In a move likely to reverberate among America’s top-tier private colleges, the University of the South said Wednesday it will slash tuition and fees for the coming school year by 10%, or about $4,600….
If not the first, Sewanee is the largest private school to institute such price cuts in recent years, said Tony Pals, director of communications for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
“It’s a bold move that will have the potential to put competitive pressure on Sewanee’s peer institutions,” said Mr. Pals.
That’s cutesy accounting. The article said they raised tuition 5% last year, and research on the Sewanee website (you have to dig for it but it is there) is that there was a 5 percent increase the year before that. So, basically they are cutting back to what tuition was only 24 months ago.
In fairness to Sewanee, it’s no small think to reduce tuition, fees, room, and board by 10 percent. And it bears remembering that increases and decreases in tuition only apply to the price of the education, not it’s true cost, which is almost always higher than the stated price, underwritten as the education is by endowment earnings.
All that said, however, Sewanee isn’t exactly a bargain, so the 10 percent is off of an overpriced product. And if one reads the fine print, it becomes clear that financial aid will also be decreased (“adjusted” was the clever term)–so the dramatic headlines notwithstanding, this may not be such a windfall for current and prospective students as it might at first appear.
In reality, the school is probably struggling in the tough economy to meet its admissions numbers, particularly when they’ve counted on many to pay the full sticker price. The school has other well-known problems besides price that cuts in tuition (real or illusory) won’t remedy. It will be interesting to see if they are able to bring in the students they need, and do so without creating a real financial problem.
Educational institutions are suffering from a long period, thirty to forty years, of faculty/staff wages, benefits and retirement packages being incrementally increased on an annual basis with little consideration being given of the ultimate impact that those incremental increases will have on the ability of students/students’ families ability to pay the resultant inflated education costs.
Another area of inflated education costs is that of needlessly modified and republished textbooks. It used to be that the annual publishing of an addendum would keep a textbook uptodate for many years.
And then to broaden this comment, the current crisis in state budgets are largely the result of similar (planned or out-of-control) incremental increases in state worker employment roles, wages, benefits, and retirement packages. And, there too, the “chickens have come home to roost.”
The stark truth is that if the taxpayers can’t pay the bill then the state employers will have to lose in the end. Massive federal subsidy of unsustainable state programs will result in massive inflation and everybody will become ‘equally poor.’
But possibly, everybody becoming ‘equally poor’ may be the ultimate ideological goal of of those support a massive state and federal work force.