North Carolina Rep. Virginia Foxx went on convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy’s wingnut talk radio show last week to denounce all these students and recent college grads who are bitching about their student loans:
I went through school, I worked my way through, it took me seven years, I never borrowed a dime of money. He borrowed a little bit because we both were totally on our own when we went to college, totally. […] I have very little tolerance for people who tell me that they graduate with $200,000 of debt or even $80,000 of debt because there’s no reason for that. We live in an opportunity society and people are forgetting that. I remind folks all the time that the Declaration of Independence says “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” You don’t have it dumped in your lap.
Of course, the expense today’s students incur is a bit more steep than the cost of obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Dinosaur Husbandry during Foxx’s youth, even spread out across seven years. How much more? It’s hard to do a direct comparison since not all of the chiseled stone tablets used to record educational expenses in Foxx’s day have been digitalized. But here’s a chart that illustrates how tuition costs have risen since 1985:
Could a near 600% increase have something to do with ballooning student indebtedness? Possibly! Here’s the punchline: Foxx chairs the House Subcommittee on Higher Education. Hahahaha!
[X-posted at Rumproast]
beltane
Sounds like Ms. Foxx needs to go back to school. Her education is in need of some continuing.
bemused
The woman is close to 70 and dumb as a rock. It never occurs to blockheads like her that things change over 50 years and replicating her experience today might not be possible. Considering her lack of brain cells, I wonder if taking 7 years to complete college had more to do with that than the money.
gene108
When I went to N.C. State University in the early-to-mid 1990’s my tuition went up from about $720 my freshman year to about $800 by my senior year. This was tuition for a full time undergraduate class load, i.e. 12+ credit hours per semester.
Tuition has since gone up considerably, but I just thought I’d throw that out there as a point of reference about what college tuition in North Carolina used to cost.
When Foxx went to college, tuition was probably considerably less.
North Carolina’s constitution mandates higher education be accessible, so “back in the day” the university system took this seriously and had very low tuition rates. It’s still a pretty good “bang-for-your-buck” university system, but the inflation of higher education has hit the UNC System.
cathyx
She attended Univ of North Carolina in 1968, got her bachelors, then got her masters in 1972. Tuition was even less than 1985 that you are showing.
Linda Featheringill
I picked up a Master’s Degree in Dinosaur Husbandry [:-)] without a loan. This was waaaay back in the Stone Age and even then, I couldn’t attempt to do it until my only child was 18 years old. Even with a fairly decent part-time job. And even with TA grants that paid my tuition. And with a verrrry cheap [in every sense of the word] apartment. And with all of that, I was in stone cold poverty for about three years.
Tuition is much, much more expensive now. It probably isn’t possible to get a college education without some kind of help today: loans, grants, kind relatives, or all of the above.
General Stuck
Virginia is Louie Gohmert grade stoopid. And a wingnuts wingnut, who once called the murder of Mathew Shepard a “hoax”. You think she is a whackjob, you ought to see her voters.
General Stuck
I went through college on just the GI bill back in the 70’s. partied like hell, and only had to occasionally sell a few bags of reefer to my friends for extra cash. I think my monthly stipend from the GI bill was like $370 a month, or thereabouts. Way different era.
donnah
I hate this old windbag. My 24 year old son is currently working a full time job and a part time job to pay his living expenses and student loans. Even with scholarships and grants, he had to borrow $40,000 to graduate. He said yesterday that they doubled the interest rate on his fed loan, too.
He’s a good kid. My mom asked if he had treated himself to the flatscreen TV he wanted when he got his tax refund, and he shrugged and said, “It all went to pay down the loans.” He works 60+ hours a week.
So Ms Foxx can kiss my ass. Shame on her, the hateful old bitch.
RSA
After reading this elsewhere, I tried to find out how much tuition at UNC was back in 1968, when Foxx graduated. No luck. But for a very rough approximation, I found that in 1960, tuition at Harvard was $1,500 per year, and the minimum wage (what you might expect a college student to earn) was $1.00 per hour. A college student working full-time in 1960 could make 133% of that total. Imagine that, an affordable education at one of the best colleges in the country. Today, a full-time minimum wage job would get just 35% of the way there.
