Higher Education: At What Cost?

Introduction

Whether one is purchasing a pack a gum or buying a house, consumer decisions are assumed to be based upon simple economics – production cost and selling price, supply and demand.   “What do I get for the money,” and “is it a good deal,” are quite possibly the consumer’s two most poignant questions. Consumers equate value with cost, so one wonders what would make the decision to purchase or invest in a college education any different.
The pursuit of education and the betterment of one’s place in life by such a pursuit has been a constant of history for thousands of years.   “Youths of fifth century B.C Athens . . . were impelled mainly by a desire for preference and advantage, by a felt need to acquire skills in the marketplace,” and “. . . the medieval universitas was . . . at root a professional training facility,”   are two examples of this presented by historian Christopher Lucas (Lucas, 2006).   The idea that education is good for its own sake is overshadowed by the fact that education has been, and still is, a means to an end - the attainment of which comes at a price.
Students, parents, and what this author believes to be the vast majority of the American public are ill-informed as to what the phrase “the cost of a college education” truly means.   While the rate of increase in tuition has outpaced inflation over the last four decades (Tution Inflation, n.d.), there are other factors that affect the cost of tuition that the tax payer, John Q. Public, is either not told about regarding the financing of higher education or cares to ignore.   It is the author’s intent, herein, to demystify both the presumed cost of higher education as realized by a student and the actual cost as realized by an institution of higher education.

The Cost to the Student

There are various interpretations of student cost depending upon one’s perspective or understanding of it.   Some view cost as the printed price of tuition, or the sticker price.   Others view...