I go to Northwestern where it costs 50k (w/ room and board) a year, yet the endowment is something around 6 billion dollars. Additionally, it's a research school where patents/pharmaceuticals are sold for a ton of money. Our financial aid packages aren't great either, so I don't really understand what the logic is here. NU isn't a business; it's a school. Couldn't they be financially solvent while charging a lot less?

It's easy to say "they charge a lot because they can" but is there a better answer?

/rant

You answered your own question, it's a school but it's also a business, they charge a lot because they can.

I think Purdue University tried charging less at one point and got rewarded by getting fewer applications. The side of tuition is a status symbol to some schools and apparently even some students.

because they can

Everything's a business and everybody's out to make a buck.

I went to a school with a $15b endowment w/ 5,000 students and 40k tuition. So $200m/yr to abolish tuition, or 1/45 of the endowment.

It's pretty offensive when they badger me for money.

Princeton fail? I get 1/75th.

What a fail. I used that numbers grid on the right of the keyboard and misclicked. Never again.

i don't buy the "tuition is a status symbol" thing, plenty of people still fighting for admission at berkeley and UCLA

why would they charge less? doesnt help the school at all less money

Wrote a paper on this freshman year. Makes no sense for a school not to raise tuition with demand rising the way it has.

the whole point of having a huge endowment is being able to say that you have a huge endowment

That's what she said.

Historically, state legislatures have underwritten the operating costs of universities (50-60%), and tuition/fees/etc covers the rest. Over the past 15-20 years, this model has broken down, and states now cover often <30%. So U's have to increase tuition to make up for the shortfall.

People are stupid. People don't judge schools based on the actual education they provide, they judge them solely on how much it costs to attend.

Schools that have raised their tuition without improving their education programs have seen huge increases in number of applicants.

cuz yale nd harvard r busto

You have to understand that a school that charges a total tuition of $200 million probably has many more expenses than that, so they can’t just pay everyone’s tuition. Believe it or not, the endowment actually subsidizes the artificially low tuition. The school’s tuition may be $200 million but its total budget may be $500 million. It’s not a zero sum. Schools with the biggest endowments tend to have the most expenses also. Also, schools normally don’t just take money from the endowment. They normally take something like 5% of the endowments average value over the last 3 years.

For example, it costs a huge amount of money to maintain a truly world-class research library. The place I got my Ph.D. had an area in their library where they had all their new books that they received on each day of the week. (I don’t know why they did this.) Each day probably had 150 new books for the library. Each book probably cost $50 and likely more. So they easily spend $2 million a year on new books alone, and that doesn’t count journals, microfilms, newspapers, interlibrary loan costs, recruiting and paying the best research librarians in the world, etc.

Also, schools like that have to recruit the leading scholars from around the world and pay them top dollar. They also have way more faculty than most schools because elite scholars don’t teach anywhere near as much as other professors do. Furthermore, they have to support those scholars’ research projects, which might mean expensive science labs, international archive research, conference presentations, etc.

So being an elite institution is very expensive and requires a high tuition, just like a really high-class restaurant charges more for that service. Having said that, tuition is often like a car’s sticker price. The final price is rarely what is advertised. Also, I’m pretty sure one of the big three Ivy schools (Princeton, Yale, or Harvard) announced plans to basically be tuition free in the next ten years.

I think you already don't pay tuition at Harvard if your family makes less than $60K per year (assuming you get in), so I'm not surprised by that. There already a few free colleges like the Cooper Union.

ETA: It looks like you're talking about Yale: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...011401122.html and http://www.yaledailynews.com/articles/view/25659.

Also very true; I go to RPI ($50K a year) and wind up making a profit each year from them (brag).

FYI, there was an article on the cover of Saturday's New York Times about tuition and financial aid, if anyone is interested. It pointed out that the average student pays 30-40 percent below the advertised price. Why? It basically quotes a university financial aid officer as saying that most people don't pay that price but they can get some people to pay it. Basically, it's better to start high and go down, because you can't start low and go up. There's a certain perverse logic to it.

Note: I don't mean to imply that they're tricking anyone. It's more that very high income families are expected to pay full tuition, so that the universities can give more financial aid to low-income families. Obviously, no one from low-income families would ever go to elite schools otherwise, since a student couldn't even borrow enough money to cover the tuition.

RPI? Also, sick brag.

isnt that where they rank basketball teams?

Translation: my parents are poor, and I am helping RPI fulfill their state-legislated mandate of providing access to those otherwise financially unable to attend college.

I hardly get any need-based aid at all--my parents are both bureaucrats.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/62...college-74181/

If you have a good back-story (half-Rican in a school with no Hispanics, overcame illness) and good grades, you can pay for school anywhere.

A good quote from 'The Name of the Wind'

"To get into the university you need lots of brains and money, the more you have of one the less you need of the other."

also i don't think endowments work like people think they do. it isn't like the endowment is the schools bank account, as i have learned it you can only spend money gained from the interest on the endowment. unless your school runs sick hot the actual amount they can spend relative to the endowment is pretty small