When I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976, the base tuition was $3,790. I paid the bill with a combination of cash from my parents, wages from my summer job as a park supervisor and from a school job cleaning pig sperm from laboratory beakers, and a bank loan guaranteed by New York State. I still managed to have a pretty good time. In addition to learning to recite Pushkin in Russian, I got to experience such wonders of campus life as seeing a friend jump up on a barroom table and pull her bra out through the sleeve of her blouse. The rapid tuition increases that occurred after my graduation were only vaguely interesting to me, like reading about a bank robbery in a distant town. Now, however, at the age of 43, with three smart daughters and having just begun to save for college, I find myself acutely interested. Make that horrified.
This year Penn, a private institution, is charging students tuition and fees totaling $21,130. Add to that the cost of room and board, books and supplies, health insurance and personal expenses, such as travel between school and home, and the actual total--as Penn recently informed students accepted for early admission--comes to $31,582. This is real money. In 1975 my summer job alone covered a significant chunk of my senior-year costs. The pig sperm was gravy. If my three daughters decide to go to Penn--or Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Swarthmore, Brown, Stanford, M.I.T., Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, Chicago or Johns Hopkins--the entire bill for 12 years of school will exceed $350,000. And that's assuming tuition never rises another penny.
But how did tuition get so high? Too often parents learn about tuition through scare stories about how we must begin saving impossible quantities of money before our children are even born, but never do we get a detailed explanation of what drove tuition up in the first place. Inflation can't explain it; over the past 20 years, tuition increased twice as fast as the overall cost of living. Tuition even outpaced a special price index deployed by colleges to help defend themselves against mounting criticism. Nor does anyone ever explain why schools with very different endowments--like Harvard, with more than $9 billion, and Penn, with just over $2 billion--charge roughly the same tuition--or just exactly where this vast torrent of tax-free revenue goes. Should it matter to parents of incoming Penn students that tuition helps cover the annual deficit at its faculty club, which in past years has reached $700,000, and contributes toward the average $121,000 in compensation that Penn pays its professors, including a tuition-reimbursement program that lets professors send their children to Penn or anywhere else at a steep discount equivalent to half of Penn's annual tuition?