While we're all watching the latest Republican debate, I want to take the chance to repeat a chart from this morning:
The actual tuition paid by college students, once you account for standard discounts, has barely changed over the past 30 years. It's up 13% at private universities and down 10% at public universities.
FIL in 1970s $15 a credit hour
Me in 2000s $179 a credit hour
Same school.
I did not make 12 times what he made at the time and still don't.
I have no reason to expect it'll change anything, but I'm curious: do we know how they're measuring tuition paid? Mean? Median? Are they tallying publicly available data on sticker price and subtracting publicly available data on various kinds of financial aid in the aggregate, or have they somehow found a good source for what colleges actually charge individual students?
College costs are notoriously opaque, so much so that even current students and their families have little idea what they're paying. So I'm just curious what data they're working with.
(Dave Barry liked to joke that the system that governs airfares guarantees two things: first, that no two people on the plane are paying the same amount; second, that everyone is paying less than you are. College feels a lot like that, at least the first part.)
I'd want to look at two things. It's possible that, as the costs of individual universities rise, people are forced to move from expensive universities to less expensive ones -- that way an average could stay constant while costs at every option rose. If UVA raises its costs a lot and Eastern Kankakee Polytechnic and Truck Driving School raises its costs a lot, but students leave Charlottesville for Kankakee, then we'd get the impression that costs aren't rising. Large numbers of students at the low-cost end of the spectrum, many of them supported by Pell Grants, could skew some results, maybe?
The other thing I'd want to address is that student loans, at least according to the anecdotal evidence, seem to have exploded. I'm not talking about the outliers with $130K of debt; I know they represent a tiny slice of the market. But conventional wisdom is that most students, not just those with insane loans, are bearing larger and larger debts. Maybe tuition doesn't account for it, but if it's some other part of the cost of education, we should know what's doing it. (Colleges like offloading expenses onto the vague category of "fees.") Or perhaps someone will the data will produce evidence that students aren't actually carrying more education debt than before?
(It's also possible, though it would be shoddy work, that they're excluding the costs of both grants and loans from the costs of universities. I suppose someone could say that you're not actually paying the tuition because you got a Stafford Loan to cover it, though it really means you're just paying it, and more, later. But I'd really like to think any minimally conscientious data collector would be mindful of this.)
-- A perfesser and sometime administrator at a big urban public research university, but with no kids of my own that lead me to see things from the other side.
I remember attending a "tuition riot" at MIT back in 1971. The chant was $2900 too damned much. Adjusting for inflation, that would be about $22,000 today. Tuition today is $20,640. I don't really trust inflation adjustments because they don't really account for housing costs, and those are most people's major expenses. (My first house cost about $80 in 1979 which would be $330K adjust, but the modern estimated price is closer to $700K. That's almost twice as much as a simple inflation adjustment, and housing is something people have to buy and tend to spend a fair bit of their income on.
For me, it was $3400, too damn much, but I got there a couple of years later. Back then, you could cover a significant chunk of your expenses working some during the term, plus summers at $3.50/hour.
Fun fact -- I think I worked for you, writing an operating system for an Interdata 7/32, back in the 1970s.
It really doesn't make sense to adjust for inflation anymore, now that inflation has become somewhat divorced from wages. Inflation is really more a measure of price, not earnings. These things need to be measured against earnings. E.g., the ratio of median tuition in 1992 vs. median annual earnings of college graduates (nominal, both) - and then do the same thing for each year. Or maybe stagger it as median tuition in 1992 vs. median annual earnings of bachelors-holders in 1996 (presuming a standard 4-year path for everyone).
I don't really expect it would be much different, but it might be.
Also, like Jack Lynch above, we really need to know what's being counted here. When I was in school, they liked to make a big show about how they weren't raising tuition by that much but the price they were charging for dorms and dining halls went up by double digit percentages in some years. And then there were the fees.
cmayo, That's a very nice point. Wages have been officially pretty stagnant when adjusted for inflation for about 50 years. But averages kinda mask realities. When I got my first real job upon graduating from college in 1979, company health insurance cost me $3/month. There was no 401k to contribute to, but the promised pension would be more than Social Security. Aside from taxes and FICA, I took home my whole paycheck.
We really need to look at take home wages.
Just an anecdote. Make of it what you will: My kid has been attending an in-state owned university for 3 years now. Leaving aside some summer classes, gross costs have run around $21k to $23k per year.This is tuition, fees, room, board, books, and expenses that a 529 plan will reimburse. Everything would be a bit more. State and University scholarships amount to $6500/yr. And I'm taking advantage of the $2500/yr Federal tax credit. So not so bad.
Of course my kid didn't settle on a major until near the end of the freshman year and that adds on another semester that will not have any scholarships apply.
I went to Ga Tech as an in-state student in the late 1970s. Here are some annual costs from the 1977-1978 catalog adjusted for inflation:
Tuition & fees: $3484 resident , $9339 non-resident
Total of tuition, fees, room, board, books, & personal expenses:
$13,470 to $14,975 resident, $19,340 to $20,845 non-resident
Most non-athletes didn't have scholarships. I was fortunate to have a $1500 ($7500 today) scholarship. I knew students from out of state who said it cost less or about the same to go to Ga Tech than to go to an in-state school in Maryland or South Carolina.
Two other differences: I didn't settle on a major until the end of my freshman year and still graduated in 4. My kid's scholarships evaporate if the GPA falls below 3.0. Mine had to fall below academic good standing: 1.9 for a freshman & 2.0 for the remaining years.
Well tuition is only a part of the cost.
From the University of Virginia website. For in-state students:
Estimated non-tuition expenses:
$18,492
(Housing $7470, Food $6470, Books/materials $1480, Personal expenses $3000, direct loan fee $72)
I don't know where my previous comment went, but when my daughter started at Penn last year, in grad school in city planning, she literally just asked if there were any programs that would reduce her tuition, and they gave her a $10K/semester grant. It was definitely not need-based; I don't even think I filled in a FAFSA form for her.
Now, that's grad school, but the University of Pennsylvania actually is a high status school, so there's a data point for you to add to anecdata that list price these days is a starting point for negotiations, at least for some students, in some programs.