Tuition Reform- A proposal

Great Debates
1

College tuition is out of control.

Since 1960 it has been rising at about twice the rate of inflation. It has long been impossible to work your way through college. It is largely impossible for the average family to save enough to pay for college for the children. Now it’s common for your average 21 year old to graduate with loans in the tens of thousands of dollars- loans which can’t be dismissed even with bankruptcy. A loan payment of $300 a month isn’t unusual, which can be quite a feat when you are getting your first job.

And this is a bad thing. First off, it makes it harder for bright young kids who happen to come from poor families to get the education they need to fulfill their fullest potential and give the most they can to society. There is a lot of aid, but that only goes so far and a lot of people miss out on it.

Secondly, it is a major factor in prolonged adolescence. Since working your way through college is no longer a possibility, people miss out on this valuable experience. And such huge amounts of money are being bandied about in college, student graduate with no understanding of what money means in the real world. Then when they graduate, instead of being able to start careers, they have to take the first ok-paying job they can. It’s a huge trend for young graduates to move back in with their parents. I don’t think this whole trend is a good thing.

In short, something ought to be done.

A large part of this is health care costs- both for students and faculty. There is nothing we can do about this until we reform health care in America.

But another part of it is that colleges have ballooned from places to go to school to…well…places that resemble resorts. There are gyms and dances and recreation clubs and all manner of things only tangentially related to learning.

Would it be possible to make a two tiered system with a “basic” tuition? I’m not a fan of creating a caste system on campus, but I’m also not a fan of paying for a gym that I don’t use and would never ever pay for if it wasn’t the only way I could get my diploma. All of these extras require facilities, staff to handle them, bureaucracy to run them, and all of that costs money. I think there should be an a la carte option. While the full college experience is a wonderful thing, there are plenty who won’t use it (older students, for example) and I think most of us would think of better uses for our money once we got an itemized bill.

Would it work? Anyone have any better ideas?

2

I think you misunderstand the concept of tuition. At schools where tuition is the highest, it is also the most malleable. Because expensive (private) universities can charge whatever they want, they use tuition as a form of price discrimination to make you pay as much as you can possibly pay.

Let’s take the absurd case: a school charges $1,000,000 in tuition. But it ends up giving 50% of the students a $980,000 grant and another 49% a $999,000 grant. The remaining 1% pay the full tuition. The school receives an average of $20,490 per student. It’s really no different from charging every student $20,490 with no grants, except now they’ve made 99% of the people very happy at the expense of the 1%.

In the less absurd case, the maximum tuition is set a little lower, more people pay full price, and fewer students get near-complete breaks, but the system works the same way.

[commentary=sociopolitical]Of course, now you can see why it’s absurd for the government to say, just give every student $20,000 to go to college – colleges would simply raise their tuitions by $20,000 and make you pay the same amount. It also raises the question of how valuable it is to actually save money for your children’s college fund, if the college is just going to keep raising tuitions so that you pay through the nose – why not just blow all your money, knowing you’ll just get a deeper discount from university if you’re poor?[/commentary]

The main issue here is that few colleges, especially private, elite universities, are growing at the rate of their applicant pool. Since you’re not going to get a Harvard education at Bill’s Learning Emporium, they can justify a higher tuition and keep raising their tuitions to make the rich, smart kids pay for the poor, smart kids.

I don’t think that universities are raising tuitions BECAUSE they have built elaborate facilities and can’t maintain them. I think they’re building elaborate facilities knowing that they can always justify tuition increases.

Creating a two-tier system for facilities already exists, but again, taken to a deeper level (charge science students more because scientific facilities require more than humanities facilities to maintain), they just represent another mechanism by which a university can do price discrimination.

I think the first step in fixing the problem is to make any university receiving federal funding to make full disclosures of its finances. This would prevent the university from hiding behind flimsy excuses to justify extravagant increases in tuition, as well as make them fiscally responsible.

[commentary]You’re building a $20 million gym center and raising tuitions $1,000 to justify it – why are you building it at all if you don’t have the money to run it?[/commentary]