Friday, August 16, 2013

Cost of Education in US Public Universities


Since we were talking the other day about the figure of Rs. 340,000 as the (alleged) cost of education at our IITs (and since the said figure appears to come out of questionable calculations), this passage (n an article arguing for free public higher ed in the US) leaped out at me:

The first step is to calculate how much it would cost to make all public higher education free in the United States. In 2008-9, there were 6.5 million full-time-equivalent undergraduate students enrolled in public four-year universities and 4.3 million enrolled in community colleges. In 2009-10, the average cost of tuition, room, and board for undergraduates at public four-year institutions was $15,014; at two-year public colleges, it was $7,703. If we multiply the number of students in each segment of public higher education by the average total cost, we discover that the cost of making all public universities free would have been $97-billion in 2009-10, with an annual cost of $33-billion for all community colleges—or a total of $130-billion. [Emphasis added]
-- For Public Colleges, the Best Tuition Is No Tuition by Robert Samuels at The Chronicle of Higher Education.

0 Comments: