The Cost of College

Please open your syllabus and note today’s topic: “The Cost of  College”.  This will be on the test and it will make up 78.9 per cent of your grade. If you would like to discuss this topic with me, my office hours are 11:00 am -11:05 am.  Feel free to e-mail me but just be aware that I will probably ignore it.

First of all, it is important for the parent of a college student to know where they rank in the eyes of the college administration and faculty.

The Ranking of Important People to The Average College Administration and Faculty

1)     The Football Team

2)     The Federal Government

3)     The State Government

4)     Corporations that give grants

5)     Politically liberal organizations

6)     President Obama

7)     ESPN

8)     Students

9)      The parents of the students

Your job, as a parent, is to ask yourself this question: Do I have lots of money to flush down the toilet or am I willing to borrow lots of money to send my children to college, even if they want to major in Russian Psychology?  Colleges see parents as one big wallet because it costs money to run a college. For example, there is some sort of law that says you have to pay professors "to teach". Even one like this one (from the Rate My Professors website):

“Grading is not on any scale I’ve ever seen. Talking to him is useless. He is arrogant and is trying to teach a legal writing class with no legal background. He is also biased in his grading. If you are cute and stare at him with awe, you might get an A. That's about the only way in his class."

                               The Problem? This is an English Class

It also costs money to buy books. A text book at the average college and/or university can cost up to a million dollars (and that’s for the used books). When I was in college,  I always bought used books and they were all previously owned by the same person-the person who uses a yellow highlighter to highlight the important information, which was always every single word in the book

                     The cost of these books: $425,000.00

Another additional cost to college is the Greek system, otherwise known as the fraternity/sorority system. The purpose of a fraternity/sorority is to bind men and women together in a brotherhood/sisterhood based on the eternal and immutable principles like binge drinking.  Ha, ha. Just a little parent humor.  

The future leaders of America. (Note to self: sell my bonds)


Yet still another cost is room and board. Back when I was in college, students lived in something called a "dormitory"  It was a building of several floors that had many rooms that featured two beds, two desks and two closets. Each floor had a shared bathroom. The bathroom usually had three toilets with only one ever containing toilet paper. The bathrooms had a communal shower where you soon learned all men are not created equal.

 Once in college, me and a friend (who is now the pastor of a very large church) were walking down the hall of our dorm when the center of the college's basketball team stepped out of his room, naked except for a towel that he strategically placed on his shoulder. This young man was seven feet tall. My friend said, "I have never seen so much skin in my life". 

     This is where I saw the seven foot tall naked man.  For real.


I don't know if you have ever seen a seven foot tall naked man, but it was my own personal Apocalypse Now. For days afterwards people would see me uttering  "The horror, the horror". Needless to say, there were costs involved due to this incident, most of them psychiatric. It might have been cheaper if I had just joined a fraternity.