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Scott Feller is president of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He wrote this column for the Chicago Tribune.
Are colleges spending money like drunken sailors and handing the bill to students and their families?
The Wall Street Journal thinks so, claiming that in a major recent story “Colleges spend like there’s no tomorrow” and noting that the spending is “inextricably tied to the nation’s $1.6 trillion federal student debt crisis.”
But that broad brush paints the picture very poorly: The cost of tuition and fees at private four-year colleges has gone down three school years in a row, according to the definitive “Trends in College Pricing and Student Aid 2022″ report from the College Board.
It’s not the first time the “colleges are on a wild spending spree” message has arisen. But it needs to be debunked because there’s a danger that parents and kids will further question the value of a college education — when in fact a college degree represents the biggest slam-dunk return-on-investment choice a person can make in life.
Studies consistently show that college graduates’ lifetime earnings exceed those without college degrees by approximately 84 percent. In the latest such survey, the absolute dollar amount of the bachelor’s degree lifetime premium is $2.3 million — a huge return on the cost of any college or university in the entire nation.
There’s no doubt that college expenses represent a major line item for every family and that the “sticker price” of tuition, room and board, and fees looks very imposing for students from low- and middle-income families. But the discounts, grants and guaranteed loans to offset that sticker price for those less-affluent students are significant and readily available, making the payoff on the investment in education even more compelling.
How did the Journal get the story so wrong? Its data is cherry-picked and not representative of the great majority of higher education institutions in the U.S. The story focuses on just six flagship universities in Connecticut, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Hawaii and Idaho but implies that the problem is universal.
I’m the president of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, where we have 840 students. Penn State has about 46,000 students at its University Park campus. It’s 54 times the size of Wabash. It would be considered absurd if a story on the problems of San Francisco and five other similar-sized cities strongly implied that Crawfordsville’s issues were the same.
I’m not here to defend or attack those flagship universities, either. I couldn’t tell you whether they’re spending too much or too little — it turns out flagship universities are asked to do and be a whole lot of things besides just educating undergraduate college students. They’re asked to be scientific research centers, economic development engines, sports entertainment centers for entire states, health care meccas and much more.
I do know there are more than 4,200 four-year degree-granting colleges and universities in the U.S., and the Journal focused on six of them. Even if the story covered the other 44 states’ flagship universities — and it’s strange that it didn’t — there would still be more than 4,100 whose economic stories were radically different.
But “colleges,” to use the Journal’s words, are not spending more. Out of curiosity, I ran Wabash’s numbers on overall spending to get an apples-to-apples comparison to the Journal’s analysis of the six flagship universities. Over the same time period the story covers (2002 to 2022), our inflation-adjusted overall expenses dropped from $55.9 million in 2002 to $55.1 million in 2022 (in 2022 dollars). Like I said, I’m not comparing our small private liberal arts college to the six flagships because they’re not the same. But I am quite certain the out-of-control spending narrative is misleading readers.
Parents and prospective students should do their own research on the subject of college costs. That College Board study is a great place to start, and you can also visit collegescorecard.ed.gov to learn about the actual price students at a given institution pay based on family income. Go visit the schools you’re interested in. Almost all have financial aid counselors that can sit down with your family to walk you through what you and your student can expect. By federal law, every school has a “net price calculator” that can show you what you’re likely to actually pay out of pocket.
You sometimes hear people say, “College isn’t for everybody.” Maybe it isn’t — but it can be affordable for everybody who wants to go, no matter what they’re saying on Wall Street.
