Most of my griping about the U.S. educational system has been restricted to those issues that personally impact me and my son (I’m selfish that way). That means posts on the expense of daycare, posts on the expense of pre-k, posts on the expense of anything academic for little ones.
But I’m growing as a person, folks. Today I’m writing about student expenses far off in the future, when JP goes to college.
What, you say, certainly I’ve begun putting away money for his PhD already? Uh, no. I’ve been too busy these past years getting divorced, which is Swahili for lighting-all-your-money-on-fire-and-then-peeing-on-it-while-my-attorney-cackles-and-buys-a-fourth-house. Little known fact.
Anyway, in that spirit, I give you this tidbit from Gawker, ranking America’s top universities in terms of outstanding student debt:
1) New York University: $659 million
2) University of Southern California: $631 million
3) Penn State University: $590 million
4) Ohio State University: $560 million
5) University of Minnesota: $495 million
6) Arizona State University: $479 million
7) University of Texas: $474 million
8 Michigan State University: $433 million
9) Indiana University- Purdue University: $421 million
10) Rutgers: $398 million
Isn’t that swell? Can someone point me in the direction of the nearest unsecured bridge? Not that I’m jumping mind you–I just wanna puke.
Well NYU is depressing. But UT and MSU both have over 50k students at a time. Ohoi, and Penn are up there. So their numbers don’t seem that crazy. Especially when you look at NYU.
What’s especially depressing is that since Rick Perry deregulated tuition in Texas that cost has more than doubled. I’ve been out of school about as long as Rick Perry has been governor. My tuition cost was less than $2k per semester. It’s now almost $5k. Of course, $40k is still a bargain compared to most schools.