“The other students receive a bigger subsidy: on average, aid totaling more than $28,500, most of it from the college itself. (Swarthmore limits its aid to students with financial need, but that can mean those from families earning $150,000 a year if, for instance, there are circumstances like having multiple children in college.)”

Our national educational priorities are not fucked up at all.

early in 2000 the board voted to raise tuition and fees 17.6 percent, to $23,460 (and to include a laptop for every incoming student to help soften the blow). Then it waited to see what would happen.

Ursinus received nearly 200 more applications than the year before. Within four years the size of the freshman class had risen 35 percent, to 454 students. Applicants had apparently concluded that if the college cost more, it must be better.

yeah, that doesn’t exactly track the general swelling of the college applicant pool due to the baby boomers’ kids coming of age or anything

With the race for rankings and choice students shaping college pricing, the University of Notre Dame, Bryn Mawr College, Rice University, the University of Richmond and Hendrix College, in Conway, Ark., are just a few that have sharply increased tuition to match colleges they consider their rivals, while also providing more financial assistance.

yes, and what they had in mind was bumping up their test scores a notch with a marginal increase in sticker price for the blingbling generation, not, you know, hiring better faculty or getting better food in the dining hall or anything. it’s not like any of those schools are seriously underrated as compared to their peers.

and while i’m being pissy, is there a more annoying word in the entire universe than “academe”?

So the more money we’d ask for guess papers, the more successful we’d be?

As George Somerby so persuasively argues, there is no subject about which reporters routinely take leave of every scrap of logic they might possess that can compare with education, whether lower or higher or somewhere inbetween.

I kind of can’t believe this is a news story; I thought everyone knew this already?

It’s like Piano Tuition, for example.

One teacher charges £18

The other charges £20

Who’d be tempted to go to T2, to see “why are you £2 better?”

i think it’s cyclical

like, people start applying to 15 schools, and thus don’t have time to do adequate research, and so use tuition as a general indicator of quality, schools wise up, eventually applicants wise up, and schools start lowering tuition (or at least lowering the rate of tuition increases), and repeat

Well who the hell wants to go to school with poor kids when you could be getting drunk and knocking up rich ones

Fuck going to a cheap college, then you can’t complain as much when you get a D

haha yesss the “i pay soooo much to go here, why can’t i [get away with x]?” routine