For the record, I’m not American nor live in the US, but I have a 19-year-old son who started attending the University of Chicago this year, studying economics. Just the tuition itself is $70k. My husband and I are lucky enough to be able to afford it - I still believe it’s an outrageous amount of money to attend college.
Corporate greed.
Greed. Come on were you really expecting a different response?
Administrative bloat. At my university, if my lab lands a grant, 60% goes to the university and only 40% is used for actual research. There’s a long chain of people whose jobs are to answer emails, and they all need to be paid.
side effects of Boomer economic policies and their ignorance regarding the changes they caused
A lot of folks are overlooking one of the largest factors, unlimited student loans for whatever.
As long as people have access to an ever increasing amount of money to use for tuition, it is in those institutions’ interests to rise their prices to extract as much as possible.
Whereas other countries tend to subsidize their education at source, that is to say, by funding the schools directly which somehwat obviates the price gouging aspect.
This is a private school so they don’t get much in the way of direct government funding. State-funded schools are considerably cheaper. I went to Wright State University in Ohio. Right now it’s about $13k/yr in tuition. This is still rather expensive on a global scale.
Why do private schools charge that much? Because people (like you) will pay that much. What about the University of Chicago makes it so that you are willing pay for it? What do you or your son hope to get out of it that a school in your home country (I’m assuming Canada) can’t give him? To compare to Wright State, even for out-of-country students the tuition is less than half of Chicago’s tuition. Is the benefit of going to Chicago worth that much more? If it is, then that is exactly what you’re paying for.
To ensure a large supply of low wage labor.
My parents paid for me to attend a private university in the late 80’s, for which I’m both extremely fortunate and grateful.
I wanted to do the same for my children, but there was no way. I pay half, my parents pay half, and my kids have very small loans.
I was experiencing significant disappointment that I wasn’t able to pay for my kids’ education the way my parents paid for mine.
At one point I used an inflation calculator to get an idea of how much my education cost in today’s dollars, and it turns out that when it’s corrected for inflation, I’m paying what my parents paid. My kids’ education is more than twice as expensive as mine was if you correct for inflation.
If we can reason and communicate effectively then we’re much harder to exploit.
Education is priced above the balance of supply and demand because in wider scope it’s more profitable to deny access.
Denial of access to education is a very good way to leave many people with violence as their only practical means of change.
learning is just a sidehustle to the sports franchise they run?
Idk why you phrased that as a question as if it isn’t pretty obvious
Nobody knows. Serious, there are a lot of factors people will point to in here. Some of them are real factors, but every time I dig in I discovered that they do not explain everything. Prices have gone up much faster than inflation for decades even after accounting for government subsidies.
Same reason everything in the US is expensive: we have largely unregulated, runaway capitalism which pervades every facet of life. Everything from housing to academia to health care is for profit – not only profit, but for obscene year-over-year increases in profit. Those at the top regularly make money hand over fist even selling basic necessities, and if they don’t continue taking more and more, they’re seen as failures and replaced by one who will.
The cherry on top is that, for the most parts, the citizens no longer have any real power to change any of it.
Around the same time that health care becomes affordable in the US (major hypothetical, of course), it probably means a wind change has occurred such that university costs would also be coming down. But it would be a systematic change.
Because there’s nothing more American than getting ripped off.
I’m sure it’s not the sole factor, but universities in many other parts of the world are partially subsidised by the government.
Yeah, in our country university is free if you get high enough grades in the end of high school exams and then if you maintain high enough grades throughout university. Even if you don’t the tuition is affordable for virtually everybody. Like the equivalent of ~$1k per year for most degrees with some exceptions like medicine. A kid could make that in a month working a summer job.
Then why didn’t you send your kid to school in your country?
Cause the quality is not the best, he wanted to go to the US, and we can afford it. Plus the US offers many more opportunities.
