Yes, the unofficial Admissions Policy Month continues here at Uncertain Principles. The problem really is that it’s Admissions Season in academia, so all the navel-gazing academic journals are loaded with articles about it, which means that having wandered into talking about it, I can’t get out without a major effort of will…
Today’s worthwhile article is from Inside Higher Ed, where Alan Contreras puts the cost of higher education in perspective in a way that makes the class problem very clear:
In 1974, a year of attendance at the University of Oregon (the flagship university in my state) cost what a student working minimum wage could earn working 27 hours a week, year-round. That is a lot of work for a full-time student during the school year, but was not impossible and could be offset by more work hours in the summer.
By 2004, a full-time student would have to work 46 hours a week to pay for the same attendance. That is essentially impossible, cannot be sufficiently offset by summer earnings and is the fundamental gap that policy makers either don’t understand or choose to ignore because it is too depressing and can’t be fixed.
He goes on to say some nasty things about politicians, and offer some ideas for solutions that border on radical. I don’t really care for those, but I think this may be the clearest statement of the problem that I’ve seen.