Schlemizel
There are 2 large elephants in the room that help explain the huge disparity in increased cost.
There was a recent report that the actual cost of delivering a college education has not risen as fast as government aid to colleges has dropped off. In other words more of the cost has shifted away from the state an onto the students.
It is difficult to control salary costs in universities because the jobs cannot be outsourced to India. In my field (IT) wages have been pretty flat since the tech bubble burst because so many jobs have been sent out of country. That pressure does not appear for professors.
Llelldorin
Now wait just a damned minute. She went to UNC Chapell Hill. She “didn’t borrow a dime” because the money came directly from taxpayers.
To add insult to injury, she later got an MA and an Ed.D. from UNC Greensboro.
Her entire education was heavily subsidized by the public. So, naturally, she’s now trying to remove the vastly more limited support that the current generation receives.
Splitting Image
Strange that the Villagers seem to agree that high gas prices are a Real Problem that could make or break a Presidency, while things like high tuition costs and expensive health care are Fake Problems that people should just stop yammering about.
The Ancient Randonneur
Isn’t higher education just an indoctrination camp run by our liberal elites to persuade our youth to go gay and convert to atheism? Why would she have subjected herself to that sort of punishment?
El Cid
North Carolina’s entirely Communist state Constitution mandates that public higher education be nearly free and forces its people to pay for it by forcible confiscation via taxation!
Thank God, nowadays the kids don’t have quite as much Communism in their public education, now that we’ve been able to redefine “practicable” way, way up.
[Note: I should add that this is just carrying out the Declaration of Leninist Maoist Ayers Kenyonesian Rights with which NC’s Constitution begins:
That and the part that the tyrannical Northern Agressionists forced in about not being able to secede from the Union and all that proves that Virginia Foxx grew up as a dedicated Stalinist.]
Ben Cisco
One of my state’s bigger living embarrassments.
Richard
Speaking of “back in day”, women of her age could also generally afford to be stay at home mothers. Now you have to be Anne Romney.
Chris
@RSA:
Mind if I ask where you got the numbers from? I’m just curious to see them myself…
HRA
At another site, I read that she graduated from college in 1961. She is 70+.
In that time frame, the state teachers college here offered free tuition and the private university offered free tuition to the employees children.
A few years back I worked part time at the campus bookstore. The cost of the text books was exorbitant and even more so for the law and medical books.
Makes one shudder to think she is the head of the education committee.
cathyx
I dare her to say this same thing on a TV news program with a wider audience, and maybe even another guest who would challenge her on this. She knows what she said isn’t true, but knew she wouldn’t be challenged on Liddy’s program.
Schlemizel
@RSA: @General Stuck:
I was also trying to find out what tuition was in 1970 at the U of MN. I seem to remember $1500 a year but don’t remember if that included room & board. According to the CPI that would be just short of $9000 today. With a dorm room & food plan it would cost you a bit of $17000 today – almost double what it cost then, adjusted for inflation.
I seem to remember my minimum wage job paid $1.25 which would be about $7.50 an hour today. You would have to work more than twice as many hours today to earn an inflation adjusted equal amount of education.
J.
I know plenty of people, myself included, who would love to find a part-time job that paid them $50,000/year after taxes, i.e., the price of tuition, room, and board (though not including text books or supplies or anything else school or living related) at the average liberal arts college or university (if you are an out-of-state student). Good luck kids!
samara morgan
but Betty…..our frontpager Firebagger Freddie agrees that those students and owwies should stfu.
yes, the OWS movement has to show solidarity with Foxx and the greys and the retardicans, or otherwise how can paper flipping college mortgage debt continue to fund the Murrikkkan way?
So selfish, those owwies.
