The UW runs a very expensive canoe trip.
700 students pack into a Biology 180 class at the University of Washington these days, reports the Seattle Times. TAs are assigned 60 students each. Students get clickers for real-time pop quizzes. There are weekly, short-answer online exams that are made anonymous and returned to the students so they can correct a classmates’ test.
Undergraduate tuition for state residents for 2009-10 is $7,125 not including fees. (In 1996, UW tuition was $3,136, up from $2,178 in 1991.) The latest increase was a double-digit percentage, but in general increases of four to five percent have come along every few years, giving everyone an instructive course in the power of compound interest, and what happens when you key tuition value to a “market rate” generated by a feedback loop.
This seems to explain why Washington state got an “F” in affordability from the 2008 Measuring Up report on higher education.
The report notes that in the U.S., higher education costs have risen 439 percent since 1982, which is more than medical care (251 percent) and certainly more than the Consumer Price Index (106 percent). In contrast, the median family income rose 107 percent in the same time period, and from 1997 to 2006, the number of students borrowing via Stafford loans grew by 33 percent (total loan dollars doubled).
Mortgage interest rates are five percent, but a student loan will run you 5.6 percent (which is down from 6.8 percent in 2008). The government seems to express a slight preference that you buy a house than go to college. No one is trotting out a higher education reform package.
