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Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much, With a New Preface Revised Edition
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America’s colleges and universities are the best in the world. They are also the most expensive. Tuition has risen faster than the rate of inflation for the past thirty years. There is no indication that this trend will abate.
Ronald G. Ehrenberg explores the causes of this tuition inflation, drawing on his many years as a teacher and researcher of the economics of higher education and as a senior administrator at Cornell University. Using incidents and examples from his own experience, he discusses a wide range of topics including endowment policies, admissions and financial aid policies, the funding of research, tenure and the end of mandatory retirement, information technology, libraries and distance learning, student housing, and intercollegiate athletics.
He shows that colleges and universities, having multiple, relatively independent constituencies, suffer from ineffective central control of their costs. And in a fascinating analysis of their response to the ratings published by magazines such as U.S. News & World Report, he shows how they engage in a dysfunctional competition for students.
In the short run, colleges and universities have little need to worry about rising tuitions, since the number of qualified students applying for entrance is rising even faster. But in the long run, it is not at all clear that the increases can be sustained. Ehrenberg concludes by proposing a set of policies to slow the institutions’ rising tuitions without damaging their quality.
- ISBN-100674009886
- ISBN-13978-0674009882
- EditionRevised
- PublisherHarvard University Press
- Publication dateOctober 30, 2002
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions6.24 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
- Print length336 pages
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Editorial Reviews
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“A thorough book on the behind-the-scenes and publicly-acknowledged factors for tuition increases at our nation’s 3,600 public and private universities. The author offers recommendations on how colleges can hold down costs such as sharing of resources and for specialized courses to be simultaneously taught at multiple institutions.”―California Education News
“[Ehrenberg] argues that colleges are risk-averse and slow to react to market pressures, traits that serve to keep tuition high. Another factor affecting tuition in recent years, Ehrenberg writes, is that colleges have felt pressure to follow other professions in which salaries are rising in return for greater productivity. ‘Faculty productivity tends not to increase over time,’ he says. ‘If you want to give faculty salary increases, you have to generate outside revenue or raise tuition. And universities have not been good at generating outside revenue.’”―Andrew Brownstein, Chronicle of Higher Education
“Why is college so expensive? Ronald Ehrenberg has an answer. The short version: Elite universities want to excel at everything they do, and excellence is expensive. The complete answer would fill a book. In fact, it has. Ehrenberg’s Tuition Rising: Why College Costs So Much exposes the forces that drive up tuition and reveals how hard it is for administrators to slow the ascent.”―Cornell Magazine
“Ehrenberg has written a book about the economics of institutions of higher education that will be clear and understandable to the general public. With great care and thought he addresses the issues that drive the costs of colleges and universities. I recommend it to parents, faculty, policy makers, trustees, and even to those running our educational institutions.”―Michael A. Baer, Senior Vice President for Programs and Analysis, American Council on Education
“Economists are sometimes accused of possessing ‘an irrational passion for dispassionate rationality.’ This book describes what a first-rate economist learned in trying to introduce greater rationality to the decision-making of a great university, a place that emerges as passionate and ambitious, but markedly reluctant to make hard choices. The account is sobering, illuminating, and immensely entertaining. Both those who love universities and those who love rationality will enjoy this book.”―Michael McPherson, President, Macalester College
“Ron Ehrenberg’s comprehensive and important analysis of rising college costs is based on both his professional expertise as an economist and his practical experience as a member of the central administration at one university: Cornell. With insight, candor, and rigor he examines the ‘arms race’ among selective universities, reviewing the role of each of the major participants―trustees, presidents, deans, faculty, local, state and federal governments, and, not least, tuition-paying students―in ratcheting up the level of tuition. Pointing to the fate of hospitals and medical centers, he cautions that self-regulation and institutional restraint are needed to prevent loss of public confidence and possible federal regulation. This book deserves widespread attention, both within the academic community and beyond it.”―Frank Rhodes, former President, Cornell University
“Balanced, sensible, and informed, Tuition Rising is a valuable addition to the literature on higher education. Giving the reader a lot of very useful empirical analysis, Ehrenberg demonstrates the value of being an economist. Anyone about to become a college administrator will want to read this book with great care.”―Henry Rosovsky, former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, and author of The University: An Owner’s Manual
“Ehrenberg demonstrates in convincing detail that private universities do not easily make economically efficient choices. The culprits are variously loose budget constraints, relatively little hierarchical authority, decentralized units that do not share the universities’ goals, poor institutional design, poor public policies, political vulnerability, and the pious blindness of faculty. Tuition Rising is interesting, well-argued, and provocative. It ought to he required reading for presidents, provosts, and trustees of elite private research universities.”―Michael Rothschild, Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University
“What makes Tuition Rising so valuable and so much fun is its combination of facts, analysis, and administrative war stories. So, for instance, the importance to a college of national rankings, like U.S. News’s, is supported by careful econometric analysis (kept in the background, as are all technical jargon and argument), put under a microscope to understand the reasons for their often-quirky rankings, and then followed into Cornell’s business school to see how ‘managing to the rankings’―the collegiate version of ‘teaching to the test’―can make sensible university-wide administration very difficult.”―Gordon Winston, Professor of Economics, Williams College
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Harvard University Press; Revised edition (October 30, 2002)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 336 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0674009886
- ISBN-13 : 978-0674009882
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.24 x 0.9 x 9.2 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #657,030 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #66 in College & Education Costs
- #377 in Education Funding (Books)
- #19,800 in Unknown
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Ronald G. Ehrenberg is the Irving M. Ives Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Economics at Cornell University and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow. He also is the Director of the Cornell Higher Education Research Institute. He was an elected member of the Cornell University Board of Trustees (2006-2010) and was appointed by Governor Paterson and then confirmed by the New York State Senate to be a member of the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York (SUNY)from 2010-2013.
