Southwest Airlines likes to tout "Transfarency" as a welcome break from the price gouging typical to modern airlines. I wish Rice would do the same. Though I am graduating and won’t feel the effects of it, Rice has again decided to increase the cost of attendance. As the Thresher reported, next year’s cost of attendance is projected to exceed $61,000. This is egregious. Over my time as a student Rice has raise the cost of attendance multiple times, each time by increments over 3%. There is an essential lack of transparency and honesty surrounding the cost of attendance at Rice, spurred on by the same lack of transparency perfected in peer institutions. Despite increasing fees, my financial aid sits languidly at nothing. I was what you might call a middle achiever in high school: in a competitive school I eked out a resume just strong enough to have me admitted into Rice. Nagged by family troubles and never helped by my poor work ethic, I did not do well enough to earn scholarships. I remember when I received my acceptance to Rice and saw that it came with no scholarship or financial aid. I should pay $200,000, for four years!? I tossed it aside. Listen, my parents had worked hard to make sure they could cover my time in college, but they didn’t rob the treasury. We didn’t have such piles of cash sitting around for me, the middle of three children. It took a while for my parents to decide they would still support me financially if I chose to go to Rice, and longer still for me to look back over Rice as an option.
What really sucks is that we agreed as a family to attend Rice when it came in at $204,600 for four years. I struggled with deciding to attend Rice because the cost was beyond the edge of what we had considered reasonable, and that was four years ago. Following yearly surges in tuition prices, the cost of attendance will be over $61,000 for the fall semester of 2018. Projected four-year costs stand at $245,380, or $40,000 more than when I came into Rice. The 3.2% increase proposed for Fall 2018 significantly outpaces a U.S. inflation of 2.1% in 2017. The real cost of tuition is rising so fast that projected four-year costs grossly underestimate the real cost of attendance for students. Based on current incremental rises in cost of attendance year after year, the projected cost of attendance should well exceed $250,000 for students matriculating in 2018. Had the cost been so high back when I was deciding where to spend my years of higher education, I don’t think I would have made the decision to attend Rice. It is troubling, then, that when the cost of attendance was raised by approximately 3% repeatedly while attending, I could not stop it. The story I had been told, how much I was expecting Rice to cost, had changed without a single thing I could do about it. The real cost of four years was clearly obscured to my family and I as an incoming student. I had to stomach the increase costs, feeling quietly swindled out of greater and greater sums each year. My parents and I talked a bit about it, but what could we do? It’s not like I could refuse. Who would listen to me, or care for that matter? The only way to refuse the rate hikes is to drop out, or transfer, both not really options on the table. I had to accept it, thousands of extra dollars spent over my time at Rice, because the process was out of my control.
This practice is wrong. If a student is accepted into the institution with a projected cost of attendance, that cost should not rise during their four years. Students should be given the quoted cost of tuition. Treating students like trapped subjects, the university piles on unpalpable rate hikes. They are abusing their power and privilege to extort. Even if you do believe that elite universities should be charging students higher fees for attendance based on a degree’s projected return on investment, it is not fair to raise costs while a student is unable to negotiate terms. If the administration were a shepherd, they would be abusing the flock. For a tax-exempt organization, the administration acts awfully capitalist.
To combat unfair tuition hikes, students and parents should demand a fixed tuition, and room and board. At Rice, the college system creates a trap where room and board are more closely linked to cost of attendance than other universities, since most students live on campus for 3 of their 4 years. While I believe tuition hikes are unnecessary (and a byproduct of poor management of resource spending) they appear inevitable in the current climate. Tying costs of tuition and room and board to matriculation year ensures that students and parents get a fair deal. Projected costs of attendance on college websites treat tuition and room and board as fixed costs over time, despite a clear trend of increasing costs. This practice demonstrates a latent effort to obscure ultimately higher costs of attendance over time. The price a student comes in with should be the price they will leave with. It’s not a complex model to implement, and a significantly fairer one.
For the university itself, the model will serve to maintain alumni donations at a strong rate into the coming decades. By increasing tuition significantly over my time at Rice, while maintaining zero financial aid or scholarship, I have grown to resent the administration’s decisions. While I have felt utter respect from my professors, from the administration I feel gamed. Their dishonesty toward the cost of four years at Rice makes me critical of any fundraising by the university. Why should I donate to a system that took advantage of me? Who already took more than its fair share of money? I feel like I am pressed to pay more and more as a student, out of fear that I will not donate back to the university in the future. The very practice of tuition rising has written the future of my alumni contributions. Alumni relations encourages me to give back to the university. If the administration saw fit to take advantage of me when I had little power, then what is there to give back? Ill will? If the administration wants to encourage a sense of fiscal duty toward the institution and for alumni to donate in future years, they should freeze the cost of attendance for matriculating classes. Give people a fair deal. Keeping costs frozen will make students (and their parents) feel like they aren’t being swindled each year as the Thresher announces another huge increase in cost. Those in the fundraising arm of the university should hope for this, before receiving more and more polite “No.” s from alumni, myself included.