This is the ninth of a 10-blog series of blogs on education. The first eight are:
1. The USA Was The Greatest Nation On This Planet -- Was http://newyork.storeboard.com/blogs/education/the-usa-was-the-greatest-nation-on-this-planet--was/190391
2. Mexico Cares More About College Education Than The USA http://newyork.storeboard.com/blogs/education/mexico-cares-more-about-college-education-than-the-usa/190910
3. Oregon Has A Solution For Student Debt Crisis http://newyork.storeboard.com/blogs/education/oregon-has-a-solution-for-student-debt-crisis/191306
4. Are Men Just Stupid? http://newyork.storeboard.com/blogs/education/are-men-just-stupid/191722
5. College Is Now Mostly For Kids With Rich Daddies http://newyork.storeboard.com/blogs/education/college-education-is-now-for-kids-with-rich-daddies/192096
6. Want A Job After College? http://www.storeboard.com/blogs/education/want-a-job-after-college/192376
7. School Matters: The Stats In This Blog Don't Lie http://www.storeboard.com/blogs/education/school-matters-the-stats-in-this-blog-dont-lie/192897
8. Work Experience In College Is Becoming More Important http://newyork.storeboard.com/blogs/education/work-experience-in-college-is-becoming-more-important/193451
Blog No. 9: California's Stanford and Pomona Are Nation's Top Colleges; Harvard Slips To Eighth
Forbes magazine and the Center for College Affordability and Productivity released their annual list of the nation’s best colleges last month. The ratings are based on “what are students getting out of college” rather than the students' academic achievements when they entered college.
Many people who look at this list will be most interested in how Pomona College became the USA's second-best college. I was unaware that the California college was such a good school, but it ranks higher than every Ivy League school, including Princeton (third), Yale (fourth), Columbia (fifth) and Harvard (often considered No. 1, but No. 8 on this list).
Stanford University is No. 1 although its most famous ex-student, Tiger Woods, didn’t graduate. The other schools in the Top 10 are Swarthmore (Pa.) College, the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y.; Williams (Mass.) College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which are sixth, seventh, ninth and 10th respectively.
When I looked at the list I was most interested in the INSANE cost of college. Most of the private colleges that were ranked very high cost well over $50,000 per year. My alma mater, Lafayette (Pa.) College, which is ranked 48th, costs $57,688 annually. I paid about $6,000 during my senior year -- 1981.
Are salaries nearly 10 times higher than they were in 1981? Are entry-level reporters making about $150K? An editor told me that his entry-level reporters earn $16K.
According to Wikipedia, the cost of living in the USA is about three times higher now than it was in 1978, while college costs are 10 times higher (medical costs are about six times higher). Given that college pays off in higher incomes later in life as I detailed in my seventh blog in this series, I wouldn’t object to the skyrocketing higher education costs if society was helping students pay for college.
Unfortunately, the USA is going in the OPPOSITE direction. What happened to the GI Bill? What happened to public colleges in states such as California offering free tuition to all students?
University Business magazine reported that the book “The Creation of the Future: The Role of the American University” pointed out that 80 percent of financial aid from the national government prior to 1980 came in the form of grants and scholarships and 20 percent came from loans.
By 2001, the 80/20 ratio was reversed. Thus, as I pointed out in the first, third and fifth blogs of this series, many young people don’t go to college at all and many others owe tens of thousands of dollars in loans that they can’t repay.
“In essence, the baby boom generation, which benefited from a strong federal higher education subsidy, has been unwilling to provide the same benefit to its own children,” wrote Juniata (Pa.) College president Thomas Kepple in University Business magazine.
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