RSS
Home
Do Illinois state colleges make the grade?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Across Illinois and across the country, high school seniors are filling out college applications and hoping they receive that big envelope in return a few weeks later.
For some of these seniors, money is no object; they will go to the best school regardless of cost. For most, however, cost and value are very real concerns and weigh heavily on the decision. That’s why the new report from the Illinois Policy Institute and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni could be very troubling for many seniors considering state schools.
In the report, Illinois receives failing grades in general education, intellectual diversity, governance, and—most importantly—cost and effectiveness. And, to be clear, it was only rated in those four categories.
Improving our universities is not out of the question, however, and this report should serve as a wake up call to Illinois legislators, to administrators at these universities, and to students,
For better or for worse, public universities, by virtue of getting taxpayer funding, have an advantage in competing against tuitions at private colleges in Illinois and colleges of other states. However, that advantage is fleeting. According to the report, “from 2002 to 2007, in-state tuition and fees jumped by an average of 56 percent” after adjusting for inflation.
The easy solution to enhance this “public advantage” would be to just throw money at the problem, but that has proven woefully ineffective, especially in the Money Award Program (MAP), designed to provide money to students who can’t afford college.
“In the last decade, tuition and fee hikes at the state’s major universities have almost entirely chewed up the aid provided through the MAP program,” according to Collin Hitt, the Director of Education Policy for the Illinois Policy Institute. Simply put, our state government, which is already facing massive deficits, cannot keep up.
Maybe, then, it is up to the universities to “keep down” by lowering costs—and there is a variety of ways to do this. Increased transparency, for one, would mean that universities post all their expenditures online, allowing the public to root out wasteful spending. Improving four-year graduation rates would also go a long way towards easing the burden on Illinois families. According to the report, only 2 of Illinois’s 10 public universities have rates over 64 percent for that category.
Six years ago, when I was deciding which college to attend, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was the clear choice when I considered cost, the quality of education, and, as a sports fan, overlooked the state of the football program
Even with the tuition increases since, it is still the best value for many students across Illinois. My younger brother, with a similar GPA and test scores to me, decided to go to the same school. The value was still best when he made his choice, but it was not as good as when I made mine.
How long is it before these rising costs drive increasing amount of high school seniors out of Illinois? If we’re lucky, that’s what they’ll choose—the alternative is not being able to afford college at all.
Michael Demkovich is a Marketing and Communications Associate with the Illinois Policy Institute.
Related Articles:
Comments
