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College Costs
COLLEGE COSTS....The New York Times, quoting a new report from the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, says:
Over all, the report found, published college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation.
Bob Somerby is astounded, as well he should be. The report is here, and the chart on page 8 is clearly labeled "Growth Rate in Current Dollar Price." In other words, not adjusted for inflation. In real dollars, tuition costs since 1982 have gone up about 150%. That's a lot, but not quite the quintupling the Times suggests.
For what it's worth, my guess is that this number is strongly affected by big tuition hikes at state universities. Adjusted for inflation, for example, tuition at Harvard has gone from $15,000 in 1982 to $31,000 last year — a mere doubling. Conversely, the state university I attended charged virtually nothing when I was there in 1981 but today charges in-state students nearly $4,000 per year. The eye popping tuition figures at elite universities get the headlines, but it's the budget strapped state schools — and the middle class students they serve — who have seen the eye popping increases.
As I've repeatedly said in the past, Kevin Drum is the world's greatest man.
I blame state schools too- it's just way too easy for goofball GOP robot governors & legislatures to pay for unneeded but base-stoking tax cuts (hey, remember when Pataki was going to run for president?) by bleeding state schools dry and boosting costs at state systems. Then the state schools push the students to high-cost private loans in return for kickbacks from those lenders and the students just sign the papers so they can finish their degrees. Everyone wins!
That's why my brother owes 3x the debt for going to a state school in the same state where I went to a private college a few years before.
Most Americans who desire higher education will now become Jude Fawley's.
Ditto on the state university, Kevin.
I went to a state university about the same time you did - '77 to '81 - and tuition was $250 a semester.
Today it's $2,500 - an entire order of magnitude greater.
Back then, I paid my tuition, room and board, books and a car payment by working 40 hours a week at minimum wage.
Today, full-time minimum wage work barely covers the dorm and meal plan alone.
When I started at Cornell in 1979, tuition and fees in the college of arts & sciences (i.e., one of the private segments of the public/private hybrid that is Cornell) was $4,800. When I finished in 1983, it was $6,400. A pittance by current standards, even accounting for a 215% increase in the CPI since 1983. I guarantee tuition & fees is WAY more than $14,000 today.
Not that you wouldn't see similar or greater increases at state schools during the same period.
Maybe this is the point Kevin was making, but I just want to make it explicit: Most of the increase in tuition to state universities can be accounted for by the drop in state funding for those universities. Gotta pay for those prisons somehow.
I got my doctorate at UCLA for 90 bucks a semester (it was 45 when I started). Now I teach at a big state university that charges almost 6K a year for in state students. Where is it going? My salary is a joke (in spite of, if I do say so myself, a very distinguished and internationally recognized career), classrooms are poorly equipped, staff is minimal, departments can't afford decent copying equipment and computers -- I could go on and on. What on earth is going on here?
Yeah, Kevin, you are singing my sad sad song. I've been making double college payments for almost four years now, and then it goes down to a single payment for a couple years.
Yeah, nobody forced me to have the kids, and yeah, they are all working more than I did in college, and they all even have some form of smallish academic scholarship. So I'm not really complaining, not exactly, but I'm glad we acknowledge that it ain't even close to the way it used to be.
For years people have been saying "it can't get any worse, cause *they* will have to do something" but it has and they haven't.
And I'm better off than most people. The situation is bad.
Virtually all the increase can be attributed to the Federal government's cuts in research funding. Universities take a fraction of the research grants as overhead used toward operational expenses. When research funds are cut back, the university has to make up the shortfall from somewhere. Another home-goal from the cretins in the GOP.
This is something that has mystified me for a long time, and with two young children it also scares me. I don't think that it's just cuts to state and research budgets that have made state U tuitions rise. I suspect operating costs have also really gone up.
It could be employee benefit costs. Education is labor intensive and certainly medical benefit expenses have gone up. That could be a major reason, but I don't know.
Jhill asks where all the tuition money goes? One money pit is salaries for the pooh-bah executive types--all those 6-figure vice-presidents and chancellors and presidents and business and engineering school deans and high-dollar professors. It's been well-documented that that colleges and universities are extremely top-heavy with these people.
When it talks about costs for the bottom quintile, it is also misleading. For most state universities and the Ives, if you're from a household that makes less than $60K a year, it's free.
I think that it can be at least partially explained by several factors.
1.) Someone above pointed out that there are many 6 figure executive positions. I have an observation relevant to this. I'm currently looking for a postdoctoral position and have found few positions advertised on schools' human resources web sites. Yet I'll see 50 listings for asst. director of this, asst. director of that, creative director yaddah yaddah yaddah.
2.) Increased cost of health care hits everyone hard.
3.) New buildings, renovations, new recreational centers, etc all cost a LOT of money. During my last year of undergrad (I went to a private school mind you), room and board went up over 7% due to the new state-of the-art freshman dorm that went up after I graduated! Its total garbage that I had to pay for a dorm I would never use.
FWIW, tuition at the University of Texas at Austin runs about $8.5k per year for residents.
And how does Congress propose to make college "more affordable"? Do they pressure colleges to lower costs? No, they make it easier for poor students to borrow more and more money to pay the bill -- money students or their parents will have great difficulty repaying. Sound familiar?
