Eyeballing the Median chart, “Cost of attending college as an in-state undergraduate”, it does in fact look like there has basically been no inflation-adjusted increase at all in the second half of the study period, meaning since 2012. Even holding aside the pandemic period, the cost of attendance increase was very low in that second period, and basically all done by 2015ish.
And that is full pay. It doesn’t account for any scholarships.
So what has gone so much better over the last decade or so than what was happening over the first decade?
Net tuition costs (adjusted for inflation) have fallen for the last three years. (here’s one source, there are many).
I don’t have a good source for total net costs (including room and board). I assume that’s difficult to get at because most students (in the big picture) do not live on campus.
Yes, I belatedly added a note that the WSJ chart is only full pay, and doesn’t include such discounts.
Your information, particularly the underlying report, is way more detailed:
Executive summary, it reports the same sort of basic curve shape since 2012 for full pay. But when you get to CB-9, it shows that net COA for in-state, in inflation adjusted terms, has very likely gone down (“very likely” just because IPEDs data lags, so they have to do a reasonable projection into the last few years):
I’m not sure this would be quite as dire if you were looking at “flagship” or “national” publics, because my understanding is that there has been an observable demand shift from more local/regional colleges to more national colleges.
Still, to the extent “flagship” and “national” public colleges are competing for out-of-state enrollees who combine very good credentials and also the ability to pay higher out of state tuitions, that may be quite close to a zero sum game.
It may be as simple as the step-functions in cost inherent to medium/long-term operation of an institution with a physical plant. You maintain and repair your physical plant, and then every once in a while you knock down an old building and build a new, state of the art facility from scratch. Maybe more of that happened to occur in the 1st decade studied, setting up the 2nd decade as one of relatively lower capex. And that in turn allows for the cost stabilization observed in the second decade.
Except, of course, as the article notes, actual state funding for these schools has declined. I’d liken this spending less to government spending and far more like private entity spending.
Again, I am confident the demand pool for national universities looks better than that, but as I recall, the nationalization effect I referenced before was also happening in the early 2000s. So, maybe the post-2010 part for them has been more flat than downward, but maybe the 2000 to 2010 part was an even bigger boom period for them.
And these are usually pretty sophisticated entities when it comes to long-term financial planning. So I could definitely see them thinking 2000 through 2010 or so was going to be a period in which they should be spending capital to try to expand capacity, and where possible improve or at least stay competitive on perceived quality, in order to capture a fair (or better) share of a rapidly growing market.
And then once they saw that boom period ending, it would make sense to plan to shift more resources to cost competition. Which is a common pattern when you see consumer demand level off or indeed decline in a market (that competing producers in that market end up needing to cut costs to stay competitive).
And in fact, private colleges had pretty similar patterns, as I pointed out before.
I think it is therefore more promising to do what DroidsLookingFor, say, did, and consider the sorts of financial explanations that can be attributed to identifiable market trends.
I think you should be comparing Purdue to similar universities when discussing tuition holds. With the exception of Engineering, these two schools are not peers.
I am not getting into that debate about peer schools. Ya know I am kinda involved with the Michigan thread on cc😉…
I am just saying there are some schools that have figured it out. Beloit college of all schools have figured it out while lots of their peers are closing…
My son went to Michigan and started like 6 years ago and I think the OOS rate was $62,000 off the top of my head. Now it’s $72,000(yes with room /board). That’s kinda a large increase and goes up Junior /Senior year.
As you know I love the school but it’s getting extremely expensive.
So I ask, what can schools like this do to hold down tuition. I was just on campus last weekend and yep the new buildings are awesome. Next fall more dorms. Awesome. The best technology/research facility /faculty, out there.
They do give financial aid even to OOS students. But something has to give.
I note that is less than general inflation over the last six years. July 2023 is the last available month, and $62,000 in July of 2017 would be about $77,400 in July of 2023.
