this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Does anyone know if college is accurate (including all the hidden fees)? I went about 15 years ago, and state schools were $10k/year for just (in-state) tuition, $20k/year for tuition and room and board. Private schools were closer to $40k/year for everything.
I’d be pleasantly surprised if it wasn’t more than $30k a year for college now.
Tuition exploded in the 90s. You were already on the bad side of it. I graduated from an "expensive" private college in 1982, and it was about $10k. If I'd gone to a state school, it would have been about $3K.
Even my older sibling (ten years older) had significantly cheaper school in the early 2000s than I did and significantly more expensive than you. I honestly just expected it to keep growing at an insane rate- I hope it’s leveled out some.
Side note: I was really excited to earn $35k/year at my first office job in 2015, because I grew up with $40k in mind as the “made it” salary. I was… disappointed.
My first programming job in 1996 was $35K a year. It was pretty disappointing even then.
I went to a liberal arts college in the late '80s and tuition there was about $13K a year. Tuition at comparable liberal arts colleges these days is in the neighborhood of $75K, so it's in the neighborhood of a 6X increase (without factoring in inflation). Which is still a fuck ton but not quite as bad as indicated by this post. However: college tuition (especially at colleges like this) is a very fluid property. They offer quite a lot of "financial aid" which is really nothing more than a discounted rate rather than any actual money changing hands, and it's quite typical for a student to end up paying half the quoted rate. A college's tuition can be better regarded as the maximum rate they're going to charge kids from better-off families.
Yup thats how they do it. I went to a liberal arts college like that in the mid 2000s. 20k scholarship out of 30k tuition/boarding. Next year it was up to 35k. Year after would have been 40k, schalorship did not increase. Transferred to state school no scholarship but it kept my out of pocket about 12k.
It costs me about $8K for this semester at my community college living on campus. So I think that would probably end up being $16-17K for the year.
You can get much lower, but those are subsidized in state tuition rates for residents. That's more 6-12k a year with the Pell grant covering community college completely if you're low income. Same as housing, that's completely address dependent, although it has gone up. But the lowest cost housing was more like 20k for a house in 90s. There are still houses for high 100s now.