;)
El Cid
Also, back in her day, people didn’t waste all this extra money on fancy doctorin’ degrees because things were much simpler then, and you didn’t have to know all these super-fancy ay-leet machines they use nowadays, and goodness knows you didn’t have all these young people trying to get jobs with computers.
John 2.0
When the next new insane Republican from the mountains of North Carolina gets a plum sub-committee assignment to make policy about things they work hard to be aggressively ignorant about, at least we can rest easy knowing that Democrat Heath Shuler is no longer in that seat.
samara morgan
well Betty…. Firebagger Freddie had a tough life too, but that dosesnt stop him from lining up with Virginia.
JPL
Virginia also walked ten miles to school and thinks buses are for sissies.
OT McCain is on Face the Nation today. I wonder what country he wants to bomb today?
HRA
@Richard:
“Speaking of “back in day”, women of her age could also generally afford to be stay at home mothers. Now you have to be Anne Romney.”
That’s not exactly true about woman generally affording to be stay at home mothers of her age. You would have to have one good steady income even then to be able to do it.
Davis X. Machina
@El Cid: Expect a legal challenge to those state constitutions.
It’s just a matter of time before taxpayer support for public education becomes a mandate forced upon all of us, so that a minority of us can consume an expensive public good at our expense, just like health care.
Some think-tank is studying how to mount the challenge as we speak. Education and medical care are the two largest categories of state spending.
gelfling545
When I attended a SUNY college, my tuition was $200 a semester and I am not nearly as old as Foxx. My daughter is at a SUNY school now. A textbook for one course can cost more that $200. If Ms. Foxx really wants to represent her district instead of just shooting off her mouth she might try investigating the current cost of living for her constituents.
kdaug
Me bonk rocks. Didn’t cost nothin’ to learn how.
RSA
@Chris: I found the basic historical numbers here, and checked a few other places to see if they matched up, which they seem to do.
I didn’t realize that the federal minimum wage went back that far. Also, I came across an old Harvard Crimson article, which begins, “College tuition rates will jump $200 next year, the third hike since 1955. Combined with health service fees, tuition costs will reach $1,520 in 1961-62, an increase of slightly more than 15 percent.” College has been getting too expensive for a very long time.
Suffern ACE
@cathyx: Wait. So that seven years of struggle included getting a masters?
samara morgan
@JPL:
Kuwait.
Brian S
@Schlemizel: “It is difficult to control salary costs in universities because the jobs cannot be outsourced to India. In my field (IT) wages have been pretty flat since the tech bubble burst because so many jobs have been sent out of country. That pressure does not appear for professors.”
There’s big pressure to move classes online so they can “serve more students” and by extension pay fewer professors and pay them less all t the same time.
Linda Featheringill
@JPL: #26
In knee high snow. Uphill both ways. And walked home for lunch or did without.
cathyx
@Suffern ACE: Honestly, how could someone lacking critical thinking skills have gotten a masters? That doesn’t say too much for UNC’s educational degrees.
Suffern ACE
@gelfling545: She does represent her district. It’s made up of folks who stay up at night praising themselves for overcoming minor challenges and worried to death that kids might have it too easy or that someone might be gay and not sorry about it. Busybodies and fussbudgies and stuff.
eric
Two things: Foxx’s comments are archetypal of two related education complaints: (1) schools are worse now than ever and (2) you should be able to pay for your own college. I am 47 and ave not been to a college, high school or middle school since I graduated, so I know nothing as to what is really going on in either place. (I do know what law school debt does to people) But that level of ignorance does not stop the older generation from consistently making both of these remarks. Whenever I ask for the basis, I get “what i hear on the news,” or some such third-hand cherry-picked account. Now that my daughter is in first grade, I am learning what it is really like as we go. I will saw that we decided not to spend the $28k per year for our daughter’s pre-k and kindergarten years. INSANE.
Chris
@RSA:
Thanks!
