<p>In the fall semester this year, the tuition will go above $1400 per point (for a 3-credit class, you'd pay over 5 grands). I wonder how they justify the tuition increase every year for a private institution with solid financial endowment?</p>
<p>You don’t have much of a grasp of what it takes to educate one student. My alma mater, a Columbia peer school with a montrously larger endowment calculated a bit ago that despite the roughly then $45000 price tag, it cost the univeristy about $95000 to educate each undergrad. Yep. With every kid they accepted, they lost about $50000. And this doesn’t include the roughly 65% of kids on FinAid, much of it very generous. Despite my school’s multi-billion dollar endowment, they went through two rounds of deep staff cuts and froze hiring.</p>
<p>I suggest you go over Columbia’s financial statements. Endowments can only use a small portion for ongoing expenses.</p>
<p>every school’s tuition usually goes up each year, or at least the total cost of attendance. please don’t necessarily attribute/blame columbia. like most economic things the goal is optimization. it wants to earn as much as it can, while still being at a price point that does not scare away the majority of its consumers. yeah folks don’t like it when these words are tossed around in academia, but imagine losing money every year, the school would eventually go bankrupt.</p>
<p>but as T2 says - columbia and all schools lose money on educating students for the most part. think about graduate students who are especially economic drains. so what they try to do is recoup loses, but they spread the wealth. it is for this reason they seek alumni giving, grants, they want healthier endowments to cover ever increasing costs. </p>
<p>i believe that this is untenable in the long run, but unless folks stop wanting career services and nicely appointed buildings, and other accoutrement, the rates will increase. there are some interesting people thinking about this; the center for college affordability (i think its acronym is ccap) does some research though i don’t always agree with it. but it is surprising how it is not an issue that is front and center. thinking about new pricing models and new fiscal models for universities is easily the province of this decade. the school to figure it out best will have a longer future.</p>
<p>Yeah right. The tuition keeps increasing because customers (students and their parents) are able and willing to pay for the services the school renders, i.e. reputation. To be quite honest, I’m sure I could have received the same education from Rutgers as I can from Columbia. However, the quality of students and some of the alumni who’ve graduated are the most important aspects of my education, and that’s nothing the school can control or finance.</p>
<p>Tuition is used to fund research by the university. At the end of the day, you buy into Columbia because of the reputation it has and the doors that it opens for graduate school and careers. The classes aren’t great and nothing that can’t be replicated at another university. As someone mentioned before, learning Organic Chemistry from a Nobel Laureate isn’t that much better than learning from your run of the mill professor. It should come down to teaching quality and their ability to communicate, not their ability to research. Knowledge has already been created, so there’s little educational value added from having a great researcher; rather that person may have the innate intuition to share with students but that’s rarely the case having taken classes with brilliant researchers. </p>
<p>Undergraduates and MS students are cash cows at Columbia. Sure, tuition doesn’t really need to be that expensive when you consider that you pay for housing, food, student life fees, medical fees, and almost all other operating expenditures. In reality, you just pay for the teacher and their TA’s, which really means you’re just funding tenure and the ability to research. </p>
<p>Take a look at the financial statements from 2010 and 2000. Tuition increases from 435,722 to 930,617 while expenditures in terms of teaching, research, and administration increase from 914,030 to (1,178,438 + 483,470 = 1,661,908). Tuition increases by 113% while expenditures only increase by 80%. </p>
<p>Sorry wifey, you’re just a cash cow for Columbia but you get to buy the name, which definitely came from research activities that the university did. So in a way, all undergraduate and MS students are benefiting from the glow of the Columbia reputation, just not from the education or from instructors that much.</p>
<p>^key takeaway here is, expenses are larger than tuition revenue. so even if tuition is rising, you are still being subsidized to attend Columbia. At a fireside chat last year, someone asked Prezbo precisely this and his answer was “even with no financial aid, the price to get your undergrad education, is less than the cost of educating you, that’s why we need people like you to donate when you all become very successful”</p>
<p>Wait, I retract my statement. I compared some financial statements from other LAC and schools focused on teaching. All schools run into the red if it weren’t for donations from alumni. Wow, I really didn’t think educating students could be so expensive.</p>
<p>I’m thinking of other factors, such as research based professors bidding up the salary of teaching professors or higher administrative costs given technological advances (students are able to do more but it costs more) as some reasons. Regardless, education is expensive and tuition doesn’t cover the costs of educating a student.</p>
<p>@beard tax</p>
<p>
I think you can say this about all schools.</p>
<p>education is a very expensive game, and it has with it a great amount of counterveiling forces, interest groups. it is indeed complicated, and when you start to way all these complexities it seems more suprising to see remnants of principled stances.</p>
<p>it is for that reason that beard says his education would be as good at Rutgers, but at Rutgers he might not have a discussion section capped at 20 students, he wouldn’t have perhaps the most impressive attempt at a large university to provide all students the ability to converse in small seminar formats (the core), he would not have the center for career education (that you might deride), which gained more than $15million in new funding through the Quigley Endowment, or the $50million for advising: both of which only come because of alumni fundraising. that a university still believes there is a reason to learn classic texts at a point when all universities are turning away from expensive cores, is telling of just how much Columbia cares about tradition and its unique pedagogy.</p>
<p>despite the constant impulse to be cynical about columbia and its weaknesses, i remain constantly amazed at the sheer principled nature of the school at pursuing some of the least cost-efficient projects for the sake of improvement the experience for students. when williams and amherst did away with their no-loan policies recently, columbia was one of the few schools that retained that pact. the health of columbia is very much due to sound fiscal management and increased/sustained giving.</p>
<p>The responses here are mostly correct. Tuition increases are actually a really good thing - one of my professors (I’m a current student) actually advocated increasing tuition to $85,000 the other day just because it would allow more low-income students to enroll. As it is now, even students from incredibly wealthy families are basically receiving ~$40,000 in financial aid since Columbia only charges $50k when the true cost of a Columbia education is $85k. </p>
<p>The higher the tuition, the more financial aid we can offer to low-income students. Don’t be so quick to judge! Princeton - which proudly announced that it wouldn’t be increasing its tuition at all this year - is actually pretty screwy and its actions are only benefiting the rich.</p>