Basic Transistor question

[Everton]

I am playing with some basic transistor circuits and seem to be having a problem getting theory to match practice and simulation alike!

I have built the common emitter amplifier seen below and am not getting the expected base bias of about 15V.

Here is my thought process:
1 - Set Quiescent current to 15 mA
2 - Calculate V Emitter needs to be 15V
3 - Set V Base at approx 15V
4 - Impedance looking into base = hfe * RE = approx 100k so I selected 10K resistors for my voltage divider to get about 15V.

When I simulated (and built this) I got V base at ~5V.  What gives?   

I redid the same circuit with a quiescent current of 1mA and everything seems to work as expected.  Does the impedance looking into the base not equal hfe*RE as quiescent current goes up?

[c4757p]

If there is 15V on the base, then there is 14.35V on the emitter resistor, giving 14.35mA quiescent. Good so far. But if there is 14.35mA flowing through the 10k collector resistor, it must drop 143.5V, which it obviously cannot do, so instead the transistor saturates. The base-collector diode becomes forward biased as it tries as hard is it can to pull the collector downward, and this draws extra current from the base and drops the base voltage.

You have to either lower the quiescent current or lower the collector resistance.

[KJDS]

You should aim to get the collector to half the supply voltage by setting the base voltage to something suitable.

If you want to keep the emitter and collector resistors as they are, then you'd have 1.5mA across the collector resistor, (from 15V and 10k) and that current will also flow through the 1k resistor, causing 1.5V drop across it so the voltage at the emitter is 1.5V. Add 0.7V for Vbe and the base voltage needs to be set to 2.2V using the resistors on the left of the circuit.

[Everton]

Does zeroes get me every time!

For some reason I was thinking that 15mA through 10K would give a 15V drop.  Sorry for the dumb mistake.

Thanks guys.