@Linda Featheringill:
In her day, people walked twenty miles every day to get to school. Even if school was only half a mile away. They’d just walk back and forth forty times to get there. Because they had VALUES in these days, you little runt!
samara morgan
@JPL: speaking of bombs….
live updates from Kabul.
can you feel it? we’re nanometers away from the fall of Saigon redux.
Davis X. Machina
@Brian S:
Two articles:
Can We Make College Cheaper?
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever…
Each pointing in the opposite direction.
Baumol’s disease is the apparent culprit.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
I got out of grad school in 1985, right when that graph starts and right when the 5 years of Reagan’s gutting of Fed support to higher edumacation began to take effect. The result? The explosion of student loans. Fuckers.
And of course Foxx says what she says, it’s a classic example of Repup “I got mine so FUCK ALL OF YOU!!!!!!”
I read something 8-9 years ago about how the massive amount of student loans for higher ed was actually another way of keeping college students oppressed (I’m not saying this right) so that they’d have to take lower paying jobs because of the crushing debt load, ie., limit their flexibility in terms of getting jobs.
Just one more little piece of the 30 year Repup plan to kill the middle class and take us back to the Gilded Age.
Mike in NC
@Llelldorin:
Grandma Foxx is Generation Tea Party. That’s their MO.
Davis X. Machina
@Davis X. Machina: Baumol’s disease, from James Surowiecki, in the New Yorker. (Three link limit, or it would have gone in the last post…)
Downpuppy
Just to be a pain, that graph actually shows a 450% increase in expense. (550-100)
Anyhow, the thing to remember is that the increase in costs is mostly due to administrative bloat.
Univ Cal. now has more Senior Administrators than tenure track faculty.
BGK
As my college expenses were all Before Quicken (1989-1993), I can’t break them down. I do know that out-of-state tuition, room, board, and expenses was roughly $50000 for four years at Illinois. I borrowed probably 40000 of that, and I dragged it around like a dead weight at 8.25% interest for about ten years, paid mostly to that apex of the grifting pyramid, Sallie Mae.
I was recently stunned to learn in state tuition, et cetera is about $40000 a year for UIUC. Illinois seems particularly aggressive about cutting back on the idea of education as a public good. I can’t imagine graduating with debt about twice that of what I paid for my damned house.
Steeplejack
@Betty Cracker:
Stop, you’re killing me.
No, seriously, stop. You’re killing me.
samara morgan
@Downpuppy: sextupled since the 80s, lol.
such a downer.
Ron
@Brian S: Yeah, the whole “online classes” thing is something being pushed where I work. Frankly I suspect that our “adult education” program is probably subsidizing the traditional education programs, though I don’t know that for sure. I’m not sure how well it will work as one of our biggest attractions to students is availability of faculty outside the classroom.
samara morgan
@BGK: DU is 54000 a year, just for tuition.
RSA
@Davis X. Machina: Right, Stanford’s new online courses are a really interesting development. I’ve read about a course at a different university that covers the same material as the Stanford course on artificial intelligence, with a flipped classroom: Students watch the Stanford videos on their own, and in class they discuss issues and work through problems with the professor present.
One question that remains to be answered is how well it generalizes. For example, 160,000 people signed up for the Stanford AI course, and 35,000 people finished it. That’s amazing–I reach about 50 students per semester on the same topic, in a conventional classroom. But it’s also hard to judge the implications of a 75% drop-out rate. Still, exciting developments…
Peter
@samara morgan: Nobody gives a shit about your latest hatecrush. If he’s saying stupid shit, then comment to that post.
John of Indiana
I work for a “Land Grant” college that was established to provide all citizens of the state with a higher education. The state has consistently STIFFED us on our allocation every year for the past decade. The U has no choice but to raise tuition, because the price of toilet paper hasn’t stayed the same and our professors just won’t work for a sack of corn and a coupla chickens like Ichabod Crane did.
The cost to Indiana residents is currently estimated (by the University themselves)at over $25,000 a year, if you live and eat on-campus.
So tell me, what kind of job can you get right out of high school that pays enough to go to school and buys stuff they don’t provide like clothes, medical care, condoms, transport, etc.?
