Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, With a New Preface

Front Cover
Harvard University Press, Jul 1, 2009 - Education - 336 pages

America’s colleges and universities are the best in the world. They are also the most expensive. Tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation for the past thirty years. There is no indication that this trend will abate.

Ronald G. Ehrenberg explores the causes of this tuition inflation, drawing on his many years as a teacher and researcher of the economics of higher education and as a senior administrator at Cornell University. Using incidents and examples from his own experience, he discusses a wide range of topics including endowment policies, admissions and financial aid policies, the funding of research, tenure and the end of mandatory retirement, information technology, libraries and distance learning, student housing, and intercollegiate athletics.

He shows that colleges and universities, having multiple, relatively independent constituencies, suffer from ineffective central control of their costs. And in a fascinating analysis of their response to the ratings published by magazines such as U.S. News & World Report, he shows how they engage in a dysfunctional competition for students.

In the short run, colleges and universities have little need to worry about rising tuitions, since the number of qualified students applying for entrance is rising even faster. But in the long run, it is not at all clear that the increases can be sustained. Ehrenberg concludes by proposing a set of policies to slow the institutions’ rising tuitions without damaging their quality.

 

Contents

II Wealth and the Quest for Prestige
33
III The Primacy of Science over Economics
91
IV The Faculty
111
V Space
137
VI Academic and Administrative Issues
155
VII The Nonacademic Infrastructure
207
VIII Student Life
231
IX Conclusion
263
Appendix Defined Benefit and Defined Contribution Retirement Plans
287
Notes
291
Acknowledgments
303
Index
307
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