Consider this post as a continuation of my earlier post “Tuition and Fees: The Cost of Higher Education“. I dug out some old data on the tuition and fees for graduate students in our university and made some quick graphs. These are shown below. The first graph shows the increasing trend in fees from the academic year 1997-98 through present. The cost has been rising pretty fast in the last few years…although the rate of increase is showing signs of easing a bit.
In the second graph below, I have just included a simple linear regression fit (available in Excel) with this data (the red line is the fit) and made a prediction after 10 more years. Please note that this is as absolute simplistic as you can get with predictions…it won’t be very accurate, but will give a general idea of where things may be heading.
According to this crude prediction, in the next 10 years, our tuition will rise to approximately $19,500 ! Man..people are going to have a hard time encouraging young students for higher education.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Hopefully the ridiculous price increases for college over the last 5 or more years will start to slow. But this info just shows why 529 plans, and other ideas for how to pay for your children’s ridiculously expensive tuitions, have come about.
Will the cost of the education be justified by the salary earned later on in life? This is a concern for my daughter. She is in currently in college, and is having to pay for it herself. Early on we were not able to put money away for her college. We help her now by renting out the garage apartment to her and her husband for a discount rate.
Hopefully her education will earn her the salary she wants.
I’m far more concerned about the cost of UNDERGRADUATE education, which seems to be less optional than graduate school. The school I went to charged 23K/year in tuition in 2000. In 2006, it was 32.8K/year for tuition. At that rate, by 2026 they’ll be charging $98K/year in tuition. We cannot afford a half million dollars to send a kid to our alma mater.
would it be an exponential increase in the future?
Jersey jen: I chose the linear rise, because right now the cost is not increasing at the same rate as it was a couple of years ago. If I were to predict the same thing just taking the data between 2003 and 2005, then yeah…that would be exponential.
Unless something drastic happens (like very high inflation, major deregulation of state universities) I don’t think it will rise exponentially in future…well at least I hope not.
I pay £3000/year for my uni. This is a bargain because foreign students can pay up to £11.000/year.
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