There are few things a parent can do to ensure their kid's future than to send them to college. It's the silver bullet, the magic bean, the cure for what ails a desperate lower class mired in intergenerational poverty. College is quite literally the last best hope for unskilled workers and the children of unskilled workers who simply can not find enough work to fill the void left behind by outsourced and closed factories and mills all over the country. If a panacea for poverty exists anywhere on earth, it is contained in the promise of college, cheap, quality higher education for everyone who has the ability and the drive to push through and earn a sheepskin that is anything, anything, but worthless.
And it's being priced right out of reach for the people who need it most.
First, let's dispense with the addled, unproductive meme that crops up about every five years in newspapers and on television, as millionaire journalists intone seriously that the promise and the reality of a college education are far apart and never the twain shall meet, so we should all just content ourselves with the high school diploma and rid our minds of such flighty dreams for shiny things. Their analyses will look thorough, their experts will sound learned, and they'll be utterly full of shit.
A trend that's undeniable, that goes back DECADES, that has been measured and noted by government agencies and philanthropic organizations, and that refutes any claim that college is worthless is just this, college graduates have a lower unemployment rate, always. Even in the currently crappy jobs market, when recent college grads are being told what a hellscape of an unemployment situation they're walking into, what generally seems to get missed is just this: Over the past 20 years that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has input educational attainment as part of their unemployment statistical sampling, no matter how bad the jobs market was for people with a college degree, it has always been about 1 1/2 times as bad for those without one.
College. Is. Not. Worthless. Dammit.
But it is getting prohibitively costly.
I took the historical median wages from the bottom three quintiles (60 percent of wage earners) from 1980 to 2009 and juxtaposed them against the average cost of a public 4-year school for the same period, expressed in 2011 dollars.
I think the trend speaks for itself. Without food, without housing costs, gas, healthcare insurance, clothes, someone in the second or third quintile could probably swing getting their kid into a state school. Maybe they could borrow enough, if nothing bad ever happens, ever. If the car doesn't break down, if nobody ever gets sick, if the roof never leaks, and they manage to avoid being a victim of some random crime as happens to so many of the people we're looking at, the scant possibility exists outside of Never-Never Land that their child could get into a state school. If nothing ever happens to a family in the bottom 60 percent of Americans, they might, MIGHT, find the cash to give their kids a better future than they themselves had. But you and I know that it's not likely, and for the bottom 20 percent, they're already underwater.
And that trendline of college costs is only getting steeper and higher. What the hell are we doing, America?