All I can tell you is, I've been doing this for 17 years and the market dynamics just don't work like that. Sellers don't set prices, the free market does. There isnt anything you can do to sell a house that is overpriced. Its amazing to watch the market work, you have 5 offers on a house and they all wind up being about the same. If sellers were "inflating" their properties to pay for the commission and the market didnt bear that, their properties would not sell. In a flat market, if the house is worth what they bought it for, then they will get what they bought it for, commission or not. They may want to "tack on 6% to pay the fees", but it wont sell.

And good Realtors absolutely care what their clients walk away with and what they spend. Its not about one transaction, its about the relationship with the person that feeds you over your whole career. Like any other sales profession, people who are just focused on closing a deal and moving on aren't going to be successful in the long term. I do zero marketing. Zero. All my clients are past clients or referrals from other clients, and its precisely because I am that way. I am also not at all alone.

You can thank the Government for that form lol. The industry has made up their own, the ALTA statement because that form is impossible for a layperson to understand.

 

As if jobs professorial jobs fall from trees. It is easier to say than find one. In your field, jobs might be dime a dozen. To others who think college is a ripoff, why did you go to college? You did not have to. Educational darkness is enveloping this country, pushing us far behind other countries. The way we are going, the abyss is near.

About textbooks--printed books are still very much in vogue, and most students ask for them. That is why colleges have bookstores. Those courses that use ebooks, somebody had to write them. They just do not emanate from heaven. Those who write them need to be appropriately compensated. What if you worked for a month and you did not get paid? I bet you would raise hell.

 

Its not an issue about people who write textbooks getting paid. The issue is colleges are charging students over and over and over again for the same textbooks, and making small changes which make affordable used textbooks not an option. Schools in bed with publishers requiring use of the most recent version. Its a racket. I know people who have written college textbooks, the vast majority of that money doesn't go to them I promise you.

As for college, I'm not saying college doesnt have value, of course it does. But the issue is the cost vs the benefit in a whole lot of cases. My wife and I each have educations that cost over $100,000...what do we do? We're in the real estate business and we're not doing anything with those degrees. Thats not to say we didnt learn things in college that we benefit from, we did but we could have learned those things at a cost a lot less than the $250-$300,000 our college and post college educations (my wife has a masters degree she also doesnt use) cost our parents and us.

To put my 5 year old twins through the same school we went to right now today, it would cost $120,000 a year...if they lived at home. With room & board and textbooks you're talking about $180,000 a year. So a college education for both of them would cost $720,000. I mean...come on! Thats just absurd. And at the rate costs are rising, what is that education going to cost 13 years from now when they actually go?

Kids come out of college with this massive debt. I had a young guy buy a $160,000 condo from me. He had $380,000 in student loan debt, he was a lawyer. His income? $55,000. Works for the government. I would jump in front of a train.

People need to make smart decisions about college. $58,000 a year plus $25,000 in room and board is a lot of money to spend to "find yourself". Unless kids have a ton of drive and direction and have a clear idea of what they want to do and that investment is really going to pay off for them, they are largely wasting money vs going to a much cheaper school or some sort of direct or vocational school. I know a bunch of really happy and extremely well compensated plumbers.

College costs have GOT to be brought under control. In other parts of the world a college education doesnt come with the same financial burden it comes with here. THATS why we fall below other countries.

 

Not always. For my MBA, there was a $30 "technology fee" for all of my classes, which included a permanent license for the digital version of the textbook. They switched platforms from one vendor to another, and I kept my previous titles. I agree that paying $100-300 for an 8-week license would be a complete rip-off, but I have no complaints about $30 for a permanent license, even if I can't then resell it.

 

College costs is 90% of why I joined the military. I got an 2 Associate's degrees (AAS and AS), a Bachelor's (BAAS) and am currently pursuing a Master's degree, all compliments of the Department of Veterans Affairs. Next semester is my last semester of Post 9/11 GI Bill benefits, after which Hazelwood Veterans Exemption (State of Texas) will carry the rest.

For most, there are ways around college costs. The question is, to what lengths are you really willing to go to to get what you want? The Armed Forces are only one option. You can also use tuition reimbursement from a job, many places will hire oil-changers or the like with little to no experience and pay a portion or all of your tuition costs.

You have to work for what you want, the world owes you nothing. Yes, college costs are spiraling out of control, but mostly, its because people continue to PAY FOR IT.

If people more people use the ways that make the state and federal government pay for it, costs should go down. why? Because it takes money out of the pockets of politicians. And no, that does not mean everyone should get "free" college. Many already can get free or close to it. Use those ways. Bottom line? People, in general, want the highest output with the least amount of input, and that isn't going to get you anywhere.

 

You paid a heavy price in the military though. Not all costs are paid with money. There are very few to no jobs that will offer tuition reimbursement for undergraduate degrees. You're not going to get a job changing oil and have them pay for you to go to a University. They will pay for vocational degrees perhaps, but the cost of those is pretty low. I'm talking about the cost of a traditional 4 year college degree, which is what most parents have in their sights for their children.

