<p>What has caused the rapid rise in tuition rates at school in the past couple of decades? </p>
<p>I wish I had the numbers on me, but I've repeatedly heard that the cost of tuition has been rapidly outpacing the rate of inflation.</p>
<p>Is there a reason for this? Or is it just demand has risen in the past couple of decades.</p>
<p>
No one knows for sure</p>
<p>The easy availability of student loans has fueled a credit-based bubble in college expenses. Colleges get paid up front and have no incentive to control costs.</p>
<p>A greater percentage of students are attempting college than in the past, since a bachelor’s degree has become a de facto minimum qualification for many white-collar jobs. More people want to buy the product.</p>
<p>Personnel costs have increased as health care and benefit costs have skyrocketed for all employees in every industry. Higher ed is not alone in this by a long shot. </p>
<p>Colleges are also now expected to offer many more support services and amenities than fifty years ago. To do so, they must higher more non-academic support staff.</p>
<p>IT needs are greater than ever. No one used a computer when I was in college. There was no Help Desk.</p>
<p>Finally, there is the building boom that has been going on. Colleges are in a competition to have the nicest physical facilities.</p>
<p>Yes, education costs have been double or triple the rate of inflation for the last 30 years.</p>
<p>There is no one reason, it is the combined effect of multiple factors:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>demand - there are many more college students now.</p></li>
<li><p>easy access to money - overly easy credit has let schools increase the price because everyone can borrow the money.</p></li>
<li><p>the ceo-ization of the leaders - school heads like to think of themselves as CEO’s rather than educational leaders. This has put tremendous upward pressure on salaries and benefits, and then they have to have to staff to justify it. </p></li>
<li><p>the rise of the bureaucracy - administrative expenses have risen at a much higher rate than educational expenses. There are Deans for everything now, with their own staffs to justify their existence.</p></li>
<li><p>building envy - there has been a huge campus building boom as schools compete to build larger and more luxurious buildings to attract students.</p></li>
<li><p>keeping up with the Joneses - a school is now viewed as “inferior” if they aren’t charging as much as the highest schools. So they price themselves in the stratosphere even if they wind up giving 80% of all students “scholarships” to bring the price down to a more affordable level. What gets reported is full list price though, not the average price paid.</p></li>
<li><p>it’s labor-intensive - pensions and benefit costs (health insurance) have gone way up; in a labor-heavy field, this pushes up prices faster than inflation.</p></li>
<li><p>cut-backs in state funding at state schools - many states have drastically de-funded higher ed, leading to huge cost increases just to survive.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I could probably come up with of a few more if I think about it, that’s just off the top of my head.</p>
<p>There’s no one answer, but I will throw competition into the mix. On cc, we talk about highly selective schools that can pick and choose students. However, most colleges must compete for students. To do so they need nicer facilities (building boom mentioned above), more services (and the staff to provide them), and they have to offer merit aid to some students to sweeten the pot. </p>
<p>I will also add the declining value of the Pell grant and state aid. When very little comes in for these sources, schools have to spend more of their own to attract and retain low income students. Think a college with a low retention rate is a bad school? Might just be one that serves a large number of low income students.</p>
<p>
You’re missing one of the major reasons:
Teaching of new technical education requires very expensive equipments</p>
<p>Not necessarily. Look at how expensive Sarah Lawrence and American University are. Both are liberal arts/social science intensive schools that cost (at full price) more than what most families make in a year.</p>
<p>Public school costs have gone up almost entirely due to one factor: lower public funding. The spending per student at public schools has largely stayed on pace with inflation, and in many cases has actually dropped in real dollars, but the public funding has been slashed, forcing public colleges to raise tuition to make ends meet.</p>
<p>Private school tuition is more complicated, but certainly the eroding price competition from the public schools allows the privates to raise prices without scaring off applicants. Many of the other factors mentioned already by other posters are part of the complex story at private schools, however the narrative that loans have driven up prices has been evaluated and found not supported by the evidence.</p>
<p>Many reasons…</p>
<p>There’s an “arms race” between the colleges to offer the latest and greatest technology, facilities, labs, etc. Security on campus, in dorms, etc, adds a lot to cost. Profs’ salaries.</p>
<p>the root of all evil is the love of money
i can tell you one thing states make a lot of money off colleges
and unfortunately they dont seem to be doing most of the students too well</p>
<p>I work at a private college, and I do know quite a bit about the costs involved in running the school. We operate with very few staff members. The school has to maintain facilities, pay for programming, pay salaries and benefits for faculty and staff, provide necessary training for staff, maintain full service human resources and accounting services, etc, etc, etc. There are so many costs … and so few places we can cut back. While tuition is not cheap, neither is it inexpensive to operate the college. Colleges have to diversify these days - they must work to provide revenue streams other than tuition. It’s not easy.</p>
<p>In my state, the flagship is overpriced because the government is in financial ruins and owes the school millions of dollars. Sad state of affairs.</p>
<p>Hasn’t anyone noticed the “high tuition, high financial aid” policy among private colleges? With the possible exception of HYPS because of their endowments, many schools have practically become Robin Hood to partially support low income students with tuition dollars from upper/middle class students.</p>
<p>Actually, PCHope, the reverse is just as often the case. See this report, “Undermining Pell
How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind” by Stephen Burd:</p>
<p><a href=“http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Merit_Aid%20Final.pdf[/url]”>http://newamerica.net/sites/newamerica.net/files/policydocs/Merit_Aid%20Final.pdf</a></p>
<p>BW, I only took a glance at the paper because of its length. </p>
<p>I think we are not in disagreement overall, just talking two different points that exist at the same time. There is no question that the poorer students are being subsidized by the government and colleges, often indirectly by richer students. Are the support enough? Mostly not. There is also common practice of limiting reasonably qualified poor students to “save” money, while increasing under-qualified rich students to raise revenue. </p>
<p>The real issue is that someone somehow has to pay for college education. Most European countries have taken the path of public funding, with very limited personal cost beyond taxation, while we have gone the other way. Sounds familiar? While I personally bias towards the public funding model, I do not see its practicality in this country, not anytime soon.</p>