That's fucked up. Nobody should have student debt, whatever generation.
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2026
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Not going to uni is feeling like one of the best choices I ever made
There’s also a lot of peer pressure for college. My niece started not too long ago. She was going to go to a community college where she would have gotten a decent education, but her cousin peer pressured her into going to a more expensive college. Her parents did not want to pay for it and told her to get a loan, which she refused. A few tantrums later she got her wish. The college was crazy in their curriculum and she dropped out after a semester or two, her parents ended up owing money and she went to another college. Not sure if her credits even transferred.
Staying in state helps a lot, and just doing research on what is really needed. My 4 year bachelor’s tuition was $15,000 at a state college. The same education in the fancier colleges was $30,000 per semester, vs my $3,000 ish. We all ended up at the same place, except I had no debt. I went to check recently and I think the same degree for 4 years is about $20,000 so it didn’t go up much in the last 15yrs.
To be fair to them, my parents grew up on a farm without electricity or running water. Unsurprising that they have less student debt than I do :3
I'm so glad I only went to community college and got an associate's. Now that I'm working full time it's so obvious that the vast majority of what I spent time on at college was a complete waste of money.
My takeaway from my bachelor's was that my time in school wasn't so much about what I learned there (though it did teach me things I wouldn't have even thought of on my own), but a) learning how to learn on my own, and b) getting a piece of paper proving that I can stick with a difficult and expensive program long enough to get through it.
Though as I understand it, at the associate's level, classes are more about learning specific skills than the theory behind them. Like an associates level CS course might teach a specific language or framework while a bachelor's level CS course will focus on algorithms, data structures, how a genetic framework might be designed and built, etc.
To get an associates your course load was probably disproportionally gen ed requirements so... No kidding.
I ain't gonna say Obama did it, but all this started when FFELP was shut down
It was those darned participation trophies.
I'm NOT going to Bail out some KID!
-Republicans OK with Bailing out Billionaire Pedophiles!
I paid my student debt, these kids don't deserve any handouts!
Boomers who paid tuition and living costs that were a manageable fraction of their part time student job that doesn't even fucking exist anymore.
These kids ain't gonna learn, 'lessn we take off them trainin' wheels...and also the pedals, brake, chain and maybe another wheel or two.
Boomer life:
Every other generation's life:
Only the other generations wouldn't be the unicycle on flat ground, they'd be balancing on a kixed-grade cement wall and the boomer would be on a nice flat paved surface on their two wheels.
And the unicycle is a rental.
That Danny Macaskill?
Yeah, it was either him or Fabio Wibmer for the trials god gif but all the Wibmer gifs i found kept cutting off.
Good eye!
Kids just don't wanna work now! They just need to work harder! We just found a job and paid off our debt, they should do the same! /s
Why do school books cost $300 each? Cost like $15 to print
Why do we need a new calculus book every 3 years? Calculus isn’t fucking changing!
There should be one public domain calculus book used by every college and if teachers want new homework problems there should be FOSS software to randomize the numbers and email out fresh problems.
Then the professors don't get to make a cut of the book sales.
There is FOSS software for elearning, Moodle. Just upload your homework to that in any of the many formats it supports.
Library Genesis is a great resource. No claims about it being legal in your country
Same reason as the rest of college being expensive. The can charge whatever they want because the government will loan the money to pay for it.
In the US states have reduced their funding for public colleges shifting the burden to students. On top of that universities have more programs and features than they used to. The university I was at constantly operated at a loss.
Low volume and high costs mainly. The printing costs are dwarfed by all the writing, proofreading, layout, editing etc that goes into them. The $300 ones tend to be these massive books with a thousand pages of instruction, problem sets, images, infographics, etc. None of these books are selling a billion copies like 50 Shades of Grey either. The most famous textbooks maybe, but a lot of them would be lucky to sell a thousand copies.
And of course, yes, greedy giant publishing companies. But those companies publish books for many different courses and professors, plus I think they own academic journals as well (which make them way more money and cost way less to publish than textbooks do).
Which is of course ludicrous. Why is education so insanely expensive should include all the materials?
My degree in Australia had some suggested text books, but none of them required it^, and all the content you actually needed was supplied in the course materials.
^ one exception, a computer network admin class had a book for lab instructions. But the library had a set of them sufficient for a lab and limited the borrow duration to 3 hours so you'd check it out, run to class and return it back afterwards every week.
I’ve also seen professors who get kickbacks from the sale of textbooks up to and including professors making their own textbook that they authored a required text for the course.
Are you asking why education is so expensive? It’s because the amount of staff (especially non-teaching admin staff) employed by universities has ballooned way out of control. A modern university campus is basically a miniature city at this point. It has its own police force, hospital, doctors offices, therapists, many different restaurants, laundry services, recreation and entertainment facilities, gyms, climbing walls, libraries (had those forever though), residential buildings, academic study (outside class) facilities… On and on and on it goes.
All of that stuff is paid for by the students through tuition, residence fees, meal plans, and miscellaneous fees. Sure, the construction of the buildings is usually paid for by donations, government grants, or the school’s endowment fund, but the day-to-day operating costs and staffing are all paid by students.
You might then ask how we got here, or why we don’t have a “bare bones university” with none of that extra stuff? Simple: competition between universities combined with student demand. Bare Bones University is not going to attract the top students who already have a ton of better options.
I’ve also seen professors who get kickbacks from the sale of textbooks up to and including professors making their own textbook that they authored a required text for the course.
Nobody is getting rich by writing a textbook. The most likely reason for using a book they wrote is that it includes information they thought was important.
up to and including professors making their own textbook that they authored a required text for the course.
one university i was at, the instructor pulling this shit had a tear-out homework section at the back of his book to prevent resale. I was all ready to stab a bitch, but thank the crablord and my parole officer for good breathing exercises. Calms the vinegar.
You forgot one factor that's also highly important: sports. College sports ALONE makes a lot of universities an eye popping amount of cash, and also costs them a boatload too. Couple that with donations and profits from those sports being earmarked ONLY for those sports (can't use your basketball money to do anything but improve your basketball facilities and pay the staff), and you're putting a stranglehold on a lot of ways to reduce cost.
I didn’t want to include sports because I live in Canada and sports are so minor they’re basically a non-factor here, yet tuition costs are still insanely high (for international students, which reflects the true cost of education).
My parents and in-laws: $0 student debt
My spouse and me: just shy of $150k
In America I'm free to accrue massive debt! 🦅💵🇺🇸
Their education was worth $0 because they allowed the system to exploit their children.
Until recently, encouraged by high school guidance counselors and college admissions and financial aid staff to accrue massive debt.
It IS the smartest of the stupidest moves for some of us. I make much more money than I would have without a degree, so I'll still come out financially ahead. In would have been so much nicer to have gotten a decent education and not be saddled with enough debt to buy a small house (at the time, before the housing market went insane), though.