As an American college student, this article by Ross Pomeroy & William Handke explains pretty concisely what I've been trying to explain to the baby-boomer generation for months. Stay woke people, because it's going to take us and the generation after us to make our nation's college tuition more affordable.
If you ever come across someone wanting to put you down for wanting affordable tuition, or calling you lazy because they got through college debt free by delaying their education to work multiple jobs, here's a compiled list of counter-arguments that should serve as a slap to the face: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/01/08/the_most_entitled_generation_isnt_millennials_its_baby_boomers_125184.html

When my mother went to university at West Point, it was a few hundred dollars per semester. THIS would be an affordable amount even in our economic recession.

I'm going to John Jay College this year... A whopping $6,000 per semester I have to defer my education (again) to make ends meet in an economy that's having adults with families in the jobs for teenagers, while being reluctant to raise the minimum wage to a livable one.

If anything, we should be known as the eye-opening generation: Not only do we see that people should be able to marry who they want, not only do we see how tolerance for different religions and races makes the world a better place, not only do we see the corruption in our government and call them out on it (#UmbrellaRevolution, #BlackLivesMatter, etc.), but we see the cuts to education and FAFSA that force high school graduates to either face years (or decades) of debt, or spend several years raising money before college is even an option...

I don't think that college prices is a good means to accuse someone of being more entitled. I think there is an entitlement problem. However, saying, "Generation Y is entitled" is a huge bitch slap and display of ignorance.

Do you know how the Millennials are? People who are born in the 80s to 2000.

Now, here's my seat on the college topic. A lot of parents are bitching about how they paid their way through college, so can their kids. Which isn't fair, because college prices have skyrocketed. Like, bitch. If college prices when I went were anything like they were when my parents went, I wouldn't be in debt today. Because the amount of money my parents gave me to help pay for it would have covered it.

Moreover, they're saying, that millions of scholarships go unclaimed. Do you want to know why? Because millions of dollars in scholarships are exclusive. I can't find a scholarship. I'm not tall. I'm not short. I'm white. I'm not left handed. I'm not gay or trans. I'm not SPECIAL or UNIQUE. 99% of these scholarships don't apply to me, and the ones that do EVERYONE'S applying for, because, EVERYONE qualifies for. Regardless, I'm in no way a "minority" so I'm screwed. At least until Asexual scholarships become a thing

Second. Fafsa sucks ass. It bases whether or not you need a grant of a shitton of things. At first, this seems like a good thing. look for ALL of the information, right?

WRONG!

Last semester, I was looking for a loan. My dad juts got laid off. My step-mother still had her job. There's three of us in college, and two in high school. The high schoolers will be in college when I graduate. One of them is chronically ill and needs a shitton of expensive medicine, doctor visits, and hospitalization. All of which, they didn't take into consideration.

BUT WAIT! You'd think that they did take that into consideration because they ask for the family's total income, right? There was a spot to put my dad was laid off, right?

Well, yeah. But the thing was, my dad had money in savings. You know, in case he couldn't get a new job to pay for everything mentioned above. In case he couldn't get his new job in time. Times are hard, man.

So, I got stuck with the shitty loan rather than the less shitty loan because my parents "had enough money to pay for my college." Which they don't. If they could pay for my college, they'd be broke, plain and simple.

Then there's my mom. She never finished college. She's paying for me, her, and my sister on her side to go through college. She's not married.

They have to pull their own loans and go into debt, as well as myself to get me through. All because Fafsa thinks that my family is rich with tons of money to juts throw around.

Then there's the job market. You need experience to get a job. You need a job to get experience. Just let that endless loop float in your head a little.

Needless to say, College sucks ass. I bet if someone ran for president saying, "I'll cut the cost of college in half!" they'd win. Because everyone in college would vote for them. Everyone with kids that are either in college or close to it would vote for them. That's a lot of people.

Now onto the topic of entitlement. Saying that everyone from the 80s to 2000 are entitled is bullshit. Kids these days are entitled. but someoen born in the 80s are 30-35. They are not entitled. They know the cruel facts of the world, and were trying to make ends meet during the bitch recession America had.

Moreover, people in the early to mid nineties are entitled. First off, unless they're spoiled rich, they're in a shitton of dept right now, thanks college. Second, computers weren't popularized until five years ago? When they were kids, they had to play outside to have fun. They couldn't get phones until they were 18. Even then, all phones coudl do was call and text. That's it.

The entitlement is caused by the fact that kids get expensive toys like phones, ipods, computers, portable game systems, at the ages of five. They grew up getting these fancy things, and so they think that they can get whatever they want. They never had to wait until they were "old enough". Hell, they never really had to wait. That's my theory on the entitlement issue.

Then you're saying that there's only a five year difference between the kids born in 1995 and 2000. Well, here's what I have to say to that. Since the laptops and flip phones became popular, tech has been improving exponentially. Therefore, times changed exponentially. A kid born in 1995 had to grow up very differently than a kid born in 2000. Because they weren't born into technology. It was still being created and discovered as they grew up. Kids in 2000 were at the exact time to be born into the tech.

