Since she enrolled at Framingham State three years ago, Tyler Risteen’s tuition has jumped nearly 50 percent. It’s an unexpected math lesson for a 21-year-old who chose a public university because it was so affordable.
“I don’t have a lot of money to spend on college,” said Risteen, whose student loan debt has ballooned to more than $20,000. “I would’ve loved to go somewhere further away.”
While President Joe Biden’s student debt cancellation plan will help millions in the United States recover from the high cost of college, the estimated price tag of the relief plan soared to $400 billion this week. And that has some analysts urging a renewed focus on the bigger problem: college affordability. Tuition and fees at four-year public colleges in the last decade have soared 10 percent — and 19 percent at private schools — leaving students and families wondering how much higher prices can go. But colleges have little incentive to reduce that sticker price.
While a majority of parents believe a college education will help their kids get a good job, just 36 percent think they have enough money to pay for four years of college. Those with kitchen-table anxieties about how to pay for college are fretting over what economists say is still a good, albeit expensive, investment.
“College has the ability to provide social mobility,” Phillip Levine, an economist at Wellesley College, told GBH News. “If people think that college is too expensive and choose not to go as a result of it, we lose out on that opportunity.
“We can talk about the pros and cons of debt forgiveness,” he added, “but it does not solve the underlying problem, and the underlying problem is affordability itself.”
Levine, the author of “A Problem of Fit: How the Complexity of College Pricing Hurts Students — and Universities,” said more transparency around the actual cost of college is a good place to start. He said there is a general misunderstanding around what colleges actually charge, or the sticker price versus the actual cost of tuition. Discount rates at private colleges and universities hit all-time highs in 2021, averaging a record 54.5 percent for first-year students — meaning a college with a $40,000 price tag would average out to cost just over $18,000.
Sticker prices are approaching $100,000 a year at selective private colleges like Wellesley, and that apparent cost can deter underrepresented students from even applying.
“When the sticker price goes up, largely what you’re doing is increasing the price on the people who are making in the hundreds of thousands of dollars a year who actually are paying those prices,” Levine said. “What most people typically pay hasn’t gone up anywhere near as rapidly as that.”
A few less selective colleges have actually lowered their advertised price to combat that fear and make themselves more attractive to students and their families.
Lesley University in Cambridge took that step in 2014, bringing tuition down from $32,000 to $24,000 a year.
Lesley’s Associate Vice President Frank Mullen said the reduction made the price more in line with what most families actually pay.
“Research had suggested that many students and families were not pursuing high-value private education because sticker shock was scaring them away from applying,” he said. “We were trying to eliminate that perceptual barrier.”
Lesley is one of the largest educators of teachers and mental health professionals in New England. With a national shortage and lack of diversity in both fields, Mullen said administrators decided it was morally important — and economically vital to the college — to make the change.
Enrollment has not surged, and remains down 3 percent since 2014, he said. But the pace of that decline isn’t as big the national rate, which is down 6 percent. And the price cut also boosted the share of low-income students attending Lesley, from 26 to 32 percent.
“I think it certainly increased accessibility,” he said.
Lesley is an outlier, though. Reducing the sticker price is so rare in higher education that the National Association of College and University Business Officers, when contacted by GBH News, said it doesn’t even track the trend.
Levine said schools are reluctant to reduce their sticker prices for one reason.
"Marketing,” he said. “If you are the student who is the recipient of the $20,000 scholarship, it makes you feel good. That’s a valuable marketing tool.”
Affordability remains an issue at public colleges, too, where prices are more transparent and frequently debated in Massachusetts’ state Legislature. A new report from the Massachusetts Teachers Association found that the cost of attending a public college in Massachusetts has increased faster than any other state.
It said long-term declines in state funding for public higher education have left students paying more.
Co-author Richard Levy, a retired public policy professor at Salem State University, said universities have increasingly borrowed to keep up with their building and infrastructure needs. That institutional debt — $3 billion at the University of Massachusetts and $1.2 billion for the state college system — is passed on to students in the form of increased fees and tuition costs. He said students may have as much as 25 percent more student loan debt as a result of the state’s disinvestment.
Students like Tyler Risteen at Framingham State are paying, on average, an additional $2,000 a year in ancillary fees — on top of tuition increases.
“It was supposed to be affordable,” Risteen said, sitting outside her dorm before going to work in the student ID office. “State schools, as they always tell you, are supposed to be where you go to save money, but, as I learned, that is not the case anymore.”
Risteen said she hopes to work in the research and policy field, helping to find ways to make public higher ed more affordable. But, for now, she works four jobs to pay for her studies.