Stella Mooney
My first comment here, though I’ve been a devoted reader since the 2008 election. BJ is my first stop on the web every day: you guys are my kind of people. (And if I weren’t an old married woman, John Cole would be my dream husband.)
I went to a state university in PA in the late 70s, paying my way while working full time; no loans, no scholarships, no aid from parents. If I were a moron like Foxx, I could claim that kids today should do the same. Except tuition then was $1000 a year, about 20% of my income–a struggle, but still possible. Today the same school charges $13,600, and that will be increasing thanks to massive cuts in state education funding. My math skills aren’t great, but I think a student would need to be making in the range of $100K per year for this to be comparably affordable.
Sly
@Schlemizel:
Colleges and Universities don’t have to outsource to India. They have a veritable army of adjuncts and grad students to serve as cheap, disposable laborers.
jwb
@Schlemizel: The universities are working on this problem. First, there is the adjuncting, which, by paying about $3000 per course often without benefits, reduces labor costs substantially. I seem to recall reading somewhere recently that adjuncts are now doing more than 50% of the teaching in universities now. (This will be skewed downward: the more prestigious the school, the less adjuncting will be used.) Second, as Brian S notes, there is a push to get courses online, which will of course allow them to be taught from anywhere. Higher education is not too far from being able to offshore its teaching.
Angry Egilsson
Top 5 Dumbest Congressmen:
1) Louie Gohmert
2) Virginia Foxx
3) Steve King
4) Paul Broun
5) Michele Bachmann
There’s also that douchebag in Arizona. Alan West didn’t crack the top 5, although he is unbelievably ignorant. I’m pretty sure there are a couple of other jackasses in Idaho who probably should be listed.
Louie Gohmert is special though.
cmorenc
@bemused:
Virginia Fox and Patrick McHenry are in a continuing contest for the title of “most maliciously stupid congressperson from North Carolina”. In principle, because Fox’s district includes the college town of Boone, NC you’d hope it would have at least the potential to elect at least a more mildly regressive congressman, but alas this district (which contains Mt. Airy, NC the model for the fictional “Andy Griffith Show”) is predominately comprised of voters who could convincingly pass for Barney Fife and Goober’s first cousins.
samara morgan
@Peter: i just don’t think BJ deserves a firebagger front pager that is isomorphic with Virginia Foxx. i offered Cole a choice, permaban me or ill do this blog like i did TAS.
OR……kick firebagger freddie off the masthead.
you should email Cole and support one of those options.
;)
bemused
@cmorenc:
We’ve been through that area a few times to and fro visiting family in Raleigh. I’ve often thought that some of the most lovely rural parts of this country are also home to a lot of backward, mean spirited people. Living in beautiful NE Minn most of my life, I know that from experience.
gaz
So since she’s involved in the higher education stuff, she knows this already.
What a fucking bitch…
Edit: I just couldn’t do it.
gaz
@samara morgan: Christ on a stick, samara.
After all this time, you aren’t winning any friends. Everyone looks at your posts like this with a glazed expression in their eyes.
You’re more tiresome than Kola the pedobear, or the other resident trolls.
This is getting beyond old, even for a troll.
FFS, find some new material. I can practically write your posts for you. Fuck, you are so predictable.
Cue the part where you say don’t care. I give you about 3 posts before you call me a JAFI, etc.
Tired.
Trakker
Ms. Foxx, I’ve been following your comments in Congress for years now and I can say with a high degree of confidence that you may have graduated without debt, you also graduated without an education.
pseudonymous in nc
@gelfling545:
It’s funny how Goopers who represent large universities (Paul Broun’s another one) seem to hate that particular group of constituents — or perhaps it’s because they’re elected by a bunch of dumbasses who are equally resentful of the edjumacated. But Foxx was a college administrator before she entered politics, so she’s either bullshitting about the rise in tuition or suffering from dementia.
