Affordability

In an environment of declining public funding and rising tuition rates, many public universities in the US are moving toward a “progressive tuition model” that attempts to invest approximately one-third of tuition income into institutional financial aid for lower-income and middle-class students. The objective is to mitigate the cost of rising tuition and keep college affordable. But is this model as currently formulated working? Utilizing data from the Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Survey of undergraduates and other data sources, this study explores these issues by...

Relying primarily on the responses of a proportionally weighted sample of undergraduate students attending eighteen major public research universities (N > 300K, responses from > 130K, n > 40K) that are part of the Student Experience in the Research University Consortium, this paper concludes that students from households at all income levels have been impacted by the increasing expense of higher education. The large majority of students from households at all income levels have changed behaviors to make college more affordable. However, the most remarkable result was that...

In forming a strategy to deal with the severe economic downturn, President-elect Obama and his evolving brain trust of economic advisers should recall the largely successful and innovative efforts by the federal and state governments to avoid a projected steep post–World War II recession – in particular, the key role of higher education. Demand for higher education generally goes up during economic downturns. Expanding higher education funding and enrollment capacity may be as important as any other policy lever to cope with an economic downturn, including funding for infrastructure...

Fees will become an increasingly important funding source for public universities in the UK and throughout the OECD, caused in part by declining government subsidization and rising costs, as well as by an increasingly entrepreneurial drive by institutions themselves to increase revenues. Beginning in September 2006, universities and Further Education colleges in England and Wales will charge variable fees within limits set by a defined cap and by ministry demands for increases in institutional aid for lower income students. This essay chronicles the response of England’s universities...