Sounds like you answered your own question there. Tuition for foreign students is expensive because the ones who come here almost always have family that can pay for it. Like I said above, no American is spending $70k per year for undergrad studies. The smart ones are going to community colleges, which are becoming free in some capacity across most states, building up a GPA, and then transferring to a University off scholarships.
I spent 7 years in school without paying anything for tuition, everything was covered by scholarships. I’ve known many people with the same experience
University of Chicago is a pretty prestigious school, too. Tuition-wise, it’s on par with Yale, Harvard, Stanford.
UIC is half of UofC. NIU and EIU are a quarter.
OP is asking why one of the most expensive universities in the country is expensive, and assuming that all universities in the US are that expensive.
That’s good. I’m glad there are ways for people to stay debt free or as debt free as possible. Since I always see student debt being a very big issue in the US in the news.
My undergraduate tuition at a state public university is under 10k a year. I was severely injured in the military though, so the government pays my bill.
What you see in the news is the result of predatory practices and people not being able to use their degrees in a profitable way. There’s a lot of jokes about philosophy programs and art history degrees being a pipeline to working in fast food, because often the only way to use those degrees is to get more education (more loans) so you can teach the subject.
The biggest issues I think comes from the facts that A) there are a handful of very predatory schools with huge inter/national outreach programmes and B) highschool students are pressured into choosing their college path before graduating HS, when they’re still a kid.
The kids don’t know how to actually evaluate their options and end up picking the big, expensive schools just off brand recognition alone. Lots of people fell for this trap and graduated with degrees that weren’t very competitive to state degrees and cost 2-10x more.
I think the next 10 years are going to see students’ debt at graduation decrease as community college enrollment keeps going up and the stigma of “community college” education, which was a big deterrant for a long time, goes away.
I’m actually from Romania, and for medicine at the most popular school in the country for it here, you’d be paying 15000 lei, or $3143 per year for the 2024-2025 school year as a local. https://umfcd.ro/wp-content/uploads/2024/TAXE_SI_TARIFE_UNIVERSITARE/Taxe UMFCD 2024-2025.pdf As an international student studying in English you’d be paying 8500€ per year.
its the opposite of that.
its that the unsecured ‘loans’ provided to ignorant kids for schooling are immune to be disgorged by bankruptcy. so they are abused by agencies providing the loans, and the schools who know those loans are forever financed.
its taking advantage of children, basically. but its a-ok, because profit.
Not really the opposite. We used to subsidize higher education. The non expungable debt was part of the “fix” for that issue that Reagan caused
We didn’t used to fund to the tune of $70k per student though. Something just isn’t adding up, but I have no idea what.
It’s an older chart but I have no reason not to think the trend it shows has reversed since 2012. Colleges pivoted really hard in the past 30 years to offering a lot more than just classes and a dorm to attract students. Non-teaching positions have more than doubled since than 70s to handle all the “bloat and bullshit” (one of my professor’s terms, a real old-school guy who hated modern academia) that that’s come along since.
Throw in the fact that federally secured loans means that almost any 18 year old can sign off on whatever the sticker price without much thought and you get those kinds of costs for some students
Bloated administration took advantage of the guaranteed federal money that was the idiotic fix for exploding college prices after the public funding stopped. Which only made prices increase more
Agreed. The only two options right now are to either do away with federally secured loans (worse option) or nationalize all universities with efficiency overwatch programs in place (better), but what we have right now is the worst of both worlds w/r/t public-private higher education
That, and the loan system.
Profits.
It used to still be a worthwhile investment though. These days… it can be, but it’s not guaranteed. You also can learn most things online for free, so what is it even getting for you, really?
Connections.
But that only if you are willing to push for them, and so many kids are only there purely bc their parents send them, like an extended daycare or continuation of high school. I’m not saying it’s not worthwhile, but it requires a VERY serious commitment, and so many people are not willing to live up to that.
See also the recent discussion in ! [email protected] Is college in the USA worth the financial investment?
