High School. Their daughter has expressed interest in attending the University of California Santa Barbara. This is a public university run by the University of California system. The daughter is a California resident with a Green Card. Here is what she is looking at as annual costs to attend this excellent academic institution:
Tuition: $14,517.00
Other Costs: $23,285.00 (This includes books, a room in a student residence building, meals, etc. It does not include what the parents will have to spend for clothes, mobile phones, medical care, etc.)
Total Costs: $37,802.00
U.C. Santa Barbara literature claims that scholarships, grants, and other government programs reduce this cost to $15,438.00 per year. I am skeptical of this figure because not every student will get all these discounts. Let us take the total costs above and multiply them by 4 years. We get some $151,208. Many economically disadvantaged students will leave college with a student loan debt of $151,208. If the student goes on to law school, medical school, graduate school of business or engineering, etc., this debt could go up hundreds of thousands of dollars more.
If that student wants to return to San Mateo County and buy a home, they will need an income of $500,000 per year to afford a home here according to published reports. They will need a much higher income because they must pay off student loans and a monthly mortgage payment.
Let us go back 52 years. I attended and graduated from Tulane University. It is a private college. Long ago tuition was $5,000 per year. I left college with a $2,500 student loan debt. (Tulane's tuition today is $68,678 per year.) A year later, I bought my first home in Falls Church, Virginia. The cost was $22,000 then. I was not required to pay a down payment because I was on active duty in the U.S. Navy. The monthly payment was $150.
Elena's great fear is that we will end up with a society where there is no upward mobility. Either one will be born with money, or they will never get it. I am not that pessimistic. But it is going to become harder and harder to move up from poverty or the lower middle class (Where Elena and I started) to prosperity