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https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities https://www.usnews

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-college/articles/2017-09-20/see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national-universities https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co... >net cost to students (actual amounts paid by students after grants and financial aid) has not gone up that much. I'm skeptical of that claim and would request a citation as well. College Board says the opposite (tuition and fees increasing faster than aid): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/25/tuition-and-fees-still-rising-faster-aid-college-board-report-shows https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/25/tuition-and-f... And another important set of expenses to track are non-tuition related expenses; it costs more than ever to rent an apartment and pay for other such expenses today.

secabeen 8y ago
So the US News graphs don't adjust for inflation (as they note). If you perform that adjustment, it's a 50% increase over 20 years, which is something, but not astronomical. That pretty much matches this inflation-adjusted data: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-fees-room-and-board-over-time https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl... Here's the net cost data, showing that the net real cost is only up about 10% over 5 years. Some sub-numbers are even lower. Net tuition for private non-profit schools is _flat_ across the last 15 years ($14,560 in 02-03, $14,540 in 17-18): https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-sector https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl... My argument is that college prices are up, but largely because of disinvestment by state legislatures, pushing up the perceived cost of college, which allows the private schools to increase their nameplate costs significantly, while using financial aid to keep the actual increases to students in-line with the increases in actual costs for state students. Another way of looking at it is this: If colleges have been raising tuition astronomically, what have they been doing with the additional money? Additional expenditures on students or facilities are not much changed over the past 10 years. Real expenses per-student are largely flat: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_334.10.a... If colleges were jacking prices through the roof to spend way more on unnecessary luxuries or administrators (as the common wisdom would have it), that would show up in the expenditures data, and it's just not there. I do agree that non-tuition related expenses are an issue, but that's not the university's fault, other than not building dorms fast enough (and dorms are usually pretty expensive, so it's just as likely that the issue is zoning and building restrictions by university town government, rather than university administrators).

secabeen 8y ago

So the US News graphs don't adjust for inflation (as they note). If you perform that adjustment, it's a 50% increase over 20 years, which is something, but not astronomical. That pretty much matches this inflation-adjusted data: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-fees-room-and-board-over-time https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl... Here's the net cost data, showing that the net real cost is only up about 10% over 5 years. Some sub-numbers are even lower. Net tuition for private non-profit schools is _flat_ across the last 15 years ($14,560 in 02-03, $14,540 in 17-18): https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/average-net-price-over-time-full-time-students-sector https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl... My argument is that college prices are up, but largely because of disinvestment by state legislatures, pushing up the perceived cost of college, which allows the private schools to increase their nameplate costs significantly, while using financial aid to keep the actual increases to students in-line with the increases in actual costs for state students. Another way of looking at it is this: If colleges have been raising tuition astronomically, what have they been doing with the additional money? Additional expenditures on students or facilities are not much changed over the past 10 years. Real expenses per-student are largely flat: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_334.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_334.10.a... If colleges were jacking prices through the roof to spend way more on unnecessary luxuries or administrators (as the common wisdom would have it), that would show up in the expenditures data, and it's just not there. I do agree that non-tuition related expenses are an issue, but that's not the university's fault, other than not building dorms fast enough (and dorms are usually pretty expensive, so it's just as likely that the issue is zoning and building restrictions by university town government, rather than university administrators).