Educated But Unemployed: For the First Time in History, There are More Jobless People Who Attended College Than Those Who Didn't

The Real Cost of Higher Education

SavingForCollege.com - An excellent education for your child does not necessarily require that you spend $40,000 in today’s dollars for one year of tuition at an Ivy League school. There are many well-regarded, reasonably-priced private colleges. The average public college or university tuition is lower yet, especially for residents of the state where the school is located.

Type of Institution	Projected 4-Year Tuition and Fees
	Today (Enrolling 2010)	In 18 Years (Enrolling 2028)
Private College	$119,400	$340,800
Public/University (in-state resident)	$33,300	$95,000
2 Years Community College & 2 Years Private College	$68,800	$196,300

(Based on average tuition and fees for 2010-2011 as reported by The College Board® and assumed to increase 6% annually.)

According to The College Board®, the average 2010-2011 tuition increase was 4.5 percent at private colleges, and 7.9 percent at public universities. The ten-year historical rate of increase is approximately 6 percent. These figures are substantially higher than the general inflation rate. They are also higher than the average increase in personal incomes.

The figures above do not include other costs your child will incur as a college student, such as room and board, books, supplies, equipment, and transportation. These additional expenses can increase your child’s cost of attending college by a substantial amount.

To compare higher education to secondary education in the U.S., on average it costs any were from $7,000 to $20,000 dollars to educate a child in the U.S. public school system. The national average is $9,000 dollars per student per year, so it would be $36,000 on average for four years of high school education, funded, of course, by the taxpayers. [Source]

Most Unemployed Americans Attended at Least Some College, for the First Time Ever

May 25, 2012

The Lookout - For the first time in history, there are now more unemployed Americans who attended at least some college than people who only graduated high school or dropped out of high school, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show.

Seasonally unadjusted BLS data from April show that about 4.7 million of the nation's 9 million unemployed either graduated from a four-year or a two-year college program or attended college for some time before dropping out. A smaller 4.3 million share of America's unemployed graduated only from high school or didn't finish high school. Jed Graham from Investor's Business Daily graphed the change.

This isn't necessarily bad news for college-bound kids, however. First of all, less educated people are more likely to not be counted as officially unemployed because they've dropped out of the labor force and stopped looking for work altogether. (Millions of these people are referred to as "discouraged workers," and they don't show up in monthly unemployment reports.) Secondly, less than 4 percent of college graduates over the age of 25 were unemployed in April, a far smaller share than the 7.9 percent unemployment rate for high school grads. High school drop outs, meanwhile, faced 12.5 percent unemployment.

But what the surprising statistic does show is that attending some college without attaining either an associates degree or a bachelors can leave people saddled with debt but facing similar jobless rates as those with only a high school diploma. The unemployment rate in April for people who attended some college but did not receive a degree was 8 percent, nearly the same rate high school graduates faced.

Many American colleges do a fairly dismal job of getting their students to graduate, especially for-profit schools and community colleges, which tend to serve poorer and part-time students. At for profits, only 22 percent of students will get a bachelors in six years, compared to a 55 percent graduation rate at four-year public colleges, writes The Education Trust in a November 2010 report. And fewer than 10 percent of community college students graduate with an associates degree in three years, according to a 2009 study from the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

Lastly, this sea change also reflects the big increase in the share of Americans who at least try to get a college degree. According to the Census Bureau, 58 percent of Americans have attended some college, with about 30 percent of people overall attaining a bachelor's degree. Twenty years earlier, only 43 percent Americans had attended some college or had graduated.