The Daily Pennsylvanian :: With college tuition, students foot the bill

As college-tuition fees increase, students are paying a bigger share of their own bill, according to a study of higher-education spending trends.

The study, called the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity and Accountability, was released last month and based its research on data colleges reported to the federal government.

The Delta Project is a nonprofit organization seeking "to help improve college affordability by controlling costs and improving productivity," according to its Web site.

The organization also found the portion of college budgets that go toward instruction has declined as administrative costs have increased.

Only about one million students attend private research universities, like Penn, which spend the most money per student.

At the other end of the spectrum, six million students attend community colleges, which spend the least per student.

In 2006, students at private colleges that offer bachelor's degrees covered 63.5 percent of their tuition after scholarships and tuition discounts.

That same year, the study found, spending on instruction decreased at private institutions.

Between 1995 and 2006, the percentage of the budget going toward instruction at private colleges declined from 40.7 percent to 38.9 percent.

An even bigger decline was seen at private research universities, where the percentage decreased from 62.3 percent in 1996 to 57.9 percent in 2006.

Bill Schilling, director of Financial Aid, said the University is doing everything it can to make education more affordable.

"We have begun to eliminate loans for families under certain income levels," he said. "And we've been doing things in the last several years to modify our treatment of outside scholarships so they go first toward reducing student-loan requirements."

But he said he could not comment about the allocation of tuition toward educational versus administrative funds.

He noted that last year's increase in tuition and fees was the smallest in seven years, going up 4.5 percent to $37,526.

Even as tuition is increasing, "net tuition costs for students receiving financial aid have not been going up," Schilling said.

Comments (1)

A bachelor’s degree is generally viewed as a four-year degree, although it seems as though that view is a little bit outdated since many college students finishing are finishing around the five or six-year mark now.But, regardless of how long it takes you to finish school, you have undoubtedly noticed dramatic rises in the cost of school since the time that you began your jaunt into higher education.For simplicities sake, let’s assume that a bachelor’s degree really does take four years for everyone. In FY07, which applies to the 2006-07 academic year – the class of 2010, a lower division class cost students $120 per credit hour. This was around a 10-percent increase from the previous year.In the student’s sophomore year, 2007-08, tuition rose another eight dollars per credit hour to $128 for lower-division classes, a 7-percent increase from their freshman year.A student’s sophomore year also tends to be when they begin to delve into upper-division classes, which are more expensive than lower-division classes to begin with. In FY08 an upper-division class cost students $144 per credit hour.s can usually be assumed, the junior year comes next. This year a student will probably be taking mostly upper-division classes, and maybe a couple lower-division classes that they could not fit in the previous year. Taking upper-division classes during the 2008-09 year will require students to put forth $151 per credit hour, or $453 for a three-credit class. This would mean that the student has experienced approximately a 4.9-percent increase from their initial foray into upper-division classes.

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