Workers have to work for a longer period of time in order to afford University Tuition than they used to in 1980. The trend is hardest on minimum wage workers who have to work 32.24 weeks of full-time work in 2020 to afford tuition, compared to 5.95 weeks of full-time work in 1980. This ignores taxes and assumes all money earned is put toward tuition.
Since 1980 the price of a Year’s University Tuition has increased by 282% when adjusted for inflation.
Wages have gone up nominally, but not as much when accounting for inflation. The minimum wage has decreased since 1980 after adjusting for inflation.
Sources:
- Median and Top 5% Income: Census.gov (Table H-3)
- Minimum Wage: Department of Labor
- Year’s University Tuition: NCES (Public Universities)
Visualized on boomerchecker.com
Edit:
- Fixed an error when converting Median and Top 5% from annual to weekly. The time to save for those two brackets rose as a result.
- Added wage data for the different wage brackets for reference.
College has just been out of reach for me. At 15 I had to start working to help my family get by. It was hard not to feel contempt, because I love learning. I’m also more of a “flapping in the wind” person for sure, so back then I’d probably have done meh in college lol.
I try not to let it hamper my self education, but only so much I can do. Most of my peers went to college, and I feel like we have just very very different experiences in the world. I remember when my friends started at school, and they were from fairly well off families, and I thought it was funny that their biggest lessons were how to function as an adult, while I had been doing that for a time already. It was hard not to scoff at higher education which was an unhealthy defense mechanism on my part.
I appreciate all you people out there looking out for me and feeding me specialized bits of knowledge that I lack.
I feel like most people on lemmy are just way more educated than I am, and there is still some feelings I have that I don’t like within my self. Like the need to maybe overcompensate, which is really dumb, but there is also a fair amount of “talking down to” that I have experienced from educated people I really consider my peers on an intellectual level.
I’m just rambling and my experience is obviously more nuanced than what I can formulate here.
We need to fix education, which is a sympton of the economic system itself imo. Not everyone can go to college, thats a design. There needs to be human sacrifices for the well being of many, and that’s really sad. At the end of the day, I wouldn’t trade my experience for anything. End rant.
There are tons of free accredited courses online. You can get certain degrees from Harvard and Yale, online for free. I don’t want to link to Reddit, but there is a community over there that just archives the links to the courses.
It may take you a bit longer, but one course at a time at your own pace is an extremely easy way to accidentally get a degree.