Hah… Good point, I do not watch football at all, so I’ll concede that if they do advertise in those times, I wouldn’t know. 
But I saw no ads from them while I was watching my L&O marathon, when even in another country, when I get my cable feed, I still get ads for some private (I assume for-profit) small colleges.
Yep. They also did a road show that came through my town.
I was referring to spam ads. They all do marketing. We went to a Harvard/MIT/Duke roadshow when my daughter was looking. But she never got tons of mail from these kinds of colleges even with high SAT scores. I didn’t either - I did get flooded with mail from small schools in Boston, though.
You can also have more subtle marketing. The yearly story on the latest weird U of Chicago essay question I’m sure comes from a press release.
In our area (Kansas City) the big colleges like KU, KState, and MU dont have to advertise. Their are so many people that do it for them with themed clothing, bumper stickers, posters, tattoos, flags, etc…
I hate to pollute this thread with facts, but here goes.
Fact 1: When I started at the University of Pennsylvania (a totally private, in fact Ivy League, university) in 1954, the annual tuition was $700, which is considered $6,110 in 2015. The actual tuition at Penn this year is roughly ten times that. One of the hardest things to find on Penn’s web site is what it actually is. The dorm rooms were spartan, the eating hall food execrable and the faculty relatively low paid, with a new instructor paid around $5000 (which hadn’t risen that much 8 years later, according to my thesis advisor). That $700 increased $100 every year reaching $1000 by 1957-58.
Fact 2: My experience at McGill. I have been at McGill since 1968. When I arrived, there was a faculty of arts and sciences and a few others including the graduate faculty. Each faculty had a dean and the largest had a vice-dean (well-named since he mostly dealt with vice–cheating and the like). Above the deans were a principal (= president) and five vice-principals, one of whom, the vice-principal for reasearch doubled as dean of the graduate faculty. Each of these people had a secretary and the largest of them perhaps one or two other staff. There was also a comptroller and that was the administration. Now look at it. There are now 9 vice-principals (one now called provost) each with at least one associate VP, all with large offices and staffs.
Someone commented that these administrators work their tails off. I don’t deny that; what I deny is whether their efforts accomplish anything. They spend a lot of time meeting with each other. They spend a lot of time mixing in affairs they don’t know anything about. Once upon a time, admission to grad school was entirely in the hands of the individual departments. Now the clowns in the grad school office make decisions about things they don’t understand.
Even so, the fees at McGill for foreign (which is to say not subsidized by the government) students is around $16,000 plus about $3000 in other fees. And, mirabile dictu, we make practically no use of adjuncts for our teaching (although some of it is done by graduate students, but only the most advanced). In 1968, incidentally, the tuition was $650 (if you were in science major; humantities major paid only $600), but that was subsidized.
Fact 3: I swear that this is true. About 20 years ago, the principal at McGill was Bernard Shapiro, the twin brother of Princeton’s president Harold Shapiro. At that time, the most important job of the principal was to stem the deficit (which he did). I remarked to him one day that when he and his brother met, they had totally different problems. Bernie agreed and added, gratuitously, that according to his brother, Princeton could abolish tuition and live entirely on the proceeds of its endowment. They didn’t do it because they counted on a healthy percentage of wealthy families to keep their endowment growing. Still, I know from personal experience that they are none too generous with scholarships for children of impecunious professors.
End of facts. So I feel that a lot of the cost is in too many hard working but ultimately useless administrators and a lot in much nicer accomodations, dormitories, etc. I see the Penn president makes over $1,000,000. Sure she brings in lots of money. Then there is the absurd salaries paid to the coaches. Joe Paterno was the highest paid public employee in Pennsylvania. Although Penn State might be one of the few profitable college football teams.
The cost of the overpaid, unnecessary administrators we’re hearing about is hard to separate out, because it is rolled into tuition. However, the cost of fancy dorms is easily separable from tuition costs, because it’s not counted in tuition.
Seems to me that if the U.S. federal government laid down tuition-cap ceilings - say, schools cannot charge over $20,000 a year for tuition per student - it could force the universities to finally have to make some tough choices and hard decisions.
All public universities make their financial statements publicly available, and private universities are required to file certain financial information with the DOE.
There aren’t hundreds of multi-millionaire administrators on college campuses. If you look at any major university the highest paid employees are normally in the follow order:
- head football coach
- head basketball coach
- athletic director
- President
And normally the AD and the Pres, are below the $1MM mark. And in the situations where the athletic programs are paying these high salaries, they normally cover the costs of through their shared revenue programs with the athletic conferences they are in.
Because having the government put price controls on products works so well.
The government interference in the student loan market, is the primary driver of increased tuition in the first place.