This post was improperly placed, probably by my own fault, it wound up above, where TB responded to it. I thought Wiki had lost it so I rewrote it from memory, not realizing it’s a near duplicate of a previous post of mine. I will leave it here unedited, in the interest of completeness. No, I am not going crazy.

You didn’t pay for your tuition. You went to a State school, that $3000 did not pay for the cost of your education, the difference was made up by the taxpayers, many of whom did not have the benefit of a college education. Your tuition was just the price of admission. It’s what kept out the riff-raff.

Even in a private school, there are government research grants, scholarships, assistantships, fellowhips, and similar funding from private, corporate and institutional sources. Again, these are resources that are available to those who get in, but are denied to those who cannot. The society pays for those resources, its not part of the tuition.

Tuition is just the cover charge that gets you in the door. Dinner, drinks, and the show are on the community at large. It is a subsidy, a transfer of wealth, to the middle and upper class who can afford that tuition. All your graph shows is that the subsidy is shrinking, and the middle class is getting squeezed out. Now, if they want to go, they have to borrow to do it. Well, no one’s putting a gun to their heads, right?

It may be a valid point of discussion whether or not we can afford as a society to subsidize our students any more, but to say that those who can afford a nominal tuition are “paying for their education”, and those who can’t “don’t deserve to get one” is just a lie. Its just part of the huge lie that those who have more, routinely inflict on those who have less.

God knows what’s happening at the Ivy League and fancier schools. The graph shows the bloat to be even more than for medical costs. If only people would give half the attention to this that they do to some corporate CEO’s fat bonus.

This happens to anything that is subsidized, when market forces stop working. It’s a law of economics.

Anybody who’s interested can find the YouTubes yourself.

Were you one of those lecturing me on how all the lunatics at the “Occupy” protests were not “representative” of the larger crowd?

Did you think that $3000 tuition paid for the costs of your education? No, it was a state school. The taxpayer made up the difference. But even in a private school, like Harvard, there are government endowments, grants, fellowships, assistantships, jobs etc., (as well as alumnae, charity, institutional, private and corporate ones). You did NOT pay for your education. No one does.

That tuition is just the cover charge that gets you in the door. But if you can come up with it, dinner, drinks and the show are on the taxpayer. All your graph proves is that the cover charge is going up and they’re watering down the drinks.

Whether or not we can afford to subsidize the education of the middle class is a valid question, how we are going to pay for it is another, but the middle class is being subsidized, and they have no right to brag about how “they paid for their education” and those that can’t don’t deserve one.

I don’t need no stinkin’ footnotes.

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College used to be a hell of a lot more affordable, both for state support and tuitions.

It’s just that nowadays, the threshold of riff-raff has been changing, the middle class is no longer getting their subsidy. So what should they do, “Take a bath and get a job?”