In Sunday's New York Times, Jonathan D. Glater reported on an emerging - and long over due - trend in higher education: differential pricing of various degree programs.
Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.
And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.
He writes that the changes are driven by costs - faculty in some professions can demand higher salaries, for example. Oddly - maybe not so oddly - some administrators balk.
“This is not the preferred way to do this,” said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible.”
The objection seems misplaced. The higher cost programs tend also to lead to more highly compensated careers. But I can accept that there may be adverse consequences - few public policies come without downsides. For example, Glater reports administrators worrying about students getting trapped in low-cost majors.
But there's an easy fix, which he also describes.
Various universities have adopted different versions of differential pricing to try to fight the unintended consequences it may create. Colleges that charge higher tuition for a major like business, engineering or journalism generally allow students outside the field to take some courses in the subject without paying more.
... Most universities with differential tuition use some of the money — 20 to 25 percent — for additional financial aid to offset some of the impact.
As expected, the story sparked some good response.
On the Conglomerate Blog, Christine Hurt writes:
... why raise tuition across the board and have people who want to teach kindergarten have to subsidize the education of people who want to become engineers, who will get paid much more after graduation? Why not just let engineering students pay more? (The article did not mention lab fees, which I had long thought were already a mechanism to have students in certain majors pay more than others. Texts also cost vastly different amounts in various majors.) Students already pay more for elite institutions than non-elite institutions; more for university education than community college; and more for degree-granting institutions than technical schools or cosmetology schools. Surely this pay differential has something to do with the value of the degree. And surely degrees within a particular institution are worth more than others.
It's a marketplace, right? This post from Inside Higher Ed last March makes a similar point.
The one-student, one-rate model is somewhat silently slipping away at many public universities nationwide, as institutions increasingly turn toward differential (read: higher) tuition rates for students pursuing specific majors, often those with higher costs of operation...
The College Board, the keeper of all tuition data, doesn’t track variable tuition rates by major, with the figures in its annual report representing the amount paid by a “typical” undergraduate. But several economists tracking tuition policy say, anecdotally speaking, at least, that while differential tuition has been around for quite some time, there has been a significant surge in the introduction of major-specific undergraduate differential tuition policies over the past five years.
Administrators may be uncomfortable with the evolving model, but I'm guessing it's here to stay.
