My parents went to Berkeley in the 60’s and tuition was free. I suppose there might have been a few fees, but it was incredibly cheap. By the time I went in the 90’s, tuition was still officially free, but the “registration fees” were thousands per semester and rising fast. Now it’s astronomical.
I don’t know what proportion of students would be covered by 50% or more of tuition.
The Ivy League and other top private schools are wealthy enough that they can afford to be generous with financial aid. The public universities, on the other hand, have lower sticker prices but are much less wealthy. So the actual cost may be much lower at a top private school than it is at a public university. That’s why I’d always advise someone to wait to hear about financial aid packages before deciding where to go. And it’s concern over the amount of debt that students have been acquiring recently that led to these no-loan pledges.
And when I attended RPI in the late 1980s, we were told that something like 27% of the tuition was spent on financial aid (although I don’t remember the exact number). That didn’t make sense to us at the time; we thought that the school should have just lowered the tuition rate by 27%, or whatever it was. But it amounts to a cost shifting. Those whose parents are wealthy enough to afford the tuition without financial aid subsidized those who need it. It’s sort of similar to the way that hospitals overcharge the insured patients so that they can afford to provide care to the uninsured.
Well, here’s Harvard’s statement about financial aid:
And here are the figures for Johns Hopkins University, an expensive private university that is not part of the Ivy league:
Basically, the main goal for most of these wealthy private schools is to ensure that anyone who gets accepted can attend, regardless of how rich or poor they are.
As for your question about why “so many younger people in the last decade or so cite student loans as one of their largest debts,” that’s because all of these expensive private schools collectively account for a very small proportion of the total post-secondary student body in the United States. The 8 Ivy League colleges between them have an undergraduate body of about 65,000 students.
One large state school (Ohio State, UT Austin) can have almost 40,000 undergrads on one campus. The University of California system has about 170,000 undergrads, and the Cal State system has over 400,000. Despite their ubiquity in the movies and other areas of popular culture, exclusive and expensive private universities like Harvard and Yale do NOT represent the experience of the vast majority of American college students.
And the reason that debt has become such a big issue is precisely because of the sort of figures that RadicalPi and i have given in this thread. My wife got her undergrad degree from UC Berkeley, and the price she paid for the whole four years of her degree is just a little bit more than what she would pay for 1 year at Berkeley today. I’m teaching a bunch of seniors in the Cal State system this semester, and in just the four years that these students have been in college, their yearly fees have risen by 67 percent.
For the most part, the debt crisis facing America’s graduates has not been caused by schools that charge 30 or 40 thousand dollars a year; it has been caused by schools that charge 8 or 10 or 15 thousand. The amount that students have to pay (often using loans) has increased dramatically over the past decade, as declining tax revenues and declining state support have led to dramatic fee increases. These increases have moved far ahead of general inflation, and also well ahead of wage increases.
Here is a comparison of the endowment, cost to attend (tuition, fees, room and board), financial aid award and indebtedness of students at Yale and the University of Connecticut. I’ve also added the numbers for the University of Michigan, as it’s considered a “public Ivy” (and has a fairly substantial endowment). The endowment numbers are from Wikipedia, while the rest of the numbers are from Collegedata.com. As you can see, those attending the public universities are acquiring more debt even though the sticker prices are lower at those schools.
Yale University
Endowment $19.4 billion
Cost of attendance: $57,850
Average Freshman Award $40,900
Average Indebtedness of 2010 Graduates $9,254
University of Connecticut
Endowment $329 million
Cost of Attendance in-state: $25,220
Cost of Attendance out-of-state: $42,116
Average Freshman Award $13,731
Average Indebtedness of 2010 Graduates $23,237
University of Michigan
Endowment: $7.8 billion
Cost of Attendance in-state: $26,030
Cost of Attendance out-of-state: $51,178
Average Freshman Award $10,432
Average Indebtedness of 2010 Graduates $27,828
I’m trusting my rusty memory here, but when my dad died in 2003, I came across some financial aid paperwork for my college days.
I attended the University of Florida starting in the fall of 1979, and I think I remember seeing $12 per quarter (semester?) hour. Wish I could be more helpful - if I find the actual papers, I’ll modify if needed.
UT