Average price of 4-year university up 15 percent

CHRISTINE ARMARIO

AP Edu­ca­tion Writer

When those col­lege tuition bills come in, be pre­pared for sticker shock.

The aver­age tuition at a four-year pub­lic uni­ver­sity climbed 15 per­cent between 2008 and 2010, fueled by state bud­get cuts for higher edu­ca­tion and increases of 40 per­cent and more at uni­ver­si­ties in states like Geor­gia, Ari­zona and California.

The U.S. Depart­ment of Education’s annual look at col­lege afford­abil­ity also found sig­nif­i­cant price increases at the nation’s pri­vate uni­ver­si­ties, includ­ing at for-profit insti­tu­tions, where the net price for some schools is now twice as high as Harvard.

At Full Sail Uni­ver­sity, a film and art school in cen­tral Florida, the aver­age price of tuition, fees, books, and other expenses totals $43,990, even when grants and schol­ar­ships are fac­tored in. The aver­age net price for an incom­ing Har­vard stu­dent: $18,277, accord­ing to the depart­ment. Net price is cost of atten­dance minus grant and schol­ar­ship aid.

Edu­ca­tion Sec­re­tary Arne Dun­can said stu­dents need to be smart con­sumers and states needs to do their part by mak­ing higher edu­ca­tion a pri­or­ity in their bud­gets. Forty per­cent of states cut higher edu­ca­tion spend­ing last year, the most impor­tant fac­tor in tuition increases.

“As a nation, we need more col­lege grad­u­ates in order to stay com­pet­i­tive in the global econ­omy,” Dun­can said. “But if the costs keep on ris­ing, espe­cially at a time when fam­ily incomes are hurt­ing, col­lege will become increas­ingly unaf­ford­able for the mid­dle class.”

Penn­syl­va­nia State Uni­ver­sity had the high­est in-state tuition for a four-year pub­lic uni­ver­sity at $15,250 dur­ing the 2010-11 school year. When the costs of room, board and other expenses are fac­tored in, the total rises to $19,816, the fourth high­est net price nationwide.

Bill Mahon, a spokesman for the school, said a 19.6 per­cent cut in state fund­ing last year, cou­pled with a decade of weak state sup­port, “has left Penn State increas­ingly reliant on stu­dents and their fam­i­lies to fund most of the costs of their Penn State education.”

Zach Zim­bler, who grad­u­ated from Penn State Uni­ver­sity this spring with a degree in infor­ma­tion sci­ences, said his total tuition came out to about $50,000 for four years. He now has loans total­ing around $25,000. He said many stu­dents don’t real­ize how much debt they’ve amassed until it comes time to pay.

“The stu­dents them­selves don’t really know what they’re get­ting into,” he said.

Zim­bler said he worked dur­ing school and feels con­fi­dent about the value of the edu­ca­tion he received, even though it came with a high price tag. He’s work­ing on start­ing his own soft­ware business.

The Col­lege Afford­abil­ity and Trans­parency lists were first pub­lished last year to ful­fill a report­ing require­ment passed into law in 2008. The lists track tuition and fees as well as the aver­age net price at pub­lic, pri­vate and for-profit col­leges and universities.

It’s one of sev­eral recent ini­tia­tives by the Depart­ment of Edu­ca­tion to increase stu­dent and par­ent aware­ness on the costs of higher edu­ca­tion. Last week, pres­i­dents from 10 col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties agreed to pro­vide stu­dents infor­ma­tion on costs, finan­cial aid and monthly loan pay­ments after grad­u­a­tion in an easy-to-understand form. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama also issued a man­date to stream­line the appli­ca­tion process for those who want to enroll in income-based repay­ment plans, which set a cap on loan pay­ments based on dis­cre­tionary income.

Mean­while, Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats in Con­gress are strug­gling against a July 1 dead­line to avert a dou­bling of inter­est rates on new fed­eral stu­dent loans for 7.4 mil­lion people.

The data released Tues­day shows increases for four-year, pub­lic insti­tu­tions that are sim­i­lar what has been observed over the last decade, though Dun­can said costs have increased faster in recent years. Between 2001-02 and 2011-12, in-state tuition and fees at pub­lic, four-year col­leges increased at an aver­age rate of 5.6 per­cent each year, accord­ing to the Col­lege Board’s 2011 report on trends in higher edu­ca­tion pric­ing. That rate is higher than in pre­vi­ous decades: In the 1980s, tuition increased at about 4.5 per­cent each year, and in the 1990s at 3.2 percent.

“Obvi­ously we’re at a period of eco­nomic insta­bil­ity at the state level, so you’ll see among pub­lic insti­tu­tions the increases in tuition and fees are a lot of times a func­tion of declines in state sup­port,” said Bryan Cook, direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Pol­icy Analy­sis at the Amer­i­can Coun­cil on Edu­ca­tion. “So we’ve not been sur­prised in see­ing increases in tuition.”

Cer­tain states have been harder hit than oth­ers. Five of the 33 pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties with the high­est net price, for exam­ple, are in Ohio. Six pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties in Geor­gia saw tuition increases that were higher than 40 per­cent. The Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia in Berke­ley and Los Ange­les also saw big price jumps.

The data released by the Edu­ca­tion Depart­ment goes up until the 2010-11 school year, and in some states, tuition increased again last year.

Cook advised stu­dents to look at the data in con­text: Some schools with big rate increases, for exam­ple, still have tuition that is below the nation­wide average.

“I think there is more com­pre­hen­sive infor­ma­tion that could be pro­vided con­tex­tual infor­ma­tion that could be pro­vided for these lists if we really want to pro­vide stu­dents and fam­i­lies with the most infor­ma­tion to make a good deci­sion about going to col­lege,” he said.

There were some bright spots in the data. Com­mu­nity col­leges, Dun­can noted, remain one of the most con­sis­tently afford­able options for higher edu­ca­tion: The aver­age net price of a com­mu­nity col­lege increased by less than 1 per­cent between 2007 and 2009. Tuition, room and board aver­age $8,085 at a pub­lic, two-year insti­tu­tion in 2010.

“While com­mu­nity col­leges have mostly done their part, there is much more the rest of us can and should be doing,” Dun­can said. “Keep­ing col­lege afford­able is a shared responsibility.”

Posted by AP News on Jun 12 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.