UC Berkeley, started in fall of 1996. In-state resident. My tuition was about $2200/semester.
I feel fortunate that I was in one of the last classes to get in and out of college before education inflation.
Mine was about this too. I’m not exactly sure - since it was so “cheap” I got enough in scholarships to pay for most of it and then my folks picked up the rest.
Books were like $300/semester, tho. I do remember that.
I went to Goucher College for the '72-'73 school year with a tiny little scholarship and a loan. My memory fails me, but I’m pretty sure tuition for both semesters was around $1000. No idea what my books cost.
I just looked up Goucher’s current tuition - over $19K PER SEMESTER!!! :eek: More if you take more than 18 credits…
Granted, that’s a private school, but still - DANG!!
The tuition was part of the reason I dropped out and joined the Navy - my folks couldn’t afford to send me, but I did live at home without paying room and board, and most of the money I earned went into the bank for school, but at $2.25/hr part time, it took a while to save up enough for a semester.
I don’t recall what it cost when I went to Purdue starting in '76 since my GI Bill covered tuition, but I recall choking at the cost of my engineering textbooks.
One of the most infuriating things about the tuition inflation is that the most commonly heard justification is “Well, it’s what other colleges of our size and mission are charging”: not “we need it to provide more student services” but “because we can get it”, and then they switch more and more to adjuncts for their core courses and undergrad courses to avoid paying full salary and benefits, yet they plead poverty just as much as they ever did.
Textbook companies have flatly admitted they release new editions of textbooks for no other reason than to make money- there’s no vital new material in this trig/lit/English history textbook than there was in the last one.
$2200 a year in-state tuition at the University of Iowa, 1995-99 (it stayed pretty much the same the whole time, started to jump after I left). Your inflation calculator says that’s just around $3300 in today’s dollars. Just looked it up–currently, in-state tuition is $8000.
I started Tulane in 1991. Tuition was about $19,000 plus about another $6000 for room , board and fees. It was one of the most expensive schools in the country at the time but I had a full scholarship and didn’t have to pay any tuition.
Started Purdue in 1998 and was in-state. Tuition was $3K, room and board at a dormitory was $5K. Dropped less than $1K on textbooks and technology fees.
I started at Texas A&M in the fall of 1991, and if I remember right, tuition and fees was something like $1000 per semester for 15 hrs- it was around $30 per credit hour, but then they got you with the fees- they were as much as the tuition cost.
A dorm rm in the expensive dorms was another $900 or so (this went up the following year to $1300, IIRC), and the meal plan in the dining halls varied, but the full one was almost $800, I think.
Books ended up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 per semester, give or take.
Basically the state had capped tuition and subsidized room and board at that point, so costs were relatively low. Sometime in the late 90’s they quit subsidizing room and board, and in the early 2000s, they quit subsidizing tuition, and prices shot through the ceiling.
Cal State San Bernardino - 1973 - $50/quarter, IIRC. I was also enrolled at a community college for night course at the same time, and those were running around $5/unit.
UIUC in the 80s - was around 5K tuition+room/board/books annually. Easily affordable with part-time work during school year (which is what I did).
For 2011 I looked it up - it’s about $23K/year. And that’s a state school. That’s quite a jump.
But I don’t know if it is not an apples to oranges comparison. The facilities that students enjoy today at UIUC and back when I was there are not comparable, and I am sure that costs. I don’t know if that really adds to the educational experience, though.
Community college in aught '88, '89 (that winter was so cold, folks like to tell of how migrating geese fell dead from the sky fully frozen…come springtime, their honking which had been flash-frozen in the sky thawed out, and the valley echoed with their honks for weeks) was $175 for a full time quarter. Going over 20 credits was an additional $18 / credit.
I then went to the Univ of Washington in '90, which was $550 for a full time quarter. It had doubled when I left, I was insanely lucky to get out at the early phase of the exponential growth. I paid mostly with part-time jobs and left with zero student loans and about $1000 of credit card dept (incidental cost-of-living expenses like books and beer).
