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| U.C. Berkeley Tower. Photo by me |
Universities
and colleges in the United States are one of the most expensive on the planet.
The average tuition in 2011 for a four-year institution was 22 thousand dollars. Students living in the United
States know that they have to start saving early and apply for financial aid
and government loans in order to deal with the hefty debt later. According to
President Obama in his August 24th weekly address, students graduate
with an average of 26 thousand dollars in debt, which they slowly pay off in
the years to come.
But why is
American college expensive? In Europe, France offers higher education in public
universities for 180€ a year. In Brazil, free excellent-quality higher
education is offered to those that can pass the vestibular, a competitive exam
(though arguably one would have to pay for good K-12 education in order to pass). But
in the United States, studying at a public university can still reach 15
thousand dollars a year.
The answer
to this question is no doubt, more complex than I’d thought- I figured I could
type in Google and blindly ask: Why is college so expensive in the U.S. when
it’s almost for free in France? Turns out, not even Google had an answer for
that. I had to break my initial question down into pieces to get a full view of
what was really going on. I broke it into three parts:
-Why is American
college so expensive?
-Why is
French college not expensive, and how can it afford to pay for foreign students’
education?
-Where does
the U.S. tax money go, anyway?
Today I’ll
be discussing the first one. Why is college in the United
States so expensive?
Now, if you
look for the answer for this question, you’ll find that many articles and
magazines explain why college tuition is going up and why it’s expensive
today. Washington post has an excellent explanation with charts that you can
check out here.
If you’re
wondering why the cost of going to college is so high in the first place, well,
it’s because it is costly. Students have to pay for room and board, for
instruction, academic support, and all those nifty things that makes each
college unique. It’s also a price that’s fixed high, just like airplane tickets
are high, and one that people are prepared to pay for. The usual way to go is
to start a saving’s account for your kid to go to college once he/she starts
kindergarten. You’re not paying the full expenses of tuition either- part of it
is funded through tax revenue. Check out where tax money goes in Part III.
But still,
colleges weren’t always this expensive. Tuition at U.C. Berkeley used to cost
$700 in the 1970’s, and today it costs 15 thousand grand, which corresponds tlo
an increase of over 2 000 percent. College tuition has been going up,
making debts even harder to pay off in the future. Here’s why:
è Schools are spending more on
research now than they used to.
è Schools are investing in more
technology to stay on top of the list. The more technology colleges invest in,
the more attractive it becomes and more students will want to attend. But getting
top-notch technology costs money and who’s paying for it are the students
through tuition increases.
è Schools are offering more
scholarships to become more attractive to some, and often they take the money
to pay for them by increasing tuition.
è In general, more people are
attending college than before. It’s getting more competitive, and in some
cases, those that can pay are priority. Many schools offer merit-based
scholarships however, so my message to fellow Americans would be: study as hard
as you can. It might pay off sooner than you think.
The truth is that college is so expensive
because it’s not subsidized, which means that the government doesn’t pay for
the complete cost of college. The current system allows individual students
make their decisions, i.e. choose what they will study, at whatever college
they choose that accepts them, and deal with the costs. That might seem like a
given, but there are other systems which won’t let you do that. In Brazil, for
example, if you want to become a doctor and receive good education at your
chosen college, you better study real hard because there’s fierce competition.
For example, 100 places are offered to study medicine at the University of
Santa Catarina (public university) but as many as 5000 people apply to take the
vestibular test. Only those with the 100 top grades on this test will get in.
There are also entrepreneurs out there who
realize the gain in opening a college, simply because they can make profit out
of it. Kids are getting their education, but meanwhile, someone’s making money
out of it. Happily, those colleges are listed as ‘FOR-PROFIT’ colleges and there’s
a big list of them on Wikipedia.
Check out
how France allows for its citizens and even non-citizens to go to college for
the lowly cost of 180 euros a year in my next post, Part II.
