Written by: Phillip Levine
Published by: The Chronicle of Higher Education
MBA News Digest Comment: GME program leaders should take a look at their own program’s website to see how easy it is to determine the cost of their program.
Extracted Content: Colleges have already begun to price themselves out of the American dream.” So pronounced The New York Times … in 1973. Since then, the cost of attendance has continued to climb, roughly doubling in the last 30 years after accounting for inflation. And yet, despite the expense, enrollments continue to rise. Why? Part of the answer is that most students aren’t paying full freight. The most widely publicized cost figure, the “cost of attendance,” vastly overstates what most students pay, giving an inflated number by failing to account for financial aid.
The numbers are indeed eye-popping. At NYU, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and many other private institutions, the “cost of attendance” is over $80,000 for students living on campus. At publics like Penn State and the University of Colorado at Boulder, in-state costs top $30,000 and out-of-state costs top $50,000 (again, assuming the student cannot cut costs by living with relatives). These figures are, happily, misleading, and I propose a small corrective: Forget “cost of attendance” and rename it “the maximum cost of attendance.”