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The title is a little misleading: The book is not only about tuition but about every source of revenue and every expense that a university or college faces. Ehrenberg thus presents a complex analysis, though in terms that any attentive reader can understand. This is no small achievement. The anecdotes of his experiences at Cornell really make this book fascinating to read, but do not rob it of its general applicability.
I've worked at an institution of higher education not that much different from Cornell for more than 20 years, and I learned a lot from reading this book. I'd like to give it to every member of the faculty and staff at my school so that they would understand better the constraints under which we all operate -- and have a healthier sense too of the challenges to come. Legislators and parents (and students too) ought to learn from it. It is going to take more than one constituency working together to fix the problem he describes.
Unlike another reviewer here, I did not see this book at all as an attempt to justify high college expenses but to explain them. Ehrenberg is very clear that many factors are to blame: from federal policies on financial aid and the reimbursement of indirect research expenses to recalcitrant faculty members who lack the will to cut anything from their budgets, from the increasingly popular college ratings game to local activists who distrust any activity the nonprofit-in-their midst undertakes. He even occasionally includes himself among the culprits. He writes about everything from the problematic combination of voluntary retirement and lifelong tenure to misconceptions about the cost of Title IX. The chapter on parking is alone worth the price of the book. Who knew how much a parking space costs to maintain each year? Read the book, and you will find out.
One myth that this book should explode is that universities are not competitive. Ehrenberg points out, accurately, that universities and colleges are in a kind of "arms race" for prestige and for the best students and faculty. There is not a sufficient brake of price pressure to rein in the increasing costs that this race involves. The price of a college education is also not well understood because of the effect of financial aid, and education is one of those sectors of the economy that is less able than others to take advantage of productivity gains. It will be interesting to see what comes in the years ahead as the pressure to reduce expenses in higher education grows. This book is an excellent place to start in understanding this challenge.
In looking toward the future, I do have one small criticism. This book was first published in 2000; it was revised and a new preface added in 2002. But most of the evidence and discussion is based on research from the 1990s. College finances are constantly changing, so there are some parts of the analysis that are dated. For example, US News and World Report has already altered some of the criteria that Ehrenberg criticizes here (e.g., the report of yield rates), so his analysis of the effects of the ratings is a little out of date. There are, I'm sure, other examples. I wish that he would revise it again, but perhaps that would be asking for a different book.
This is a useful way of proceeding, for universities are not anxious to share the specific details of their budgets and do not often explain the private negotiations (or maneuvers) that serve as the backdrop for their public actions.
The book is conservative in the sense that it is largely accepting of `the way things are', though it offers suggestions for efficiencies or more rational ways of proceeding at the margins. The principal cause of the rise in college costs is the academic `arms race' in which the top universities compete with one another for the best faculty, the best students, the best programs and the best facilities. That competition drives up costs. It is aided by certain forms of federal support, by plentiful endowments, dramatic developments in information technology, increased student applications and conscious policies (need-blind admissions, e.g.). The federal government is a player here, of course, with increased regulation, reduced coverage of indirect costs, Title IX and the prohibition of fixed retirement ages.
If one wants a general account of what has transpired since the early 70's, with some interesting details with regard to Cornell, this is a fine book. The author is aware, of course, that he is only describing a tiny subset of U.S. higher education, but it is that subset which often draws the most attention.
He does not address sensitive political issues and he does not address the common elements (which contribute to the rise of costs) across the spectrum of private institutions (though he does give some attention to public education, particularly those elements of public education which offer competition to the upper tier of institutions). There are many, many things which exist on college campuses which did not exist there in the 1950's or 1960's. Are they necessary? If not necessary, should they be high priorities? Would students/parents opt for them if given a choice?
There is virtually nothing on for-profit higher education, which avoids many of the costs that campuses incur. Is the difference in `experience' provided by traditional campuses worth the price? Is there some hybrid model that we should be considering?




