You are here: Home / Archives for tuition

NYC private schools charge more than Harvard

January 30, 2012 By 2 Comments

Private school tuition is soaring in New York City, reports the New York Times. Parents pay as much as $40,000 a year — and that doesn’t count what they pay admissions consultants to help get their kids in.

Over the past 10 years, the median price of first grade in the city has gone up by 48 percent, adjusted for inflation, compared with a 35 percent increase at private schools nationally — and just 24 percent at an Ivy League college — according to tuition data provided by 41 New York City K-12 private schools to the National Association of Independent Schools.

Indeed, this year’s tuition at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory ($38,340 for 12th grade) and Horace Mann ($37,275 for the upper school) is higher than Harvard’s ($36,305).

Schools say they have to pay teachers more to compete with the public schools, but the main push seems to be supply and demand. There are lots of parents who’ll pay anything for a place at an elite school.

 

Filed Under: Education Tagged With: , ,

College leaders fail Obama’s tuition plan

January 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment

College leaders don’t like President Obama’s tuition-control plan, reports AP. In his State of the Union speech, the president threatened to cut some forms of federal aid to students at colleges that raise tuition or fail to provide “good value.”

Fuzzy math, Illinois State University’s president called it.

“Political theater of the worst sort,” said the University of Washington’s head.

States have reduced higher education funding, forcing public colleges and universities to raise tuition, university presidents say.

Under the president’s proposal, colleges would be judged on “responsible tuition policy,” either by “offering relatively lower net tuition prices” or “restraining tuition growth,” reports College Inc. In addition, the Education Department would evaluate how well colleges prepare graduates to get jobs and repay student loans, and their performance in enrolling and graduating low-income students.

The aid that colleges stand to lose under the president’s plan is not the Pell grant, the largest source of federal funds to students, but rather a package of “campus-based” programs that the federal government delivers to colleges. They are Federal Work Study, an initiative that subsidizes the expenses of campus jobs for needy students at 3,400 colleges; Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, a supplement to the Pell grant that awards needy students $100 to $4,000 a year; and the Perkins loan program, which delivers low-interest loans to students.

Obama is proposing to expand all three programs to the tune of about $10 billion — enhancing the Perkins program from $1 billion to $8 billion and augmenting Work Study and Opportunity Grants by a combined $2 billion.

While some believe higher education funding should be tied to performance, Obama’s proposal would deny aid to needy students, critics charge. “Ultimately, who you are punishing with this is the students,” said Haley Chitty, spokesman for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “They’re the ones who get this aid.”

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Colleges should share student loan risk

January 28, 2012 By 5 Comments

Fix student loans by giving colleges “skin the game,” writes Alex Pollack in The American.

(Colleges) are the effective originators, the promoters, and the chief financial beneficiaries of student loans. It is their rising costs which result in ever more debt and more risk of default for student borrowers and for taxpayers.

The federal student loan program should make colleges share the risk of bad loans, Pollack writes. Colleges would have an incentive to avoid charging more than students will be able to repay.

 

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , ,

How to pop the college tuition bubble

January 14, 2012 By

“For a growing number of students, entering the lucrative college-educated realms of the economy is like being smuggled across the border—you can get to the promised land if you try hard enough, but you arrive in a state of indentured servitude to the shady operators who overcharged you for the trip.” So writes Ed Sector’s Kevin Carey, who offers A Radical Solution For America’s Worsening College Tuition Bubble. The only way to control college costs is to introduce competition, Carey writes.

New providers of higher education could be made “eligible for payment via Pell grants, federal loans, or other current and imagined federal aid systems if they agree to a few baseline conditions,” such as price regulation and transparency. “They would be required to provide public information about how much their students learn, and have their access to federal aid rescinded if students are not learning enough.”

. . .  a pair of well-known Stanford professors are currently teaching an Artificial Intelligence course to about 200 Stanford students—and more than twenty thousand students around the world, online. The non-Stanford students won’t receive credits from Stanford, but they will receive official documentation from the professors as to how they scored on course tests and their overall rank. Under this new system, those professors would be free to set up their own business teaching Artificial Intelligence over the Internet, and students would be free to pay them with federal aid. Other providers might take advantage of the fast-growing body of open educational resources—free online courses, videos, lectures, and syllabi—and add value primarily through mentoring, designing course sequences, and assessing learning.

To remain eligible for federal financial aid, old-line colleges would have to accept transfer credits granted by the new providers.

And because they will be inexpensive and attached to verifiable data about how much students are learning, they will make a compelling value proposition when competing with traditional colleges that have no such data, charge more money, and are weighed down by legacy expenses and change-resistant cultures.

Existing colleges and universities will have to adapt or die, Carey writes.

Making sure those new-style credits are transferable will be tricky. Colleges today often reject credits earned at other accredited institutions.

Filed Under: College, Online Learning Tagged With: , , , ,

Students hit hard by textbook costs

January 13, 2012 By

While community colleges have kept tuition under control, students have been hit hard by rising textbook costs. Increasingly, students say they’re trying to get by without buying all the assigned books.

Virginia’s community college system will help India develop job training centers.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Asian Americans lose out to Chinese students

January 3, 2012 By

Asian Americans lose as California schools pursue Chinese students, reports Next Media Animation, which is based in Taiwan.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , , ,

Tuition-paying Chinese squeeze out Asian-Americans

January 2, 2012 By

Cash-strapped California are recruiting tuition-paying international and out-of-state students, leaving fewer places for Californians, reports Bloomberg News. Often that means Chinese students get in while high-achieving Asian-Americans, many of them the children of immigrants, do not.

Kwanhyun Park, the 18-year-old son of Korean immigrants, spent four years at Beverly Hills High School earning the straight As and high test scores he thought would get him into the University of California, San Diego. They weren’t enough.

In 2009, UC=San Diego cut its number of in-state freshmen by 500 to about 3,400 to make room for out-of-state and international students. California residents pay $13,234 in annual tuition while nonresidents pay $22,878.

The number of Chinese freshman soared from 16 to 200; the number of Asian-American Californians fell by 29 percent.


Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , ,

Obama: Cut college costs

December 7, 2011 By

President Obama met with college leaders to discuss ways to cut college costs.

Colleges will keep raising tuition as long as federal loans make it easy for students and parents to borrow, a higher education analyst concludes.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , , , ,

‘Stop smiling’

December 5, 2011 By

“Stop smiling,” says the photographer in “School Portrait,” a short film made in England.

“No, stop smiling, we’re going to do something different today,” the photographer says as the first student sits down. “It’s called a reality check. I want you to repeat after me: university tuition fees.”

After the student says it back, frowning, he keeps the ball rolling.

“Banking crisis means I’ll never afford a home,” he says.

These reality checks keep coming, with topics ranging from divorce rates, to climate change to how hard the young students will have to work.

There’s no such thing as “pocket money,” the photographer says. You have to work for a living.

School Portrait (2011) from Michael Berliner on Vimeo.

Filed Under: Children Tagged With: , , , ,

College costs outpace medical inflation

November 5, 2011 By

The cost of college has outpaced inflation for 30 years, even rising faster than medical costs, according to Freakonomics.

Cato’s Neal McCluskey explains why tuition keeps going up.

Filed Under: College Tagged With: , ,
« Older Posts