Just guessing…maybe from the revenues coming from 35K plus online only students thru Purdue Global? Maybe deferring building/improvements that aren’t fully funded using other peoples’ money?
Michigan has an interesting fee schedule with the increases for Jr/Sr year. It’s $2k for residents, and double that for OOS (on top of the almost $40k difference the first 2 years).
Honestly, I support a state school prioritizing residents by letting those willing from OOS pay more. In Michigan’s case, a lot more. They have built a school where the market supports those prices for out-of-state students, so why not charge what you can?
I think having a flagship where people constantly question anyone who could attend and chooses not to is a really good environment for the state.
I’ll give an opinion here. My D started at Purdue in 2013 a year after Mitch Daniels became President and took a hard look at the cost of attending Purdue. I believe on of the first things he did was look carefully at administrative costs. He supposedly eliminated redundancies where they were found and demanded productivity. Initially some people were concerned that it might affect the academics of the school but that never seemed an issue. They were also concerned how it might affect the Professors but I haven’t heard that as a complaint recently either. Indiana has two flagship universities. So does Michigan but unlike Michigan Purdue has always been considered Indiana’s flagship for Engineering and the Sciences while Indiana is better known for Business, Medicine and the arts. I think that and Purdue’s reputation worldwide in Engineering allowed it to draw more OOS and international students. Since they held their tuition down they didn’t need to give out as many scholarships giving them a better feel for just how much they were going to be generating in tuition funds. Purdue also grew. I think the number of undergrads was around 30k when my D started and is closer to 37k. I think the additional tuition helps spread the fixed costs around especially if they are holding the line on administration. Finally, I am curious as to how the state of Indiana has funded higher education. I really don’t know but perhaps it has held it’s funding more level. I’m spit balling but I really appreciated the education my D received (Chemical Engineering) and the fact that the university seemed most focused on the education not the university.
So - maybe state universities (like school public districts) shouldn’t be “competing” amongst one another, or with privates, and spend their funds on “marketing” themselves (incl. sports), but should just be SERVING.
And, if enrollment trends from constituent (in state) families mean facilities (and staffing) has to be scaled down accordingly over (a long) time, then that’s not a “disaster” to be fought, but rather a reality to be dealt with appropriately (again - like public school districts would.)
I think Purdue Global, plus all their masters engineering online programs are cash cows for the university.
I have seen no deferred building/improvements - the facilities and labs are amazing and there are new buildings going up all over campus. They just announced a new dorm that will house 900.
Perhaps not a coincidence is that Idaho is the only state in the WSJ article where costs have gone down, and appears at the top of the list for growth in enrollment. Of course, that’s helped by Idaho being one of the states with the most rapidly growing population.
Obviously that is a personal question, and a given family might not have thought it was a deal at either point in time.
However, among the reasons to adjust for inflation is that these colleges do have input costs, and if their own input costs are going up with inflation, then they usually have to pass that on in some way barring new revenue sources.
Another is that if they are competing for full pay students, and those families have more to spend in unadjusted terms, then they can raise full prices in step with those families ability to spend. But of course they may use that revenue to decrease cost of attendance for others.
General inflation is only a crude measure of that, of course. But as it happens, households who are potentially considering full pay in the first place likely have seen their income increase more than inflation over those six years. This again is crude, and lagging a bit, but in the most recent six year period available, household incomes at the 80th percentile went up by about 12.3% over inflation. At the 90th percentile it was 15.2%, and at the 95th 17.6%.
So Purdue in fact has dropped its inflation-adjusted cost of attendance since 2012-13. However, it appears on average, public four-years and private non-profit four-years have dropped their inflation-adjusted cost of attendance since 2016-17–not coincidentally, the period we have been discussing.
So Purdue started earlier than some, and I guess it gets some good PR out of doing this in the form of freezing full pay costs in nominal terms. But it isn’t really unique in the broader scheme, it is a widespread change in trends over the last period.
