I was skimming through my Costco magazine last night and noted an article on education in America. I didn't have time to read it in depth, but it got me thinking about higher education in the US.

It seems to me that college has become a luxury in our country these days. That is such a difference from when I was going away to college in the late 1970's. Back then, it seemed that almost all of my peer group in high school went away to school. Of the handful that remained at home, most of them went to junior college (our JC is the oldest in the nation) and some of them went on to four year schools to finish their degrees, mostly in a business field or teaching.

Nowadays, it seems that the majority of the college bound kids I get to talk to (in my dental practice) are choosing to go to the junior college to begin their higher education. And by no means is that group necessarily the majority of kids I see. Many of them just go and get a job if they can find one. Or they end up in a vocational school program.

Not that there is anything wrong with that. And maybe it's always been that way. After all, my own experience was colored by the group of kids I ran around with. As I said, they were all that type of college bound kid. I'm sure there were plenty of kids graduating with me who did NOT go to college at all. It just seems like it was more "the thing to do" back then. You were almost expected to go to college.

Now it seems like there are two impediments to kids going away to college. But as I think of it, maybe it's just two manifestations of the same impediment: cost.

I have often felt that parents of my generation are and have been too accepting of their kids' "lot in life". There is too often an attitude, or so it appears to me, of "it's good enough for me, so it's good enough for them too." My own parents definitely did not have that attitude. They worked hard and sacrificed so that I could do better than them. But they also saw that as a possibility. It was very possible for a smart kid to do far better than his/her parents did.

But maybe that's just a result of the high cost of an education. When I went, I think my whole year at Loyola of Chicago was less than 6 grand, and that included room and board. I don't exactly know what it costs today, but I know that it's a LOT more than that.

Perhaps those parents of today have that attitude BECAUSE they do not see the possibility of their kids doing better than they did. The overwhelming cost and resultant debt of a good college education and the lack of jobs for many college grads (depending on their degree) is depressing. It may well be something that they don't see themselves being able to overcome.

When I think about it, I wonder just why the cost has skyrocketed as it has. I don't think academics' salaries have gone up THAT much...not as much as the cost of a college education has proportionally. So where does the money go? I don't know.

I do know that a good higher education has to somehow become cheaper and more attainable in the US. If it doesn't, we'll fall further behind the rest of the world and we will see our middle class standard of living plummet further than it has.

I don't have any answers on this subject; just concerns...

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