Posted on 08/25/2008 10:10:45 AM PDT by bs9021
Free to Choose?
by: Deborah Lambert, August 25, 2008
In these days of rapidly escalating college tuition costs, the very mention of an institution like Berea College can make the heads of pricey schools a bit defensive. After all, Berea, located in Kentucky, educates only low-income students, and stands apart from almost every college by offering free tuition, according to the New York Times.
“It’s difficult to find a college that balances thrift and altruism as deftly as Berea,” noted Anthony Paletta in a recent posting on mindingthecampus.com.
While high-profile Ivies with their megabucks endowments attract the super-rich and offer a leg up to the less affluent, Paletta says it makes sense to compare Berea to the “countless less-than-fabulously wealthy American colleges” that are “caught up in endless cycles of expansion, refurbishment and tuition increases.”
Berea College president Larry D. Shinn noted that when liberal arts colleges charging $40,000 a year suddenly sprout upscale coffee/juice bars and glass-walled physical education buildings, you have to start wondering, “does this contribute to the public good?”
Clearly the Berea model is not for everyone.
The question is, could a student at Amherst or Yale even survive at a school like Berea with...
(Excerpt) Read more at campusreportonline.net ...
The only thing in our economy coming close to matching the rise in gas prices in the last few years has been college tuition. It dwarfs health care increases (which have been pretty scary).
And Tuition Costs rise proportional to Congressional Student Aid financing. Every $1000 that Congress increases in ‘college aid’ causes a $1000 rise in even public school tuition cost. Somehow, universities found they are immune from inflation because they can charge whatever they want and people are still dying to get into their schools.
So why bother to reduce rates when raising them is working so well?
When I was in the Army, every time we got a $50 increase in housing allowance, the off-post rents went up by the same amount.
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