When I attended University of California in the late 1960’s, fees had more than tripled over the previous decade and I had to pay a whopping $107 per quarter.
The 60’s were a bit before my time, college-wise, but based on what I paid a few years later, I think it was about $90-$100 per quarter at state schools where i lived. (It had gone up to a whopping $120 a quarter by the time I finished.) So something like $600-700 in today’s dollars.
I still have a few of my college textbooks from the 1970’s; $10 to $20 for science and computer textbooks… and some from when I went back in the mid-80’s - $60 to $100; and bought some for part-time courses recently $150 to $300 (Accounting 3-book paperback set).
Plus of course the editions change as fast as they can to prevent used book sales.
In the mid-70’s classes were 2 lectures, 1 hour each, per week, plus an hour of tutorial time; lab classes were 3 hours every other week. The tutorial assistant ratio was 1 tutor to about 10 to 25 studens. By the mid 80’s, tutorials were 1 or 2 tutors per 100 to 150-student class. But the tutors were originally regarded as conveient slave labour; by the mid-80s they had unionized and went on strike and gained $20/hr wage rate. Similarly, assistant professors, lecturers, and other lesser peons were no longer content to be starving slave labour for the off chance to become tenured into wage nirvana. (Same as doctor interns no longer were willing to work 28 hours straight for no pay) For technical professors, the colleges were now competing against a much-better paying job market. You did hear stories about the dean of admissions or somesuch on a gravy train earning an executive salary while putting in part-time hours, but in general, it was not a case of administrative self-largesse but the fact the universities had to pay a living wage, while the governments were cutting back in response to the 80’s economic slowdown. The major administrative growth was due to the fact that when it came to workplace issues like sexual harrassment, equity and diversity, the university HR department would be on the forefront of addressing these concerns since they were the first target of activists.
The only part of this paragraph that is true is the claim that private colleges (many of them, anyway) have stratospheric costs.
It is certainly not true that these costs means that there is “not much competition” to get in, and i very much doubt that Brooke Shields got in just because she could afford to go.
Firstly, there are lots of rich people in the United States. There are far more students from wealthy families than there are spots at the nation’s top private colleges. Most of the really expensive private schools (whether Ivy League universities like Harvard and Princeton, liberal arts colleges like Middlebury and Bates, or other private universities like Stanford and Duke) have small student populations, especially compared to large state universities.
Harvard University’s undergrad population is just over 7,000, and they take in fewer than 2,000 for each freshman class. Some liberal arts colleges have intakes that are less than half that size. Many private universities get at least ten times as many applicants as they can admit each year, and plenty of those are from families who can afford the huge fees.
Also, while the official fees are high at many private colleges, those institutions also often have huge endowments and other funding sources that allow them to offer full or partial scholarships to many of their students. A substantial number of students at these places get a free ride, while others are heavily subsidized by scholarships and other awards.
When i came to the United States to attend grad school, i had to confine my applications, somewhat paradoxically, to very expensive private universities, because they were the only places that would guarantee me full funding for an extended period of time. As a foreign student, my F1 visa was conditional on having sufficient income to pay for grad school and support myself, and the only way i could do that was to get fellowships as part of my grad school package. A few top public schools in my field, like Berkeley and Michigan, might have been feasible, but it was mainly private universities that had the money to cover both tuition and living expenses.
I remember the theme of the annual spontaneous tuition riot being $2250, TDM (TFM in alternate years) in 1972 I think.
1975 at UC Davis was $212.50 per quarter.
I agree, I don’t think Shields got in solely on her wallet. She’s not the airhead some might like to believe; but she’s no raving genius either. But seriously, with tuition at (so I hear) $20,000-plus per year, what proportion of students have more than say, 75% of their tuition covered for the 4 undergraduate years? (And then, how many of these students need that help?)
Also, when the number of applicants is much higher than admissions - how many “rich kids” are applying at multiple colleges? I’m sure every applicant has at least a first, second, and third choice.
Finally, I wonder how many applicants decline ivy spots because they cannot afford the tuition or decide they don’t want the debt? 4 years of college seems to leave many students deeper in debt than houses mortgages used to be a decade ago. I have not heard of student debt being an issue in Canada, but maybe I don’t hear those stories.
