Here’s a link which is probably not going to get anyone (except WSJ subscribers) anywhere: “More Students Subsidize Classmates’ Tuition.” But if you copy the lines quoted below into your browser, you should be able to get to the non-paywalled version.
Well-off students at private schools have long subsidized poorer classmates. But as states grapple with the rising cost of higher education, middle-income students at public colleges in a dozen states now pay a growing share of their tuition to aid those lower on the economic ladder.
The student subsidies, which are distributed based on need, don’t show up on most tuition bills. But in eight years they have climbed 174% in real dollars at a dozen flagship state universities surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.
During the 2012-13 academic year, students at these schools transferred $512,401,435 to less well-off classmates, up from $186,960,962, in inflation-adjusted figures, in the 2005-06 school year.
At private schools without large endowments, more than half of the tuition may be set aside for financial-aid scholarships. At public schools, set-asides range between 5% and 40% according to the Journal’s survey.
The article continues to provide specifics of the situation at various universities, as well as to quote parents and administrators opinion on the subject. This is something that’s always been very hidden — but encouragingly, some universities are now being open about it, due to political pressure, and in at least one instance cited by the WSJ, the University of Iowa, have ended the practice.
The money used in this manner goes under various names, the most prevalent being “tuition set-asides.” So I googled “University of Illinois” “tuition set-asides” and came across a link to a survey on the topic (which I can’t link to because it automatically opens up the document) with a few answers: in Florida, for instance, 30% of all tuition increases (since when?) are set aside as financial aid, and in Texas, 20% of tuition greater than $46/credit hour is set aside — but I came up empty on the University of Illinois. I tried their website, too, but couldn’t find anything about tuition policies or financials in general, really.
So this just leaves me even more irritated than when I initially wrote on the topic a while back, but more determined that, when my oldest (entering high school in the fall) starts looking at colleges, I’ll be a bit helicopter-parent (but it’s my money!) and make the necessary calls to at least try my best to force the schools under consideration to disclose how much of the tuition we pay is mandatory scholarships. Hey — at least it should be tax-deductible. . .
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