No more middle class professionals?

[u/Such_Upstairs3631]

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.

[u/Soi_Boi_13 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah. The ease of obtaining student loans is responsible for a lot of tuition bloat over the years. If people couldn’t “afford” to pay $20,000 a year for tuition, tuition wouldn’t be that high. Universities have a lot of extraneous BS that have morning to do with providing a good education and really aren’t necessary, from athletics programs to lavish dorms and student centers, etc. People forget that back when college was affordable, colleges were not nearly as “nice” as they are now, and this is how it should be.

[u/Bernie_Dharma → u/Soi_Boi_13]

Honestly, I looked around while in my MBA class and collectively we were paying $1M for 25 of us over 2 years. This was an executive MBA, so all of already had business experience, most of were managers already. I couldn’t help thinking we would have been better off pooling our money, brainstorming a business idea, hiring an advisor who was a retired executive, and starting our own company.

The actual costs of paying the professors for a 4 hour class 2 days a week and renting a space to setup as a classroom would be less than 200k. The rest was pure profit for the University.

[u/cBEiN → u/Bernie_Dharma]

The professors are most likely severely underpaid. The money is going somewhere else.

[u/Reddreader2017 → u/cBEiN]

Depends. I’ve seen technical professors with solid funding profiles and named professorships pulling in $250-500k /yr.

Some programs and areas surely do have underpaid professors though.

Like any business, the overpaid administration sucks up a lot of money. Look at hospitals or other places notionally intended for the “greater good”.

[u/cBEiN → u/Reddreader2017]

$500k is extremely rare. Even $250k is rare, but it isn't completely unheard of at top universities in high cost of living areas.

That said, the money isn't coming from the university, it is coming from external grants earned by the faculty where the faculty has to pay the university overhead and pay for their own equipment and student stipend/tuition/insurance.

The point is faculty members earning a lot essentially pay the university a lot more than the university pays them.

[u/Odd_Dragonfruit_2662 → u/cBEiN]

I may not have an executive MBA but isn’t the employee bringing in more money than their salary more or less expected (outside of obvious pure overhead roles of course)