I hate to go on Facebook Dental forums. All the B’in and moaning about how staff make their life miserable or insurance isn’t enough. Throw on top, all the shade patients tell you they hate you. Keep shaking on that salty salt to our already gaping wound.
But I do have a sort of soft spot for my millennial brethren. Anyone between the ages of 25-40 when reading this at the time of this writing, my heart is with you. We just might have some legs to stand on when they complain about the injustices we’ve endured. The entitlement may not be entitlement at all.
I feel a mind-numbing sensation thinking about my years in undergrad. The adults in the administration room at my University would record new highs in tuition hikes. Hikes of 16%, 14%,12% and 7% ensnared me and my fellow comrades.
I was one of the lucky who had Pell Grants and because of the socioeconomic status of my parents, received some state aid. But to the others who didn’t. The thousands of other millennial students who would pursue careers that didn’t necessarily need a college degree? What about them?
This is what happens when you have educational institutions like colleges and universities that give access for students to an endless supply of Student Loans with no cap to how much they can raise tuition. Since the 1970’s, the University of Minnesota has raised tuition on average 7.2%. And that’s just a single state school. Other private and more nationally recognized schools will run hotter.
Millennials are needing to take on debt just to have an average lifestyle in comparison to our Baby Boomers. Somewhere in their Gen X has been forgotten but doesn’t have it so bad.
If your patients were loaned all the credit and debt they could to afford all their treatment plans, I bet you’d see a ton of bloated treatment plans out there. It’s unfortunately human nature to take advantage when the system promotes it.
An incentivization of time wasting classes, bloated admins and poor post degree job placement makes this cartel of education worse. Just ask most newly minted dental grads how many root canals they got to do in school. Quality of education does not equate to how much you spent in school.
And yet compared to baby boomers, millennials paid 2.5x more for their undergrad education. I don’t believe education has gotten 2.5x better. Instead you get less face to face time with instructors, bigger class sizes and less experiences.
We need to sit down and ask ourselves, is this how we really let our next generations thrive? My millennial brethren might not be able to get a second chance when the cards have already been stacked against them. And we shouldn’t expect anything to get easier for us. But if we want higher education to be accessible we have to take a stark look at school administrations to not use the carrot of socioeconomic advancement and the backs of the student body to carry all of the financial burden.
Lam