Families’ efforts to calculate the cost of an undergraduate education can be complicated by colleges’ adoption of differential-tuition policies, which set tuition rates based on academic major or year of progress toward a degree.
Such policies have become increasingly common, especially at public four-year colleges in the Great Lakes and Plains regions, as higher-education institutions seek to take in more revenue or offer students financial incentives to train for high-demand occupations. At some institutions, undergraduates’ tuition bills can vary by 40 percent or more based on their choice of academic program. Little is known, however, about the impact of such policies on students’ college-going decisions.
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Families’ efforts to calculate the cost of an undergraduate education can be complicated by colleges’ adoption of differential-tuition policies, which set tuition rates based on academic major or year of progress toward a degree.
Such policies have become increasingly common, especially at public four-year colleges in the Great Lakes and Plains regions, as higher-education institutions seek to take in more revenue or offer students financial incentives to train for high-demand occupations. At some institutions, undergraduates’ tuition bills can vary by 40 percent or more based on their choice of academic program. Little is known, however, about the impact of such policies on students’ college-going decisions.
Whether students can even know what they will be charged is a question that interested Casey E. George-Jackson, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Louisville; Glen R. Nelson, an associate dean at Arizona State University’s college of nursing; and Gregory C. Wolniak, a clinical associate professor of higher education at New York University. With the help of research assistants, they examined the websites of 143 public, four-year, research-intensive colleges for information on differential tuition for the 2015-16 academic year.
Finding themselves in disagreement in their calculations of what the institutions charged, the researchers focused on the more basic question of how easy or difficult it was just to locate tuition information on the sites. They presented their study’s results last month at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Higher Education.
The Chronicle this week interviewed Mr. Wolniak, the study’s lead author, about its findings. Following is an edited and condensed transcript of that interview.
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Q. Why do you see differential-tuition polices as a cause for concern?
A. We don’t know what effects they’re having in terms of institutional resources or — arguably more importantly — in terms of student decision-making and college access for traditionally underrepresented students.
Q. How common has it become, and why do colleges adopt it?
A. We were able to trace data back to the early ’90s among the four-year, public, research-intensive universities, and we have seen almost a tenfold increase. There are 143 research-intensive, public, four-year colleges in this country, and at 86 of them we were able to find evidence of differential-tuition practices, by college major or by class year.
There are at least three very rational reasons why an institution would choose to adopt these practices. One rationale would be to align tuition with the cost of delivering instruction. The second case an institution could make would be to incentivize students by way of differentials, through tuition discounts in majors where policy makers think there are not enough graduates to meet work-force demands. The third rationale would be to align tuition with students’ ability to pay after graduation. We know that students who major in certain fields earn sometimes upwards of 40 to 50 percent more in the labor market.
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If an institution wants to align tuition with instructional costs, it might lead them to increase tuition for a particular field of study. If, on other hand, the institution wants to incentivize enrollment within a particular major, they might opt to lower tuition in that field.
Where this doesn’t make sense is when institutions don’t know the impact this practice is having. It’s really a problem when you start to consider that these practices considerably increase the complexity for students making decisions based on what it will cost them to achieve their degree.
Q. Where public colleges have adopted such policies, have state lawmakers had a say?
A. We see a lot of policy talk in the direction of differential tuition. We see, for instance, the Board of Regents in Iowa this past year pressuring the three main public universities there to adopt tuition differentials. We have seen state governors in Florida and Kentucky in recent years propose plans that would charge more for undergraduate degrees in areas where they perceive there being a lower value for the work force, things like arts and the humanities.
Q. What’s wrong with collecting more money from college students whose education is costlier to provide?
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A. I don’t think there necessarily is something wrong with doing that, as long as there is a clearly stated reason for it and some understanding what the effects will be.
Q. You concluded that less than half of the colleges that you examined were transparent about their practices. Why?
A. We had three researchers collect information on every institution. There was three-way agreement in only 44 percent of the cases on whether the differential tuition was evident.
Imagine how difficult that would be for the average prospective college student. Imagine the difficulty for first-generation college students.
As difficult as that was for the research team to identify differential-tuition rates, imagine how difficult that would be for the average prospective college student. Imagine the difficulty for first-generation college students.
Differential-tuition information is often embedded in main tuition tables that you’ll find quite easily in the financial-aid or the bursar’s office websites. But in quite a few cases we were finding that information communicated in much less straightforward ways, for example, in footnotes to a table, or under the label something like “special fees assessed to all students within a major,” or through a link to some downloadable form that you could only see once you clicked on it and opened it.
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Q. What should colleges do differently?
A. Colleges should be making it abundantly clear to prospective students what the education they choose will cost them, across majors and across years. We would never expect somebody to sign on the dotted line in mortgaging a home or financing a vehicle without clear information on costs.
We find examples of very clear and transparent portrayal of such information on college’s websites, and we need to see that more commonly adopted across the country. Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data and College Board information, the kind of information that goes into college-cost calculators, don’t take into account this kind of nuance. Therefore it masks the true costs of an education. That’s a big problem.
Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.
Peter Schmidt was a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. He covered affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. He is a co-author of The Merit Myth: How Our Colleges Favor the Rich and Divide America (The New Press, 2020).