College Opportunity Options

[BamBamBoogie]

Should there be a tuition for college? Some say that it discriminates against those who lack opportunities and financial stability. While others say it prepares you for a society where nothing is free. What do you say?

[-DressYourEyelid...]

i'm just going to assume that all of you posting here in this thread are american. i was just wondering what the average tuition fee is for college/university over there.

[mipadi]

i'm just going to assume that all of you posting here in this thread are american. i was just wondering what the average tuition fee is for college/university over there.

It can vary a lot, based on whether the school is a public, semi-public, or private school. You might be able to go to a public school for as little as $10,000/year; a semi-public school might $15,000-$20,000/year; and a private school can be around $35,000-$50,000/year. This generally includes room & board, too, since most US students live in dorms at schools. At my undergrad institution, a year of school with room & board was about $48,000/year.

But most US students also don't bear that cost themselves. Most get some form of financial aide from the federal and state governments, and from the school itself. For example, I only paid about $8000-$12,000/year to attend college; the rest came from a scholarship given to me by the school. Private schools generally have a much higher ability to award scholarships than public or semi-public schools, since they usually have wealthier alumni donating money to the school.

Finally, there are also community colleges, which are small local schools that some students go to. Those can cost as little as a few thousand dollars a year, but you usually can't get anything above an associate's degree at community colleges. (I don't know if they have associate's degrees in other countries. In the US, an associate's degree represents 2 years of study, a bachelor's degree represents 4 years, a master's degree represents about 6 years, and a doctorate represents anything above about 8 years of study; some doctorate programs take as much as 11 years beyond undergrad in the US.)

As you can see, higher education is very much a business in the US.