Most Americans already know that a crisis is going on in American advanced schooling.Tuition costs are surging, putting a college education out of reach for many Americans. College grads are defaulting on college loans. They can not find jobs in the fields they trained for.Those trends make the news every day. Yet get more info are only the most visible signs of deeper troubles that threaten to destabilize American higher education in the coming years. Let's take a closer look.Coming Crisis: Colleges Will Price themselves Further and additional Out of ReachBased on the U.S. get more info , the median income of U.S. households in 1970 was $8,390. By 1989, it has risen to $28,910. And by 2005, it had been $46,326. Those figures indicate that Americans today are earning about 5.5 the salaries that they earned 40 years back.How much have college costs grown? In line with the Congressional Budget Office, the common yearly tuition at a four-year public American university in 1970 was $480. The common tuition at a four-year private college or university was a whole lot higher, at $1,980.Today, in accordance with data from The College Board, tuition and fees at four-year state universities currently average $7,020 each year for students who live in- state, and $11,528 for students who live out of state. And private four-year colleges charge the average or $26,273 each year in tuition and fees.So tuition costs are rising at a rate that far outpaces the growth in income of the typical American household. While income is continuing to grow by a factor of 5.5 within the last 40 years, the expense of attending circumstances college has increased by a factor of 15 for in-state students and by way of a factor of about 24 for out-of-state students. And the cost of attending a private college has increased by way of a factor of more than 13.And colleges are organizing tuition increases for the coming years. It is the big squeeze. For many American families, the imagine sending a child to college is slipping even more out of reach.Crisis: American Colleges Will CloseEndowments at American universites and colleges have dropped dramatically through the current economic downturn. At the University of Delaware, the endowment shrank by 24.8%. Gettysburg College lost 25.3%, and the list continues on and on.Top-tier, well-funded institutions will weather the crisis. But a growing number of smaller American private universites and colleges already are finding it difficult to attract enough tuition-paying undergraduates to keep their doors open. With increasing frequency, these schools are making their troubles known.There's another reason that colleges come in trouble. With having less jobs awaiting graduates, it is difficult to convince many American families that it's really worth paying $30,000, $40,000 or even more per year to earn a college degree.Crisis: American Students WILL UNDOUBTEDLY BE Unable to Train for Available JobsThe times of the English major, the philosophy major, and the overall studies major could be numbered, as more students seek training for jobs that they can actually find after graduation. They are training as medical technicians, computer programmers and air conditioning technicians. Yet just as students are trying to find practical training, the sources of that training are harder to find, for some reasons.First, community colleges are no more offering just as much practical training because they once did. To attract more students, many have modified their course offerings to are more like private institutions. While President Obama has pledged to get heavily in community colleges and upgrade their training programs, the changes are long overdue.Second, for-profit universites and colleges are in trouble. A number of them are being investigated right now by Congress due to shady recruiting practices and abuse of government programs for funding advanced schooling. It seems likely a amount of for-profit schools will shut their doors.The effect? American students will see it harder to find schools that offer the practical training they have to secure jobs.And we all know what can happen when a country's workers are under-trained, compared to workers far away. The result will likely be further damage to the American economy and business.What Will Save American ADVANCED SCHOOLING?The trends outlined above are grim. Yet the situation is definately not hopeless. A number of positive trends are in work that point to the possibility that American higher education is not going away, but simply changing.* America still has the strongest educational infrastructure on earth. We simply have more universites and colleges than any other country. Many of these institutions already are reinventing themselves by offering distance education options, three-year degree programs along with other incentives for modern learners.* Americans' desire for education remains strong. With so quite a few citizens hungering for learning, there's ample incentive for colleges to build up new learning options for them.* The timeline of education has changed. More Americans are returning to college at all stages of life. The effect is that a larger pool of Americans that are interested in advanced schooling.* Distance learning is moving into the forefront of American advanced schooling. As Bill Gates predicted on August 9 in his talk at the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, it is already possible to provide a college education over the Internet for less than $2,000.Ultimately, we predict that American ingenuity can not only survive these crises, but turn America into a new kind of community of learners.StraighterLine is really a leader in making a quality college education more affordable making use of their online college courses. StraighterLines distance learning courses are a great way to tackle the escalating cost of four-year educational costs and steer clear of a mountain of student debt.