Relatively, yes, I believe so. But Oregon State still tells me to budget 30K/year for a resident undergrad. About half of that is living expenses, half is school.
The dynamics of this play out different on various campuses but at my alma mater we had a bunch of "right off campus" apartments that competed heavily with the dorms. Well, it wasn't much of a competition, if you calculated your monthly rent based on what you paid for room and board, you got about $700/mo to live in a dorm with 3 others.
By comparison you could go off campus and rent an entire 1bd for like $750/mo. A similar living situation off campus with 3 roommates would set you back $300-400/mo and $550 if you really wanted the nice place.
The thing that always bugged me about dorms is they aren't treated as regular residences. School having a week long break? You have to be out of your dorm during the break with no where to go but back to your parents. Also that 30k for a year only covers two semesters, about 6-7 months of actual housing, which works out to $2.5k/mo for board if we take half of that 30k you mentioned.
I don't know where this college is but I'm going to bet that you can get a seriously nice place, probably a small house for that amount.
In my undergrad, when I was living in dorms, it also came with a meal plan (I think ~2 meals a day covered). So for in state, 10-15k was tuition. The rest was rent + meals. So 15k / 12 = $1250 a month, which is not cheap, but considering it includes food is really not bad at all.
But you can't divide it by 12 since school is only in session for roughly 9 months. During summer session you're on your own for food and housing. That makes it more like $1666/month. That's nuts.
> You will not be paying 30K a year for OSU e-campus. More like 10-15K a year or so.
Yeah, last time I looked it is the same tuition as if you were using the in-person facilities. I think that's too much for an online program. I paid less than $10K for my master's degree at Georgia Tech. That works out to about a third of what OSU is charging for the online undergrad CS degree, if my math is right. For online videos recorded once and watched many times, I think it should not cost anywhere close to what sitting in a room with a professor does.
This is because the degree granted does not mention if it was earned online or not (and this is why we choose OSU). It gives literally the same degree as if you earned it in person.
Well they said they were told to budget 30K a year, half for school expenses, and half for living expenses, so it sounds like their experience isn't contradictory with yours.
I'm losing the thread of this conversation. The original poster said that OSU costs around $30K per year, with $15K for tuition and school fees and $15K for living expenses. The person who replied said their wife only paid about $15K per year for online courses, which is in line with the above mentioned costs.
Yes and OSU is in a relatively rural and affordable part of Oregon. So even with the insane housing market explosion - $1200/month is probably doable for a bare minimum type of living situation for a student. It’ll be just enough if the student has no emergencies. $600/month rent for a room. $400/month for food. $200 for misc.
If this was not a college town or somewhere as rural - you’d likely have to make it closer to $2000+ just because that’s how expensive it is these days to live in cities unless you were able to buy a house a couple decades ago.
Yes and no. I used to work at a state university recently. The cost of most state universities (in my state) has stayed largely the same over the last 10 years. However state appropriations (tax dollars from the state government) has been going down each year. So students are responsible for more of the bill.
Back in the 70's and 80's state appropriations covered between 70-80% of tuition. Now my state covers roughly 35-40% of funding for most public universities [1]. Part of this is the university offering more programs - athletics, counseling, therapy, other student services, which all need additional funding. The other part is that state funding is going down due to a variety of political budget reasons.
I started college almost 20 years ago, so I don't know the current situation. Back then the state schools had acceptance rates of only 20%-30% because so many people wanted to go to state schools to save money. There wasn't nearly enough supply to meet demand.
I never applied to any public school, but I was legitimately worried about not being accepted. I wouldn't depend on it.
I'm really glad I went to a private college in the end. People who went to state schools said class sizes were huge (like 150 students per class) and they were being taught by TAs. I really don't think I would have succeeded in that sort of environment - At my private school we didn't have any TAs and I never had a class over ~30 people, which was important because classes were very interactive.
My state school (Washington State) nearly doubled while I was attending. Of course I was there between 2009 and 2013 which is where all colleges really jacked their prices up.
