Graphs - Cost and Price

Ohio's independent colleges held the line on tuition increases this year, compared to their peers in the Midwest region.

While business officers at independent nonprofit colleges and universities worry about whether students will come and can afford to attend, at for-profit colleges the key concern is availability of tax money to support their businesses.

By redistributing its higher education funds to limit public-campus tuition increases and simulataneously slash need-based aid, the state of Ohio more than tripled the out-of-pocket tuition at the public baccalaureate campuses for its poorest citizens.

Ohio's independent colleges have worked to hold tuition levels down.

A major new study of graduations at public colleges and universities — including Ohio’s — offers further evidence of targeting student aid rather than tuition level in helping needy students complete their degrees. While net cost of attendance has no measurable effect in the graduation rates of well-off students seeking bachelor’s degrees in the public sector, it has a major, statistically significant effect on those with the least ability to pay and the greatest need for financial aid.

Although there are regional differences, the inflation rate of goods and services bought by colleges and universities for 2008-09 was half that of the previous year.

Ohio's independent colleges offer excellend value compared to their peers nationally.

Annual Rates of Change

Average Tuition and Fees at AICUO Member Institutions v. U.S. National Health Expenditures (1997 to 2007)

Sources: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group; AICUO Annual Tuition and Fees Survey

Broad-scale misunderstanding about higher education costs is one of the key problems colleges and universities face. In a Public Agenda/National Center on Public Policy on Higher Education survey, almost half of those polled thought that college prices were going up as fast as health care costs - a perception that is simply wrong.