Talk:College tuition in the United States

The closing college door

The widespread alarm over "the closing college door" during the 1950s, leading to the National Defense Student Loan Act, then attending and paying for MIT during the 1960s rush of tuition hikes, were formative experiences for me. Having endured those times, I never expected anything so difficult again. Yet it was so, when our two sons attended research universities (not MIT) during the 1980s and 1990s. The enormous time and expense to create a research university limits the supply of such services, which is far outpaced by the demand for them. Barring a depression of even greater harshness than the 1930s, the trends seen since World War II may well continue for another 50 years or more.

Left out of the original version of this article is any mention of loans and scholarships, particularly the "need-based" scholarships that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Someone who knows these topics better than I should undertake a summary. It is hoped that writers on this topic will deal with the reluctance of anyone ingrained in our culture to be labeled as a beggar.

Craig Bolon 23:30, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

Thanks

Great work, Craig! Just copyedited the article a bit — hope you don't mind. jareha ^(comments) 00:34, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

Categories

I removed Category:Educational stages and Category:School types because college tuition is neither an educational stage or school type. It's a form of education financing, which is why I left Category:Education finance. jareha ^(comments) 16:50, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

In state vs out of state

Can we include something about in-state tuition being cheaper than out-of-state tuition? It often has a lot of crence over where students go.

First Graph

As a constructive comment, I think the first graph on this page would be much more illustrative if it included only inflation adjusted lines and was not on a logaritmic scale. It would be less cluttered and convey with full force the fact that the "real" price of education is increasing very quickly over time.

Is this first graph correct? The Y scale is in orders of magnitue. I would expect the graph to dramatically flatten.

WHY?

Some discussion of why the cost of a college education is rising so quickly would be a very welcome addition to this article! -Toptomcat 18:24, 25 July 2007 (UTC)

College loans cause of inflation???

Just a theory of mine although I haven't tried statistically correlating Dept. of Education figures with annual tuition increases. I reckon that gov't loans that were supposed to "help" have done the opposite and ended up subsidizing the academic "industry." Essentially, colleges are jacking up tuition because they know that students can take out large loans to pay for it. Our gov't then raises loan amounts to "help" with rising tuition costs, but of course, colleges know this and so jack up tuition again. It's essentially turned into a fookin mess that drives Americans deeply into debt. If gov't cut loans, colleges would be forced to cut tuition / pay / expenditures / etc., but colleges have turned into such huge money making businesses and proliferated greatly, meh. I think it's probably just another instance of gov't "assistance" backfiring, but I could be wrong of course - just a simple theory. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.116.105.117 (talk) 21:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Reprise

Since the article was created, there has been little time to revisit it. Mostly the comments seem helpful and appropriate, including a notice seeking wider perspective. It turned out to be difficult to obtain long-term data outside the United States; Toronto was the only exception. However, the issue or rising college tuition might not have a much wider perspective. Among the industrialized nations, the United States stands out for allowing its educational economy to be dominated by elite, private institutions and for allowing those institutions to charge all the market will bear. Graphs are logarithmic because data trends are exponential. Inflation adjustment needs to be explained by showing uninflated trends, because there is controversy as to an appropriate deflator and because inflation is enormously variable by country; it was somewhat a stretch to use the US CPI as a deflator for Toronto. The out-of-state tuitions are not as significant because of the social role of state colleges in supporting students from the sponsoring state. In recent years out-of-state tuitions have become badly distorted as states try to use them as money trees. The "why" of tuition increases is indeed interesting. To start with, one would probably need candid testimony from two or more generations of finance officers at elite, private colleges. It is fairly obvious that many less prestigious colleges are using elite institutions as benchmarks and finance floors. They don't carry the burdens of research universities yet have been able to charge nearly the same prices. What the article indicates is that price trends at private institutions appear to be a very long-term trend, stretching over more than six decades, and that public institutions appear to have different, perhaps more socially responsive, long-term trends. Recent trends, however, suggest public institutions may be moving toward the rates of price increases at private institutions. -- September 28, 2007

Propose move to College tuition in the United States

I think the US and Canada are the only two countries to use the term "tuition" for college fees. Thus it should be under a new title. --Liface (talk) 10:12, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I concur. Entitling the page "College tuition" without specifying that it only pertains to the United States is U.S.-centric and misleading for the majority of readers. (Amos True (talk) 00:06, 20 May 2010 (UTC))

I am from Australia and I have to mention that this page isn't actually about Tuition fees (in the US), it is about the growth of tution fees and the inflationary trends in student living costs. It tells me nothing about what tuition fees actually are, why colleges have tuition fees, when tuition fees were instituted, what is the average cost of tuition (no fancy graphs please - just plain English), how people pay for tuition, college funds, comparison between tuition fees in the U.S. and other forms of higher education payment in other countries and the differences in cost between, say, a science program to an arts program to a law program. In Australia we pay between $5000 and $9000 per year to go to university. How does that compare to fees in the U.S? I don't know. Because no-one thought that it was relevant.