College Gets More Expensive, Part MCMXVII

The College Board released it's annual Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing reports today. These are generally considered to be the definitive sources of new information on the respective topics and are chock-full of informative historical tables if you're interested in that kind of thing. While the data itself is reliable, the College Board tends to spin the annual results in ways that reflect well on its customer base: the higher education industry. So the press release was titled "College Prices Increase in Step with Inflation." The New York Times bought into this hook line and sinker and then did it one better, titling its article about the reports "College Costs Up Slightly, Report Says." Given that tuition has been routinely doubling the inflation rate for the past 20 years, this is good news, right?

Well, no. Average college tuition at public universities was up a healthy 6.4 percent this year, well in line with historical trends. Inflation-adjusted tuition was lower because inflation was higher, due to the run-up in energy prices among other factors. Now, it's true that on a long-term basis, on average, wages and income rise along with inflation. But at the moment we're still teetering on the brink of economic calamity (or we fell off a couple of weeks ago and just haven't gotten around to admitting it yet.) Unemployment is up, people are losing their shirts in the stock market, and the domestic automotive industry is about to collapse. The bottom 50% of households--i.e. the households that are most vulnerable to changes in college costs--are no better off today than they were eight years ago in terms of income, even as the price of college has risen dramatically. Suggesting that everything is copacetic because a worldwide spike in oil prices combined with a global food crisis and other terrible problems had the effect of deflating real tuition calculations is absurd.

Update: I note that the Times has now changed the headline to "Downturn Expected to Drive Tuition Up." Better!