Why don't American students riot over tuition costs?

Probably because their parents are paying their tuition and they don’t feel the pinch themselves.

If our tripled in cost, there could be some angry people here. I’m happy that mine has his degree.

Because they spend all their allowance on X. And when you’re that happy, nothing else seems to matter.

I know a lot of students, including myself, who have to pay for college ourselves. Why don’t we protest? For one, because we have no sense of solidarity. We don’t believe that enough people care, so we don’t do anything. Secondly… What the hell difference would it make?

You want to see the cost of tuition go down… way down? Stage a national rally where every student boycotts school for an entire month. That would have far greater impact than riots.

Didn’t some students in California riot when the state raised tuitions? I seem to recall they almost beat a cop to death a few weeks ago.

Well, some students do. Take a look at UC Berkeley the first half of this year. They were protesting for quite a while, regarding tuition hikes. The state of affairs in California is a huge mess. Costs are rising without there being an equal rise in financial aid (though Obama did help increase grant money considerably).

Anyway, I don’t know. I personally find it a shame that eduction is not more affordable in this country. Europe to me really has it down, in terms of how to treat one’s citizens.

There was some outcry when tuition increased for the California state university system, but those increases were only 5 and 10 per cent.

Maybe because they understand that those “awesome” universities have to have some way of providing quality education. Tuition is just a way of funding your education. how else could they pay all that is involved in college education. This isn’t public school.

There is a theory, that the banking institutions want students to graduate college under a great burden of debt in order to set them upon their future paths with no money in their pockets. This causes them to borrow even more money paying interest on cars and homes.

One way to accomplish this is to keep tuition very high priced. I don’t know, but I hear that med students graduate with hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole… Yet they are prime income earners ready to take out more loans to get their life and careers started.

Well, because here in America prices are set by supply and demand, not our government.

Tuition costs are so high simply because there are more people who want to go to school than there are slots in schools to accommodate them. Sadly (and somewhat ironically) this high demand for higher education is in part driven by rising unemployment and a more competitive job market.

It cost me $16,000 to send my daughter to a state university, and $7,500 to a community college. I know that she could not afford that on her own,working full-time at a minimum wage job. Not and drive her car, or live on her own. I certainly can’t afford $40,000 a year for tuition, nor can most people we know.

As @MissAnthrope and @WestRiverrat mentioned, California got in on the action of picketing and protesting… it didn’t do anything for us. In fact many students were threatened with being kicked out. So going back to what @DrasticDreamer said, “What the hell difference would it make?”

Maybe if you could virtually riot from your Xbox Kinect…

@crazyivan, that’s very funny. And very true.

@HearTheSilence, I never heard anything about California schools protesting. Do you think the US media plays down protests like this, because they’re “anti-establishment”? Or is it because the idea that protest is an option hasn’t caught on?

I live in California so it was all over the news here. Your state just probably didn’t think it was news worthy, most people here wrote it off as “a bunch of rich kids complaining” since they focused on USC a lot. Perhaps your state looked at it in the same manner or there was just more news worthy things to raise viewer ratings than California news. I don’t think it was downplayed due to being anti-establishment though, the more controversial something is, the more the news wants to cover it, it’ll raise ratings.

My personal reasons? 1) Washington is really far away. In Britain, the most they have to drive is 4 hours… 2) I honestly don’t know who’d I’d riot against. The government? Could they really do anything? The private company? Which one? 3) If I riot, will I be put on terrorist watchlists? Wouldn’t that get in the way of me completing college? 4) So it’s just me doing the rioting? Yeah, that’s a great way to change things and not at all get locked up…

I would suggest that perhaps all students sit out a semester, so that the financial impact of students on the economy is felt, but the problem really isn’t the universities themselves, but the funding.

The US has gone from college being an elitist advantage prior to WWII, to a carrot dangled in front of GIs during WWII and after in the form of home ownership for GIs, free education for GIs, and “a better life for your children” than the depression years that led up to WWII. That was followed by the expectation that education would lead to good-paying jobs, and a decline in manufacturing jobs that supported the middle class. Now higher education is expected, even for jobs that should not necessitate a college degree. Knowledge workers have become the new factory worker. Meanwhile, people continue to go into debt for education, hoping it leads somewhere. If a society expects education from its citizens, then education should be attainable at a level that leads to employability.

could it be that in the US the tuition are market driven, capitalism? Over there it is set by their govt. They have grown accustomed to govt taking care of them so in a sense they feel entitled to lower tuition and that triggers revolt. It’s always too easy to blame the govt for anything.

@woodcutter Well said. I think the more or less permanent state of protest in France backs up that hypothesis.

They do, but the demonstrations are at individual campuses because our system is not Federal, but rather each state has it’s own public Universities.

I’m going to add that you can protest on campuses when they raise the tuition, but if you’re trying to protest before you even start school all anyone will say is “go to a cheaper college”. It’s much harder to deal with systematic problems of hodge-podge systems.

The reason tuition is so high is because kids have been brainwashed into thinking they need to go to college. For many college students they will never see a decent return on their tuition investment. Instead of protesting high tuition more kids should opt out of college and get into the trades or start learning an industry and get into sales. College is simply not for everyone and the fewer that attend may make rates come down.

Aside from the size of the increase itself, one of the key reasons the students are all up in arms is because the political party that is one of the two at the centre of the increase (we have a coalition government right now) PROMISED in their election manifesto to not increase tuition fees.

I’ve always wondered about that myself. Cultures and values can be different shaped by different history. Most Americans think that every person should be allowed to own a gun. Most Europeans think that every person should have the right to go to college.

@mattbrowne All Americans have the right to go to college. Some schools are pricier than others. It is not unlike the American right to keep and bear arms in that, no, not every person gets to have a gun, not even close. Just like in order to be allowed that right a person has to meet certain criteria. It’s not a free for all. And no American college is going to accept a student who has proven to be un -college worthy. And finally those Americans that do have the right to bear arms, they are not all guaranteed GLOCKS. Some may have to settle for HIGHPOINTS, ( a very cheap firearm but still no less a gun). hth.

@woodcutter – I meant ‘the right without the dependency on financial means’.