32% raise
These kids are right in protesting! I just hope they don’t do anything stupid.
Think about it. A 32% rate hike? Who can afford tuition as it is?
Hey, it’s over 2 years, so it’s really only 16%!
Understand that this is an effect of the economic downturn AND a retreat from the idea of publicly funded education. It’s the single biggest thing we are doing to tank our economy. College ought to be nearly costless. On the other hand, it makes my little school a bargain. Our enrollment is out the roof, b/c no one can afford U of Mich anymore…
I saw cool bumper sticker this week…
“If you think education is expensive try ignorance.”
So 16% of 50,000 is another 8,000 per yr?
Ouch!
True phoo, but being lead blindly = ignorance IMO. What I mean by that is; I think they should say something and challenge the additional cost but not to the extent of non professionalism.
Sorry TommyS my figures where a little exaggerated! Lets say 40,000 over 4 yrs, that ok? That’s still 6,400 buckaroos at 16% But why do you say over two yrs? When the hike is 32% of the tution? I didn’t get that
The Board of Regents approved of a 32% hike over 2 years, so ave 16% a year.
It’s entirely easy to see why the costs are going up.
Go back to the late 1970s - we used to support higher ed from state and federal funds at a greater rate.
Hence the actual cost has not risen as much as tuition.
It’s that we’ve decided that students must pay for more of it themselves.
This may not seems like a bad thing, but here are some interesting figures:
Quote:
This crisis has been a long time coming, but bad times have brought it into clearer focus. In the past several decades, the cost of higher education has climbed at an astounding pace – faster than the Consumer Price Index, faster even than the cost of medical care. Over the past 30 years, the average cost of college tuition, fees, and room and board has increased nearly 100%, from $7,857 in 1977-1978 to $15,665 in 2007-2008 (in constant 2006-2007 dollars). Median household income, on the other hand, has risen a mere 18% over that same period, from about $42,500 to just over $50,000. College costs, in other words, have gone up at more than five times the rate of incomes.
Simply to ensure that a child attends a four-year public university, a family in the country’s lowest-income bracket now has to pay, on average, 55% of total income (up from 39% in 2000); for a middle-income family, the average is 25% (up from 18% in 2000); and for an upper-income family, 9% (up from 7%), according to “Measuring Up 2008: The National Report Card on Higher Education” by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. Similar figures hold for four-year private schools: In Missouri and Texas, almost 70% of family income is needed to pay college expenses for a four-year private school, after financial aid is included; in New York and Pennsylvania, it’s nearly 90%.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/04/03-3
Since the investment is well worth it (for each dollar spent on public 4 year degrees, e.g., the state gets an additional 4 dollars back in tax revenue, and a similar pattern holds for the student him or her self), one would think that students and families would not mind coming up with more of the initial investment at the front end of their careers.
But (1) we’ve come to expect public support for education; (2) families simply aren’t capable of that sort of forward planning, for the most part, and (3) giving a leg up for those students who are from poor backgrounds makes good public policy sense.
What we are doing is, in effect, going back to the time when higher education was for the sons of the elites, in order to train them to become elites themselves.
Harvard’s founding documents say something like this explicitly.
A huge step backward for our economy.