https://graphics.wsj.com/marketwatch/college-debt-now-and-th...
The average price of attendance is being inflated because the average student is picking a school first and then burdening themselves and their parents with whatever gigantic loans it takes. Kids are picking a school based on campus tours or social pressures, but on the first day of class they still couldn't tell you how much it's costing them to go there. They are underprepared to begin with.
There are affordable 4-year schools if you are prepared and shop around. The US has more scholarship opportunities than anywhere else in the world if you are prepared in advance to get them. There are expensive programs that are worth financing. And there are dirt cheap 2 year options that are still affordable today, on an hourly wage income.
But there are also plenty of stupid decisions that are possible to make when buying a higher education, and the system is not set up to prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot.
If a student can't say what they want to study, why they want to study it, and how they're going to pay for it -- they probably aren't prepared to be making the decision to attend. Unfortunately, too many parents are uncomfortable accepting this transition of responsibility in life and pressure them to "just try it". Signing the loan docs are easy enough, and that's the recipe for disaster.
I get the first point and maybe the second one as well (although I personally had no idea why I wanted to study math right out of school) but thinking that a 18 year old should figure out how to pay for their education in their own is kinda crazy to me.
Maybe it’s a cultural difference but I think parents nowadays should be responsible to provide a little more than just childhood and early teenage years. You can’t just leave your kid on a street because he cannot justify his passion for something.
But the cultural problem we have today is exactly that parents feel that they are responsible to provide a college education for their kids. Doing well in higher education is something that cannot be handed to someone. A student needs to be invested in their education, they need to have some real skin in the game, they need to feel real-world consequences for their actions.
Young adulthood is a time of transition -- they should be transitioning fully away from accountability to their teachers and their parents, to an accountability to themselves and the realities of adult life. They need to learn to be responsible for real world things, not just a report card. Part of that responsibility is having some urgency, desire, and ambition to do something with your life.
Giving a undecided kid a mandate to go to school is the exact opposite of what they need. They don't need someone to tell them what to do. They need to learn how to tell themselves what to do. Parents instinctually want to "help", but doing this for them does not help.
It is nice for parents to help. But there are way too many parents who think that if they just enroll their kids in a good college, that college will magically give them direction in life, ambition, and life skills. But if they didn't have a good grasp on these things before enrolling, they're already set up their children for failure.
I know people who work in higher ed, and they thank god for FERPA, because they are inundated with more calls than ever from helicopter parents asking what their grades are, asking where they were on the weekends, why they won't call their parents back, etc. "I am paying for this education and I demand to know [x] about my child", etc.
Any student who is actually prepared for college should already have a pretty reasonable idea what direction they want to go with their studies, what it is going to cost, how it is going to be paid for, and generally what they're going to do with their education. If they don't have a clue, blowing $100k is not going to fix that problem -- it's going to make it worse.
In my opinion, undecided kids would be much better off dabbling in college at a 2 year alternative. There are fewer distractions and less impactful consequences for "figuring it out".