Yes, yes there is someone who will report the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… it’s Citybloggy. Utter dismay is what a typical reaction to the common media report should be these days. A typical media report will focus on only one of about five crucial factors involved on the subject topic; down below Citybloggy will give you all five… because he’s a fiver… a five star.
The REAL cost of college:
1. What they ask you to fork over to fuck off for four years: about $50,000 per annum, 50k per year, 50 grand young lad, give me fifty fucking thousand dollars and you are not allowed to drink alcohol yet. They may teach you that those figures add up to $200,000 dollars young lady, young fella.
2. If you take an economics course, you may take away that there is an “opportunity cost” to going to college. That opportunity cost is “not working or earning money”, because you’re listening to some gangsta professa while he is essentially stealing your money and going on some maniacal ego trip about listening to his voice. So if you focused on working, let’s be cheerful and say that you would be able to muster up about $25,000 grand a year, about the median income in the U.S., which is comprised from mostly non-college graduates. So your four year opportunity cost is about $100,000 big boys.
3. Interest and lack of interest. Yes, they may wait until your final year of college, or maybe your junior year, to tell you how to calculate the real cost of financing. That’s if you major in finance, and by the time you learn you are already screwed and have no choice as to looking around for a better deal. So, if your nominal four year cost is 200k as explained above, let’s figure grandpa and mom and dad somehow are convinced to fork over half of that to “help” you out. Maybe some art history class would inform you that half of $200,000 is $100,000; that’s six figures for all of you liberal arts majors. So if you finance $100,000 at 6.9% interest for 30 years, guess what you end up paying just in interest charges? That’s right, $140,000 grand, big boys and girls. And if your parents were not as helpful, and could only fork over $57,500, your interest costs would balloon to approximately $200,000. Oh yeah, and if you were working for yourself, instead of working for banks and professas, you could have your money work for you and earn interest, instead of coughing it up. If you saved $10,00o grand a year for four years in the posed alternative scenario (of working and living modestly at home), you would have $40,000 big boys to invest. And $40,000 grand invested in gubmint bonds at 3% a year for 30 years would yield you approximately $100,000 at the end. Invest in gold and silver, and perhaps a much greater sum.
4. Debt slavery. You essentially would have to be working until you resign to diapers again just to pay off your lousy joke that you were sold on before you had the right to vote, consume alcohol, or become a real estate agent. Instead of working because you like that kind of thing, or because you have interest in a particular field, you would be working to fund the salaries of lust mongering bankers and lazy la di da professoras. Just hope that a debtors prison near you does not come calling for your free labor.
5. Addition 101. They do not stress this enough in the twelve year sentence of public school math that could be retracted into one year (if they let you play first, and then catch you at calm moments of decreased testiness and angst). So here it goes and you may use a calculator to check the math:
$200,000 nominal cost of four year college
$200,000 interest costs on a 30 year $142,500 loan @ 6.9%
$100,000 opportunity cost of not working for the four years after the twelve year sentence of public school
TOTAL : equals $500,000 for something that does not necessarily provide any value in this day and age.
How do you repay that? If you are lucky, after you work, feed, cloth, and shelter yourself for 30 years, you might come up with some table scraps that amount to that figure. Even if you make $100,000k in income directly out of college (not going to happen, except for maybe the most motivated and obsessed 1% of you), after taxes and food and shelter and transportation costs, you may still be stuck with the debt burden for 20 years or so. How do you value paying for the salary of big bankers and tenured professors that teach only six months out of the year? Mastercard may say it’s priceless, but they charge merchants about 2 to 3 % of each transaction you make at the dive bar to drown out the current malaise of debt not being subsided or diluted by the habit being developed out of need for peace of nerves.
This is the basic 101 course on the subject, not meant to dissuade one from going to college. Of course, the cost of the course can be much less if taken through a less expensive route of alternative means. For a more detailed more user friendly dialogue contact Citybloggy below.
Tags: college, diapers, Voluntary Slavery
