<p>Proposed tuitions based on costs of the courses of instruction, and parallel debate on propriety of charging different tuitions based on anticipated income of graduates in particular courses of study.</p>
<p>Issues of efficacy in delivering differential tuition classifiications at same school. </p>
<p>Recognition that professional and graduate schools often charge different amounts than undergraduate.</p>
<p>Could students then ask for a refund if their ‘anticipated’ incomes aren’t realized? I’m trying to think if there’s anything else where we pay a price based on potential rather than on receiving a service or commodity right at the point of paying - it’s early in the a.m. and I’m stumped. </p>
<p>If there’s a different cost in hiring medical school faculty vs. education faculty, it makes a little sense, but then we’re already in a system like that where med school tuition is higher. There aren’t many undergrad majors where differing levels of tuition make much sense to me, since many undergrad majors (liberal arts, for example) don’t lead directly to a vocation (nursing, engineering and teaching the only exceptions I can think of).</p>
<p>I’ve seen it at some of the schools where my son has applied, as an undergrad. He’s applying for physician assistant programs, where he’ll earn a masters degree after 5 years. We pay the higher tuition from day one.</p>
<p>The based on anticipated incomes policy is amusing to me. My D2 is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama. Tisch’s tuition and fees are the highest of all of NYU’s colleges! There, it isn’t based on anticipated incomes being higher but on the costs of instruction. This isn’t unusual.</p>
<p>I don’t think this could happen at LAC’s where students do not apply into any department. Should this become common practice, I become a strong supporter of LAC’s. Bio and philo would not be differentially priced there, and a good thing too.</p>
<p>Pre-professional programs offer a different kind of training and I can see the logic of differential pricing a bit for those programs.</p>
<p>UIUC charges $3792 a year more for science, business, and engineering majors. I don’t think it has to do with the future income of the students, just that the faculty and facilities are more expensive.</p>
<p>And even for the same course, the cost of instruction would certainly be different if you are taught by an assistant professor and if you are taught by a super-star professor. So where is it going to stop?</p>
<p>It’s not broken down by course, just major. Is it perfect–no but it allows the various schools in the university to pay market rates for their profs and provide needed equipment in the more expensive to teach majors such as engineering, sciences, and business. It has less to do with salary potential than the total cost of instruction.</p>
<p>So how would one charge a student who must take 12 courses to fulfill requirements for a poli sci degree and takes 4 bio courses (with labs) for a minor, plus a physics course with lab as part of the gen ed requirements, and a foreign language with lab? I count 6-7 courses with labs in this scenario.
By the same token, someone could take 12 bio courses for a major, one chemistry, one physics course all with labs, and the remaining 18 courses without labs or expensive equipment.</p>
<p>Marite, I think it just depends on what your declared major is, at least at the example I used (UIUC). I wonder if you could go in as undecided, load up on bio and chem classes for two years, then declare your major at the beginning of junior year.</p>
<p>That is the rub, isn’t it. Is there anything to prevent a student from declaring a major in the humanities, taking enough courses to fulfill the requirements, but loading up on lab courses? And even if that did not happen, how would one treat a student who took only humanities or social sciences courses vs. one would divided his or her course load between lab and non-lab courses? Not to mention students who keep changing their majors. The administrative headaches would probably not be worth the extra revenue.</p>
<p>You are talking lots of revenue so it’s worth it. All classes are tracked by computer and a bill can be prepared after you register for classes. Most schools don’t get into breaking down science vs non-science majors as thet are in the same school but charge for business and engineering. You start multiplying $1000 by a few thousand students and you are talking millions in revenue so it’s worth it to strapped schools.</p>
<p>It seems that the only way it could work would be to charge by the specific course but this would add complications of a variable tuition and variable funding and could cause some students (and some parents) to pick and choose courses based on individual cost (i.e. take the philo course rather than the history course or vice-versa to save a few bucks) which could be detrimental to the student’s education. It might also encourage taking the minimal number of courses and refraining from ‘exploring’.</p>
<p>I do agree that certain science and engineering majors can be more costly to the college than certain other majors but this is largely because of difference in the number of courses that need to be taken in addition to the cost of the labs and maybe the teaching staff.</p>
<p>^^Agree about the invidious choices students could make. Also, given generous drop/add policies, this could also be quite an administrative nightmare.</p>
<p>The typical business or engineering prof makes double what a nonscience liberal arts prof makes. Engineering also has higher costs for labs and equipment. Illinois is doing it already for science classes so they have come up with a system that works for them. I’m sure they keep it as simple as possible and some people figure ways to game the system but in general it’s working and worth it.</p>
<p>Is the justifying scenario that the article lays out–public schools can’t afford to offer some more expensive courses, hence they are in danger of losing their accreditation–something that’s actually affected some campuses? I can imagine a campus shutting down an expensive major, though maybe first there’d be an appeal to alumni. If a program is expensive and underutilized, and if its graduates don’t feel strongly enough to support it at some level, it may make sense to put it on the chopping block. </p>
<p>Science and engineering professors at a research school bring in grant money. At least, they’re supposed to. So they may be paid more, but they are also bringing in some revenue. Makes it sound like the justification for paying the football coach big $$$, lol. </p>
<p>One scary thought: a student on a budget goes to sign up for courses, and can only find expensive ones. Or maybe they can’t find enough of the cheap courses to get enough credit hours to qualify as full-time.</p>