Price War?
The New York Times is reporting that a number of universities have recently increased their tuition because having lower tuition was actually turning off applicants.
Yes, you read that right.
I got curious and did a little checking as to what the going rate (tuition +room & board) was for an undergraduate year at some of the well-known Catholic colleges and universities in the
Villanova $45,715
Fordham $45,520
Notre Dame $44,390
St. Mary’s (CA) $43,281
Loyola (MD) $41,825
Loyola-Marymount $39,152
Loyola (IL) $33,696
Creighton $32,968
Now it’s true that a lot of schools are offering financial aid to an increasing percentage of families, so who knows what these rates really mean. But as the parent of two children (8 and 6) who would be interested in offering them higher education at a Catholic institution, these numbers are pretty terrifying. By the time my kids are in college, four years at a Catholic college is going to cost more than I paid for my house.
In one of their statements adopted a few weeks ago, the bishops talked about encouraging Catholics to have larger families. All I can say is “good luck!”
As a Marquette graduate I don’t know whether to be offended that it wasn’t on the list of “well-known Catholic universities” … or relieved that it isn’t expensive enough to make the list.
many students at Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City receive financial aid.
Kristina Chew
As a senior at Fordham and a co-chair of the Rose Hill Society, Fordham’s tour guide group, I found that the Fordham Office of Admissions states that in 2006-2007, tuition and fees are $30,800 and room & board is $11,600. It’s lower than the number indicated in the post and in fact, I have found that the Financial Aid Office has been extraordinarily helpful to at-need students in particular.
The number was derived from the document below. I may have added in the “Indirect expenses”
http://www.fordham.edu/images/finaid/06-07%20fc&cb%20coa.pdf
I don’t doubt that the Financial Aid Office is helpful. But one of the real questions–not just for Fordham but for all these schools–is the ratio of grants to loans. Subsidized loans certainly are a form of “aid,” but even if they were zero interest, you’re still looking at the potential of 100K+ in debt upon graduation.
Maybe someone who works in higher ed can tell me why these numbers don’t tell the full story. I suspect they don’t. But on their face they’re enough to induce cardiac arrest.
One thing I would like to point out on the document is that tuition plus room & board at Fordham is $42,535. The $45,520 isn’t really accurate, since books, travel, and misc. aren’t standard or even typical for most students. Sorry to make such a case over a few thousand dollars, but I think Fordham doesn’t deserve such a high rank among other Catholic schools — although I admit that these figures have skyrocketed in recent years
I agree, it’s terribly expensive. But education at Catholic schools corresponds to prices at other schools –roughly. I think ND is about like Duke–though I haven’t checked.
So what to do about it? Right now, ND is about where Princeton was when I graduated–we’ve got need blind admissions. My parents and I took out loans for a Princeton education; I took out loans for Yale Law–and you know what–I ended up OK. The loans were difficult, but not unbearable. Three years of living more or less like a grad student after law school, and I paid most of them down. It was an investment in my future.
I hope, in the next twenty years, ND goes to where Princeton is now– need blind admissions, no loans (I think). But that will be a process.
In the alternative, what do we do? Pay profs less? An entry level liberal arts faculty makes about 45-50k per year (usually about 33 years old, with eight plus grad school years behind them). Pay staff less? Catholic Social Teaching? Build less buildings–yes, we could do that. BUt believe it or not, kids will pick where to go in part based on whether there’s a good gym, good food, etc.
Well, something happened to costs of higher education since the ’60s. And I don’t think it was skyrocketing professors’ salaries (with the explosion of adjuncts, I wonder if salaries have slimmed as a componant of budgets). Fuel costs are much higher than that have been in years–no small part of a university’s budget. But universities are large, lumbering animals.
Then why is the popular perception that ND is mainly upper middle class compared to other Catholic colleges? From what I can gather that perception does seem real.
Is it the aura of ND or what?
I’m no expert–ibut it’s probably true that there are a lot of upper middle class kids here –they test well, they are very athletic, they are very service-oriented. But there are a lot of upper-middle class kids at Duke too.
I guess the question is this: Do we want a range of Catholic institutions of higher education — some serving the immigrants, others serving the middle class, and a few research universities too.? I myself think we want a range– Catholics come in all shapes and sizes, and need a range of educational institutions to serve them and to educate them to serve others.
Notre Dame isn’t the sum total of all Catholic higher education. It’s one piece–other pieces are important too.
I teach at Michigan State, obviously a public institution, and it seems to me that a lot of students do “shop the campus” as if it were some type of spa where they can also get educated.
The Legislature tied state university appropriations tuition hikes–the idea being that colleges would get less money if they raised tuition, but this hasn’t worked all that well.
MSU has contracted out bus and food services, as I assume many of the Catholic schools have as well, to save money.
