Here’s a new take on “tuition”:
At many (maybe most) colleges, the
tuition “sticker price” isn’t really the per capita figure for what it costs for
the institution to keep its doors open. In any event, most students don’t pay
the sticker price, so what’s the information value of the “tuition” number?
Danielle Allen, at WashingtonPost.com,
recently wrote that the posted annual tuition at your college “is
as good as useless.”
She says: “At elite colleges and
universities, the actual cost of educating any given student for a year is
greater than the “sticker price.” For the
2014-2015 school year, Amherst College calculated a cost per student
of $95,600.”
Ooops, sorry, I just lost my lunch. It
seems to me to be beyond all reasonable question that at most colleges it
shouldn’t cost anything close to $95,600 to keep Maryanne or Juan in a decent
room, well-fed, with access to the internet and a decent library, and give
him/her a decent education for nine months.
Allen also notes:
“Tuition decisions made by elite colleges and universities are
actually decisions about whom to subsidize. The lower the sticker price, the
more the well-to-do are being subsidized for an education that costs well above
the sticker price. The higher the sticker price, the more the subsidy is
shifted to the less well-off.”
Let’s hold for another time the
discussion about who’s paying for the subsidy (alumni, taxpayers) and the
issues that make student loans unmentionable in some polite company.
Read Allen’s complete take on tuition here.
In simplistic terms, here’s the point:
college costs too much and a college education increasingly has a dubious
cost/benefit rationale.
Allen says the tuition/sticker price is
a useless piece of information.
Is there any way to have some straight
talk about the desired and presumed benefits of getting a college degree?
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2016
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