Last summer, even though limits were put on government spending as part of the agreement to increase the national debt limit (and there may have even been some cuts in spending), one thing that did not get cut or limited was spending on Pell grants.** In fact, it is my understanding that spending for Pell grants was even increased. And recently, President Obama announced changes in federal college loan programs that are supposed to make college loans a little cheaper for some students.
All of this is in the name of making college “more affordable”. Which got me to thinking about what I paid for tuition to Yale Law School 40 years ago (ouch, I’m old) and wondering what the tuition there is now. I remember that, at the time, I thought the tuition was pretty high – and it was given the money we had and the value of money back then. For the three years I went to Yale, from 1971 to 1974, the annual tuition was $2800, $3100 and $3300, respectively. It was a total of $9200 for three years, which was a lot of money.
Then I checked to see what Yale’s tuition is now. The tuition for the 2011-12 school year is $50,275.*** In other words, what I paid for three years would cover 37% of just one semester now. But that’s unfair. There has been a lot of inflation since 1971-74. You can’t compare prices now with prices then without factoring in inflation.
So I went to the U.S. Department of Labor records to see how much inflation there has been since the early 1970s. I used the Consumer Price Index-All Urban Consumers because the DOL has numbers for this index all the way back to 1913. For ease of calculation I decided to compare the CPI number for January 1973 (midway through my time in law school) with the CPI number for September 2011, the start of the school year. The January 1973 number was 42.6. The number for September 2011 was 226.889. Doing a quick calculation tells us that $9200 in January 1973 is equal to $49,000 in today’s money. (See, algebra does come in handy in the real world.)
My first reaction was that $49,000 is about the same as today’s tuition of $50,275 – until I remembered that $49,000 represented three years of tuition, not just one. In other words, while the cost of living went up 430% from January 1973 to today, Yale Law School tuition went up over 1500%. In “real” terms, tuition more than tripled. The tuition I paid for three years wouldn’t cover even one year of tuition today. Which is, of course, ridiculous.
[ End of Part 1]
--------
* I have been wanting to write about increases in college tuition for quite a while. I have come to the realization that I am not going to be able to do one long post, which is what I wanted to do. So, I have decided to write several shorter posts that will hopefully tie together. This is the first.
** Laura Meckler, "College Grants Spared From Spending Cuts," The Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2011. Pell grants are grants (not loans) given by the federal government to college students, mostly to undergraduates, with financial need. For the 2011-2012 school year, the maximum Pell grant is $5,550 per year.
*** For 2011-2012 there are also administrative and activities fees of an additional $2,250, but I don’t know what those were back when I was there, so I will just look at “tuition”.
Comments