Rising Cost of College Tuition

Myriad academic studies and citizen speculation have been devoted to the rising cost of college tuition, which is a blame shifting, blame assigning exercise of the 1st magnitude, and which unfortunately ignores the asymptotic demand curve for the product (in that demand should decrease for education as the price goes up, but the opposite seems to happen - people need more training, not less, for a 21st century career and are willing to pay (handsomely, I might add) for the privilege of operating in the modern world).

And frankly, the cost of Harvard ($54,496) has always been about the same as a top of the line Buick (which I found to be the Buick Enclave at $53,775), and I have never heard a person complain about the rising cost of a Buick.

But the cost of education is less of a concern to me than the problem of giving anybody with talent and drive level access to the product. University fundraisers and agencies dedicated to the advancement of one ethnicity or another have been subsidizing this access for generations, forcing the remainder onto those who can pay full freight. Hidden chits for children of alumni, friends of alumni, and graduates of prep school X, Y or Z artificially limit the number of spaces in the incoming classes of most reasonably prestigious universities. The limits are even more acutely felt by qualified international applicants, who would make up a decidedly higher proportion of American university students - if only their population weren't artificially capped during the admissions process. More on that, perhaps, in a future post.

But what I am talking about is leveling the overall financial impact on a student or family from the choice to attend a particular university. The result would not be a sticker price (loosely, "tuition"), but rather a ratio representing the true cost of a students education, taking into account career choice/ambitions, where they come from (literally and figuratively), where they plan to go (projected, not binding), and the possibility or likelihood of current/future financial support from other sources (trust funds and the like).

So a student from rural Maine who gains acceptance to a prestigious private university and decides to attend without familial support, shares that she plans to become an educator, and return to rural Maine and teach mathematics. This students "ratio" should be considerably lower than a student from San Francisco who plans to enter management consulting and move to New York after graduation. The differences in ratio should determine the four year (and long term) financial outlay an individual student is required to assume. Of course, as we've learned in the case of Wall Street's excess, there should be some clawback provision for those students who "change their minds" and decide to shift from teacher to consultant. But I fundamentally believe that a university degree should be equally borne by all those who decide to pursue one. The "cost" of education would matter considerably less of those who are most capable and prepare for lucrative careers subsidized other, less lucrative (but equally important) vocational choice.

In Higher Education, the product demand curve will never flatten, so why not get away from obsession with "sticker price" and instead find other ways to finance higher education - and if there were ever a compelling rationale for progressive pricing strategies, this would be the place to try it.