Hey Brandeis,
If you checked your e-mail before 4:15pm today, you have seen the announcement about the increase in charges for the 2011-2012 academic year. According to Keenyn McFarlane, the Vice President for Enrollment, tuition, room and board, and other fees have been increased by 3.9 %. The “total charges,” which of course depends on your choice of housing and meal plan, is around $53,754.
$53,754. Wow. Brandeis is expensive!
To account for the raise in prices, the financial aid budget has been increased by 10.6% for the academic year. McFarlane says that two-thirds of Brandeis students receive some financial aid.
To help sweeten the deal, McFarlane mentions the $6 million upgrade to technology and the $3 – 3.5 million renovation of the pool.
What do you think? Does the technology upgrade and pool reopening demand such a high increase of tuition and other fees? Is Brandeis offering enough financial aid to everyone?
It’s obviously frustrating that the price of tuition is increasing. However, it’s typical for tuition to rise each year. Apparently UC Berkeley saw tuition increase by 32% last year
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/20/california-college-tuitio_n_365209.html
Mr. McFarlane is really missing the point with the percentage of students who receive financial aid; a much more useful number would be the actual cost to students (tuition, room, and board minus financial aid) but I assume that wouldn’t be a particularly flattering number.
My when my father went to college, tuition was 10% of his father’s salary, and my grandfather had a fourth-grade education and worked in aluminum. This was at a public school, but the point still stands. The most recent data I could find on household income was dated 2003 (I didn’t look particularly hard), and it stated that median household income was at 45k, or roughly Brandeis’ tuition. There’s really nothing Brandeis does for its students which justifies this kind of cost, and I don’t mean that as a slight at Brandeis. Most students would be far better served coming out of a public university–and even out-of-state universities are far cheaper than Brandeis–than attending Brandeis and coming out of school in massive debt.
This is obvious when you look at Brandeis’s student body. I wouldn’t say it’s priced itself out of the middle class yet, because many do believe in taking out huge loans to go there, and Brandeis is also fairly generous when it comes to merit aid (and to a lesser extend need-based aid). Ultimately, though, it’s a real shame that a university which was started with a commitment to social justice is losing both its ability to catalyze social mobility and the diverse student body necessary to inform a truly progressive campus.