And again, public school is not "free". Its paid for by taxes. Public college would similarly not be free. As a society we are immeasurably better because of public school, and we will be made even better by public college that is accessible to people without cost outside of their tax dollars. Thats what you see in other countries.

 

I think you need a qualifier for your first sentence. "Minimum wage jobs" or something like that. Because tuition reimbursement of some form is an incredibly common benefit in the corporate world, and of course in academia. I had enough credits for an AS 100% paid for by one employer, and my current employer paid for the vast majority of my BS and MBA. My wife likewise got her AS, BS, and MBA mostly paid for by her employer. All told, we are out of pocket a grand total of around $40k for all of our degrees combined.

Neither employer would have coughed up $50-70k/year in reimbursement, true. But for a less-expensive school over a longer period of time, one can often get quite a lot covered.

 

The issue is today, in order to get hired for a job that would provide you tuition reimbursement you would need to have a college degree. What career did you get hired into as someone with no college degree that paid for you to go to undergraduate college? People without college degrees today don't get hired into the "Corporate world" period.

Post graduate degrees are another matter entirely. MBAs, Masters, Ph.Ds all of those are very commonly reimbursed or paid for as a benefit for an employee. But its hard to graduate high school and get a job along a career track and have your employer pay for your undergraduate degree,

 

I was working at a utility that offered tuition reimbursement for a 4-year degree to students working there. The company stopped doing that only a few years ago because the customers were complaining that they're effectively paying for the reimbursement. It costs $1 per customer per year.

 

Cars are definitely better built now with more equipment than we saw in the good old 70s. Being an entry level buyer with a lower end salary at the time about 45% of my gross salary bought that all time classic - the Pinto. The problem for buyers in the the lower-end of the income market now is their incomes have not keep up with increasing prices in entry level cars. Perhaps the saving grace is used vehicles are a more realistic option now.

 

Depends on the field but most large companies offer tuition reimbursement no matter what position you have.

I know ppl who started as tellers with HS diploma and got their masters degree and then became Managing Directors. At my wife’s hospital they reimburse ppl with no college degree to earn Associates or Bachelors all the time.

If there is a will then there is a way.
Working full time and going to school is not easy but definitely another option to get free education if you don’t want to go to the military.

 

We hired a guy at PacLease when I worked there to wash trucks. He finished his AAS and started his BS as i was leaving, online, at Texas A&M. I did pay a heavy price, and I would do it again, tomorrow, if asked.

Even McDonald's has a tuition reimbursement program for full time employees. Quik-Trip too. There's a gas station/conv. store chain here called Buc-Cee's and its lowest paid job is $13.50 an hour with 40hrs a week, all the OT you want, medical, dental, vision, matching percentage 401k options, tuition reimbursement, etc. From a gas station chain with less than 15 stores. If they can do it....

 

IT. The first job I referenced that essentially paid for the first half of my BS, I was doing field service for banks. My current employer hired me into a Network Administrator role without any degree at all. They have since paid for the lion's share of my BS and MBA. I was already managing all of IT Infrastructure before I even started my MBA (but I could have started it sooner).

My wife started in the mail room at a Fortune 200 company while she was in high school. By the time I met her, she was the Accounts Payable manager at one of their internal subsidiaries, with no degree. By the time she finished her Bachelor's, she was already manager of Accounts Receivable, credit and collections for all of corporate, and then moved on to run HR Shared Services.

Seeing as both my wife and I are hiring managers (she is now a Director) in the corporate world, and you don't work in that world at all, I'm going to go ahead and go with our experience. The people we hire rarely have college degrees, and most of those that do have completely unrelated ones--I've hired a couple of IT folks with Art degrees, for example. We both have had multiple employees take advantage of our respective tuition reimbursement programs. I have one right now who will finish his Bachelor's next year, who I hired 3 years ago into Desktop Support and has since moved up.

With regards to how common these programs are, they're not quite ubiquitous, but they're very close to it. The 2017 World at Work study found that 85% of employers offer tuition reimbursement and 19% offer tuition discounts. Overall, 92% of employers offer some form of tuition benefit.

 

Reminds me of much of what I saw in my Federal career of some 33 years. We would see job after job, on the official Vacancy Lists, advertised as "needing" this degree, or that degree, or X number of college credit-hours in this field or that field, when, in fact, most of what we did was either common sense, OJT, skills learned from actual experience, or, at most, linked to math/geometry we learned at the high-school level. We couldn't prove it, but it (strongly) appeared that our Senior Managers and Personnel-Specialists were using those lists to try and make themselves (and their offices/fiefdoms), on paper, look more important than they actually were by artificially inflating the job-qualification necessities to try and bull-****** people into thinking that you had to be Albert Einstein to do the job LOL.

 

So if its so simple to get hired into the Corporate world without a college degree straight outof high school, what are we even talking about? Should be no reason to even go to college before you get a job. That may be the case in IT, but it flies in the face of the experiences I've seen and had. My company for instance wont hire anyone without a college degree, even administrative people.