I completely agree with your last point about not letting college be out of reach for poor students. (In my experience, sticker price can be a big barrier. Many prospective students don't realize that they can get tuition discounts based on having a lower household income, so they never apply to schools that would actually be well within…
I completely agree with your last point about not letting college be out of reach for poor students. (In my experience, sticker price can be a big barrier. Many prospective students don't realize that they can get tuition discounts based on having a lower household income, so they never apply to schools that would actually be well within their reach.)
It's common among left-of-center folks, including many of the college professors I know, to blame lack of state funding for the ballooning cost of college tuition. As you'll see from my long comment on Katie's rant, I'm definitely concerned about further state budget cuts, too. This excellent piece by Planet Money explains the bigger factor: Colleges are competing on amenities and other facilities like the lab described in the piece, and those things are massively expensive: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-000-a-year-for-college-is-actually-a-discount
State universities are engaged in the same expensive competition, to varying degrees, in part because college rankings really matter for attracting both students and donations.
But you are discounting lack of state funding by talking about the budgets of private universities. I think amenities are a problem-- less wealthy schools can end up privatizing to keep up which can put schools in long term fiscal trouble. Still-- it doesn’t mean it’s the same driver of tuition.
Unfortunately, I can't control Planet Money's choice of spotlight in its story. :-) But let me try to put this another way: The public university where I did graduate school has gotten less than 15% of its budget from the state for years now, so >85% of its budget is paid for by other sources (tuition, major donations, etc.--college funding is very complicated). Funding-wise, it's *mostly* a private school with a state cushion tacked on. Meanwhile, tuition continues to rise dramatically. For out-of-state students, its sticker price is as high as a nice private college's. The reasons include competition for students and rankings via exactly the sorts of expenditures Duke, a 100% private institution, also makes.
This may be less readily apparent to those who haven't worked in institutions of higher ed, but those of us who've been fortunate enough to work at both public and private ones can see them engaging in similarly expensive competition that leads to tuition increase at both. State funding is less and less of a difference maker in the many states that have already slashed most of it.
The biggest difference in the financial health of most colleges is probably the relative size of the endowments. That's why Harvard can offer much lower tuition than the ritzy but non-Ivy liberal arts colleges. But another major factor is the push and pull between being able to do cool things (like offer scholarships to needy students, or fund summer internships) if you charge a lot for tuition and having trouble if you max out the number of applicants who are interested in paying sticker price.
Instead of propelling students into the middle class, many public institutions such as the University of Alabama are leaving them saddled with large loans.
I completely agree with your last point about not letting college be out of reach for poor students. (In my experience, sticker price can be a big barrier. Many prospective students don't realize that they can get tuition discounts based on having a lower household income, so they never apply to schools that would actually be well within their reach.)
It's common among left-of-center folks, including many of the college professors I know, to blame lack of state funding for the ballooning cost of college tuition. As you'll see from my long comment on Katie's rant, I'm definitely concerned about further state budget cuts, too. This excellent piece by Planet Money explains the bigger factor: Colleges are competing on amenities and other facilities like the lab described in the piece, and those things are massively expensive: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/02/14/277015271/duke-60-000-a-year-for-college-is-actually-a-discount
But that’s Duke— a private R1 university which isn’t state funded. State universities, especially regional ones have been hit pretty hard.
State universities are engaged in the same expensive competition, to varying degrees, in part because college rankings really matter for attracting both students and donations.
But you are discounting lack of state funding by talking about the budgets of private universities. I think amenities are a problem-- less wealthy schools can end up privatizing to keep up which can put schools in long term fiscal trouble. Still-- it doesn’t mean it’s the same driver of tuition.
Unfortunately, I can't control Planet Money's choice of spotlight in its story. :-) But let me try to put this another way: The public university where I did graduate school has gotten less than 15% of its budget from the state for years now, so >85% of its budget is paid for by other sources (tuition, major donations, etc.--college funding is very complicated). Funding-wise, it's *mostly* a private school with a state cushion tacked on. Meanwhile, tuition continues to rise dramatically. For out-of-state students, its sticker price is as high as a nice private college's. The reasons include competition for students and rankings via exactly the sorts of expenditures Duke, a 100% private institution, also makes.
This may be less readily apparent to those who haven't worked in institutions of higher ed, but those of us who've been fortunate enough to work at both public and private ones can see them engaging in similarly expensive competition that leads to tuition increase at both. State funding is less and less of a difference maker in the many states that have already slashed most of it.
The biggest difference in the financial health of most colleges is probably the relative size of the endowments. That's why Harvard can offer much lower tuition than the ritzy but non-Ivy liberal arts colleges. But another major factor is the push and pull between being able to do cool things (like offer scholarships to needy students, or fund summer internships) if you charge a lot for tuition and having trouble if you max out the number of applicants who are interested in paying sticker price.
A CRIMSON TIDE OF DEBT
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/public-universities-debt/619546/
Not all of them! Some have turned into state sponsored versions of Trump University.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/08/public-universities-debt/619546/
A CRIMSON TIDE OF DEBT
Instead of propelling students into the middle class, many public institutions such as the University of Alabama are leaving them saddled with large loans.
Here another study https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/a-lost-decade-in-higher-education-funding
It’s interesting to read how priorities in state funding was affected in 2008 by the Great Recession. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-briefs/2019/10/two-decades-of-change-in-federal-and-state-higher-education-funding