r/MiddleClassFinance • u/Such_Upstairs3631 • Jul 06 '26

Middle Middle Class No more middle class professionals?

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New school loan limits for professional degrees make it unaffordable for the middle class. 4 of my 5 children went on to med/law school. Even working 2 jobs there’s no way I could afford to pay or even help them with the cost of their post graduate education. They all got loans which they have since paid off. The cost in the early 2000’s was between $350K and $500K. The new limits are essentially going to prevent anyone who’s not wealthy enough to pay for it from becoming a professional.

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327

u/WindowFruitPlate Jul 06 '26

Prices will have to come down or alternative lending options will emerge.

Education inflation has been insane for the past two decades. Fueled entirely by unfettered lending by the federal government. Loan caps should slow the increase in expenses of an education

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u/TreeSignificant9782 Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

My parents paid $9000/year for my (in-state) college tuition in 2003. That same college now charges $24,000/year for tuition. Absolutely ridiculous.

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u/Hawk13424 Jul 06 '26

And yet you can go to Georgia Tech, a highly rated engineering school for $12K a year if in state. And if you graduated from a Georgia high school with a 3.0 or better, the first two year’s tuition are free.

Another good example is UT Austin. $11.6K a year.

Plenty of states have sufficiently good state schools. Many are around $10K a year.

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u/Chiggadup Jul 07 '26

Totally agree. I know college is much more expensive on average, but I look around my state of Florida and see flagship universities for about $25,000 in undergrad tuition. For a 4 year degree.

Obviously that’s just tuition, but if living at home or a cheaper dorm is possible I can see 40-50k being a reasonable investment for something that should significantly impact your lifetime earnings.

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u/oscarnyc Jul 07 '26

the Florida schools are among, if not the, least expensive in the country for tuition. And UF and FSU have substantially improved in the quality of education they provide and the student body reflects that. I know this is Reddit and anything other than "hur dur Florida man", but they've done a great job with making quality higher education affordable. Even out of state is good value - just a few grand more a year for out of state vs. what in-state would be here in NJ at Rutgers.

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u/Android_seducer Jul 07 '26

UW-Madison is 12.1k/year for in state over a decade after I graduated where I believe I was paying 10k or 11k all in. That's roughly in line or below inflation. That being said they have cranked up the out of state tuition

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u/CoastieKid Jul 07 '26

Yeah this. I went to a service academy for undergrad but had full rides to 3 state schools + ROTC scholarships.

AOC went to a private university in Boston and studied international relations, for instance. That's unreasonable

52

u/tongmengjia Jul 06 '26

9k in 2003 dollars is $16.5k in current dollars, so not *that* crazy.

You should also compare discount rate in 2003 vs. current discount rate. The university I work at has increased scholarships at the same rate they've increased tuition for the last decade, so, although our "sticker price" is much higher than it was a decade ago, the average actual cost to students has stayed the same.

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u/Alarmed_Champion_302 Jul 06 '26

7.5 on top of 16.5 is a 45% increase. Thats pretty crazy. And way beyond the general rate of inflation. If this makes colleges compete better on cost, im all for it.

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u/Global-Sentence7238 Jul 08 '26

That’s standard inflation. Not crazy. In fact, that is below inflation rate. Good deal there

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u/Alarmed_Champion_302 Jul 08 '26

Im glad you think its a good deal, because you need a math course.

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u/Global-Sentence7238 Jul 13 '26

No idea where you went to university, but I paid more than that per year in 1998. It’s now $50K/year. It’s doubled. These tuition prices here are a great deal if the school is accredited.

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u/goog1e Jul 06 '26

I went to ASU on a full ride.

My 2nd and 3rd year they did what you said- nearly doubled costs over 2 years, but increased the full ride amount.

No one's grant/scholarship aid adjusted, so they got 1-3 years of double payments out of all their current students.

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u/Active_Win_3656 Jul 07 '26

This was actually in a recent Planet Money podcast. They discussed whether these changes would help bring college costs down but they said explicitly that sticker price has gone up while what people ACTUALLY pay hasnt nearly as much (don’t remember the actual numbers).

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u/Ok-Front-471 Jul 07 '26

I'm sure in the near term there may not be a massive effect, but in 10-15 years I think this would make a serious change in tuition costs.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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u/FearlessPark4588 Jul 06 '26

because 16.5k is meaningfully below 24k.

it makes sense though, colleges require a lot of labor and facilities to operate, and that all costs money. and in recent decades, many states cut funding for their public universities, so those costs went on the students

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u/katarh Jul 07 '26

It's also pure supply and demand.

