I’ve long been an advocate of cutting tuition and getting away from the wrong-headed “luxury-price signals quality product” logic so common in lower and middle tier higher education. There are many reasons not to “just do it,” but more than a few things in favor of the idea should at least motivate serious discussion:
- honesty in pricing might better reflect institutional values;
- some prospective students never consider a school, knowing sticker price is out of their reach; the current system discriminates against such “humble realists”;
- institutions should grapple with the fact that full-pay families might not be willing to participate in the institution’s redistribution scheme if they thought (knew) about it;
- it is not clear there is any dis-interested, scientifically valid research on the implications;
- revenue models rarely take into account the cost of administering Byzantine financial aid schemes;
- some institutions are unfairly labeled “elitist” based on sticker price alienating people to whom their mission otherwise would appeal;
- tuition discounting is one of many opacity practices that undermine administrators’, board members’, and faculty members’ capacity to effectively monitor the economics of their institutions.
See also
- Ry Rivard. Paper (Tuition) Cuts.” Inside Higher Ed September 16, 2013
- Ellen Berman. “Higher education faces tuition disruption: Experimenting with price at a time when higher education is being viewed as a commodity.” University Business, November 2013
- Ruth Simon Connect. “Colleges Cut Prices by Providing More Financial Aid.” Wall Street Journal May 6, 2013
