The answer seems to be, “Probably Not”, so long as you are the beneficiary of the complicated and inter-locking system of subsidies, grants and government loans available at the elite college level (“elite” being defined as one of 200 private colleges and universities that have “high brand recognition”, like the Ivies.)
But, for others, the author paints a much darker picture:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/is-college-tuition-too-high.html?_r=0
College is obscenely overpriced. $250,000 for a four year undergraduate education is absurd. Unfortunately, the market treats elite colleges as Giffen goods with their desirability increasing as fees go up.
The problem is that as they note in the article, schools do indeed have tiered pricing models, but these are opaque to the buyer. What’s needed is some kind of app like that one that you can use for car buying where you can see what others paid for a similar car. That way, you could look up someone with your similar income and stats and see what the ‘real’ price is for your demographic at your school. That would be a better starting point.
Other countries are able to keep their college tuition affordable like Germany, Canada and Finland. I was surprised the article didn’t mention that.
Most other countries strictly control WHO can go to college by “tracking” students thru their K-12 years.
I imagine that other countries univs don’t have the “luxury” fitness centers and maybe some of the state of the art things our univs do. US univs also spend a lot on security.
There’s hardly any university abroad that has the bells and whistles of a Stanford, or even of an Ohio State. Oxford and Cambridge are pretty unusual for housing everybody for 3-4 years. Most places, universities offer undergraduates lectures and exams and not much else. Sports, layers of counseling and support, dorm communities, acres of landscaping, etc. are not common.
On the other hand, shared rooms are more common in the US than in many overseas universities. In Britain, they think it’s barbaric to stick you in one little room with a stranger.
Unequivocally, yes. Tuition is crazy high.
Part of the problem is that colleges have deviated from their original mission. Now, most of them are being to run to benefit the administration, not educate students. That is why you end up with bloated budgets and tuition fees.
Isn’t this what NPCs are for?
I know they don’t work well with divorced parents and some business owners, but they seem like a better guide than what some other family paid.
NPCs seem worthless to me. Granted, I haven’t run many, but when you are pretty dependent on merit aid…their use seems minimal at best. I love the schools that list guaranteed merit based on stats…then the comparison and waiting game is be much easier. I wish more schools did this, although I guess it would dilute the pool.
True some include merit in their NPCs and some don’t.
Yes, that’s what NPCs are for. Many NPCs, though, are…problematic. Just for starters, some of them bake automatic merit aid into the results they give, others ignore even automatic merit aid completely, and others appear to give the most optimistic possible picture on competitive merit aid.
Wellesley is perhaps unique in that if you do some digging, you will find two completely different NPCs (though only one that’s actually called that). For my family, which has a pretty straightforward financial profile, both of them give results that I find on the expensive side, but one is approximately half the other.
If a single school can have its own NPCs give such disparate results, I’m not sure I really trust any of them, let alone to the point of making comparisons between schools.
FYI, here’s the average cost of tuition at colleges around the world.
Sweden/Germany: $0
Canada $5900
Australia: $7700
United States $9000 (public) /$31000 (private)
https://www.tuition.io/blog/2012/08/how-do-students-around-the-world-pay-for-college/
Some of these countries have higher levels of educational attainment than the US as well.
IIRC there was a time, not so very long ago, when even the University of Pennsylvania, a private college dating from Colonial times, received a handsome subsidy from the State of Pennsylvania. Is it just a coincidence that tuition has skyrocketed ever since the legislature phased it out?
@fubar, If you’ve ever seen a German or Swedish or French university campus you would understand very quickly why American universities cost a heck of a lot more. While they’re funded differently, there are also very different expectations, ones that don’t include climbing walls, state-of-the-art gyms, restaurant-quality dining halls, or college sports. An American would be shocked how few fields are available to study at any given university. That’s because a huge percentage of our majors don’t exist in their universities, but rather specific training schools.
None of this changes the fact that the American “college experience” is becoming unaffordable for many people. But comparing it to the European model makes no sense because in Europe, few universities and few students expect a similar “college experience.”
Only the more ‘elite’ students (based on high scores on early standard tests) go to college in many countries - others go to apprenticeship programs.
4 Year College costs have outpaced inflation, as talked about on first page of article. H and I attended school 1974 - 1978; my private tuition was lower the first year, and the next 3 years was $1200/semester tuition (or $100 a credit hour). I believe my brother at Univ of WI paid a bit over $500/semester tuition as in-state student. H had trimester tuition fees of $975 a term (private engineering school). Our children are at in-state public universities and with academic scholarships.
I think the higher costs at university and four year college levels will drive more students to utilize the CC system just as our family was ‘driven’ to not consider private university/private college. However my students are getting a good education where they are and have clear career goals. We knew when they were born that college costs were outpacing inflation; saved money and prepared them to be scholarship students.
However first thing to say is that students who don’t take advantage of doing well at ‘free’ HS, what makes you think they will do well in college? Many HS students have the opportunity for AP or dual enrollment. Many students don’t challenge themselves educationally up through HS and then it is too big of a jump for them to go on to CC or university and perform well. Some of that does go back to families not knowing how to provide the support at home to foster academic excellence. Some may be student laziness, lack of role models, lots of reasons.
In 2007, there was a class action lawsuit that claimed property taxes in AL needed to be raised because not enough minority students can afford to go to college; the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals Jan/Feb 2007 rejected this claim. “There were too many links in the chain to justify a judicial remedy, to compel or justify a federal court to overhaul AL’s tax system.” Should not have lawsuits be turned into “amorphous vehicles for the rectification of all alleged wrongs.”
This sprung up because there was a college desegregation lawsuit going on where AL A & M University (a land grant school) did not have equal land grant funding as Auburn Univ. and they (AL A & M) did win additional funding through the courts. Huntsville Times Editorial Board said the higher-education lawsuit is over and it’s time to move on. “The present taxation system is far from perfect, its flaws are neither so broad nor so deep that they call for extreme, even unprecedented measures, to correct them. Solutions to a problem are ideally proportional to the seriousness of the problem.”
I can’t believe that this is a serious question. Of course, U.S. college tuition is too high.
That may be true in some European countries but certainly not in Canada. The Canadian university that 3 of my Ds attended had similar amenities to the top U.S. colleges that their two sisters attended. And there is no control, strict, or otherwise, over who goes on to post-secondary studies. All of our universities and colleges are public and they are heavily subsidized by general tax revenues in order to keep costs down.
The delta between US public vs. Canada & Australia is only $3.1k and $$1.3k, respectively. Not huge.
Sweden/Germany ration access to admit the high academic achievers.
The article alluded to the fact that it cost nearly $100,000/yr to educate a student at Harvard. In essence every Harvard student is getting a price break. I would be curious to know what it costs to educate a student at every college. I keep seeing how state funding of public schools is falling but I’m not sure what that means? Is it falling as a percentage of the cost to educate a student? Is it falling in inflation adjusted terms? Is it falling in real dollars? Is it falling on a per student basis but not in total dollars but more students are attending? I’m not sure. If I compared what states contributed to education in 1970 and adjusted the raw number for the regular rate of inflation (not educations rate of inflation) and compared it to today would the states actually be contributing less? Just curious.
Harvard may spend $100,000 per student, but an undergraduate education does not cost them that much. They spending on buildings and salaries that have minimal impact on the quality of the education but enriches the administration.