Sorry for the long post, so much to talk about, but I think that college and entitlement don't go hand-in-hand. Even if college debt rapes everyone up the ass.

Ah! One more thing I meant to add:

Congressional Leaders Agree To Cut Aid To College Students To Pay Student Loan Contractors

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/10/pell-cuts-cromnibus_n_6299092.html

"The cuts come amid an era of record college costs, skyrocketing student debt burdens and decreasing government support for state schools. The Pell program has a budget surplus that is forecast to turn into a deficit in two years. Cuts to the program would likely lead college students to increase the amount they borrow, further driving up the nation’s $1.3 trillion stack of unpaid student loan bills."

(Be sure to read the comments on these articles too, guys! They can sometimes be really helpful.)

i Find what Magnolia said very true and is something i often see in life, it isn't just college but everything in the country and most others as well. People need to learn to evolve, idk if i am alone in seeing this but I honestly feel as if Myself and others from my generation truly see the world different from the previous generations, the baby-boomers generation is one where they are seeing major tech developments being what they could have imagined and than try to cling to there old ways instead unless they dont have a say in the matter. the current middle aged demographic is one that grew up in a very low tech age, and as such are ignorant to the way that anything works, this causes anyone from there generation who knew anything about what was high tech at the time to be considered smarter than the rest. These people have since become unwilling to continue to learn and are holding back the rest of us, to quote Daniel J. Boorstin
"The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." this is true of everything in this world.

Seriously, though, what do colleges spend all that fucking money on anyway? The kids are buying their own books. Whatever they have in the building has long since been paid off for. I doubt they pay their professors that much or even that new computers or science equipment would equal the amount they get from the hordes of students attending.

>I doubt they pay their professors that much

The average at my school for a professor is 150K. There are a lot of professors.

>>6 Aaaand where do you go? And how do you know that all the professors there get paid that much?

I could only believe something like that if they were a professor in Science/Engineering.

I thought on average associate professors got around $65,000 & full professors got $100,000.

But even if this is the case, did they only recently start paying professors handsomely? Can that alone explain the skyrocket in tuition?

>>7 Ah, I kind of misread. I go to a University, and the tuition is about the same as yours. This might not be applicable anymore, however the same kind of disparity between how much we pay and how much seems to go into anything in the University is there.

Anyway, they publish all their rates online. There's 3 people that get paid less than 100K, most are about 125K, while the President is 500K. This did not start recently and has been going on for years. Tuition has been steadily rising.

I go to the University of Waterloo.

>>8 Half A Million D-Dollars!? The president of you're university...?

The President of the United States gets paid 100K less than that... It's not even a private university...

Listen... It's not like I'm saying they don't deserve all of that since it's hard work becoming and being a professor, but... FML, ya know?

>>9 Hey, the President has to create a stamp of his signature, like, probably more than once every 5 years. Also, he has to travel to various countries for free. Also, he has to host dinners in those countries (for free, unfortunately). Also, he has to take endless streams of pictures for all those brochures. I can't even imagine living in his shoes.

To be fair, you do have to get a PhD to become a Professor. That is a pain in the ass.

>>10 I know you're joking, but it's unfortunate that a lot of people legitimately think being president is as peachy as that.

>>6 Even so. If your tuition is around Mag's, it's around 6k/semester, right? And Waterloo currently has 31,577 students. That means they're making about 379 million dollars a year with that admissions rate - which btw wouldn't even be federally taxed in America.

If they had a thousand professors plus the president, that still wouldn't even be half of what they made.

I can't imagine it costing over 230 million to take care of their other annual expenses.

>>11 Oh, Inu was joking?

At my high school during senior year they hired what the staff jokingly called a "trophy principal". This being China, they believe in appearances being more important than qualifications (#x. They paid my African American, late 40s, mother 8,000RMB for being a classroom teacher at the school. They paid the white, early 20s, librarian a whopping 17,000RMB...).

So this principal, right?
He never did anything.
He really didn't.
He pushed it all on his wife who *just happened to also be* the Vice President.
He would make speeches, sign papers, and look pretty with his blindingly white teeth in front of the parents, but that's about it.

(That school was really racist now that I think about it... There was us, a Jamaican, and a Pilipino family who wanted the school to provide the 3 bed room teachers apartments that were completely empty for years. A white newly wed couple came to teach at the school, and they IMMEDIATELY got the 3 bedrooms?! They...They didn't even need 2 bedrooms... There was another older white male who had a 3 bedroom apartment, and he was single... Wow... That school was really racist...)

>>11 Uh, I'm talking about the President of the University, right? He doesn't require a PhD. He has to do a lot less than the President of the United States, I really think he should not be making 500K a year.

>>13 Derp, thought it was meant the other way around. But I got the gist anyway.

I shouldn't post in the middle of the night lol

^