Graduation is almost upon us, a time where hundreds of thousands of college seniors across the country will remember fondly the friends they made and the times they had. They’ll celebrate their trials and triumphs in the collegiate arena. Parties thrown in their honor will be attended by their friends, their family and their giant pet elephant named student loan debt.
Never before has a diploma been so costly. Tuition alone for this year at USC was $11,158 for in-state students and $29,440 for out-of-staters. When I was born in 1994, a year of tuition here was $3,090 for in-state students. Even after adjusting the 1994 sticker price for inflation, the price of a year at Carolina has more than doubled in my lifetime.
This trend is not unique to USC. Nationally, the inflation adjusted price of college has more than quadrupled in the last 35 years. We all know college is expensive, and becoming more so every year. The real question, then, is why?
As a student, you can get up to 10 individual psychiatric counseling sessions for free, per academic year. In the Russell House Theater, you can see free movies every weekend (sometimes they even have free drinks and popcorn). If you’re more of the sports type, you can get free tickets to just about any home Gamecock athletics sporting event. Afterwards, you can ride a free shuttle to and from Five Points to celebrate the victory (or forget the defeat).
When you feel like actually studying, you can download Microsoft Office for free, take a free GMAT practice test or get free online tutoring for select classes. If you have any computer problems while trying to take advantage of any of the above free activities, you can even get free tech support from the iCare center.
Of course, nothing in life is actually free. Someone pays the price of all of these goods and services, and many more supposedly “free” offerings from the university that I do not have the space to list. Many of these costs are directly passed to students in the form of various fees that are included in tuition, such as the student health fee, the university technology fee and the student activity fee. The ones not directly attached to any particular fee still have to be paid for by someone, and I don’t expect President Pastides or the board of trustees to reach for their wallets any time soon.
I don’t mean to insult the work done by any of these departments or insinuate that they aren’t useful. To the contrary, I myself regularly take advantage of many them. But there are many that I haven’t tried and never will.
You, the reader, have probably used some of the “free” programs that I have not. I have probably used programs that you have not. Even the programs that we both have used have probably been used in different amounts by each of us. Despite those differences in consumption, you and I are both charged the same amount for each program, even the ones we don’t use at all.
To understand why college is so much more expensive than it used to be look no further than the “free” items come with your diploma. It is no longer possible to pay for school without also paying for monthly visits with a psychologist, an early access movie pass and season tickets for all of your college sports teams.
If students want to see their tuition stop growing or even decrease, we need to resist the urge to keep asking for more free stuff and instead tell our schools to do less.