Cornell University, College of Arts & Sciences - tuition around $15,000 in 1988, plus $5000 room & board. I don’t know exactly what I paid, but I found data at the Cornell website for 1990, which is probably comparable to 1988 - $15,164 tuition, $5000 room & board.
I have to admit I do not remember what books cost, but I do not remember feeling outraged at prices, so… ?
ETA: 2013 tuition - $45,130, room & board around $11,700
When I was still in school, toward the end there, CSUB stopped having regular janitorial service in class rooms. Maybe once a quarter rooms would be swept and mopped, if that. Trash cans would be overflowing for weeks.
Meanwhile, they pushed for Division 1 athletics and needed to build a new gym for that, so tuition was raised there, too.
Classes were cut, services were cut, fantastic staff members were let go, but hey! There’s a gym!
University of Chicago, school year 1967-68, tuition was $2000. In today’s dollars that would be $13,600.
I don’t know how my parents did it (I had a scholarship that covered room and board, and I paid for my own books). I don’t think I was properly grateful at the time.
Roddy
Here is a PDF going back to 1964. Nearly everyone lives on campus, so total cost is nearing $60k/year, with tuition at $44k.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/Documents/administration/ir/Tuition.pdf
Let’s pretend my child is born tomorrow, and tuition there increases 5% each year. SUM(y = 18 to 21)[57,870(1.05)[sup]y[/sup]] = ~$600k total cost for four years of college down the road.
Assuming an annual rate of return of 5% on my savings, I need to save ~$15k/year to have enough to pay all that. Lot’s of not-entirely-accurate assumptions here.
Anyway, this illustrates that it’s not so daunting if a parent plans for it from birth, assuming good health, keeping one’s pants on until securing a decent wage, etc. And not accounting for private school before college. An 18-year-old trying to pay her way through on her own? Probably not going to go so well.
I was lucky enough to go to university (in the UK) when it cost nothing, plus I got a maintenance grant to live on, as well as support for the cost of accommodation. Changed days…
2004, my tuition was a hair over $31,000, and another $10,000 for room and board and fees. It was one of those private liberal arts colleges that usually makes the annual ZOMG HIGHEST TUITION IN THE WORLD lists.
When I applied, they would provide grants and loans to match the financial need of all admitted students. In my case, the FAFSA determined that my family could “afford” $20k. Off the top of my head, my financial aid included $5k in government subsidized loans, and $10k in straight up grants from the school. For the rest, I had about $5k in assorted merit-based scholarships, my parents paid about $10k, and I took on another $10k in private student loans.
Overall I took on $50k in student loans, and since a big chunk was unsubsidized, that grew to $60k by the time I graduated. After five years of making payments, the balance is now down to $40k. I started grad school two years ago, so all of my loans are in deferral (which means the federal government pays interest on the subsidized loans. I’m still paying a little towards private loans since they still accrue interest, though thankfully not very fast since I gambled on variable rate loans and rates are as low as they can possibly be right now.
That’s almost a third of the median household income across the US ($50k or so-- the number is only $37k if we look at people who are just high school graduates). So, yes, I would say that expecting a family to put $15k a year aside for one child for 18 years is a little bit ridiculous.
Colby College, starting in fall 1991. Around $25,000.
Current comprehensive fee (tuition, room & board, but not books or travel to/from school): $57,510
Johns Hopkins University: my freshman year was the '02-'03 school year, so tuition alone would have been $27,390; I also lived on campus that year for an additional $8,829. That seems like a lot, until I see that the combined total was just over 50% higher nine years later, at $55,242 for the '11-'12 school year.
I came out of it with significant student loans, but not nearly as much as I could have, given the total bill of something like $150k for four years of tuition, two years of living on campus, and two years of living off campus (which was cheaper than on-campus, but still wasn’t exactly free). I am massively thankful to my parents for this.