Should College Tuition Vary By Major, Based On the College's Costs For the Major? (qz.com)

Registered Coward v2 writes: Vault, in a blog post, discusses whether colleges should base tuition on the actual cost of providing the education rather than on a one-price-for-all-credits basis. Their argument is based on a Quartz article that shows engineering and science degrees cost schools a lot more than liberal arts degrees for a variety of reasons, including higher professor salaries and equipment/infrastructure costs. As a result, those majors are subsidized by the cheaper ones even though they also have the highest earnings in aggregate. The new paper on the topic estimates that it typically costs the universities more than $62,000 to educate an engineer (including professor salaries, facilities fees, and administrative costs), while an English or business major costs nearly half that. Quartz has a chart embedded in its report that shows the cost of education by major at the University of Florida. There's also another chart that shows the earnings of past graduates, up to age 45, minus the cost of each degree. According to the paper, even though it costs more for an engineering degree, it pays off.

Comments

No

[The Real Dr John]

Community college and state colleges should be free, like it is in civilized countries.

Re:No

[budgenator]

So I'm taking "Human Anatomy and Physiology II" in a summer session and one of the Ladies in my class has a 13 year old daughter who's too young to stay home all day on her own and way too old for daycare. The lady asks the instructor if her Daughter can sit in on the class because of the above and the Instructor agrees. In lecture she asks a few intelligent questions, in lab she dissects her fetal pig like everyone else. Eventually we come to the first hour exam, the Instructor hesitantly hands her a test and she get a C on it. At this point she's pretty much a student like everyone else, she finishes the course with a C+. The Instructor, who's the Science Dept Chairman, get her retro-actively enrolled, credits her for the course, and transfers the credit back to her middle school.

In 1980 that was pretty amazing, now most Colleges have dual enrolment programs so High School Students can get College credits before they graduate. The confidence in public education has deteriorated to the point a High School Graduate with out being able to check "Some College" on a job app is really in YMMV territory..

Include all costs

[Anonymous Coward]

If the university has any research, the overhead from funded research will help offset the cost of undergraduate education, as well as graduate.

Then, there's the costs of athletic programs, Don't forget that, and assign it to the right departments...

Engineering degrees already cost more.

[gweeks]

They already charge more for Engineering degrees. It's called "lab fees" rather than tuition. Another good one is "Engineering major surcharge" that I had to pay.

Education should be free

[Opportunist]

There should be exactly one deciding factor dictating whether or not you can get a degree: Your brain.

Most European countries follow that idea. My university gets stormed with new students every September and their solution was quite simple: Radical testing. 3 semesters in about 10-20% of the students remain and most of them actually finish.

If you got a LOT of people wanting a degree and you're not dependent on them paying you, you can test brutally to eliminate anyone who isn't willing to put in time and effort above and beyond anyone else, and what you get in the end, holding a degree, IS the best you could possibly get. Everyone who isn't perished.

Who said that "free" cannot end up in ruthless competition that makes any cold blooded capitalist beg for mercy?

The question is premature.

[hey!]

The first thing you have to establish is what is the basis you want to judge by: The good of society? The good of the students? The good of the faculty or the administration? The good of human knowledge as a whole? These all lead to fundamentally different ways of evaluating the question.

I should point out that not every institution of higher learning has the same purpose. A for-profit institution like University of Phoenix exists to turn its proprietors a buck. The very reason for an academic department to exist is to be a profit center, and if it can't pull its weight, either due insufficient pull (Classics) or excessive weight (engineering), it doesn't have a right to exist. At the opposite end of the spectrum are Jesuit colleges which exist to glorify God by cultivating each individual student's God-given talents.

I see no intrinsic need for all majors to cost the same. But the whether it's a good idea depends on your mission, your strategy for accomplishing it, and the resources at your disposal. It may well come down to what you can afford to do.

Re:You mean "forced to pay, whether you attend or

[The Real Dr John]

I don't have kids, but I pay taxes for other people's kids to go to grade school for free. I have paid those taxes all my life, and I get nothing for it myself. In fact, much of my property tax on my house goes to pay for local education. But I am perfectly happy with this because education should be free in a civilized society. It is too important to to make it something people have to go into debt for. If we were not spending around $600 billion a year on bombing the middle east and occupying the rest of the world with military bases, it would be very easy to make community college free for everyone.