The Coming Educational/Skills/Training Apocolypse

I've been thinking a lot lately about the consequences of the increases in the costs of acquiring post-high-school skilled and training and education, on the one hand,, and about the increasing importance of those skills and education on the other. The depressing thing is how things have  changed (slowly) over time.  I managed to attend a somewhat selective small liberal arts college based on actual financial aid (scholarships), working (both during the school year and summers), and an affordable contribution from my parents (who had 4 kids to put through college in the space of about 10 years). 

In the intervening 55 years (my older brother started college in 1964), tuition t the school I attended has gone up from $1500 a year to over $50,000 a year a factor of 33, and average family income has increased by a factor of 14, while prices in general have increased by a factor of 8.  One of the things this means is that, when I entered college, tuition at the school I attended amounted to about 20% of average family income.  Now, it's basically 50% of average family income.

Everything I know about higher education tells me that financial aid (I DO NOT COUNT STUDENT LOANS as financial aid) has not increased anything near enough to make it possible for someone like me (my family's income was probably 150% of the average family income in 1965, my tuition plus my brother's tuition probably would have amounted to about 30% of the family's income--before taxes) to have attended the school I did.  At 150% of average family income today, my tuition and my brother's would amount to roughly 65% of family income.  So there's no way we could attend those schools today.

At a public schools--like, for example, Indiana University--tuition was about $350 a year in 1965 and about $10,500 in 2018.  For a family with 2 kids in college, with family income at, say, 2/3 of the average, tuition would have been 14% of average family income in 1965--and 21% today.  And, remember, that does not include books and supplies (textbooks alone have increased tremendously--my intro econ boon was $7--new--in 1966.  A "standard" intro econ book is around $250 (again, new)--a price increase on a par with tuition increases.  It also does not include room and board--also about $10,500 in 2018. 

A college education--or any post-high-school education--which is becoming more and more important has also become disproportionately more expensive to obtain.  It's more and more difficult to make a compelling case for post-high-school education if we expect students to pay for it largely by borrowing. 

On the other hand, it's also the case that the prosperity of our country is more and more dependent precisely on workers with more knowledge, more skills of all sorts.  And we are doing an increasingly bad job of making it possible for people to obtain the education and training that they need--and that we, as a society, need them to have.  We have, it seems, begun to think that there are no society-wide benefits to having a highly-skilled work force.  And, in thinking that we are completely wrong.