Don’t forget Sue Myrick, who’s still competing for that title, though she’s stepping down at this election.
ruemara
Who could be surprised that this stupid, evil cow, said something stupid and/or evil? Yet another reason why my disdain for red state voters can continue unabated.
Smiling Mortician
@Downpuppy:
Yup. At the state school where I teach, over the past 20 years student enrollment has increased by about 70%, the number of full-time faculty has fluctuated by about 5% either way, and the number of full-time administrators has increased by nearly 400%. The additional students have been accommodated largely through increased outsourcing via a state online consortium. Full-time faculty salaries have increased by about 25% over 20 years, but have been frozen for the past five years — no COLAs, no increases for experience or professional development. Since the faculty salary freeze, in-state tuition has gone up 53% — to cover increased administrative costs and decreased state funding.
Cheryl from Maryland
My alma mater’s tuition has increased dramatically because the support from the state, Virginia, has shrunk dramatically, cf:
Thirty years ago, state funding represented 43 percent of William & Mary’s operating budget. In 2000, it provided 28 percent. Today, state money represents about 13 percent and is, in Reveley’s words, “heading south.”
honus
@RSA: In 1973 in-state tuition at UVA was $125.00 a semester. I imagine UNC was about the same. I was out of state, and my tuition was $625. It went up to about $!,000 by the time I graduated in 1977. So paying full out of state tuition I finished college for under $8k. Which was less than a year’s work as a carpenter’s helper at 4.50 an hour, which was my first job.
Also, a bag of good reefer was $15, and Lowell George was still alive.
Gozer
@Schlemizel: Most profs don’t actually make that much. What’s striking is when you look at the salaries for administrators (and athletic staff) vs. salaries for academics.
In some fields like business and economics 6 figures is the norm for junior faculty, but in most of the social sciences, STEM fields, humanities, etc. pay is more moderate. Administrators can make 250k to 1.x mil or more depending on the institution. All of that pales in comparison to athletic staff. When he was at Louisville, Bobby Petrino signed a 10-year, $25 mil contract and his Arkansas contract was around $18 mil.
Ash Can
And all the geezers listening to her on Felon Liddy’s program shook their canes and said, “Damned right,” while everyone under 30 — a.k.a. America’s future — collectively said “Go to hell” — that is, if they even heard her at all.
honus
@pseudonymous in nc: And the venerated Jesse helms regularly and publicly referred to UNC as “The University of Negroes and Communists” But no, he wasn’t a racist.
gene108
I wonder if there’s a “drown it it in a bath tub” approach by Republicans in government towards higher education. Make it so damn bad that people will stop wanting to go to college and thereby crushing a bastion of opposition (i.e. educated, analytical minds) to their BS.
Also, too maybe because college enrollment has skyrocketed compared to earlier generations, making it unaffordable will leave it in the realm of being only accessible by the rich, where nice things naturally belong.
OzoneR
@bemused: .
No, it doesn’t and that’s almost unanimously true among older folk.
I can’t tell you how often I hear my family bitch that they bought a house/raised a family on $30k a year, so what’s my problem?
samara morgan
@gaz: its a free country. say what you like.
I’m just pointing out Firebagger Freddie and Virginia Foxx are on the same page.
bemused
@OzoneR:
Does it help to point out to them that $30,000 a year in 19?? would mean you would have to make ? in 2012? They don’t seriously think that you could buy the same size and type of home they did now?
I have elderly family members in their 80’s, 90’s that understand this but then again, they are liberals, heh.
samara morgan
@Ash Can: not Our Freddie.
he totes agrees with her.
tcinaz
Most comments reference tuition costs, but those aren’t the primary costs incurred in attending college. It is living expenses. What the loan debt explosion says: most college students don’t leach off their parents after high school (good for them), they live on their own; most schools are not in the same location their students originate from. This is our system in part because student loan debt coupled with degree enhanced income was once affordable, like when I graduated in 1971. No longer is that so much so. And as Ms. Foxx’s regressive Republican policies continue to work their majik reducing entry level and middle class incomes, the situation worsens. Republicans elites have been out to destroy the leveling of the playing field by education since before Reagan, and they have been quite successful.
bk
I went to UNC (Chapel Hill) from 67-71. Every night on the evening news, the then-VP of one of the Raleigh tv stations would editorialize about how Chapel Hill was a hotbed of communism. His name was Jesse Helms. Good to see that the state is still electing lunatics.