When will college administrators be forced to cut the costs of college education? When the government threatens loss of their tax free status unless they spend X% (pick a number above 5) of their endowment each year, or when consumers get fed up buying a product that isn't worth the cost.
Harvard may charge $31,000, but any family earning under $180,000 pays no more than 10% of their gross in tuition. My son is at St. John's College, in Annapolis Maryland, and we pay right at $50,000 with room and board, so we're paying about three times as much for St. John's as we would have for Harvard.
Of course, my son could get into St. John's, not to mention preferring it.
anandine,
That is good info to know. My son is accepted at Harvard and Yale both, and I had heard there were good deals available. Still I doubt he's gonna go there, because of his dislike for business and 'fatcats,' which I am sure he has gotten from me.
What a weird world we live in. Snobbery goes both ways. With the future uncertain it is difficult to give him good advice on which path to take.
I wonder if this study simply compute the average of all schools' costs, with say Harvard and North Dakota State each counting as one data point? Or does it compare the total dollars spent on higher education in 2007 with those spent in 1982?
What are the sizes of various college and university endowments now as compared to 25 years ago? Are those being built with money that could cut tuition and fee costs?
Mo wrote:
"When it talks about costs for the bottom quintile, it is also misleading. For most state universities and the Ives, if you're from a household that makes less than $60K a year, it's free."
You have a cite for that chestnut? I can vouch that it is most certainly NOT the case in Virginia and it never was and nobody I know of in my generation in other states had such a generous deal.
I have long been angry, very, very angry about skyrocketing tuition costs for state school and this asinine notion that one should go into debt for a modest state school education. We need to properly fund our state schools so that students good enough to be accepted to the school and good enough to maintain the grades once there have FREE tuition, room and board.
We've robbed at least two generations of a good start in life by denying them the right to an education regardless of ability to pay and we've robbed our future by putting up so many roadblocks to higher education that we must import our scientists and engineers from abroad. The seed corn has long been eaten so the famine is here.
I can kind of see the confusion if your don't look carefully at the chart (and note it includes a CPI line)
"Current Dollar Price" may be mistaken for "Price in current dollars" which would indeed mean 'adjusted for inflation'
Tripp: My son is accepted at Harvard and Yale both, and I had heard there were good deals available. Still I doubt he's gonna go there, because of his dislike for business and 'fatcats,'
Two strategies I'd suggest:
1. Remind him that the American Communist John Reed went to Harvard.
2. Tell him that as a member of the proletariat, you're too poor to send him any place other than Harvard!
As has been said with regard to other elements of the current recession, why let a good crisis go to waste? In both secondary schools and higher education, the institutions have resisted any change in their instructional model and continue to have "research" professor who teach one or two courses a year, often for one semester a year.
The egg crate classroom remains the primary instructional delivery tool and universities continue to subscribe to journals and buy books as if paper were necessary to a good library these days. There are as many things an educational institution can do to cut costs and increase quality of delivery as there are ways to improve gas mileage or grow better food. Nothing has happened in our political environment to make such changes necessary. When enrollment continues to fall, it'll still take a while before the mega-universities decide it's time to change. Maybe we should allow a few of them to go bankrupt, too. Recently, I've been very impressed by the apparent educational attainment of home-schooled kids. Of course, there are no fraternity partys or football games on the Internet. - Ted
Tripp: Still I doubt he's gonna go there, because of his dislike for business and 'fatcats,'
Let me disabuse you of that thought. I graduated from Harvard in 1977, and I have a friend whose son started there this fall. His class and mine are entirely different. Legacies are rarer and rarer. Lots of people of all ethnicities, all smart and all driven.
And if he's deciding between Harvard and Yale, since they're both good schools, let the choice be either that Harvard has lots more intellectual and ethnic diversity than Yale, or Cambridge is a much nicer place to spend 4 years than New Haven.
Eh, that comment above about state universities being free for everyone making less than $60,000 is utter nonsense.
If Exxon is greedy, what are colleges?
Harvard's cost increases have been masked by their elephantine endowment. State schools, by and large, don't have that luxury to anywhere near the same extent (always excepting Texas).
Some info about increase of private university tuition: Harvard tuition (and "facility" fee) went from 8,820 in 1982 to 33,699 in 2007; 382% increase. Yale tuition went from 8,190 in 1982 to 34,530 in 2007 for a 422% increase.
The egg crate classroom remains the primary instructional delivery tool and universities continue to subscribe to journals and buy books as if paper were necessary to a good library these days.
Oh yeah, the journals. That takes me back to grad school. I doubt it's much of a factor in tuition, but what a racket. Look at some reasonably respected journal for the whole of, say, 1982. Maybe four or five medium-size volumes. Look at what it turned into in the mid-2000s. Probably half a frigging shelf. Everyone publishes like mad for career advancement, libraries have to pay to stuff all this crap on the shelf, and nobody's any smarter since most of the articles are one publon in value (publon: minimum publishable unit, just enough new to squeak through).
Joke is that soon the rate of increase in the size of journals from year to year will soon exceed the speed of light, but that's OK since no information is being transmitted. I got out of academia in a hurry.
It is a very interesting
It is a very interesting article about colleges.