Is college tuition really too high?

Last updated on 09/09/2015

The NYT magazine has a fascinating story about price discrimination, spillover benefits, the returns to college and how to increase completion rates. By Adam Davidson, here:

But probably the single most important factor behind the rise in tuition is one that few other businesses share: Students are not just customers; they are also an integral part of the core product. When considering a school, potential students and their parents often look first at the characteristics of past classes: test scores, grade-point averages, post-college earnings, as well as ethnic and gender mixes. School admissions officers call the process through which they put together their classes the ‘‘shaping’’ of the student body. Kevin Crockett is a consultant with Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a firm that helps colleges and universities set prices. He says that the higher the prices that schools charge, the more options they have in recruiting exactly the students they want.

‘‘I’ve got to have enough room under the top-line sticker price,’’ he says. A school that charges $50,000 is able to offer a huge range of inducements to different sorts of students: some could pay $10,000, others $30,000 or $40,000. And a handful can pay the full price.