[quote=“Ninerdawg, post:74, topic:27429”]Its fine if you want to include the cost of housing and board, but to be fair, those things don’t become magically free if your kid goes to a community college or stays at home. You (or they) still have to pay for a place for them to live and to eat. The cost of the college education (at UNC Charlotte) is roughly $6,000. The other $13,000 is just the cost of living, and the University does not appear to be charging a particularly high rate for rent and food. If they are, then the kid can simply live in an apartment and buy food from the Teeter.
Does anybody really think that anybody can live comfortably in the University City part of Charlotte for much less than $13k/year? I bet you are actually paying that when they are high school seniors - you just don’t notice it because you don’t write a separate check for it.[/quote]
The cost of food certainly isn’t free, but if you are able to live at home then you are saving all of the room charge. And the grocery bill may be more if the student lives at home, but the increase in the grocery bill is about half of what the meal plan is. And when you are one of 4 people living in an on campus apartment, there is no way it should cost $10,000 to live there for the year. That’s a cost of $40,000 for the apartment for 9 months. The parent is supposed to be paying/renting a living space for 9 months, not paying for a mortgage on the whole complex.
[quote=“Ninerdawg, post:78, topic:27429”]Dowless, I agree that it is vastly cheaper for a kid to live at home with respect to housing. For food, the costs are close to a wash - the kid either eats at home on the family budget or eats where they live on a different budget. There are some dis-economy of scales, but they are not orders of magnitude different. (Teenagers eat much more than 1/N of the family food budget where N is the number of people in the house.)
What I am arguing is that the $19k number people are throwing around is not really the cost of college. It is the cost of college (about $6k) PLUS the cost of setting a kid up to live semi-independently in a city. Those addition $13k costs are basically the same whether the kid is going to college, junior college or just working (although many families would not support them if they were working.) I agree with your statement that the on-campus housing and services are basically the market price of housing (with really good security, i.e. your own police force) in Charlotte.
UNC Charlotte’s tuition and fees are about 3 times higher than CPCC (instate), but we are still talking about less than $3k/semester. This is highly affordable.[/quote]
The cost of college to attend UNCC is $244.70 per credit hour if taking 12 or more credits for in state tuition. Any community college in NC looks to be at $69.00 per credit hour up to 15 credit hours. This is chump change for college. The community college in my town in Iowa is $170 per credit hour with no max. So if you take 20 hours you will pay for every hour. University of Northern Iowa, the cheapest public college in Iowa is $270.00 per credit hour for 12 credits in every major, except business. The business college at UNI is $341.83 per credit hour for 12 credits. College in NC is cheap compared to many states, and there is an excellent community college system.
If it costs $13,000 for you to live with 3 other people living on cheap beer and spaghetti then you had better get a good job from that degree when you buy a house, have a wife, and 4 kids.