With High Tuition and Declining Public Funding, Higher Education In the US Costs Much More Than In Other Countries
As governments have cut spending on higher education, public and private higher-ed institutions have kept hiking their tuition, forcing students to shoulder the high cost of pursuing a degree.
This chart, which accompanies the OECD data cited in this post, shows the wide gap between tuition paid by students here in the U.S. and students everywhere else in the world.
As US state governments have cut spending on higher education, higher-ed institutions have hiked up their tuition, forcing students to shoulder more of the cost of pursuing a degree. According to the Urban Institute, tuition "grew from 19 percent of higher education expenditures in 1977 to 31 percent in 2017. Tuition as a percentage of higher education spending grew in part because state direct appropriations per student declined. That is, state and local spending on higher education increased over the period in large part because tuition payments increased."
The Urban Institute's analysis was based on an Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report on education.
A column in Forbes, based on the same data, noted that "In countries where the government picks up most of the bill for higher education, spending per student is usually much lower." The OECD data show that US universities spend $30,165 yearly per full-time student. The Forbes column suggests that "Congress could rein in the blank-check federal student aid programs that facilitated tuition increases in the first place, forcing colleges to live within students’ and taxpayers’ means." Many of those "blank-check" programs are actually loans, with interest that increase the cost of education even more.
None of these costs include room and board, which students must pay -- or borrow to pay.
Compared to Other Nations
According to the OECD data, in 2017-18 US private institutions charged $29,478 annual tuition -- far more than those of other rich countries, which all charge under $10,000. Tuition at public institutions in the US was $8,000 -- again higher than all other rich countries.
In 2017 the United States spent $34,500 per FTE student, twice as high as the $17,100 average spending of OECD member countries, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, citing the OECD report mentioned above.
US universities' spending of $30,165 yearly per full-time students is almost twice the average of $15,556 that other rich countries spent, according to the OECD data.