Study Shows College Spending Is Why Tuition Is Completely Unaffordable

Have you been racking your brain trying to figure out how in the heck college tuition has gotten so darn expensive over the past several years? A new study might help put things into perspective.

You’ve heard the sad story so often that by now you could write a country song to it. It goes something like this: The cost of higher education has dramatically skyrocketed over the past several years, and the devastating cost of this “investment” is compounded by the fact that an uncomfortable number of college graduates are forced to return to the restaurant or retail industries to work jobs they held in high school.

In an effort to understand why college costs are so dramatically high, Virginia commissioned a state board to analyze how the state’s public university expenses have changed over the past few decades.

The reason they found? In the words of MSN‘s Michaela Gianotti, “Your tuition is pricey because you basically live in a country club.”

According to the commission’s report, a very likely reason tuition is so high is because college spending on auxiliary services like housing, dining, and intercollegiate athletics has gone up.

Spending per student in Virginia has gone up 11 percent over the last decade, and auxiliary expenses have been cited as the biggest reason for the jump.

Even more disturbing, the findings of the commission’s first report seem to support a common criticism of colleges spending their money on non-essentials in order to increase their “competitiveness” — but as a cool place to hang out, not a place to get an education.

How many stories have we heard about lavish dorm rooms, climbing walls, self-serve ice cream machines, and, even in some cases, lazy rivers?

One big and problematic implication of the report’s findings is that politicians and lawmakers will use nonessential spending as an excuse to reduce public aid to colleges, which has also contributed to the problem of higher education costs.

But …

“Except for a few exceptions, at almost all institutions auxiliary services are bringing in more revenue than is being spent,” said Donna Desroches at the Delta Cost Project.

You can read more about Virginia’s college spending report here, but let us know what you think will solve the problem of higher tuition costs in this country in the comments below.

[Image via: Ken Drysdale / Shutterstock]