The 24.6 Second College Degree

Update: I munged up some of my math this morning and got the numbers slightly wrong. I’ve updated the post with correct numbers. They’re still scary and infuriating.

According to this morning’s Seattle Times, the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan are costing approximately $118,000 per minute — $100,000/minute for the war in Iraq, and $18,000/minute in Afghanistan.

CNN/Money reported last October that the average cost of attending a four-year public university was approximately $12,127 per year, or $48,508 for four years.

In other words, 2.69 minutes worth of the money we’re spending in Afghanistan would pay for the average four-year degree. Only 29.1 seconds worth of the money we’re spending in Iraq would do the same. So would 24.6 seconds of the two operations combined.

Every day, we’re spending enough money in Iraq and Afghanistan to pay for 3,503 four-year public school college degrees.

And yet, George Bush is asking for $70 billion more to pay for those wars, while cutting education funding by $12.7 billion.

The bill the U.S. Senate passed in the last hours of its 2005 session is called a “budget reconciliation” – an attempt to force the federal budget into balance with spending cuts or tax increases. But there’s no way to reconcile one of the biggest items on the chopping block, aid to education, with the long-term interests of the nation, its students, families and economy.

The bill includes a $12.7 billion cut in federal aid to education. The Senate passed it 51-50 with Vice President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote. The cut, the first in federal education spending in more than a decade, accounts for nearly a third of the bill’s spending reductions.

[…] If the House approves them, the cuts will be very real. Here’s what they will mean:

• An increase in the federal Stafford Loan Rate from 4.7 to 6.8 percent. The will go to 8.25 percent in July.

  The higher interest rates mean that on average students will pay $2,000 more and parents $3,000 more.

• Pell Grants to low and moderate-income students will remain frozen at $4,050 for the fourth straight year despite the president’s earlier promise to raise them to $5,100.

  According to the American Council on Higher Education, Pell Grants covered 84 percent of the cost of attending the average public four-year college when they were created in 1972. They now pay 34 percent.

The cuts come at a bad time. In five years the average cost of tuition at a public university has increased by 57 percent, the cost of room and board by 44 percent. American higher education is becoming more unaffordable at a time when attending college has never been more important.

A conversation Prairie and I had while walking into NSCC about how we’re going to afford getting me a degree prompted this little exploration. Meh. Not happy right now.