When Tony Soprano sent his daughter to Columbia University in the famous TV show "The Sopranos", he recoiled from an additional $50,000 "donation" that the dean requested. Even the great mob boss of New Jersey considered Ivy League costs a shakedown—and that episode aired in 2001.
Since then, tuitions have skyrocketed, nearly doubling the cost of attending highly selective private schools over the span of 13 years. Parents could expect to pay $22,054 for a Harvard tuition in 2000. Now that number is $37,576. Over the same period, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, and MIT saw similarly meteoric increases. This growth seems an uniquely American phenomenon (read Oxford’s prices and weep).
These prices make you yearn for the good old days of 1920 when attending the University of Pennsylvania cost just $700 (a mere $8,500 in 2013 dollars).
The cost of attending college could soon become a crisis in a country where high-paying jobs for those without university degrees are scarce. The college wage premium—the ratio of hourly earnings for bachelor’s degrees holders to those for workers with some college education—has been steadily increasing since the 70’s, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
But with higher stakes come higher debts. The amount of debt held in student loans quadrupled from 2003 to 2012, and now stands at more than one trillion dollars, according to Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, said in an interview with National Public Radio. This is a sum that young adults cannot escape, not even through bankruptcy.
And the pace appears to be accelerating as public universities see their budgets slashed from states whose funds are being diverted to unstable pension and Medicare funds.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which keeps track of inflation, has shown the cost of college dramatically outpace base inflation, growing nearly 140 percent faster than the consumer price index for urban consumers. College costs have grown faster than even medical care.
That’s not to say that there could not be justifiable reasons for the tuition hikes. Running world-class universities is a pricey business and admissions offices are likely to cite robust financial aid programs and improved facilities as counterbalances to the inexorable climb of the sticker cost of attending college.