UA, ASU in “100 Best Value Colleges” list

by David Safier

I could play good-news/bad-news with this item all day. The Princeton Review has put UA and ASU in its top 100 list of the Best Value Colleges for 2010. 

Good news: Hey, you get good bang for your university buck in Arizona!

Bad news: If, after all our recent tuition hikes, we're still in the low range nationwide, that's a sorry statement about escalating college costs.

Good news: The criteria for selection included academic ratings as well as costs. "Academic ratings were based on student surveys about such issues as professors' accessibility and class sizes, as well as institutional reports about student-faculty ratios and percent of classes taught by teaching assistants." So our colleges fared reasonably well academically.

Bad news: We didn't break into the top ten public colleges list. After that, they aren't put in rank order, so AZ colleges could be anywhere from number 21 to 100.

Access to education is one of the hallmarks of a mobile society. I went to University of California for a pittance. I probably spent more for occasional lunches on campus than on tuition.Today, tuition is a serious burden.

Easy financial access to college increases a society's meritocracy, where the most talented are given the opportunity to rise to the top, regardless of their parents' income. When costs drive college enrollment, the rich hold onto their privilege by having access to more and better education.

A final good news/bad news item. It's not such a terrible thing for colleges to increase tuition costs if they have adequate financial aid packages. It makes sense for people with more money to get less in the way of state subsidies for their education. That's kind of like progressive taxation: progressive tuition. But if the financial aid money is limited for those with financial need, and it dries up as people's incomes approach middle class, that means fewer deserving students from poor families will be able to attend college, and the middle class will be squeezed unmercifully.