The University Where I Teach Just Broke the $90K Annual Tuition Barrier. Gulp.
“Why would you ever take an entire course on trauma?”
That was the question I asked my students last year at the beginning of a semester-long, waitlisted class on the most distressing type of psychic pain. Were they aspiring psychologists or social workers? Had they themselves been traumatized? Were they searching for tools to deal with catastrophe? Or had they just been intrigued by the topic?
I braced myself for their answers and was shocked that, to a person, they all responded the exact same way:
The course fulfilled a graduation requirement.
Accordingly, I was less surprised this year when I heard the same reply from participants in a very different (also full) course I taught on the philosophy of charity: They needed it for their degree.
I’m seeing this attitude more and more at the college where I teach, Boston University: Electives as you might remember them are out. Matthew Bae, a director of academic advising at BU, says he sees not more than one or two students a semester sign up for a course merely because they’re interested. “Students taking pure electives are the exception, not the rule,” Bae said, “and I always remember them because they’re so rare they stand out.”
If students can’t figure out what the immediate use value of a course is, they won’t take it. And so far as I can tell, this utilitarian approach is directly related to the rising costs of college.
Or perhaps I should say skyrocketing costs. Because, as the Boston Globe reported last week, four top New England universities—Tufts, Wellesley, Yale, and BU—will cost an unconscionable $90,000 a year next fall. Northeastern and MIT aren’t far behind. That means that the price tag for an undergraduate education at these institutions is about to push past a third of a million dollars.
These universities will say that such numbers are “sticker prices”—and that financial aid packages ease the burden. (Asked for comment on the price increase, a BU spokesperson made that argument to a local news outlet, adding that the average aid package at the school was $67,000 in 2023–24.) But a 2023 survey by Sallie Mae indicates that students across the country still shoulder, on average, 71 percent of costs through family contributions and loans.
The effects of this trend are manifold. Recent surveys suggest that one of these is increasing student anxiety. According to a 2022 poll, 68 percent of undergraduates say that it is a struggle for them or their families to pay for college; another indicates that a whopping 92 percent of students fear they won’t have enough money to cover tuition. No wonder stress and worry are a daily struggle for the broad majority of college students.
And another effect, while less visible, is no less pernicious. Because 78 percent of students believe that the price is worth it anyway—but only so long as it leads to financial independence. In other words, a university education better pay.
This is the brute logic of economics, which encourages students to see each course as a product that should earn a short-term return on investment. And this same logic is keeping students from doing the most important thing college lets them do: intellectually explore.
When I graduated from university, about 25 years ago, the entire price tag for my degree was around $50,000—a shade over the cost of one semester at BU these days. That was no small sum for my firmly middle-class family, even minus the scholarship money I was able to scrape together, but it also wasn’t a backbreaking expense.
So, while I felt appropriately motivated to find a major, get a degree, and graduate, I could also afford to look around a bit. I enrolled in electives in anthropology, astronomy, and urban planning, and I did so not because I wanted to secure a return on investment—they just sounded really interesting. And they were! I still remember what I learned about ethnographic methods, the Drake equation, and buffer zones, and I’m the better for it.
It turns out that my experience wasn’t out of the norm. As Robert Elliott and Valerie Paton point out, college curricula that encourage students to follow their interests trace their origins back to the elective system put in place in the late 19th century by Harvard President Charles W. Eliot. Eliot’s reforms encouraged freedom of inquiry and liberated students from the rigid requirements of a common core, and, Elliott and Paton argue, their influence has persisted into the modern era. To wit, former Brown Dean Katherine Bergeron notes (citing Derek Bok) that at the turn of the 20th century, “curricula in more than one third of America’s colleges were at least 70 percent elective.”
For 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill, this kind of free exploration was one of the most important purposes of higher education. He wrote that a “mind to which the fountains of knowledge have been opened, and which has been taught, in any tolerable degree, to exercise its faculties—finds sources of inexhaustible interest in all that surrounds it, in the objects of nature, the achievements of art, the imaginations of poetry, the incidents of history, the ways of mankind past and present.”
In other words, a college experience that allows students to engage in a wide-ranging pursuit of knowledge, liberated from economic pressures, turns the world into a buffet of intellectual pleasures. And it’s one that treats the student as something more than a cog in a giant capitalist machine.
But for Mill, the capacity to appreciate that buffet is “a very tender plant, easily killed, not only by hostile influences, but by mere want of sustenance.” In jacking up tuition costs, American universities are in the process of killing that tender plant. And the costs won’t be just economic. As prices rise, elite institutions risk turning themselves into high-priced vocational schools for the professional managerial class—and shunting students away from the most valuable part of college.
