| What college students are reading |
| This weekly column looks at lists of books kids are reading in various categories. Information on the books below came from the Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 19, with data supplied by Barnes & Noble and the Follett Higher Education Group. |
| Most popular books on college campuses |
| 1. The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Presents Earth (the Book): A Visitor’s Guide to the Human Race by Jon Stewart |
| 2. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson |
| 3. A–holes Finish First: by Tucker Max |
| 4. Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk by David Sedaris |
| 5. The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson |
| 6. I Am America (And So Can You!) by Stephen Colbert |
| 7. The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan |
| 8. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner |
| 9. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieg Larsson |
| 10. Tinkers: by Paul Harding |
As collateral damage during the current recession, public universities have been forced to increase tuition as state funds have diminished. We’ve seen an extreme version of this in England, where, up until 1997, students paid no tuition at all. Now they are faced with a tripling of the current $4,800 yearly fee. British students are not pleased by this tuition explosion. During November, there were protest marches, sit-ins and building occupations; the largest gathering had participation estimates ranging from 10,000 to 50,000. Even Radcliffe Camera, directly behind the college where, for the past two summers, I’ve stayed with George Mason University students studying at Oxford, was home to 300 protesters who occupied it for a day before police removed them.
Concurrent with the demonstrations in England have been protests at the University of California, where tuition increased 32 percent this year and will increase 8 percent for 2011-2012. When the University of California Board of Regents met in November, it was the second year in a row that student demonstrators, 13 of whom were arrested, disrupted their meetings.
It’s not surprising that colleges are feeling the pinch during our global belt tightening; it’s only surprising that we haven’t seen more upheaval over tuition increases. Public institutions of higher learning in California have lost 20 percent of their state funding in the past two years, and 48,000 employees have taken a 10 percent pay cut in the form of furloughs. That stings.
UC has cushioned the effect on students at the low end of the earnings scale: All students whose families earn less than $70,000 a year pay no tuition, and students whose family income falls below the $120,000 will receive a one-year reprieve from the tuition increase.
And yet the cushion softens the blows only slightly. Students are our future, and those least able to absorb the increases may be looking for jobs or doing menial part-time work rather than applying to schools and researching grant availability. Or they may be applying to schools based on tuition costs rather than how well the school fits their intellectual and career goals. Consequently, the cost to young people may be far greater than the incremental tuition increases against which they are demonstrating.
The College Board recently published “Trends in College Pricing,” which confirms some of our fears about tuition and fee increases. On average, public institutions charge 7.9 percent more this year than they did last year. But the document points out that only one-third of students pay full tuition with no grants or scholarships, so the number of students affected by the increases is not as dramatic as it first appears.
And long before the current economic downturn, schools were increasing tuition costs beyond the level of inflation. Our children have us to blame, in part, for the trend that has met with little resistance from us over the past three decades.
We can comfort students with the thought that “It could be worse. Tuition could be tripling, as it is in the U.K.” But even at triple the cost, a British education costs much less than a college education in the U.S.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected]
