Letter to The Wall Street Journal on "There's No Mystery to Soaring College Tuition"

September 14, 2005

Letters to the Editor
The Wall Street Journal
200 Liberty Street, 9^th Floor
New York, NY 10281
VIA E-MAIL

To the Editors:

At the risk of belaboring the discussion of college tuition prices, it is important that I respond to Richard Vedder’s continued obfuscation on this issue (“There’s No Mystery to Soaring College Tuition,” Sept. 14).  While Dr. Vedder is certainly entitled to his own opinion, he is not entitled to his own facts.

To reiterate: The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics asked two teams of respected scholars to closely examine the issue of college cost and price and their relationship to student financial aid, if any.  In 2002 those scholars issued two benchmark studies (Study of College Costs and Prices, 1988-89 to 1997-98, and What Students Pay for College: Changes in Net Price of College Attendance Between 1992-93 and 1999-2000) that found: a.) cuts in state appropriations were the greatest tuition driver at public institutions; and b.) simply no evidence of a relationship between tuition price increases and the availability of student financial aid from any source.  While Dr. Vedder may indeed possess a “more sophisticated analysis” on the topic of tuition increases, it evidently escaped two teams of researchers who examined every financial analysis and scrap of information on this subject.

I do represent and work with college and university presidents all around the country.  To a person, they are greatly concerned about the impact college prices may be having on access by low- and middle-income students, and they share Dr. Vedder’s interest in cost containment and rethinking our enterprise to meet student needs in the next century.  But if we are to make any progress on the issue of tuition price, we have to work with the facts as presented and not the facts as we would like them to be.

Sincerely,

David Ward
President
American Council on Education
Washington, DC

The American Council on Education is a trade association representing more than 1,800 college and university presidents in the United States.