These days on college campuses, aspiration is colliding with reality.
During the last 30 years, the cost of tuition and fees has nearly tripled. Paying for college has become the typical family's second-largest investment, behind the mortgage.
Temple University has raised tuition every year since 1995 - this year 9.9 percent for in-state students.
West Chester University, along with the 13 other state-owned colleges, hiked tuition 7.5 percent.
At Ivy League University of Pennsylvania, tuition rose 3.9 percent to $42,098 a year. Throw in a dormitory bed, meals, and books, and the price reaches $57,360.
Steve Cohen, coauthor of Getting In!, a guide to admissions, said the cost had gone from high to higher, with no end in sight.
"It's driven by supply and demand," he said, "and demand has grown."
Overall, college enrollment grew a healthy 9 percent between 1989 and 1999 - but a phenomenal 38 percent in the following decade, from 14.8 million to 20.4 million, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
That increase occurred as a college degree, once a sure ticket to a well-paying, fulfilling career, has become a minimum requirement for job-seekers - but too often, not enough to get them hired.
Perry Morgan, a partner in JLM Design Group L.L.C., an architecture firm in Plymouth Meeting, has watched in anguish as his son, Zachary, has sent out resumé upon resumé.
Digging holes
He graduated near the top of his class in a five-year architecture/landscape program at Pennsylvania State University - and can't find work. For a while, he took a manual-labor job, digging holes for a landscape company in Florida, but eventually that ended. Now he's home - and thinking of moving to Canada for opportunities.
"Hard, hard worker, excellent grades, no job," Morgan said. "He doesn't want to live in the basement; he wants to get on with his life."
