college rankings

[cheesycow]

Chees. I would have strongly opposed your viewpoint 20 years ago, and even most recently as a few years ago. Now, however, I agree with you. There is no way my parents could afford today's tuition at my undergra nor could I afford truly afford my graduate degree at SLU. First, the tech bubble, then the housing bubble, next the credit card and the commercial retail bubbles with pop and soon the university bubbles will go. There is no way we can sustain these increases in price. Also, while few would doubt the difference in quality between a Harvard degree and that of UMSL, many students find jobs without the need the for their expensive degrees. Aside from making me a bit more attractive on my graduate school application, my undergrad degree has done nothing for me that an UMSL degree could not have done. At some point, paying $200,000 to slightly move ahead on a subjective standards list anyway is downright foolish. Schools like SLU need to be careful. Building up $100 million endowments to spend on non-essential, but required, items to keep up with the other schools is not the best use for a university committed to offering a Catholic education to the upper-middle class.

It'll be interesting to see where it ends. Are students eventually going to pay 70-80-90-100k a year to go to places like Harvard or Yale? What happens when another recession hits, and all these students are graduating with 200-400k in the hole and they're trying to compete against laid off professionals with 10-20 years of experience? That's what just happened to a minor degree, and is still happening now. Plenty of Law School grads from Wash U looking for work right now.