CSU is the cheaper state university system in California. It costs like $6,000 per year for in-state students. If they were waking up to the con game, more would be going there.

Tuition and non-tuition costs have both absolutely skyrocketed and made CSUs unaffordable for a lot of people. I went to Cal Poly, my entire freshman year was ~$6000 in 1997. It was an even split between $3k tuition and 3k student housing/food. I could actually mostly pay my own tuition without finical aid, holding a part time campus job.

Today those numbers are $11.5k tuition and ~21.5k non-tuition (https://www.calpoly.edu/financial-aid/costs-and-affordabilit...) which is triple the inflation adjusted value from 1997. After 4 years (5 more likely) you're looking at > $125k in costs, which absolutely puts most people into massive loan debt. Even a part time job ($16/h) would offset barely a third of this.

CSU is just beyond expensive compared to 20 years ago.

Which is still about twice of what I paid for my entire bachelors and masters education in germany and it included a ticket for the entire public transport system in my city for the entire 5 years and full access to _very_ comprehensive library (of both physical books and e-books so there was no need to buy even a single book during my studies).

I may speak from a perspective of ignorance here but I believe 6000$ a year is still prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, especially if they don't want to accrue debt.

It's an infinity% more than what I paid for university in Poland

Some were even payed for university. Those were times when almost nobody actually could afford to pay, socialism, <beep>

>I may speak from a perspective of ignorance here but I believe 6000$ a year is still prohibitively expensive for a lot of people, especially if they don't want to accrue debt.

Reality is almost no one pays that. Out of state and international students are just about the only folks paying tuition at CSU. Nearly everyone else is covered by the various state/federal grants, and community colleges are essentially free.

Americans take home a lot more money than Germans.

I don’t know, I think it’s still a good deal, I’d rather have cheap tuition and low taxes than high taxes and no tuition

Agree, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.

At one point, California had free community college. They could have expanded that to CSU instead of charging for CC as well.

But some people in the ownership class have to get new yachts...

It's not just the cost of tuition, cost of attendance in California is extremely high because cost of living in California is extremely high. You'd have to compare it with enrollments across the country.

In-state tuition for the CSUs is on the order of $13,000/yr. I don't think an aversion towards student loans explains this.

If only that even closely resembled the true cost to attend college.

For comparison, when I went to CSUC it cost ~$3000/year for tuition (2024 dollars).

And boy were we pissed at Pete Wilson for making it cost that much.

The only thing that makes it worth becoming a grade school teacher is PSLF. Otherwise you'd be in debt for life.

Situation is dire.

If by con you mean "a degree is worth, on average, about $1 million over a career vs high school only".[1]

Yes, there are degrees that don't confer an obvious or immediate value, but on whole, college still pays off, even with loan interest included.

And I don't mean to imply college shouldn't cost less, it should.

https://www.wral.com/story/fact-check-do-college-graduates-e...