You hear a lot about the precipitous rises in tuition lately, some of it coming from kids, some from parents. So when I saw this chart at a panel this morning, it struck me as worth highlighting:
The blue line represents private four year institutions, the light blue line 4-year public schools, the black line 2-year publics, and all come from College Board data sets. Tuition growth at the public institutions has been relatively minor, while the privates have skyrocketed, for reasons that remain relatively unclear (save that the market will bear it). It’s not that they’re adding much in value. Studies show kids who were accepted by top privates but went to
lower-tier schools tend to have exactly the same outcomes, salary-wise,
later in life.
So when you read all those articles on the shocking trends in tuition, keep an eye out for whose tuitions they’re talking about — professional journalists tend to have gone to Ivies, or know a lot of people going to Ivies. Subsequently, they tend to send their kids to private universities, or know a lot of people doing so. The inflation of private tuition thus seem rather immediate and newsworthy, and often gets extrapolate out as if private school pricing was closely tracked by public school trend. But, as the graph above shows, that’s not the case. It’s another of those availability problems I talked about last week.