Reliance on adjuncts is growing, and salaries there vary widely, but they usually make about half what a tenure-track person does.
The big bite has come from health care costs, and more colleges are requiring staff to pay more for those benefits.
The Becker-Posner blog for December 03 discusses some of the technical economic issues related to student loans for college students.
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
Becker proposes income-contingent loans by which “persons who earn very little repay little, while those who earn a lot repay a lot.”
This kind of arrangement would partially compensate those wishing to enter callings with reduced incomes (clergy, teachers). Otherwise recent graduates may be sorely tempted by the more highly remunerated though less socially beneficial occupations.
Thanks for that link Patrick. Intriguing proposal.
One other thought – I wonder if there’s a connection between the high cost of college, the prevalence of student loans and the decline of vocations. That is, those with lots of debt are less likely to enter a seminary or religious life, at least immediately or soon after graduation. The problem is only likely to worsen as loan levels increase. And parents, who may have partially financed their children’s education, are likewise anxious to see some immediate return for their sacrifices, and may, without too much subtlety, focus predominantly on the financial aspects of career choices.
In addition to income-contingent loans, perhaps loan forgiveness programs, voluntarily financed by the Church, might help those interested in the religious life, though there are obvious problems to be avoided.
While I agree that it is sad that college tuitions (including those of Catholic institutions) have reached such high levels, I wouldn’t connect the bishops rejection of birth control to this topic. We know the bishops have almost no influence on most Catholic colleges. Most circle in an orbit of their own and fewer even maintian the patina of a Catholic identity. Sad to say, some of the Catholic high schools are heading in the same direction
” … loan forgiveness programs, voluntarily financed by the Church, might help those interested in the religious life … ”
I could support this (obvious problems taken into consideration) IF the church would also be prepared to help finance some or most of the educational expenses of those entering into lay ministry. Wishful thinking aside, parish leadership for the forseeable future will remain mostly in the hands of lay folk. The cost of their obtaining qualifications to assume those tasks is almost 100% on their nickle. Until the church starts to take the lay vocation as seriously as the ordained vocation, there will continue to be problems with getting the best qualified folks to keep the place going.
Here in the Land of Enchantment, students who maintain reasonable progress for the first 6 months can receive tuition from the State, funded by lottery(Lottery Scolarships.)
Catholic coleges hacve no such advantages, except federal assitance.
Back in those “awful” 60′s and 70′s, Fordham, Marymount and Mt. St. Vincent (under the leadership of the late Dr. Mattie Cook,) ran Malcolm King Harlem Colkege extension in Harlem. All the faculty were volunteers! I know because I taught psychology in the program for a number of years. A small paid staff provided study skills and support.
It was wonderful! But it ended …
I guess with Bundy monies, a number of small colleges became coed and developed outreach centers for poor students.
I’m sure our Catholic universities continue to reach out to the poor in many fine ways, indeed: my friends back in NY tell me great stuff about Fordham still.
I think it’s the lower middle class and middle class students who will have more and more problems with the cost of Catholic education. That’s obviously true as well at the grammar school and high school level for young families.
The lack of free employees (nuns and brothers) and the need to pay a living wage to lay faculty, as already noted ,make the costs necessary.
Given the curent situation, I can’t see any reasonable hope of resolving this on the horizon.
As a parent struggling to deal with a $40K+ college tuition, I can attest to Peter’s comment about the increase in the loan/grant financial aid ratio. At least at my child’s school, the number of loans as financial aid substantially exceeds the number of outright grants. I’m not complaining, especially since it was a personal choice to take on the tuition burden of private vs. state school tuition, but my child will have graduated long before her college tuition is completely paid off.
There is also an interesting book that came out this past September that some contemplating college for their kids may find interesting (and unsettling). It’s “The Price of Admission,” by Daniel Golden. I believe Golden is/was a WSJ reporter, and he investigated and researched the role of wealth as a factor in college admissions. Of course, wealth is a factor in financial aid awards, but Golden makes a strong case that wealth is often a very important factor in college entry decisions, too. He highlights many instances where schools will accept unqualified rich kids, to the detriment of qualified less-than-rich kids, in the hope that the wealthy parents will make large donations to the schools’ endowments. Whether true or not, Princeton and Duke, for example, do not come off well at all in Golden’s book. He holds out Caltech as a model school. Caltech looks at qualifications only, often forgoing large donations from the parents of underqualified applicants.
ND also takes a hit in Golden’s book, though not on the wealth issue. He reports that 1 in 4 incoming freshmen at ND is the child of an ND alumnus. I have two siblings who graduated from ND–one of whom has served on ND’s board of trustees–and when I told them about this statistic, which ND does not deny, the swords of course came out, and they were pointed at me. My sibling/trustee made the reasonable point that it is natural that ND alums would want their children to have the same excellent education as they did. I was less convinced by the argument, however, that the pool of legacy applicants is as or more qualified than the pool of non-legacy applicants. If my sibling is correct that there is at least parity in qualifications, then I’m not so bothered by the 1 in 4 figure, but a 25% son/daughter of an alum student body seems to be a very high % to me.