According to here (publicaffairs.illinois.edu/surveys/tuition_fee_tracking.xls), this is how much tuition was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for every year from 1966 to the present. This only covers tuition. Various fees, de minimis at the earlier times, are now significant. Although I did read somewhere while looking for this information that only about a third of students pay the full amount; the rest have some financial aid. So, there’s that to consider. I’ve also included the federal minimum wage (not the Illinois one since I couldn’t find the data) that would have been applicable for at least most of the preceding summer and the number of 8-hour days of work it would take to pay the tuition at minimum wage (History of Federal Minimum Wage Rates Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938 - 2009 | U.S. Department of Labor).
YEAR TUITION M. WAGE DAYS WORK
1966-1967 $170 1.25 17
1967-1968 $170 1.40 15
1968-1969 $170 1.60 13
1969-1970 $246 1.60 19
1970-1971 $321 1.60 25
1971-1972 $396 1.60 31
1972-1973 $496 1.60 39
1973-1974 $496 1.60 39
1974-1975 $496 2.00 31
1975-1976 $496 2.10 30
1976-1977 $496 2.30 27
1977-1978 $496 2.30 27
1978-1979 $586 2.65 28
1979-1980 $634 2.90 27
1980-1981 $682 3.10 28
1981-1982 $748 3.35 28
1982-1983 $822 3.35 31
1983-1984 $1104 3.35 41
1984-1985 $1248 3.35 47
1985-1986 $1314 3.35 49
1986-1987 $1406 3.35 52
1987-1988 $1470 3.35 55
1988-1989 $2070 3.35 77
1989-1990 $2130 3.35 79
1990-1991 $2130 3.80 70
1991-1992 $2236 4.25 66
1992-1993 $2486 4.25 73
1993-1994 $2486 4.25 73
1994-1995 $2760 4.25 81
1995-1996 $3000 4.25 88
1996-1997 $3150 4.25 93
1997-1998 $3308 4.75 87
1998-1999 $3408 5.15 83
1999-2000 $3546 5.15 86
2000-2001 $3724 5.15 90
2001-2002 $4410 5.15 107
2002-2003 $5302 5.15 129
2003-2004 $5568 5.15 135
2004-2005 $6460 5.15 157
2005-2006 $7042 5.15 171
2006-2007 $7708 5.15 187
2007-2008 $8440 5.15 205
2008-2009 $9242 5.85 197
2009-2010 $9484 6.55 181
2010-2011 $10386 7.25 179
Very interesting. Some years ago Forbes ran an article detailing how much of the tuition goes to pay the staff that doles out student aid.
My guess is that very few applicants decline Ivy spots because they cannot afford the tuition or decide they don’t want the debt. Here is a list of schools, including the entire Ivy League, that have pledged to eliminate or at least limit student loans in financial aid packages. Beyond that, the aid packages for lower-income students are quite generous. At Yale, for instance, “for students with family incomes below $60,000, after a student contribution from summer earnings and a work-study contribution of $2,500, the program covers the remaining student budget with grant aid.”
I graduated from RPI in 1988 and even then was explicitly told that the school does not want people to decline admission or leave school before graduating for financial reasons. They would do their best to make it work for the student.
Not exactly. The tuition in 1967-8 was $1900. They raised it the next year to $2150 – my first “Tuition Riot.” As I recall it was not raised for my junior year and was $2400 for my senior year 1970-1.
Oh dear, I so wanted to go to Union College for my grad degree. The Way We Were was filmed there. I saw Benoit Mandelbrot speak there. Alas and alack I went to RPI…
I attended CMU in the same time period.
I recently found a bill for tuition, room and board - it worked out to around $13,000 for four years. In those days, a good engineering starting salary was in that same range.
I doubt that a starting salary for this year’s MIT or CMU grads would match the four year costs.
I started college in 1962 at a small private liberal arts college that had the second-highest academic pay scales in the country. IIRC, I think tuition for a 4-month trimester was something on the order of $900. (It’s possible that that amount included room and board, but I’m not sure.)
At UCSD in the late 1970s my registration fee was about $212 per ten week quarter, full time. We didn’t call it a “tuition” fee because in those days there wasn’t any. Tuition was taken care of by the State. IIRC it stayed that way the whole time I was there. The classes were structured pretty much as md2000 described.
When I got to grad school in 1982, at UCLA, it had gone up to $450 or so.
What present day students at those institutions have to pay to attend those schools today is a crime. No, it really is, as it results from the near-abandonment of the University by the State.
