DailyDirt: College Tuition Is Expensive

Paying for college has never exactly been easy, but it's been getting increasingly difficult over time. On top of that, it's getting more difficult to get into some of the more selective schools. CA Gov. Jerry Brown remarked that "normal" people can't get accepted to Berkeley anymore (hold the jokes on how normal the students at Berkeley have ever been, okay?). Proposals for free community college tuition (with fine print attached) might make higher education more accessible and certain colleges more socio-economically diverse, but what's going on with the costs of tuition?

• All the Ivy League universities and a bunch of prestigious schools like MIT and Stanford offer free tuition for students from families earning less than specified income levels. However, if the goal of these kinds of programs is really to achieve higher socio-economic diversity of student populations, perhaps efforts to level the playing field should start far earlier than college. [url]
• The putative reason for the increasing college tuition is related to slashed government funding, but the conventional wisdom seems to ignore the growth of the student population, as well as the administrative expansion which has been roughly ten times the rate of growth of tenured faculty positions. Some folks point to the seven-figure salaries for high-ranking university executives as a scapegoat, but the situation seems to be much more complex. Is there a more efficient way to deliver higher education and reliably recognize student achievements? [url]
• Government subsidized higher education isn't going to lower the costs of educating -- it'll just obscure the relationship between that cost and tuition. Reducing administration costs for colleges and universities seems like the place to start, but it's not clear how the cuts there would begin... or why they would be initiated by the very people who are in charge of the administration budgets. [url]

After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.

Permalink | Comments | Email This Story