Student Loans and College Costs!

By Donald A. Collins | 29 November 2022
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

This subject is a bit off my usual beat, as I write daily columns for a London site, www.churchandstate.org.uk but your excellent piece struck a personal chord with me which prompted this piece. I take no ownership in it and its use is entirely up to you.

Student Loans and College Costs!

My alma mater Yale just sent me a bill to pay my “class dues” which since I graduated in 1953 was for $53.

My fond memories of those wonderful years in New Haven remains!

My annual cost to attend from 1949 to 1953 was about $3000 per year which included tuition, room and board and personal expenses. That my father paid them was fully appreciated by me then and the amount marveled by me now.

Since $100 in 1953 would now be about $1100 now my $3000 yearly cost at Yale would translate into around $33,000 today.

Hardly the case as you can read here at $84,000 per year. This site tells how scholarships can ameliorate that cost, but my father’s income inflated to 2022 would not even come close to the lucky $3000 he paid then.

You can read the full article about adjustments in cost could depend on the financial status of the prospective student’s family.

Yale’s famous endowment manager David Swenson died in May 2021 after a stellar career of raising its endowment fund from a billion to over $30 billion.

Somewhere it would appear that adjusting students’ attendance costs got lost as $336.000 for 4 years at Yale compares poorly with $12,000 even adjusted for inflation!

Significant student loan relief has been proposed by President Biden but is now tied up in litigation despite the positive good outcomes for students who graduate debt free.

Read here the WSJ story which tells about how significant financial help for students is.

The 11/28/22 Wall Street Journal article by Joe Pinkser notes that “President Biden said in late August that his administration would forgive up to $20,000 in federal student-loan debt for tens of millions of Americans. Independent estimates suggest the plan will cost more than $300 billion over 10 years.”

My point is not to blister my beloved alma mater but to underline the importance of getting our young well started as I certainly was thanks to costs then.

If our many billionaires could invest in direct student aid in educational institutions with tax breaks already in place and simply specify that their grants go only to reducing student costs it would not solve the problem but at least would be a start.

Hope Biden’s relatively modest boost to help students can get past the litigation. However, the full price of 4 years at Yale of $84,000 times 4 ($336,000) if not somehow ameliorated could leave most families financially staggering.

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?” and “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”.

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