A college education is not the same as it was two decades ago.
In 1999, the full cost of an undergraduate education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst cost a little over $10,000. Today, it’s closer to $30,000. Struggling to combat budget cuts and the higher costs of operating, the UMass system has raised tuition on students for the past four years by 2.5%, and plan to do so again this year.
Former Massachusetts Secretary of Education Paul Reville said he believes that the root of the problem lies in successive years of budget cuts that have shrunk the university’s ability to operate without increasing costs for students.
“We’ve shifted the model of financing higher education to a much bigger load to bear for the consumers for the students and their families than for the state,” Reville said. “It puts them under pressure as they grow, and that pressure expresses itself in a variety of ways. They need more income, so some of them are pushing hard to get more out of state enrollees because they pay higher levels of tuition.”
To Reville, the combination of higher college costs and the economic shift in the American economy towards jobs that demand a college education can portend dim futures for middle- and lower-income students. For upper-class students, Reville says, education costs can be burdensome, but not a determinant in whether a student can go to school. For lower-income students, however, he fears that it will deter students from enrolling.
“People don’t want to contemplate spending $120,000 for four years of higher education and emerging with all that debt,” Reville said. “When you’re pushing north of $30,000 ... it provides sticker shock for a lot of people who were thinking about a public higher education. ... It scares a lot of people away.”
In an effort to stymie rising college costs, the state Senate sought to pass a tuition and fee freeze for the upcoming academic year in exchange for an additional $560 million in state funding. The policy, however, was left on the legislative cutting room floor in the recent budget bill that passed both chambers and was signed by Gov. Charlie Baker in July.
Following the budget fight, the UMass Board of Trustees voted to raise tuition by 2.5% earlier this month, for the fifth year in a row.
“This has been a challenging summer for all of us as we strive to meet the expectations of our students, understanding that we went through a year last year recruiting a whole class in that had certain expectations of how we would treat them,” UMass Lowell Chancellor Jacquie Moloney said to the State House News Service on Aug. 3.
