My tuition was 1/10th of yours, same era. Just nuts.
Haha, love this idea.
I canāt say with accuracy, but Iām pretty sure my annual tuition at CSULB was about $1300. It seems about right by referencing @ucbalumnus and others. Now the annual tuition and fees (I commuted, so no boarding fees) is about $18,000. Still a bargain!
My senior year (77) at Washington State tuition was right about $300/semester, although I donāt have a bill to prove it. We lived in a decrepit WWII era 2 bedroom apartment in married student housing that went up from $75/month to a shocking $79!
My husband had his tuition waived because he had a teaching assistantship, otherwise I think grad school tuition was about 10% more.
Total cost of attendance for next year will be $35,000 in state and $51,000 for out of state. Still a comparative bargain. Only $13,000 of that in state total is tuition and fees. R&B and misc is more.
I do know that the 1st apartment I rented on my own was $129 for a 1 bedroom place about 5-8 miles from my workplace, on the bus line. I lived there for 3.5 years and then we upgraded to a 2-bedroom place and stayed there until S was 4 years old and our tenant lost his job and we moved into our house. The extremely low rent allowed us to save. Rents for similar places now are about $2000 or more/month.
I attended a community college for 2 years in the mid '70ās. I found an old tuition statement several years back and it was just over $100/semester for a full course load. I paid it with earnings from a part time retail job. I believe the same cc is now over $10K for a years tuition.
I transferred to a medium size university in the midwest (one rarely discussed here, but for privacy reasons, I will not name it). I remember my friends at instate public universities considered it āexpensiveā because the total cost of tuition/books/room and board was about $5K/year. I saved money by living in my sorority house which was cheaper than the dorms. Itās now a total of $56K/year.
We were pretty fortunate about CC in our area. When D attended in 2005, it was about $3400/yr or so (she attended 3 semesters). I think we paid more for books and she lived at home. It was much cheaper than the $10,000/yr private HS tuition we had be paying. Today, in 2025, tuition is $3284/year for instate residents. Itās still a bargain.
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CSULB current in state tuition and fees are $7,374, according to Undergraduate Costs | California State University Long Beach . Add $10,920 for non-California residents, which would total $18,294 for non-California residents.
I must have read the wrong thing. Still, a bargain.
I almost went to Texas A&M because of the $4/credit hour tuition! My dad was military and we were still officially Texas residents even though we were stationed in Georgia then.
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UGA ā Freshman year, 1979-80: Tuition/fees $251, Dorm $212 (double, no A/C, 8ā x 11ā room), Meal Plan $354, Books $120, times three academic quarters ā $2811. Does not include phone bill, travel or spending money.
UGA 24-25 academic year: $29,568 COA.
I put myself through school without parental help. $2800 may as well have been $28,000. Didnāt find out they werenāt helping til I actually moved into the dorm and Mom gave me $50 and said, āYouāre on your own.ā That was all the money I had. Back then you didnāt pay in advance ā you stood in line at the Bursar, cafeteria and housing offices to write a check. Had a $1500 scholarship and had to beg the Bursar to dispense it over two quarters instead of three so I didnāt have to go home. That gave me time to earn money so I could pay Spring fees myself.
Had a job at the cafeteria my first full day in Athens, working the maximum allowable 20 hrs/week freshman year, and then I was an RA for soph and junior years. Made minimum wage, $3.10/hr. Couldnāt afford to continue as an RA. Moved off campus to a $90/mo duplex senior year and went back to the cafeteria. If you had a cafeteria or RA position, you still had to pay full meal plan/dorm fees. Total ripoff!
Worked every summer on campus, as I didnāt have a car. Took out GSL (now Staffords). POād my parents by going independent for FA purposes, back when this was still possible. Was a very difficult time, but it was character building, and I met my H in NYC via my main extracurricular!
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Iām glad you didnāt go to the Dark Side!
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I worked the maximum 15 hours/week I could via work study and actually enjoyed the work. I was the person checking names when I worked at the dorm dining room. Later, I worked for the vice-provost and was allowed to re-activate honor societies at U of OR. Lastly, I worked at the Center for the Sociology of Women, which was an easy job where we had a lot of free time to do our homework. I also got to meet the professors there and got several to be my advisors so I could write an honors thesis and be the 1st to graduate with honors in Sociology in 1979.
Notre Dame 90-94 COA was $19-20K. Now it is like $75Kish.
Luckily my parents were poor and I didnāt have to pay that. Got out with $14K in loans.
Note that at the highly selective colleges that are often emphasized on this forum, most students do not pay sticker price. A good portion of students have an expected cost to parents of $0. This is a change from past decades where most students paid sticker and very few students paid $0. This also contributes to why sticker price has outpaced inflation. Inflation adjusted cost has often decreased for lower and middle income families, while increasing for higher income families
For example, in an earlier post, I mentioned that Stanfordās 1999 CDS lists an average net cost (after FA) of $43k, after adjusting to current $. Doing the same calculation on most recent IPEDS/fed numbers suggests an average net cost of $46k. $43k to $46k is indeed an increase, but 7% increase over a nearly 25 year period does not seem ridiculously high.
I donāt know the cost to parents when I attended Stanford, but I expect it would be far lower today, after FA + inflation. My parents earned near median US income, so cost to parents would likely be near $0 today.
Edit ā Filling out a NPC, I expect cost to parents would be approximately $3k/year, had I attended Stanford today.
I think the cost to my parents of my education was mostly plane tickets to get me home for summers and back to school, plus plane ticket to go somewhere for Christmas.
Iād be curious as to the definition of, āmost are not full pay,ā at Stanford.
FA stats from College Navigator are below. According to the table, 63% of Stanford undergrads received grant or scholarship aid, and 55% of Stanford first time freshmen received grant or scholarship aid.
Among students in the fed database, the average net price by parentsā income is listed as:
Under $48k ā N/A
$48k to $75 ā $1k per year
$75k to $110k ā $9k per year
So, my ds received a one-time NMF award of $2,500. This was not Stanford awarded money - it came from the National Merit Folks and was sent to Stanford. Does that mean he falls into the 63% and 55% statistics from your first sentence?
I appreciate that this chart shows average amount of aid awarded, but even a grant of $64k was probably at most only around 20% of the all-in costs for those years. My ds graduated before then, so I am not sure.
I donāt want to derail the thread going down this rabbit hole, but I appreciate your reply.
Double post
The first table mentions 948 of the 952 freshmen who received grant or scholarship aid received aid directly from Stanford (sometimes in addition to other sources, like Pell grants). The remaining 4 of 952 presumably were likely high income students who received other non-Stanford sources and/or students who did not apply for FA from Stanford. Your daughter may have been in this minority.
Thatās $64k/year in grant/scholarship aid, not $64k for all 4 years.
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