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@Matthew9Thirtyfive Students who comes from low SES backgrounds who are looking into college/university systems should be looking at community programs with good linkages into 4-year university programs to stave off having to pay sticker price for all 4 years. Prices are ridiculously high at institutions, however it doesn't mean that as a student you need to pay the full sticker price. If you are able to get scholarships (not loan scholarships) from being an overqualified applicant then you should be able to shave off enormous debt off the top. I went into school with two scholarships, one from the school and another related from a private backer that supported high performing high school students. When I graduated, I finished with twelve scholarships after applying to roughly 125 of them (over four years) and being denied or ghosted from the majority of them. Even if you can't obtain scholarships, obtaining an associate's degree and being able to use that to land a full time job while you attend school part-time is another solution to cut down debt to only federal student loans. These aren't all cures, but there are ways to blunt the expensive edge of the cost of university.
This doesn't absolve the high cost of tuition, but students have options for navigation that can cut down on the cost. Many of my friends now are even transitioning away from their four-year degree specialty into areas that they could have done with a crash course in front-end/back-end development through a code bootcamp or areas of specialty that are met with an associate's degree. Even associate oriented programs are now able to offer bachelor options to their graduates in order to address some long standing issues with respect to employment between ADN v BSN candidates. Regardless, stating that higher education is exclusively a problem created by the older generation is incorrect. Students continue to feed into the educational system instead of seeking alternative options, the cost of programs increase because the demand is still present. To not raise prices as seats become more and more in demand would be to go against the innate drive of business profitability itself.
Law schools had enjoyed a significantly long period of time in which they saw continuing enrollment since 2010-2011. One of the major factors that caused the drastic drop from 2012-2014 was the scam blog movement in which law students, legal graduates, and key faculty began to share how bad employment opportunities were at firms ranging from small to big law, environmental law, patent law, and public law positions. As this became more of a consensus, speakers became more emboldened to call out these institutions in speaking arrangements such as David Frakt at Florida Coastal School of Law who pointed out the high attrition rate and low pass rate on the state bar examination meant that only a handful of students who were part of the class would realistically become christened attorneys. The writer for this article, Paul Campos had started his own blog in 2011 called Inside the Law School Scam (ITLSS) in which he operated anonymously and shared the shortcomings of the law school he was operating within as a legal professor. Campos's accounts showed how his school and law schools in general saw students with the end goal of making a profit, his accounts were so on the nose that associates began to identify him through his posts and he outed himself in public while still maintaining the blog.
When students began to fade away leaving law schools with empty seats, law schools began to adjust by cutting down staff, taking seats off, and reducing their tuition. Institutions had a need to reflect on their practice when the demand was not present. A transition point to this is that federal funding tends to mask the burden of the student needing to afford outrageous prices. Facilitating loan debt certainly incentivizes students to take on risk when they don't need to concern themselves about upfront capital. However, as far as I'm aware almost every federal program that I've come across will be plagued by predatory private businesses attempting to cash in on people who for a brief moment have fool's gold within their hands. Whether you want to associate the predators with being the loan providers, the schools, or the government for playing a more involved role in this entire process the one common element that people can control is their own decision making process on how much of an impact these actors can have within their lives.
Although the law school boom & bust (and boom again?) is a very specific case study, it shows how insensible it is to lump together all boomers together into a generalized category. Individuals like Campos have the courage and the moral fiber to point out b.s. in the systems in which they are present. There are bad actors in every job sector, the individuals who serve as whistle blowers are far and few in between. Thanks to these few people, there can be paradigm shifts in how these systems change holistically. However, these changes often lag behind the speed that individuals can apply creative and logical solutions towards navigating their own solution to these problems. Simply blaming the baby boomer generation is somewhat of an infantile response, especially with the millennial generation aging and being able to have an increasing voice across all sectors. To blame actors who put on the performance when most of us have largely spent the majority of our lives in the audience is like a critic pointing out all the things that went wrong with the performance rather than taking note of the points that were done correctly.
This doesn't absolve the high cost of tuition, but students have options for navigation that can cut down on the cost. Many of my friends now are even transitioning away from their four-year degree specialty into areas that they could have done with a crash course in front-end/back-end development through a code bootcamp or areas of specialty that are met with an associate's degree. Even associate oriented programs are now able to offer bachelor options to their graduates in order to address some long standing issues with respect to employment between ADN v BSN candidates. Regardless, stating that higher education is exclusively a problem created by the older generation is incorrect. Students continue to feed into the educational system instead of seeking alternative options, the cost of programs increase because the demand is still present. To not raise prices as seats become more and more in demand would be to go against the innate drive of business profitability itself.
Law schools had enjoyed a significantly long period of time in which they saw continuing enrollment since 2010-2011. One of the major factors that caused the drastic drop from 2012-2014 was the scam blog movement in which law students, legal graduates, and key faculty began to share how bad employment opportunities were at firms ranging from small to big law, environmental law, patent law, and public law positions. As this became more of a consensus, speakers became more emboldened to call out these institutions in speaking arrangements such as David Frakt at Florida Coastal School of Law who pointed out the high attrition rate and low pass rate on the state bar examination meant that only a handful of students who were part of the class would realistically become christened attorneys. The writer for this article, Paul Campos had started his own blog in 2011 called Inside the Law School Scam (ITLSS) in which he operated anonymously and shared the shortcomings of the law school he was operating within as a legal professor. Campos's accounts showed how his school and law schools in general saw students with the end goal of making a profit, his accounts were so on the nose that associates began to identify him through his posts and he outed himself in public while still maintaining the blog.
When students began to fade away leaving law schools with empty seats, law schools began to adjust by cutting down staff, taking seats off, and reducing their tuition. Institutions had a need to reflect on their practice when the demand was not present. A transition point to this is that federal funding tends to mask the burden of the student needing to afford outrageous prices. Facilitating loan debt certainly incentivizes students to take on risk when they don't need to concern themselves about upfront capital. However, as far as I'm aware almost every federal program that I've come across will be plagued by predatory private businesses attempting to cash in on people who for a brief moment have fool's gold within their hands. Whether you want to associate the predators with being the loan providers, the schools, or the government for playing a more involved role in this entire process the one common element that people can control is their own decision making process on how much of an impact these actors can have within their lives.
Although the law school boom & bust (and boom again?) is a very specific case study, it shows how insensible it is to lump together all boomers together into a generalized category. Individuals like Campos have the courage and the moral fiber to point out b.s. in the systems in which they are present. There are bad actors in every job sector, the individuals who serve as whistle blowers are far and few in between. Thanks to these few people, there can be paradigm shifts in how these systems change holistically. However, these changes often lag behind the speed that individuals can apply creative and logical solutions towards navigating their own solution to these problems. Simply blaming the baby boomer generation is somewhat of an infantile response, especially with the millennial generation aging and being able to have an increasing voice across all sectors. To blame actors who put on the performance when most of us have largely spent the majority of our lives in the audience is like a critic pointing out all the things that went wrong with the performance rather than taking note of the points that were done correctly.
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