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The Big Squeeze - The Coming Crisis in American Higher Education
Most Americans already know that a crisis is going on in American higher education.

Tuition costs are surging, putting a college education out of grab many Americans. College grads are defaulting on college loans. They cannot find jobs in the fields they trained for.

Those trends make the news headlines every day. Yet they are only the most visible signs of deeper troubles that threaten to destabilize American higher education in the coming years. Let's have a closer look.

Coming Crisis: Colleges Will Price themselves Further and additional Out of Reach

According to the U.S. website , the median income of U.S. households in 1970 was $8,390. By 1989, it has increased to $28,910. And by 2005, it was $46,326. Those figures indicate that Americans today are earning about 5.5 the salaries they earned 40 years ago.

Just how much have college costs grown? In line with the Congressional Budget Office, the common yearly tuition at a four-year public American university in 1970 was $480. The common tuition at a four-year private college or university was a whole lot higher, at $1,980.

Today, according to data from The College Board, tuition and fees at four-year state universities currently average $7,020 each year for students who live in- state, and $11,528 for students who live out of state. And private four-year colleges charge an average or $26,273 per year in tuition and fees.

So tuition costs are rising for a price that far outpaces the growth in income of the normal American household. While income has grown by a factor of 5.5 within the last 40 years, the price of attending circumstances college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and by a factor of about 24 for out-of-state students. And the cost of attending an exclusive college has increased by a factor of more than 13.

And colleges are organizing tuition increases for the coming years. It is the big squeeze. For most American families, the dream of sending a kid to college is slipping even further out of reach.

Crisis: American Colleges Will Close

Endowments at American colleges and universities have dropped dramatically during the current economic depression. At the University of Delaware, the endowment shrank by 24.8%. Gettysburg College lost 25.3%, and the list continues on and on.

Top-tier, well-funded institutions will weather the crisis. But an increasing number of smaller American private universites and colleges already are finding it difficult to attract enough tuition-paying undergraduates to help keep their doors open. With increasing frequency, these schools are making their troubles known.

There's another reason that colleges come in trouble. With having less jobs awaiting graduates, it is difficult to convince many American families that it is really worth paying $30,000, $40,000 or even more a year to earn a degree.

Crisis: American Students Will Be Unable to Train for Available Jobs

The days of the English major, the philosophy major, and the overall studies major could be numbered, as more students seek training for jobs that they can actually find after graduation. They are training as medical technicians, computer programmers and air conditioning technicians. Yet just as students are trying to find practical training, the sources of that training are harder to get, for a couple reasons.

First, community colleges are no longer offering as much practical training because they once did. To attract check here , many have modified their course offerings to are more like private institutions. While President Obama has pledged to get heavily in community colleges and upgrade their training programs, the changes are long overdue.

Second, for-profit universites and colleges are in trouble. read more of them are being investigated at this time by Congress because of shady recruiting practices and abuse of government programs for funding higher education. It seems likely that a number of for-profit schools will shut their doors.

The result? American students will see it harder to find schools that offer the practical training they have to secure jobs.

And we all know what can happen when a country's workers are under-trained, in comparison to workers far away. The result will likely be further damage to the American economy and business.

What Will Save American ADVANCED SCHOOLING?

The trends outlined above are grim. The situation is definately not hopeless. Many positive trends are at work that time to the chance that American higher education isn't going away, but merely changing.

* America still gets the strongest educational infrastructure on the globe. We simply have more universites and colleges than any country. Many of these institutions already are reinventing themselves by offering distance learning options, three-year degree programs along with other incentives for modern learners.

* Americans' desire to have education remains strong. With so quite a few citizens hungering for learning, there is ample incentive for colleges to develop new learning choices for them.

* The timeline of education has changed. More Americans are time for college at all stages of life. The effect is that a larger pool of Americans that are interested in advanced schooling.

* Distance learning is getting into the forefront of American higher education. As Bill Gates predicted on August 9 in his talk at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, it really is already possible to deliver a college education over the Internet for less than $2,000.

Ultimately, we predict that American ingenuity will not only survive these crises, but turn America into a new sort of community of learners.

StraighterLine is a leader in making a quality college education more affordable making use of their online college courses. StraighterLines distance learning courses are a smart way to tackle the escalating cost of four-year educational costs and avoid a mountain of student debt.
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