The American fascination with rebates, coupons, sales and other forms of tiered price discrimination has finally reached college tuition rates, and the results are not pretty. Marketing companies have been dreaming up ways of selling the same product at different prices to different people for years, and now college boards are getting in on the act: hiking prices on average of 81% in the last ten years, and offsetting this by hiking tuition aid over 130% ... but is it a tool for socialism, or discrimination?
Early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow)...
Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent … Applicants had apparently assumed that if the college cost more, it must be better…
Ursinus also did something more: It raised student aid by nearly 20 percent, to just under $12.9 million, meaning that a majority of its students paid less than half price…
Basically, they raised tuition and fees 17.6 percent, but raised student aid by nearly 20 percent … so the average student may actually be paying less. But more students come, because they think they’re getting a great deal on an expensive school, and since it’s expensive, it must be good.
Average tuition at private, nonprofit four-year colleges in the United States — the price leaders — rose 81 percent from 1993 to 2004, more than double the inflation rate, according to the College Board, while campus-based financial aid rose 135 percent.
So basically, they’re raising tuition just to make things look more expensive, but they’re raising financial aid even more, so it’s not actually more expensive? Well, maybe not. The numbers here are based on a percentage of the original figures, so even 135% of the former tuition aid is apparently less than 81% of the tuition price.
Poor and lower middle-class families are hypothetically paying the same or less, but upper middle-class and rich families are paying the full price. However, not all grants are need based, most schools use at least some of this “aid” money to attract brighter students by offering GPA or test-score based grants. And of course, you have to take into account that some poor students, unaware of the tremendous amounts of available tuition aid, simply stay away and attend state schools.
It can be argued that everyone studying at a private liberal arts college is getting a discount… officials say they offer an education costing tens of thousands of dollars more … Swarthmore spends about $73,690 a student. But its tuition, room, board and fees in the last academic year were little more than $41,000.
Actually, both public and private universities spend more per-student than they charge. The difference is that at a private school, the costs are covered by private endowments from rich alumni … and at public schools they’re covered by the tax payers.
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