I was reading an interesting piece from a Financier who worked at an American bank. She described how 4 years of university had left her $140,000 in student debt and that she would be working full-time at a great job in the Financial Services sector for the next 10 years just to pay off that student debt, BEFORE she could even begin to address the issue of getting a mortgage for her first house.
Her point was, her university tuition cost her $35k per year in the USA and she now admits that she had fallen victim to a system which intentionally extracts the first 10 years of post-graduate earning power from each student in the form of grossly inflated tuition fees across the country, but most notably experienced in north-eastern USA.
To keep this in perspective, when you own a successful commercial business like a pizza shop or an apartment building for example and then you turn around and put your business up for sale on a commercial property advertising site, the price your business gets listed at by a Real Estate Company, is typically based on 10x it's average annual earnings over the previous 5 years, but is in addition to the land value itself that the commercial business sits on, assuming the land is owned by the business.
What this means is, the new owner of that business typically pays the previous owner the equivalent of what the business would have earned over the next 10 years IF the previous owner had kept the business and ran it himself!
That is precisely what American universities have been doing to students who attend American universities. The universities charge the students in tuition fees, what the student will potentially earn for the first 10 years after graduation from the kind of work which that specific Degree would have earned for the student as a credential listed on their resumé .