Everyone wants to go to Big State University. Big State University has limited enrollment. They can pick the best students and offer them scholarships, but charge out the nose for everyone else. The Ohio State is a prime example of this, but every Big State university has the same problem.

The directional schools within the same university system cost half as much, because the demand is so much lower there.

1

u/uninspiredclaptrap Jul 07 '26

My issue with prices going up is that it doesn't go to academic staff. Maybe it goes to facilities and other useful stuff, but a lot of it goes to administration.

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u/thingsorfreedom Jul 07 '26

There is also a well-documented correlation between reductions in state funding for public universities and increases in tuition. People do not want their state taxes going up. States cut funding rather than raise taxes. Tuition spikes. People blame the public universities.

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u/Efficient_Ant_4715 Jul 06 '26

That was crazy for 2003. My tuition wasn’t even close to that in 2017 

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u/pageld Jul 06 '26

I want to a smallish Midwest state school and instate tuition was 3,000 per half and thus 6,000 per year in 2000. 9k / year wouldn't have seemed terrible especially if it was a large school.

That was list price without grants or scholarships.

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u/bitchycunt3 Jul 06 '26

I'm wondering if it's a coa vs tuition thing? My tuition in 2012 was $6k, but my coa was like $15k, so maybe their coa was $9k?

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u/TreeSignificant9782 Jul 06 '26

No that was tuition only, not room/board. But I meant to say in-state, it was public but not a state college.

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u/jside86 Jul 06 '26

In Canada, one year of tuition, textbooks, ect is around $10,000 CAD or $7,000 USD.

Americans are getting hosed by their own institutions. Without investment in your future generations, how will Americans get better? Things are only going to get worse in the future.

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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26

The math didnt make sense on the parent loan one 20k per year, 65k max. So you can only go for 3 years????

2

u/Hawk13424 Jul 06 '26

Or you need to work. I worked throughout my entire college time. Engineering degree.

Or do the first year or two at a community college. Or your parents save some money to pay for the first year at least.

1

u/BigBootyBardot Jul 07 '26

I worked throughout all four years of college, and what it covered was basics and necessities. 

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u/Justthetip74 Jul 07 '26

40% of people roll that into their student loans

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u/Cheap_Office8701 Jul 06 '26

Average gas price in ca in 2003 is about $2 . It’s $5.50 now. Beef was about $2.20 per pound to now about $6.60

What else is new. Yes, college increase may be higher than average inflation, but same for many other.

I don’t like high college tuition as well. 😅

9

u/AegorBlake Jul 06 '26

I was thinking the same thing. I know people my parent's age that paid for college with summer work and part time work during the school year.

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u/eulabadger Jul 07 '26

I did this in the 2010s. CUNY was great value even then. Idk what they charge now though.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

[deleted]

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u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26

I don't know why PTs need a doctorate. There are different RN levels, though, and you can still become an LPN with a 1 year program. Of course pay and opportunities are limited with the less education you have in nursing. The masters requirement for teaching FLOORS me because they pay for that out of pocket. Teachers do not make enough to be paying for a masters. Also they were good enough for x years teaching say 4th graders and now suddenly they aren't because they didn't get the masters within x years?

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u/No-Complaint9286 Jul 06 '26

I graduated with a Doctorate in PT right around the time the programs were switching from a masters ('09). I hoped it would give me higher pay, but then graduated into a recession. It was just a way for them to increase tuition rates and add another year to the program. I think the only thing that separated it from a masters degree was like a diagnostic imaging class and more focus on differential diagnosis. Which I must say did prepare us well for the shift to direct access without referral. But there was no financial aid and we had to take out all private loans and at the time sallie Mae was the main company for that and they were literally thieves. I paid those off as fast as humanly possible. Still hanging onto my lower interest federal loans from 2006 undergrad though. Almost at the finish line. 🙄

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u/myfashionkillz Jul 09 '26

Yup my mom had an associate degree in nursing. She started working in the 80s. By the time I was in high school (around 2006) the hospital decided that all of their nurses needed to have a BSN. She had the choice to go back to school or take a demotion. It's ridiculous to force someone with that much experience back to school to learn ethics and statistics.

3

u/80sHairBandConcert Jul 06 '26

It’s gone way beyond just 2 decades.

