[Grovenet] The Cost of Education

[Ron D'Eau Claire]

SHEPHERDSTOWN, West Virginia (AP) -- A father and his two sons died Saturday
in an apparent murder-suicide at Shepherd University, authorities said.

Douglas W. Pennington, 49, shot sons Logan, 26, and Benjamin, 24, multiple
times then shot himself once in the chest with a .38 caliber revolver on the
Shepherd University campus, state police said. Both sons were identified as
Shepherd students. 

Police said the elder Pennington traveled to the campus to visit his sons,
but authorities offered no reason for the shootings....

---------------------------
Full story:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/09/02/university.shooting.ap/index.html

I saw a report yesterday that discussed the tremendous personal and
financial stresses placed on families by the relentless increase in the cost
of a college education. The motives behind the above murders isn't clear
yet, but it reminded me of the issues revealed in that report. 

As more and more debt is offered to students to pay college costs through
various government and private sources, the costs go up accordingly. Many
schools are private businesses, free to increase their prices as high as the
market will bear. Just like the price of houses, the prices go up when
customers have more money to spend.  

Unlike the price of a good home, school may or may not be a profitable
investment for the individual, even over a 30 year working lifetime. The
report showed that if an individual took the nominal cost of a Bachelor's
Degree today, about $100,000, and invested it in simple mutual funds that
pay a very nominal return of about 5% a year, and simply got a job out of
High School, he/she could make the same amount of money over their career,
including the interest on the investment, as the college grad.

Of course, if there's an economic downturn during that 30 year career, the
college grad finds jobs scarce with a huge debt to pay off where the High
School grad and investor has no debt and, if really needed, some cash
resources to rely on to survive.

Indeed, the extremely successful people in the USA seem to be successful
independently of their education. More than a few never went beyond a High
School diploma or they dropped out of college without graduating. They are
the exceptions. It's the "mainstream" that I believe we should be paying
attention to, and we are asking them to do something supremely stupid to get
an education: go deeply into debt with no idea about how to pay it off. Many
kids are graduating to teach or go into other careers in which they'll be
lucky to earn $35,000/year while carrying school debts of over $100,000 to
pay off.

I'm not advocating ignorance. I am saying that America's education system is
broken. 

Ron D'Eau Claire