For the record, I’m not American nor live in the US, but I have a 19-year-old son who started attending the University of Chicago this year, studying economics. Just the tuition itself is $70k. My husband and I are lucky enough to be able to afford it - I still believe it’s an outrageous amount of money to attend college.
I’m sure it’s not the sole factor, but universities in many other parts of the world are partially subsidised by the government.
Yeah, in our country university is free if you get high enough grades in the end of high school exams and then if you maintain high enough grades throughout university. Even if you don’t the tuition is affordable for virtually everybody. Like the equivalent of ~$1k per year for most degrees with some exceptions like medicine. A kid could make that in a month working a summer job.
Then why didn’t you send your kid to school in your country? Americans do not pay $70k for undergrad tuition unless it’s a very expensive study.
(E: the OP corrected me below that theyre not from the Great North. Ill still leave this next part up to demonstrate that universities charge a lot more for international students than domestic but I acknowledge that I jumped the gun here)
The fact that you use the $ symbol, have socialized college tuition, and are not from the US makes me think you’re Canadian. I did the reverse of your situation and used this tuition fee lookup tool from UToronto to see what I would be paying for a year of medical school. Came out to a little under $46k/ for the 2025-26 school year.
Cause the quality is not the best, he wanted to go to the US, and we can afford it. Plus the US offers many more opportunities.
Sounds like you answered your own question there. Tuition for foreign students is expensive because the ones who come here almost always have family that can pay for it. Like I said above, no American is spending $70k per year for undergrad studies. The smart ones are going to community colleges, which are becoming free in some capacity across most states, building up a GPA, and then transferring to a University off scholarships.
I spent 7 years in school without paying anything for tuition, everything was covered by scholarships. I’ve known many people with the same experience
University of Chicago is a pretty prestigious school, too. Tuition-wise, it’s on par with Yale, Harvard, Stanford.
UIC is half of UofC. NIU and EIU are a quarter.
OP is asking why one of the most expensive universities in the country is expensive, and assuming that all universities in the US are that expensive.
That’s good. I’m glad there are ways for people to stay debt free or as debt free as possible. Since I always see student debt being a very big issue in the US in the news.
My undergraduate tuition at a state public university is under 10k a year. I was severely injured in the military though, so the government pays my bill.
What you see in the news is the result of predatory practices and people not being able to use their degrees in a profitable way. There’s a lot of jokes about philosophy programs and art history degrees being a pipeline to working in fast food, because often the only way to use those degrees is to get more education (more loans) so you can teach the subject.
The biggest issues I think comes from the facts that A) there are a handful of very predatory schools with huge inter/national outreach programmes and B) highschool students are pressured into choosing their college path before graduating HS, when they’re still a kid.
The kids don’t know how to actually evaluate their options and end up picking the big, expensive schools just off brand recognition alone. Lots of people fell for this trap and graduated with degrees that weren’t very competitive to state degrees and cost 2-10x more.
I think the next 10 years are going to see students’ debt at graduation decrease as community college enrollment keeps going up and the stigma of “community college” education, which was a big deterrant for a long time, goes away.
I’m actually from Romania, and for medicine at the most popular school in the country for it here, you’d be paying 15000 lei, or $3143 per year for the 2024-2025 school year as a local. https://umfcd.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/TAXE_SI_TARIFE_UNIVERSITARE/Taxe UMFCD 2024-2025.pdf As an international student studying in English you’d be paying 8500€ per year.
its the opposite of that.
its that the unsecured ‘loans’ provided to ignorant kids for schooling are immune to be disgorged by bankruptcy. so they are abused by agencies providing the loans, and the schools who know those loans are forever financed.
its taking advantage of children, basically. but its a-ok, because profit.
Not really the opposite. We used to subsidize higher education. The non expungable debt was part of the “fix” for that issue that Reagan caused
We didn’t used to fund to the tune of $70k per student though. Something just isn’t adding up, but I have no idea what.
Bloated administration took advantage of the guaranteed federal money that was the idiotic fix for exploding college prices after the public funding stopped. Which only made prices increase more
Agreed. The only two options right now are to either do away with federally secured loans (worse option) or nationalize all universities with efficiency overwatch programs in place (better), but what we have right now is the worst of both worlds w/r/t public-private higher education
It’s an older chart but I have no reason not to think the trend it shows has reversed since 2012. Colleges pivoted really hard in the past 30 years to offering a lot more than just classes and a dorm to attract students. Non-teaching positions have more than doubled since than 70s to handle all the “bloat and bullshit” (one of my professor’s terms, a real old-school guy who hated modern academia) that that’s come along since.
Throw in the fact that federally secured loans means that almost any 18 year old can sign off on whatever the sticker price without much thought and you get those kinds of costs for some students
That, and the loan system.