Catsy
@El Cid:
That is actually in their constitution? The fuck kind of sloppy gibberish is that? Which is it then, a right or a privilege?
Abijah L.
I paid $238 per quarter easily while working a minimum wage job. Since that time tuition at the University of California has gone up by a factor of 10 while minimum wage has tripled.
Those cheap educations that Dr. Mr. L. and I received have allowed us to pay 6 figure tax bills which have more than compensated the state and federal governments for the investment that they made in us. Win-win for all involved. We even do societally useful jobs. We cheerfully signed the petition for Uncle Jerry B’s initiative to raise our taxes.
Schlemizel
@Gozer:
Oh God! Please don’t get me started on the crime that is college sport. Did you know that the so-called revenue generating sports (football and basketball) do not actually turn a profit when you look at the amount the school/government spend to fund those sports in the first place – and that is without calculating in the cost of stadium/arena the unpaid “student athletes” labor in.
Enlightened Liberal
@J.:
Yea, really. If you could find a part-time job paying 50k after taxes you don’t NEED college.
NCSteve
@RSA: Okay, hold on to your lunch, because the sheer Republican hypocrisy of the answer is going to require a strong gag reflex.
In 1968, in-state tuition at UNC would have been the next best thing to free. This goes back a long way in the state’s history and the state’s constitutions (even the ones enshrining slavery) have long required that tuition for North Carolina citizens shall be as close to free as possible.
That’s right comrades, here in the glorious worker’s paradise known as the People’s Democratic Republic of North Carolina, the state the State is supposed to provide free college educations to the masses. When I went to law school at Carolina in the late 80s, my tuition was a few hundred bucks a semester. (Historically, the state has kept this largess to the masses from requiring them to overburden the elites with taxes by keeping public elementary and secondary schools so underfunded that few graduate prepared for college).
In recent years, as a tax system calibrated for an agricultural and manufacturing economy in the 1930s has failed to keep up with the migration of the workers from tobacco, furniture manufacturing and cotton and textile mills to banking, biotech, software, transportation services, mega-hospitals, and Wal-Mart (because Republicans and conservadems in the General Assembly freak out over changes to the tax code just like they do everywhere else), they’ve repeatedly jacked up in-state tuition, especially for advanced degrees and they’ve cranked out of state tuition through the roof. Tuition at the flagship schools, Chapel Hill and NC State, is bit over $7,500 with the regional and historically black schools running in the 4-6k range. Still remarkably reasonable compared to, say, 44K a year for Dook or 43K a year at Wake Forest, or 29K for Elon U., especially for schools of UNC and State’s calibre, but hardly “free.”
It’s also worth noting that as tuition has increased, the state has added means testing elements to the formula and now promise that low-income in-state students who do 10-12 hours a week of work study can graduate more or less debt free (Soshulism!). But if you’re not low income, you aren’t getting out of the UNC system for much less than 80k, no matter which school you go to. And yeah, that’s what passes for a bargain these days.
For this hateful, acid-spewing old harpie, who, god help me, is my representative, to act like her tuition experience in the UNC system somehow bears on the cost of education today is, well, typical because she’s evil, evil, evil! But the education system which allowed her to work her way through school without much debt was a perfect example of the “socialism” she spends so much time decrying today.