I started UCLA as an undergrad in 1980 and a quarter’s registration fees were $244 (IIRC) and they had increased by the time I graduated I 1984, I don’t know how much. There were three quarters in a regular year, four if you count summer session when it was only mickey mouse classes. Quite affordable.
It is my recollection (and nothing else) that tuition for one semester in the College of Liberal Arts at a state university on the western edge of the Big Ten was $95.00 in 1960. By 1964 it had crept up to $125.00. That’s for a full load, 16 or 17 semester hours. Full room and board in the dorms was another $600 per semester.
For law school at the same institution in 1964-1967 it was about the same. The Colleges of Medicine, Business, Engineering, Dentistry were a bit more expensive, but not much. Of course if a starting law school graduate got a $10,000.00 annual salary in 1967 he was doing pretty well.
If you came up with a co-signer the university would actually loan you a semester’s tuition at no or very minimal interest
As a point of comparison, when I graduated from a Catholic high school in 1970, tuition was $225/yr. for seniors. This year, tuition is $8,065.
No public funding obviously, but in those days the faculty were mostly members of religious orders, who worked for virtually nothing.
I found your table so informative that i decided to put one together for California. I’ve included figures for both the University of California system and for the California State University system, and based my calculations on the California minimum wage. As you can see, the most dramatic rise in the relative cost of university has been over the past decade. Both systems have seen the number of days work required double since about 2003.
Year CA Min. Wage UC Days Work CSU Days Work
1965 $1.30 245 23.56 105 10.10
1966 $1.30 246 23.65 105 10.10
1967 $1.30 248 23.85 110 10.58
1968 $1.65 331 25.08 133 10.08
1969 $1.65 334 25.30 149 11.29
1970 $1.65 487 36.89 161 12.20
1971 $1.65 640 48.48 161 12.20
1972 $1.65 644 48.79 161 12.20
1973 $1.65 644 48.79 161 12.20
1974 $2.00 646 40.38 194 12.13
1975 $2.00 647 40.44 194 12.13
1976 $2.50 648 32.40 195 9.75
1977 $2.50 706 35.30 195 9.75
1978 $2.65 720 33.96 212 10.00
1979 $2.90 736 31.72 210 9.05
1980 $3.10 776 31.29 226 9.11
1981 $3.35 997 37.20 319 11.90
1982 $3.35 1,300 48.51 505 18.84
1983 $3.35 1,387 51.75 692 25.82
1984 $3.35 1,324 49.40 658 24.55
1985 $3.35 1,326 49.48 666 24.85
1986 $3.35 1,345 50.19 680 25.37
1987 $3.35 1,492 55.67 754 28.13
1988 $4.25 1,554 45.71 815 23.97
1989 $4.25 1,634 48.06 839 24.68
1990 $4.25 1,820 53.53 920 27.06
1991 $4.25 2,486 73.12 1,080 31.76
1992 $4.25 3,044 89.53 1,460 42.94
1993 $4.25 3,727 109.62 1,604 47.18
1994 $4.25 4,111 120.91 1,853 54.50
1995 $4.25 4,139 121.74 1,891 55.62
1996 $4.75 4,166 109.63 1,935 50.92
1997 $5.15 4,212 102.23 1,946 47.23
1998 $5.75 4,037 87.76 1,871 40.67
1999 $5.75 3,903 84.85 1,830 39.78
2000 $5.75 3,964 86.17 1,839 39.98
2001 $6.25 3,859 77.18 1,876 37.52
2002 $6.75 4,017 74.39 2,005 37.13
2003 $6.75 5,530 102.41 2,572 47.63
2004 $6.75 6,312 116.89 2,916 54.00
2005 $6.75 6,802 125.96 3,164 58.59
2006 $6.75 6,852 126.89 3,199 59.24
2007 $7.50 7,517 125.28 3,521 58.68
2008 $8.00 8,027 125.42 3,849 60.14
2009 $8.00 9,311 145.48 4,893 76.45
2010 $8.00 11,279 176.23 5,390 84.22
2011 $8.00 13,218 206.53 6,422 100.34
Interesting, thank you.
SO what proportion of students would be covered to say 50% or more of tuition?
If the goal is to eliminate student loans for the poor, is this just happy noises or is it well on the way to reality? If so, why do so many younger people in the last decade or so cite student loans as one of their largest debts? (Suzy Ormand is always fun to listen to). Is the goal of a poor (financially) student to get into Ivy League so they do not end up with a massive debt, and the State schools are basically just generators of revenue for the banking system?