It's no secret that the cost of college has skyrocketed, even as IRAs and stock portfolios have withered. According to the College Board, tuition at a top school can set you back $35,000 or more per year in tuition and fees. Will you be mortgaging your kid's future if you don't pay for a four-year degree from a prestigious school?
Maybe not. The authors of Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — and What We Can Do About It argue that students at the nation's most expensive schools may not get commensurate value from their educations.
Authors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus pose a simple and compelling question: College costs are more than two and half times higher than they were in the 1980s. Is college two and a half times better?"
Their answer, of course, is no. They say, "it's hard to argue that students are getting a lot of extra value for all that extra money. Why? Colleges aren't spending their extra revenues, which we calculate to be about $40 billion a year nationally over 1980 revenues, in ways that most benefit students." Instead, they're spending the surplus revenue on sports, on extra layers of administration and on highly paid "star" faculty and staff.
But Hacker and Dreifus think that students don't directly benefit from having a super-professor on campus, because few will actually get to be taught by them. They point out that at the prestigious Wharton School, one of the nation's top business programs, freshmen in Management 100 are taught, in part, by other undergrads.
Their bottom line:
The travesty of high tuition is that most of the extra charges aren't going for education. Administrators, athletics and amenities get funded, while history departments are denied new assistant professors. A whole generation of young Americans is being shortchanged, largely by adults who have carved out good careers in places we call colleges.
In a review in Bloomberg Businessweek, Paul Barrett writes, "Authors Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus report that, with an open mind, teenagers and their parents can find any number of surprisingly high-quality, reasonably priced colleges and universities. Forget Harvard. Arizona State, anybody?"
Next week, the White House will host the first White House Summit on Community Colleges to look at ways to make a college degree available to every American. The community college system could be an excellent alternative for some kids — and not only those who don't have excellent grades.
My parents packed me off to a top college, where, thrilled to be out from under their rather old-fashioned rules, I partied for two years before dropping out. I did go back to school, and paid for it myself — which was feasible in the 1970s, when going to a state university didn't cost as much as a luxury car or a down payment on a house.
College ratings inflation is fueled in part by the annual ranking published by U.S. News & World Report. The media report on the results, driving up demand for the top schools on the list, which always seems to be led by Harvard, Princeton and Yale.
If your highschooler is starting to make a list for college applications, help him or her use the same savvy you'd bring to shopping for a car or a cashmere sweater. Look beyond the pricey brand for real value.
In Higher Education?, Hacker and Dreifus include examples of lesser-known colleges that provide excellent education at a good price. And even U.S. News now includes a list of Great Schools, Great Prices, with a simple criterion: The higher the quality of the program and the lower the cost, the better the deal.
You can use CNN's College Cost Finder to quickly estimate how much a diploma will set you back.
So, look beyond American Idol-type college rankings and help your kids find a school that will pay off in terms of intellectual and emotional growth — without bankrupting you.