The new Reform Judaism Magazine just arrived and it’s got a big section called the Insider’s Guide to College Life. Let’s parse some of it!
The first section, a Q&A with Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro, is about the economics of financing college. Their first question is, “Why is college tuition so expensive–up to $50,000 a year?” Northwestern’s tuition, according to the U.S. News and World Report’s latest list, is $40,247. Schapiro has some interesting facts and figures about how that’s a slightly misleading way to think about it.
75% of underdraduates attend public universities, typically paying less than a third of that $50,000 […] of the 16.5 million undergraduates in American higher education, only about 500,000 attend colleges and universities in that price range, and only about half of them pay full tuition…
While those figures are definitely interesting, Schapiro doesn’t answer the question. Why do some college cost that much?
Schapiro does point out that college has actually “become less expensive as a percentage of household income because of rapid increases in aid discounts.” At my school, Drew University, which is in that $40-50k range, it’s true that I hardly know anyone who doesn’t have some kind of aid. Schapiro is able to conclude, “In short, and Ivy League-type education is considerable more affordable today than it was 15 years go.” The picture is a little incomplete because he does not discuss inflation. I’m left wondering if earning has been outpaced by inflation, the decreasing percentage spent on college may not be decreasing enough to keep pace with the gap between earning and inflation.
The next questions confirms that college tuition has still increased faster than inflation. Schapiro says that this is basically because figuring out what to spend money on in a university is really complex. Thanks. He doesn’t address the fact administrative staff has increased greatly in academia in recent years. Here’s a study with more on that. He also doesn’t discuss factors like the U.S. News and World Report, which rewards schools for having higher tuitions. (My school is voluntarily unlisted because our president, in a rare ballsy move, doesn’t want to support that kind of mindset.)
He does paint an interesting portrait of religious life at Northwestern:
People of all religions are welcome at the president’s house. Catholics come over to celebrate All Saints Day, and Muslims to mark the end of Ramadan. At Williams, when we broke the Yom Kippur fast, my wife and I hosted dinner for more than 200 people. About 150 of us marched from the Jewish center to the president’s house with our tallit bags in hand. It was a lovely sight. At Northwester, we had 45 people over each night for seder. That would not have happened in the not-so-distant past, when many colleges and universities were not exactly welcoming to Jews.
The other parts of the guide offer substantive, straight-forward advice. It is much different from the book we reviewed here yesterday, “Jewish U.” To be fair, though, the article is on a different subject, focusing on choosing a school, where the book was more about what to do once you get there.
