Notes

The Big Squeeze - The Coming Crisis in American Higher Education
Most Americans already know that a crisis is happening in American advanced schooling.

Tuition costs are surging, putting a college education out of reach for many Americans. read more are defaulting on college loans. They can not find jobs in the fields they trained for.

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

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

Based on the U.S. Census, the median income of U.S. households in 1970 was $8,390. By 1989, it has risen to $28,910. And by more info , it was $46,326. Those figures indicate that Americans today are earning about 5.5 the salaries they earned 40 years back.

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

Today, in accordance with data from THE FACULTY 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 each year in tuition and fees.

So tuition costs are rising at a level that far outpaces the growth in income of the typical American household. While income has grown by way of a factor of 5.5 within the last 40 years, the price of attending a state college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and by way of 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's the big squeeze. For most American families, the imagine 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 through the current economic depression. At the University of Delaware, the endowment shrank by 24.8%. Gettysburg College lost 25.3%, and the list goes on and on.

Top-tier, well-funded institutions will weather the crisis. But a growing 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 the lack of jobs awaiting graduates, it is difficult to convince many American families that it is really worth paying $30,000, $40,000 or more per year to earn a college degree.

Crisis: American Students WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE Unable to Train for Available Jobs

The days of the English major, the philosophy major, and the general studies major may be numbered, as more students seek training for jobs that they can actually find after graduation. They're 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 few reasons.

First, community colleges are no more offering as much practical training because they once did. To attract more students, 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 colleges and universities are in trouble. Many of them are being investigated at this time by Congress because of shady recruiting practices and abuse of government programs for funding advanced schooling. It seems likely that a number of for-profit schools will shut their doors.

The effect? American students will find it harder to get schools that offer the practical training they need 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 harm to the American economy and business.

What Will Save American ADVANCED SCHOOLING?

The trends outlined above are grim. Yet the situation is far from hopeless. Several positive trends are at work that time to the possibility that American higher education is not going away, but merely changing.

* America still gets the strongest educational infrastructure on the planet. We simply have significantly more colleges and universities than any country. read more of these institutions are already 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 many of our citizens hungering for learning, there is ample incentive for colleges to build up new learning options for them.

* The timeline of education has changed. More Americans are returning to college at all stages of life. The result is that a larger pool of Americans that are interested in higher education.

* Distance learning is moving into the forefront of American advanced schooling. As Bill Gates predicted on August 9 in his talk at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, it is already possible to provide a college education on the internet for less than $2,000.

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

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