Last year, the average American saved $5,011. Thus, it would take them almost 75 years to accumulate enough money to fund the attendance of one child at a prestigious US colleges.
It costs a lot to attend college. And the price just keeps going up. According to information gathered by US News & World Report, the average tuition at US private institutions increased by nearly 4% last year to slightly under $40,000 per year.
That cost was $10,500 for a public in-state institution, which represents a rise of 0.8% for in-state students and about 1% for out-of-state students each year.
But the cost soars significantly at prestigious or elite colleges. Undergraduate tuition and fees at Harvard University cost $57,246 per year.
The cost of living is estimated to be $95,438 a year by Harvard when accommodation, food, books, and other costs are included.
This is not how it always was. The Education Data Initiative discovered that college tuition has climbed 747.8% since 1963 after accounting for currency inflation.
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Wage Stagnation And US College Tuition Inflation
According to a study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, the average cost of tuition, fees, room, and board for an undergraduate degree climbed by 169% between 1980 and 2020.
That is far faster than wage growth. The survey found that over the same 40-year period, wages for workers aged 22 to 27 only climbed by 19%.
According to a Gallup poll issued this week, that may help to explain why Americans’ confidence in higher education has reached a historic low.
Only 36% of Americans, down more than 20 percentage points from eight years earlier, said they were confident in higher education, according to a study conducted in June.
The National Education Association claims that the higher education system is becoming more and more reliant on this transient labor. By fall 2021, about 70% of US academic members had a contingent job, up from 47% in 1987.
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Source: edition.cnn.com