Education Grants For Public Schools

College shopping? Check new lists of tuition costs

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Education released new and startling lists of public and private college tuition costs.

At the top of the College Affordability and Transparency List of four-year private schools?

Bates College here in Lewiston. Cost per academic year: $51,300.

At the top of the tuition list for four-year public schools is the main campus of Pennsylvania State University. Cost per year for in-state students: $14,416.

No one should make a college decision based on these listed costs alone because the federal agency’s method to quantify costs is not equal.

For instance, the cost listed for Bates includes room and board. The cost listed for Penn State does not, nor is there any information about the base tuition cost out-of-state students might expect to pay at this public university.

According to David Bergeron, the Education Department’s deputy assistant secretary for policy, planning and innovation, the information contained on the agency's multiple lists is useful as a starting comparative shopping point. It’s not the checkout line.

The lists and comparisons are definitely worth a look.

The lowest tuition for a private four-year college in the U.S. is zero dollars, at Webb Institute on the north shore of New York’s Long Island. The institute is a specialty engineering college for students interested in naval architecture and marine engineering. The market for students keen on designing the next America’s Cup yacht is pretty slim, though, which means the zero dollar tuition is attractive to an exceptionally limited audience.

The lowest tuition for a public four-year college in this country is Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas, at a cost of $430. This is also a niche school, with a 1,000-member student body of American Indians and Alaska natives focused on teaching, business administration and environmental sciences.

The more useful information on the highest-to-lowest lists is the net price of individual schools for an academic college year.

If the average amount of grants and scholarships is calculated into the annual cost, the highest-priced private four-year college in the country is the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, a multi-campus school of research and medicine, at a net cost of $24,192.

The national average net cost is $10,747.

The lowest net price tuition in the nation is Sitting Bull College on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota, at $938 per year, with a school enrollment of about 300 students.

2011 Lege Wrap Up: Vouchers « Texas Freedom Network

Tea Party, and religious-right and other anti-government fanatics launched full-scale attacks on public education, religious freedom and women’s health in the regular and special sessions of the Texas Legislature this year. Over the next week, TFN Insider will recap what happened on major TFN issues during the two sessions. Up today: private school vouchers.

Voucher advocates made two major efforts to pass an  enormously expensive scheme to drain billions of dollars from Texas public schools — a last-minute amendment to a major budget bill in the regular session and a stand-alone bill, HB 33 , in the special session. Both of those efforts to subsidize private and religious schools through so-called “taxpayer savings grants” failed in the face of solid opposition from TFN, our partners in the Coalition for Public Schools and other supporters of public education.

Opponents of diverting tax dollars from public schools to private and religious schools won a close but dramatic victory in the Texas House in 2005 . Then legislative support for voucher schemes essentially collapsed, with the House voting overwhelmingly in 2007 and 2009 against spending any public dollars on private school vouchers.

The only voucher bill filed early in this year’s regular session — SB 157 by Sen. Tommy Williams, R-The Woodlands — went nowhere. Then in mid-May, as the House struggled to pass budget bills that already included billions of dollars in cuts to public education, voucher advocates revealed a new scheme: “taxpayer savings grants” . Such grants would take tax dollars from public schools and use them to pay tuition for students who instead attend private or religious schools. Even data provided by the scheme’s supporters showed that billions of dollars would disappear — on top of the other deep cuts legislators were planning — from public education funding in Texas.

This last-minute proposal had appeared in no bill during the session and, as a result, had not been vetted by any legislative committee. Its supporters clearly hoped to avoid such scrutiny by attaching the scheme as an amendment to a key budget bill in the rush to pass legislation at the end of the session.

TFN and our partners in the Coalition for Public Schools immediately mobilized public education supporters across the state, urging them to call their legislators. We also made sure that legislators — Democrats and Republicans — were aware of this irresponsible sneak attack on neighborhoods public schools and its enormous potential costs. Opposition was so strong that the scheme’s supporters didn’t even bother to ask the full House for a vote on their amendment.

A cyclopedia of education

Lord Brougham on education

American public school law

Encyclopedia of American Education: A to E

Nature