Do students want to study business so badly that they’ll pay more for their degree than they would with a different major? Are students ok paying higher tuition rates as senior engineering majors than they paid as freshmen? Does a student’s desire to be a nurse outweigh the desire to stay financially afloat?
Those are some of the questions researchers at Cornell University’s Higher Education Research Institute, or CHERI, would like to eventually answer. In the 2011 Survey of Differential Tuition at Public Higher Education Institutions, just released on its website, the institute reports that 143 public colleges and universities, as of March 2011, use some form of differentiated tuition, or tuition that varies based on a student’s major or level. While differentiated tuition is not a new concept—some schools reported beginning the practice in the 1970s—the growth of the trend has been rapid. In 1996, only 50 public institutions varied their tuition rates in some form; in 2002, the number doubled, and has increased 43% since then.
Ronald Ehrenberg, CHERI’s director, said there are many factors involved in the increase of the number of schools participating in some form of differential tuition. Some schools differentiate tuition on the cost of providing an education to a specific major; others differentiate by course level. Some, the study suggested, could differentiate tuition based on the income earning potential of students. Research was conducted by gathering tuition data from school websites, then contacting schools who use differentiation. CHERI researchers found that the most common majors for which differentiation is used are business, engineering, and nursing. Nursing students cost more to educate than many others due to the necessity for smaller class sizes and labs. Business students cost more to educate, he said, based on the cost of paying business professors. Upper level engineering students may have more lab work than lower level students.
So what does this mean for the future of higher education? Ehrenberg and researchers at CHERI plan to do more research to answer questions of both cause and effect. One obvious cause is budget cutbacks at state institutions, he said. Research has shown that doctoral institutions use differentiation at much higher rates than schools that offer primarily bachelor’s degrees—with rates of 41% and 29%, respectively—and flagship public institutions are more likely to face cuts and increase differentiation in the future, as long as states don’t restrict the practice. New York, for example, has forbidden differentiation by major.
“One important question is how state and institutional programs will respond to these increases,” he said. “First, we’ll examine what caused the spread of differentiated tuition. What will be the impact of state finances? How many of a given school’s competitors are offering differentiated tuition? Then we’ll look at answering things like, once differentiated tuition is adopted, does it affect the number of students who enroll in these programs? It might discourage lower-income students from enrolling.”
Facebook Comments