I'm a 37-year old Aquarian (sun/moon) college dropout (at least I didn't drop out from high school), has a mild form of autism (I was able to graduate at 18) and from a lower or ex-middle class background (and 1/5 Cherokee Indian - affirmative action?), so I learned how life isn't great, but college grads today are being ripped off in high numbers. In the 1990s, half of my available universities are either too much for me or too far (I may have to move), now there are high tech options like computer courses depending on what class is available on the internet. It was possible in the 1970s-80s to produce a yuppie class, today in the 2000s-10s, more like over half the US population in some form of poverty and millennials aren't like the boomers when it comes to living a fairly decent middle-class life in a developed nation.
I don't think most students realize that a lot of university courses and degree problems are available on-line. These are usually cheaper, if less prestigious, than attending a bricks-and-mortar college or university. Also that, for various reasons, most students do not cruise through their BA or BS in 4 years. It's more like 5 or 6 years. That generally costs more.
The university "rip-off" of high tuition has several causes.
1. As tax-cutting measures over the years, most states have cut way back on their grants to their state higher education systems. The gap in state funding gets made up largely through tuition increases. (California's former free or low-cost tuition fees were courtesy of state tax payer dollars funneled through the state legislature to the state college/university system.)
[
There's your libertarianism at work, AppLeo]
2. Education in lab- and computer-intensive fields is more expensive. Gone are the days, in many majors, when students could be taught by a professor with a piece of chalk at the blackboard. Computer labs are really expensive, as the machines--
and software license agreements-- need constant upgrading and cost 6 figures to keep them at the standards that graduates will find in their places of employment. Chemistry labs have moved beyond Bunsen burners and test tubes.
3. Faculty salaries in departments with competition for talent from corporations and the private sector have to keep pace, otherwise nobody would teach in STEM fields or business schools. In some universities, you can get a big wage differential between well-heeled medical school faculty vs. starving philosophy profs. But in many campuses where unions or "special plan" faculty associations negotiate faculty salaries, a base pay raise of, say, 1% will be applied throughout the departments.
There may be a separate salary fund to top up the base pay raise for the faculty "stars," but then these star profs typically bring in 6 or 7-figures of externally-funded research grants per annum, of which the university skims off its overhead. The stars support grad student, post-doc, and technician stipends. They earn their keep, and then some. Universities also often have an internal funding formula to give more money to departments (usually with super teachers) who bring in extra student credit-hours, typically through their Gen Ed/Lib Ed courses.
4. A comparatively minor problem but still on the radar is that universities-- with all those big campus buildings-- pay massive utility bills. They support big libraries. They fund intra-mural sports that don't pay for themselves, like college football does. It costs money to pay staff or contractors to shovel snow off the parking lots or to maintain the athletic fields. Sometimes Big Givers will donate funds for a new campus building, which is great; but then once the bricks-and-mortar are finished, the university has to pay for the new building's utility bills and upkeep.
So again, if these budgets are not underwritten by state grants or a big long-term university endowment fund (like Harvard's,) somebody has to pay for this stuff. Maybe it's rising tuition fees or maybe it's special student activity fees, but some universities are not permitted by the state legislatures to run a deficit. They have few options to balance their budgets. Some colleges sadly resort to deferred maintainence, but then leaky roofs dripping on the computer lab get really expensive to fix subsequently.
I wouldn't expect anybody here to know this stuff, but I hope this post helps to keep the high fees in perspective.
