How much you pay now depends on what you study
A resident freshman studying advertising or journalism at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign will pay $12,416 in basic tuition for the 2012-13 academic year. A freshman studying chemistry, business, engineering or life sciences at the same university will pay $16,556.
That sort of policy, known as differential tuition, is seeing a resurgence nationwide, and it’s neither fair to students nor good for America’s economic competitiveness. Administrators should — and can — look elsewhere to fill holes in their budgets. It might be OK to charge some students higher fees because lab work or other aspects of their major create more of a burden on school finances than other majors. Or because the students are from out of state and therefore their parents haven’t contributed taxes to state coffers.
But charging higher tuition for more popular majors such as business just punishes students for choosing a popular field. And it’s shortsighted to discourage them from pursuing certain lines of study. Does the economy really need more liberal arts majors and fewer STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors? As for charging more for upper-year courses, that’s just a tax on perseverance.
Almost a third of public universities charge some undergraduates higher tuition rates than others, according to a new study from the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. The University of Maine charges 9% more per course for undergraduate engineering. The University of Kentucky charges about 10% more for nursing.
The other area where universities are charging more is for their most sought after major — business — a field where costs aren’t that different from the average. Taxing what’s popular looks like an effort by administrators to go after money wherever they can find it. In addition, colleges’ more popular majors subsidize less popular ones because they bring in more tuition dollars.
Charging some students more than others is unfair in other ways, too: It is a kind of bait-and- switch for students who come to college expecting a solid higher education for a certain price, only to learn that their preferred courses carry a premium. Put another way, charging for different majors differently takes the “universal” out of “university.”
Administrators defend the differential fees by saying the large numbers of students lead to higher teaching costs and more expensive professors. But that’s a dodge. Over the past decade, as these majors have grown and as overall tuition revenue has climbed 50%, teaching costs have been the slowest growing part of the average public university’s budget. They’ve grown less than 10%.
The part that has soared along with tuition has been administrators’ budgets, paychecks and benefits, along with amenities such as climbing walls in the fitness center and gourmet food in the cafeteria.
There’s no question that college budgets are pinched. But the path of least resistance has been to jack up tuition and expect students to take on ever larger debt burdens.
Before colleges impose differential tuition, they should trim administrative costs, increase faculty teaching loads, drop money-losing sports, boost private fundraising, and call a truce in the amenities arms race.