Send your kid to college...ha ha

School days, school days.¦

I was going through some boxes looking for old photographs when I came across the letter that said I was accepted to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and that I was the recipient of a full four year tuition scholarship. RPI was one of the pricier schools and was ranked with M.I.T. in the engineering world. The builder of the Brooklyn Bridge was a graduate of RPI and the first steel frame building that used welding instead of rivets was part of the campus.
The tuition was $800 a year. My dad came up with $100 a month for board, room and entertainment. The drinking age in New York State was 18 and beer was 5 cents or 10 cents a glass, depending on how classy the bar was.
I graduated as an electrical engineer with no debt and went right into graduate school.
In 1986, one of my students graduated from a state university, supposedly a less expensive option for higher education, with a $40,000 debt. Students now graduate from college directly into bond slavery.
I don't really see how this either encourages higher education or makes it better.
When I began graduate school my professors had leather patches on the elbows of their jackets. They lived in modest houses in more or less genteel poverty. They were excited about mathematics. They were my role models.
In the late 80s, by a trick of fate, I was on the Ph.D. committee of a student in electrical engineering. There was a get-together at the house of the student's dissertation advisor when all the student's papers were signed, sealed and delivered.
I was blown away by the house. You walked in and were confronted by a long room with a with a fire place at the far end which turned out to actually be in the center of a really long room and burned brightly on both sides. There was a balcony on the right side of the long room and doors that, I was told, led to bedrooms.
I recalled the houses that the Professors of Electrical Engineering had at RPI.
I constantly hear how the cost of higher education is rising. Well, times change and Professors of Electrical Engineering who get lots of grants cost more than they used to. Oh, I forgot; there didn't used to be grants.
And I suppose it does cost more to print all those multicolored pleas to the alumni on slick paper. As a matter of fact, since every organization on campus has to send its flyers on slick paper, there is a bit of an increase in printing costs. In the course of a month I could fill up an empty copier paper box with very important communications which I never got around to reading.
And then new buildings have to be built; I'm sure why the old buildings don't work anymore. And professors and administrators deserve offices that live up to their houses.
Perhaps it is worth bond slavery to graduate from a university that has new buildings and a well housed faculty and administration.