With increasing college costs and rising student debt, the issue of college affordability has driven intense concern about declining trends in enrollment.
Xinhua News Agency reported that for the 2024-2025 academic year, many top private U.S. universities announced their all-in price would be over $90,000. This is the highest on record in terms of the cost to attend a university and now exceeds the median household income in the United States at some universities, according to a report last week from the Education Data Initiative.
While this cost has just jumped upward, the annual cost of attending the University of Pennsylvania is now $92,288. Cornell University charges in excess of $92,000 annually, and both Dartmouth and Brown Universities are over $91,000 annually.
The Stanford University Board of Trustees has approved a 5.5% increase in tuition and a 7% increase in room and board for the next 2024-2025 academic year. That's how the university increases its offerings of financial aid and responds to pressure from increasing inflation. These increases outpace the rate of inflation.
The Consumer Price Index rose 2.9 percent over the year ending July according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Tuition and fees at private non-profit four-year colleges rose 4 percent this academic year, before inflation, according to the "Trends in College Pricing 2023" report from the College Board.
Public colleges weren't immune to the cost bumps either: Tuition and fees for in-state students at public four-year schools rose 2.5%, while out-of-state students face increases of 3%, according to The College Board — before accounting for inflation.
Dramatic increases in room and board are now being reported, too. For example, the San Francisco Chronicle writes on September 19, "California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, has raised its room-and-board charges to about $18,000 this year, a 63 percent hike in the past decade.".
Meanwhile, several other universities have announced increases in the costs for the 2024-2025 academic year: the University of Southern California increased undergraduate tuition by 4.9 percent, after two consecutive years of rises of 5 percent; Duke University has officially approved a 4.35 percent increase in the total cost of attendance, and Washington University in St Louis announced a 4.5 percent tuition rise that puts undergraduate tuition at $64,500-the sharpest jump in a decade.
Increasingly, the high cost of a U.S. higher education has been a growing concern, with respect to the implications for college enrollment and an increasing reluctance from families believing in the return on investment from a college education. Correspondingly, the students have been led to extreme dependence on student loans as a way to get by, which has resulted in significant debt upon graduation. By removing this financial burden, the payoff from their labor in general might diminish, and the overall payoff to their investment in college might diminish.
A new report out in late July from the think tank New America suggests the momentum is actually moving in the other direction quite quickly. Fully 90 percent of U.S. adults say high cost is the biggest obstacle preventing more Americans from going to college, and 80 percent feel it's the most important reason low-income students aren't able to enroll, according to the "Varying Degrees 2024" survey.
This decline in college enrollments within the U.S. was furthered by a report via the College Board, which explained that from the fall of 2019 to the fall of 2021, enrollment within colleges was down in total 5%, with studentship numbers falling by 947,900. The public two-year sector was the most dramatic-the decline: 13%, or 883,000 students.
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