There was a fascinating article in the Times a few days ago about a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania called Ursinus which wondered if its low tuition caused people to think that the education wasn’t worth much. So in 2000, they raised it 18%, up to $23,460 — and received 200 more applicants that year and within four years raised the size of its freshman college by over one third. Their tuition is now about the same as Harvard’s and Notre Dame’s. So the education must be as good!
Who knows what is really going on with what seems insane tuition hikes (it is happening in private elementary and secondary schools as well in my area), but one does wonder if the Catholic schools have high tuition so as not to seem second-rank.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/12/education/12tuition.html
It appears we’ve struck a nerve!
Let me first say that my original post was not trying to assign blame for this situation. I work in health care, another industry with odd economics. When people complain to me about the cost of health care, I often wryly inquire whether they would like to forgo hip replacements for 80 year olds, something we didn’t do 20 years ago that is almost routine now.
The economics of education are similarly difficult. Education is one industry where the method of “production” is still pretty similar to what it was in Socrates time. Oh yes, we have the web, photocopy machines, and computers. But education ultimately comes down to an instructor and a number of students. It’s very hard to increase efficiency unless you are willing to increase the number of students per instructor or reduce the cost of the instructor. Both strategies seem to be in use right now, with class sizes being increased and the number of adjunct faculty on the rise. There is also no question that at virtually all colleges, the cost of tuition only covers a portion of the actual cost of education.
I agree with Cathleen that we need a range of college options for Catholic families. The problem is, at least in the far Western U.S. (AK, CA, HI, OR, WA), the options are fairly limited. Among member schools of the NCAAA, I counted 5—with a combined total student population of 5,930—whose tuitions were below $20,000 a year. I can only imagine what the faculty make at these places!
I don’t have a solution. All I was trying to say is that as a parent who is currently paying Catholic school tuition and trying to sock away a little for future college expenses, I feel incredibly daunted (let’s not even talk about what Catholic high school is going to cost!). I can’t imagine being able to save enough that would allow my children to attend a high quality Catholic college without incurring an extremely large debt burden. Living in California, I’ve obviously got a lot of great non-Catholic options for higher education, and I suspect that is the direction we may have to go.
As serious social problems go, this obviously ranks pretty far down the list. But as a Church, I think we need to ask ourselves whether we think giving a larger number of Catholic kids a Catholic educational experience is a priority. If it is, we may need to think of more creative ways to help families make that happen.
There is a lot of inscrutability to what goes into tuition, but I doubt if the cost of professors has much to do with inflation. My guess, based on what I know about this from my academically oriented friends and relatives and the kinds of appeals I get from the five institutions that my husband and I attended:
1. Health care costs of employees
2. Number of ancillary or administrative employees per student or per professor has risen dramatically, and these can’t be made into “adjuncts” as easily as the professors.
3. Buildings. It’s not enough to have a classroom, and increasingly it’s not enough to have a decent space for laboratory — appeals are made for state of the art facilities in order to draw facutly and students, and there seems to be a shorter useful life for these kinds of projects. This is phenomenally expensive overhead that gets filtered into tuition.
4. Perfume pricing. That’s what the NYT article was about — the concept that something that costs alot must be better than something in a similar bottle that costs less.
However, in conjunction with number 4, all students and their parents should realize that the list price is for suckers only (in this, education is just like health care), and a bit of pushing and prodding and appeals and outright threats to take one’s business elsewhere will often get the price down (or the aid to go up) if a student is desirable. It won’t work for every student at every school, but it will work for many students at one or more schools of their choice. It’s too bad that the whole system is so complicated, but it has a lot to do with an obsessive desire to control the mix of students admitted in the first instance.
After Peter made this post I went out and researched the cost of attending Catholic colleges/universities in Canada using his criteria for a standard undergraduate BA degree.
In Canada our public universities have religious colleges as component parts of the whole and this includes Catholic colleges. For example The University of Western Ontario has two Catholic colleges, Kings College (co-ed) and Brescia (woman only).
You can view the findings at http://tomorrowstrust.ca/?p=155 under the blogToTrust title “Costs for Can & Am Cath U”
To compare in American dollars reduce the CND by roughly 10% or increase the American one. At the time of posting $45,000 USD was about $53,000 CND
The interesting thing is even with fully supported Catholic elementary and secondary education in Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta these are all very small colleges.
To put it mildly from this side of the border American private university costs are insane.
Kathy, how in heavens name could a young person graduate from a Catholic faculty of education with those costs and work as a teacher in a Catholic school and ever hope to pay his/her student loan back before he/she retired?