Just as an aside, when I say she’s evil, I don’t mean “evil” like big banks or AT&T or oil companies are evil. I’m talking “In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming” pentagrams and Vlad the Impaler evil. I pray for the day when the DCCC wakes up to the fact that Republican strength in her district was significantly diluted as part of the Teahadist General Assembly’s cunning plan to hold Democrats to three of our 13 seats despite our outnumbering them.
ruemara
@bemused: I don’t want to rain on this parade about old folks don’t understand, but when I explained to local friends about the disparity between the (then) huge housing costs vs the regional wage, they proclaimed that I didn’t understand because their parents bought houses at $50k which is why a region with the average income of less than $60k now should be fine with housing prices of average $400k. The fact that your salary as a professional would be nearly $20k and your house would be $50k did not seem to faze them. A lot of people don’t want to know things if that knowledge is not in their best interests. Yes, they bought before the boom and had the benefit of a salary that was SF levels during the boom.
OzoneR
@bemused:
No, they don’t understand inflation, therefore its some metric made up by greedy liberals.
Its an incredibly simple minded country full of hate and ego.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Sly: University of Texas at Dallas does not allow students to teach.
cckids
I’ve got a friend (in her late 40’s), whose kid started college 2 years ago. She has similar ideas; don’t take out loans, just use scholarships/grants & work your way through. After 2 years using this philosophy, her kid has 20 credit hours completed – i.e. one relatively light year’s college work. If he stops getting the scholarships, that pace will slow even further. By the time he graduates, it seems like his skills will be getting kind of stale.
Peter
You know, this could act as a pretty decent drum to beat for getting out the student vote. I mean, I know it probably won’t shift the numbers very much, but you could do a lot worse for student GOTV than this quote, a brief explanation of what’s wrong with it, and then “if you don’t vote, you get chucklefucks like this in charge of your student loans/tuition/whatever the fuck the sub-committee does”.
RSA
@NCSteve: Thanks for all the info, NCSteve! I’ve lived in NC for some years now, but a lot of this was new to me.
alex milstein
I attended Washington University in St. Louis, and when I arrived in September 1965, I was carrying two $750 checks in my pocket: one to cover the first semester tuition and one to cover a semester in the dorms, which included 20 meals a week. Fifteen hundred bucks for one semester. Three grand for a whole year. Three grand! Today, 47 years later, I think the yearly fee runs about $52,000. That’s 17 times what my freshman year cost my dad.
FlipYrWhig
@Cheryl from Maryland: W&M represent! Hark upon the gale!
Ben Cisco
@John 2.0: Not sure who you’re aiming the snark at, but he got redistricted out of the seat – he would have had to “practically completely separate himself from the Democratic party” in order to even have a shot at keeping it. Then there’s this:
Toss in his challenging Nancy SMASH! for the leadership position, and you have a Republican wrapped in a Democratic blanket. Exactly how does that help?
Lex
That graph would be even more illuminating if it also showed the trend on median U.S. houseshold income, particularly if you broke out the top 1% separately.
John 2.0
@Ben Cisco: I remember all the celebration here when Shuler announced he wasn’t running, and I said it in that thread and I’ll say it again: I didn’t like Shuler, but another republican in the McHenry/Foxx mode in infinitely worse for everyone.
asiangrrlMN
@samara morgan: You know, you’re so full of shit, I’m surprised it doesn’t just spew from your mouth every time you open it. You take one or two sentences from Freddie’s post and twist it to suit your own personal vendetta against him. His point in that excellent post you keep linking is that if the Occupiers aren’t advocates for more than themselves, they’re not going to win over the masses – NOT that kids with massive loans for college should STFU.
I’ve had my issues with Freddie, but you’re fucking wrong on this. Here is what Freddie ACTUALLY has to say about the rise in college tuition, and it’s not the only time he’s spoken up against it.
MikeJ! I need my fucking filter for Chrome, STAT!
P.S. Foxx is an asshat, and I’m not getting off her lawn. The end.
El Cid
@Catsy: If you think about it for a second, what they’re doing is separating the right to have access to higher education from the privilege of qualifying for it. In other words, they didn’t want to declare that anyone who wanted it would be granted education beyond typical compulsory public school, but that those who met whatever standards were to do so as free as practically possible.