The cost of living

Rec'd a venting email from a former student whose kid has reached schooling age about the cost of same. Indeed, it's frightening. When I reached college age in the late 1950s, tuition at a public institution like the University of California system was practically given away. A summer job would earn you a year's expenses at college. Not any more. Young families not only can't afford to buy a home as easily as in the past, they face real strains in providing a good education for their kids.

Here's a graph tracking the rising cost of college tuition, for example:

Tuition at the University of Toronto tracked close to inflation rates during the entire period. [4] The University of Iowa had rapid increases in tuition during the 1950s and then tracked close to inflation rates since that time.[5] The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), among the most expensive of the private U.S. educational institutions throughout the 20th century,[6] had continual large tuition increases, dipping slightly below inflation rates only during the World War II years.[7] [8]

Over the 60-year period charted, the inflation-adjusted, long term, annual increases in tuition at these institutions were 0.4 percent for the University of Toronto, 1.4 percent for the University of Iowa, and 2.1 percent for MIT.[9] Other institutions in the same categories differ in details but not in general patterns.[10] The results of the trends are that over the 60 years shown, adjusted for inflation, the tuition at the University of Iowa increased by a factor of 2.3 and that at MIT by a factor of 3.6, while tuition at the University of Toronto rose only about 30 percent.[11]

I don't buy these comparative analyses for the simple reason that I lived in both eras and the dramatic difference is not reduced by economic jargon. In 1950, a couple with an average male-breadwinner income could buy a house. Period. Not today. You don't erase this fact with mumbo-jumbo about cost of living, 2000-dollars, and so on. This is not progress but its opposite. The middle class is not better off today but worse off. The rich are richer, yes, and that's the real economic trend in this country. CEOs make many times more than their company's average wage earner than in the past. We've created a class society, an aristocracy of the wealthy.

How an average family buys a house and sends the kid to school is a greater and greater financial burden. This is not progress by any definition I understand.