Tuition Terrors

The other day our local paper ran a story saying the board of trustees approved a tuition hike for the '07 - '08 academic year. I didn't pay too much attention since tuition is always going up, but then I realized tuition for in-state students at our state university will be $8660 for the next academic year! On top of that, fees will add a whopping $2394 and room and board will total $7666. The icing on the cake is that tuition increased 9.5% over last year - yikes!

I started thinking... we want more children, but can we possibly afford to send Maria to college, much less any future kids? I started my calculations by assuming tuition and fees will continue to rise at 9.5% per year. This seems reasonable since states have been pushing more and more of the funding burden for higher ed back onto the institutions themselves. Universities have responded by raising both tuition and fees. I assumed that room and board would rise at the rate of inflation (which I assumed to be about 3%/year), that Maria would start college when she's 18, attend our state university (the cheapest option by far!) and graduate in 4 years. I further assumed that the policy of freezing tuition for incoming freshman would still be in place when she attends school. With a little help from excel, here's what I discovered:

Tuition for 4 years: $177,400 ($107,600 in today's $)
Fees for 4 years: $56,500 (32,800 in today's $)
Room and Board for 4 years: $ 54,600 (30,700 in today's $)
This would cost a grand total of $288,500 ($171,000 in today's $) ... much more than the value of our home!

If I make the scenario slightly darker and assume that Maria will need 5 years to graduate and the room and board in the university dorms will rise in a manner similar to tuition, it will cost more than half a million dollars for her college education! ($320,200 in today's $)

At some point one has to ask if education is worth this price tag!?! Remember, these numbers are not for a private ivy league institution, just in-state tuition at our local university. Encouraging our child to take lots of AP classes in high school or go to the local community college is starting to seem like a financially prudent move. I have read that one factor in the high cost of education is that loans specifically for school are available at low interest rates and therefore students do not pay much attention to the price tag for an education. The argument goes that if you raise interest rates on student loans, students will become more price sensitive when choosing institutions. I don't really buy this argument. I think the average person assumes education is a good deal regardless of what it costs and doesn't understand exponential growth well enough to realize how high interest rates affect the paying off of a loan. My only hope is for online education to come into it's own and offer some serious price competition for traditional brick-and-mortar institutions. Online dating has lost it's stigma, so maybe online education is next!