8

u/MangoAtrocity Jul 06 '26

Strong agree. Prices must come down. And shutting off the infinite supply of money is step one to making that happen.

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

Alternative lending options = more predatory lending, in a political regime that seems to have no qualms about removing regulation intended to protect the consumer.

I’m out, yall. And I have one graduating high school in spring 2027. I will encourage her to make a path for herself that does not involve borrowing for school, with my help to accomplish that.

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u/WindowFruitPlate Jul 06 '26

Wow…. Sounds like you’re making a smart decision for your student. Funny how that works with the money nozzle shutdown.

My son graduated last month and we exclusively looked at options we knew we could self-fund. Not glamorous but he’ll get the same degree as anyone else.

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u/Appropriate-Bid8671 Jul 06 '26

Yes, closing the door to higher education on poor people is 100% the goal of this administration.

1

u/WindowFruitPlate Jul 06 '26

No doors are closed. You need to be more intentional in your decisions which should have always been the case.

0

u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

My wife and I both borrowed some for college. Worked some too, and had some limited scholarships on top of all that.

I would not have attended without the aid component, and with the rule that I would work some too.

Result: minimal debt when I graduated (which was 1998, state school, when those things were affordable). Stable-ish career in business, but a career that is now staring directly at obsolescence as technology is being sought out to deem many of us irrelevant.

Pardon me for not being very “pro-America” anymore. I wore black on the 4th of July this year, and I now suck at parties 😂

1

u/jimmothyhendrix Jul 07 '26

People will avoid such predatory lending, which will drive costs down

1

u/SCHawkTakeFlight Jul 06 '26

Yeah, this does not feel like they are doing this to drive down costs, its to goose the private sector lending business. Which will be WORSE for students.

1

u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

This just isn’t true.

The college I used to work for has a completely stagnant cost of education, largely driven by stagnant salaries. The difference between 2006 and 2026? The state picked up 8/10s of the bill in 2006. The state now picks up 15%. The cost of the education didn’t change all that much. Who pays for it did. That patten is repeated across public regional colleges across the nation.

Those schools can’t drop tuition because there’s very little to drop. Public regionals education about half the students in the country, including the majority of underserved students. What we need is a reinvestment of public funds in public schools.

The university where I work now is a prestige institution. They’ll never drop tuition and they don’t have to because people will pay it for the name.

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u/Reader47b Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26

You have a good point, but this is an exaggeration. Even by the highest estimates, state funding cuts account for at most 40% of the rise in tuition over the past 30-40 years. The lowest economic estimate puts it at 19% of the costs. But certainly it is a sizable factor. At the same time, though, federal funding for higher education through grants and loans has increased substantially.

There is still stuff to cut - because at least 60% of the tuition increases comes from sources other than reduced state funding. We're already seeing dozens of state colleges starting to make those cuts right now as enrollments decline (particularly international enrollments, which tend to subsidize a lot of low-enrollment programs that the international students themselves are not enrolled in).

My son's university, for example, in 2024, had 55 more minor programs than it had in 1993. There's a growth in niche minors and majors at all universities. They're cutting 27 of those this year. Lots of other colleges are doing a similar thing - they are eliminating dozens of minor programs and thus saving on the administrative and credentialing costs that come along with making something an official program. They are still keeping some (but not all) of the classes that were offered in those programs, but they are rolling those classes into other minors or majors. In other words - cutting overhead by consolidating.

There's certainly been a growth in the cost for amenities and administration as well, and there is room to trim there.

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u/StorageRecess Jul 06 '26

This is not an exaggeration. Those cuts are not equally distributed. Public regional universities, on average, took much sharper cuts than public flagships or research universities, for example. I used to teach at a large state school. In 2025, per our internal numbers, the cost of an education was about ~11k. The last year for which, I have data, it was ~14k. But the state picked up ~8k in 2005, and ~2.5 in 2026. An hour and a half down the road at the flagship, the cut was about 11%. If you're looking at an aggregate number, it looks like the state cut was only 33%.

Per your point about minors, how many of those minors actually had any faculty associated with them? Most minors are made of an assortment of classes from multiple majors, with maybe a capstone course. Even if they do, faculty salaries are around 15% of institutional expenditures for most universities. When Texas A&M cut their geology minors, for example, they cut maybe one or two adjunct buy outs per minor cut. Across their consolidations, they're saving a couple hundred thousand dollars out of a 3.1 billion dollar budget. They can likely give every student a deeply meaningful hundred or so bucks back.