Where Is Your Tuition Bill Going?

As of this upcoming school year (2018), I will be headed into my senior year of college. I graduated high school in 2014 with college credits already under my belt, putting me ahead of students who hadn't taken AP or Post Secondary classes. You would think by 2018 I would have graduating with a bachelor's degree; however, that is not the case. Believe me, it is not that I don't want to be moving forward or that I have been held back for educational reasons. No, the #1 and only reason I have for not graduating college is that it costs SO much money. I'm sure many of you have parents have graduated college with little to no debt, while working part time jobs at minimum wage and having very little family financial support. For us "millennials," attending college full time, working full time, and taking out exuberant amounts in loans is the norm. According to FinAid.com, inflation for tuition has exceeded 8 percent, which is higher than it has been in the past 30 years. I'm not here to tell you tuition has risen and the numbers behind it, but to ask schools WHY tuition has risen. It is understood that as wages increase, the price of living also increases, but it does not explain the thousand dollar annual leaps schools are making in their housing and tuition costs; and I am here to tell you why.

1. Staffing

On average, for every 10 students there is 1 administrator, coach, or professor. If a university has 25,000 students, there would then be approximately 2,500 staff members in charge of running the school. Not only are college professors or college staff members some of the highest paid jobs in the industry, but if you consider a college professor makes about 6 figures and at some colleges the football coach makes seven, this accounts for a large chunk of money that is going into the school. If college tuition is $20,000 a year per student, the school's income solely off of the students would be 500 million dollars. (Keep in mind this is a hypothetical situation.) Once all of the staff is paid, we would be left with 360 million dollars. Now, our hypothetical school has 350 million dollars left. Where does this remainder go?

Staffing

Upkeep and Growth

As a large university with a reputation to uphold, it is important that colleges maintain their retention rate. Public community colleges currently hold the lowest retention rate at a little less than 54 percent. The average retention rate for private liberal arts colleges is a little higher at 69 percent, and the colleges with the highest retention rate were public research institutions such as state schools with a 72 percent retention rate.

This being said, how many signs and commercials do you see for your surrounding universities. TV publicity, media publicity, and student workers all cost a pretty penny. The average TV commercial costs anywhere between 200-1200 on local television and typically starts at 120,000 on national TV. If our college was to put out 10 commercials a year on annual television, it would be at almost 1 millions dollars in publicity. This is solely to make the college look appealing to the public in order to maintain a growth rate strong enough to keep the college running.

Upkeep? This is meant solely as the buildings themselves. Think about it as your house. You have to pay your water bill and your heating and cooling. The list goes on. Let's say our college is 200,000 square feet of building all together. The average cost of upkeep would be around 30 million dollars according to Webspm.com. Where are we left financially after the annual upkeep and endorsement of our university? We are currently left with 300 million dollars.

Upkeep of Square Feet

These are the two main and most important places all your hard earned cash is going. Of course, there are smaller areas of distribution such as teacher pay, student activities, and classes themselves. But a significant amount of students have no idea where their money really is going.