UNZ: 21-12-2025,
When I attended Georgia Tech, it was an engineering school with math, physics, and chemistry departments, a school of architecture, a school of design, and a school of industrial management. The student body totaled about 5000 and consisted almost entirely of Georgia young men. There were a handful of foreign students, and a handful of women in master degree programs that were not offered at women’s colleges.
Georgia Tech was supported by Georgia taxpayers. As a Georgia resident, my tuition was about $450 a year, a price most parents could afford. For those who could not, Georgia Tech offered co-op programs. At that time, Georgia Tech was on a quarter system, not a semester system. The co-op program operated by attending school a quarter and working for a firm for a quarter. The work quarters produced the income for the students education. It took longer to graduate, but many graduates ended up working for the firms where they had been co-ops. In those days there was a demand for graduates that does not exist today. Every graduation at Georgia Tech was accompanied by recruitment booths setup by many American corporations in an effort to recruit Georgia Tech graduates as employees.
There was no such thing as, and no need for, student loans. No students in my day graduated in debt with loans equivalent to a mortgage payment.
In those days, if you graduated from Georgia Tech, the only employment question you faced was which of the many job offers you would accept.