Posted on 10/28/2010 5:23:45 AM PDT by reaganaut1
As their state financing dwindled, four-year public universities increased their published tuition and fees almost 8 percent this year, to an average of $7,605, according to the College Board’s annual reports. When room and board are included, the average in-state student at a public university now pays $16,140 a year.
At private nonprofit colleges and universities, tuition rose 4.5 percent to an average of $27,293, or $36,993 with room and board.
The good news in the 2010 “Trends in College Pricing” and “Trends in Student Aid” reports is that fast-rising tuition costs have been accompanied by a huge increase in financial aid, which helped keep down the actual amount students and families pay.
“In 2009-2010, students got $28 billion in Pell grants, and that’s $10 billion more than the year before,” said Sandy Baum, the economist who is the lead author of the reports. “When you look at how much students are actually paying, on average, it is lower, after adjusting for inflation, than five years earlier.”
In the last five years, the report said, average published tuition and fees increased by about 24 percent at public four-year colleges and universities, 17 percent at private nonprofit four-year institutions, and 11 percent at public two-year colleges — but in each sector, the net inflation-adjusted price, taking into account both grants and federal tax benefits, decreased over the period.
Almost everybody has been helped by the federal government’s increased spending on education, Ms. Baum said, either through Pell grants, which provide an average of $3,600 for low-income students, or through tax credits, which go further up the income scale.
The increase in federal support this year was so large that unlike former years, government grants surpassed institutional grants.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Hmmm, the schools are dependent on government money and the students are dependent on government money... What could possibly be the goal?
The Times has this backwards. The artificial demand for college education predicated on the availability of federal assistance is why the tuitions are so high in the first place.
Yeah, aid goes up, but not for everyone. We’re praying our sons find some scholarship assistance, because they’re sure not getting any financial aid based on “need”. Government meddling drives up the cost, but only compensates those it chooses as worthy.
College is one of the worst rackets going.
There’s no market control on the fees, so they skyrocket. Any money needed is thrown out by the government so the rises don’t matter to anybody because either it is the kids saddled with the debt or us when they don’t pay it back.
It is a perfact scam for the government to have seized control of.
College fees are high for eeeevvvviiiillll capitalist White rich privileged individuals and low for the poor downtrodden victimized underclass minorities.
Just another “transfer the wealth” scheme.
High tuition —> overpaid lib profs —> Dem donations —> more financial aid
and repeat
Take a look at what public universities are paying Professors and administrators these days, its outrageous. Costs have been going up 8-10% per year for years, way beyond the rate of inflation. Lots of liberal pigs feeding at the trough.
http://www.collegiatetimes.com/databases/salaries
Other than government I’m hard pressed to identify any other entity where the skyrocketing cost is less justified with respect to the quality of what it provides.
Let's see if I have this right - the cost of college continues to go up because there is more money available. There is no significant increase in quality of education; in fact, the quality may actually be going down.
Could I change the above to read:
Let's see if I have this right - the cost of government continues to go up because there is more money available. There is no significant increase in quality of government; in fact, the quality may actually be going down.
Any reason why we shouldn't reduce the availability of money to both institutions? PS. I support the recent push to have some colleges prove that they actually help their graduates find jobs with meaningful wages. But, I want that concept spread to all colleges and to exclude teaching at other colleges as "meaningful employment".
I’d laugh if this wasn’t so damaging. The geniuses at the NYT have stumbled onto a truth—subsidy many times INCREASES prices. They could have written the exact same article about the housing market. Universities are a racket with their main purpose being to stick their snouts as deeply in the public trough as possible.
see my flow chart in post #8
Assimilating knowledge by going to a particular location and sitting in front of a talking instructor is a completely outdated mode of education.
“fast-rising tuition costs have been accompanied by a huge increase in financial aid, which helped keep down the actual amount students and families pay.”
...part of this may be a CYA move by the schools...last year Senate hearings questioned continuing the tax exempt status of colleges.....their endowments/foundations were sitting on millions/billions of dollars....all tax free money, while they were jacking up costs to the kids and their families.
Clearly the NYT writer is an economic illiterate to not grasp the pernicious looting of the taxpayer and unjust enrichment of the "educrat class" that is truly going on here...
YES!! I have one kid out of college one almost done with grad school. Both are in fields that require active participation (ie. labs) that make on-campus learning mandatory. HOWEVER...the current grad student told me that no one shows up for lectures (they get the prof lecture online). Some lectures are done ONLY by videoconferencing. A nephew grad student at an illustrious university told me that he was shocked to see the students hit google for problem solving as opposed to actually thinking through problems.
There is a sports like symbiotic relationship between schools and the government. Government sees a “problem” and throws money at it to fix the problem. The schools just raise their gloves higher to catch all of it.
The first principle that must be driven home to all taxpayers is that education is not public service, it is a business. The idea is to raise revenues as high as possible, reward the owners (administrators in this case) with the profits. Since it is a monopoly, it does not worry about competition driving down either costs or revenues thanks to the teacher unions and the lack of a voucher program by the union supported politicians.
Feds In The Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.