Net tuition and fees cost, University of Pennsylvania vs. typical state university.
As I explained yesterday on Slog, the High Tuition/High Financial Aid model proposed by Gov. Gregoire’s higher education task force, doesn’t exactly work if the plan doesn’t guarantee high financial aid, and from what I’ve seen of it, I’m just not confident that this proposal does. What might satisfy me? Well, for one, a philosophical shift in the task force’s objectives:
Along with more money from tuition, the task force’s proposal would lessen the impact to lower- and middle-income families by creating a private financial-aid endowment, with a goal of raising $1 billion in the next decade.
Change “lessen the impact” to “eliminate the impact,” and then back it up with reasonable safeguards, and you might just get my support, along with a enough Democrats in Olympia to make this a reality. Otherwise… piss off.
As the chart at the top of the post illustrates, it is possible to charge sky-high tuition, while keeping a college degree affordable to lower- and middle-income families. This chart compares the net costs at my admittedly pricey alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, to those at a typical public university, and as you can see, once financial aid packages are factored in, Penn can turn out to be just as affordable. In fact, more so, as Penn’s aid comes entirely in the form of grants, meaning its students no longer graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in loans.
That’s the way the High Tuition/High Financial Aid model is supposed to work. Those families that can afford to pay full price do; those who can’t, pay what they can afford. At Penn, students from typical families earning less than $90,000 a year receive grants equal to full tuition and fees; students from families earning less than $40,000 have their room and board covered too.
And it could work that way in Washington state too, if both the money and the commitment is there to move to this model without making a four-year degree less affordable to lower- and middle-income families.
So in the interest of moving this conversation forward, I’d like to suggest that my friends in the legislature consider this very simple but significant amendment to the task force’s proposals: give our four-year universities the freedom to set tuition prices as they see fit, but impose a needs tested cap on the net cost to in-state, lower- and middle-income families.
In the end, I couldn’t care less where the sticker price of a UW degree falls in relation to that at comparable public universities, and neither should should students or lawmakers. All that matters is the net cost of that degree in relation to what the student can afford. And if we as a state can embrace and defend this principle, then the move to tuition flexibility can be a net plus for our higher education system as a whole.
What worries me is the slippery slope of funding our public ivies from tuition.
Once that happens, the incentive to take more high paying out of state students will be irresistible. For example, UC Berkeley now has an out of state tuition of $50,000. It seems inevitable to me that Berkeley will be pressured by its faculty and the legislature to go as private as possible.
That might not be bad thing if, in our state, the legislature decided that what WAstate needed was an elite private school .. a Northwest version of Harvard/MIT, Oxford, or Stanford. Perhaps our local bazillionaires seeking to outdo the Gates’ Foundation as a personal legacy might want to buy a world class university?
A largely privatized Allan University or perhaps Universite de Amazon, could serve many of the same seed functions for industry that the UW does now.
Of course, our model would have to be Stanford, rather than UPenn, we would want to stay in the PAC 10! Imagine, Paul Allen could even buy us a new stadium the way he bought one for the Seahawks!
Of course Allen U would have a much smaller, Ivy-like class size, other than for football). But, like football, we could then recruit the best students from wherever they might come .. India, China, Qatar???
Somehow, I find this image hard to accept in this remote haven of Scandinavian sensibility. Moreover, to achieve this we would REALLY need to change the way we treat K-12 as well.
In a WA state dominated intellectually by Allan U, how would we be sure that our public schools were able to produce Washington kids able to get into Allan? Or. perhaps, would AU become the school of choice for Lakeside and Bush?
I also sent this to the AAUP, the UW’s only “liberal” faculty organization.
The editor/censor of their listserv refused to post David’s pece, saying:
“This is both confusing and a rant.”
The editor is a very bright person with a history of support for liberal causes. Her response, sadly, is typical of the isolation of UW faculty from the community outside our walls.
If UW faculty play like ostriches, then we ALL, the citizens of the state… not just the faculty, will lose.
I hate to quote Reagan in referring to a colleague, but my message to the editor is:
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear this wall down!”
See excellent editorial in Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/dannywestneat/2013844712_danny05.html
“Harvard selects from at least the population of the USA, 600 million”
What’chu talkin’ ’bout, Willis?
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=us+population
Sorry,
Therfe was a typo, I meant to say 300 million as the pop. of the USA/ Even so, Harvard’s market is certainly bigger than just the USA.
i fancy it Is U Penn Cheaper than UW? /
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