Late last week, Princeton University announced it will cover tuition for students whose families earn less than $100,000 per year. This is an increase from the current threshold of $65,000. It’s a great move that will allow more students and their families to have financial flexibility while attending an Ivy League university.
However, as generous as the action is, it raises the question: What took it so long? With a reported endowment of $37.7 billion, Princeton could have offered this long ago — not to mention afford to be much more generous than this $100,000 cutoff.
Princeton costs slightly less than $80,000 per year, including room and board, according to the school’s website. Tuition alone is listed at $57,410. Why so high? No one seems to know. But truthfully, there’s no legitimate reason why it should cost that much. Although the new policy will benefit many students and help them attend the school, it should receive criticism for limiting it to just $100,000. Two parents can easily make $100,000 without being affluent — especially given today’s inflation.
Previously, I wrote that colleges deserve more of the blame than they get for the nation’s student debt crisis. Over the last 40 years, they have raised tuition far above inflation and without any justification. Education has no actual defined monetary value — it certainly isn’t determined by the knowledge conferred. To learn Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity at Princeton costs about five times more than it does at nearby Rutgers University. It also doesn’t depend on the salaries of faculty, unless you think they’re making five times what they did in 1990.
As tuition prices ballooned, left-wingers naturally turned to the government to fix the problem. Yet Princeton and other elite colleges have long had the means to solve the student debt crisis. Most of them choose not to address it at all. Princeton has perhaps done better, but it could have acted sooner. The lesson is that academia has long been feasting off the taxpayer while raking in the green — essentially what left-wingers criticize Wall Street for and driven by every bit as much greed.
Elite colleges and universities have billions of dollars in endowments. If they truly cared about the left-wing platitudes of diversity and social mobility they constantly claim to support, they would all be doing what Princeton has done — and would have done so long ago. Instead, they hire a few token diversity officers — this dead weight of course drives up tuition— and turn to the government to keep the money coming at the cost of student borrowers.
After exploiting tens of thousands of students’ families and taxpayers over the course of decades, Princeton finally decided to step up and help people. Taxpayers should start demanding that all other colleges do likewise.
