Financial Issues of College Students

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Tuition- $40,000
Room &Board- $11,000
Books&Supplies-$800
Personal Expenses-$1,200
Total fees~ $53,000


For a 4 year private college with a top tier reputation students will end up paying between 50 and 55k per academic year. This can be a burden on parents and the students already, who often find themselves with huge amounts of debt upon graduation; simply because they have chosen to pursue the best possible education. Do they really need the burden of more expenses on top of this already heavy load?

Unfortunately the schools are not as understanding of the high prices as one would expect. Surveys of students at 3 New England Small Colleges (NESCAC) including both Williams and Amherst colleges report students having to bear high costs for travel arrangements to airports in Albany, Boston, and New York City. Speaking with students at Amherst College it was reported that a 1-way trip to Boston (~1.5 hours from the school) is about $33/person. Albany and New York City (3-4 hours away) cost closer to $45/person for the one way trip. Consider the fact that the students are traveling in 50+ person shuttles and that comes out to well over $1000/fare. Fuel costs even with a large vehicle like that are not reaching over $75 and surely the lowly driver is not making more than $100/trip. So what is happening to the leftover money? This is going straight into the already thick budgets of the colleges, to consumed with money to help their paying students head home for the holidays.

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1. What do the schools care?

Education loans are an asset-stripping operation, nothing more. They're a way for the financial industry to heap enormous amounts of debt on the least informed and most naive in our society - debt that can never be discharged due to the uniquely harsh terms that come with being a student loan borrower.

The actual value of the education given to the average student paying these numbers is probably less than four figures, and that includes all the operating costs. Ask yourself how Larry Summers managed to have $1B to play with (and lose) in the financial markets on behalf of Harvard. Institutions the size of a university don't accumulate that amount of money unless they are making obscene profits from their operations.