I remember how it was -- JR
Tuition at these elite New England universities will hit eye-popping $90,000 a year this fall
"Soak the rich" prices
Several elite New England universities will cost students a jaw-dropping $90,000 a year beginning this fall — with more schools expected to follow suit, according to a report.
Boston University, Tufts, Wellesley, and Yale — among the top private colleges in the country — will begin charging the nearly six-figure sum a year for tuition, housing and other expenses, according to the schools’ admissions websites, The Boston Globe reported.
Just six years ago, families were in an uproar when the annual price at schools like BU, Tufts, Harvard and Amherst college all topped $70,000 — and costs have continued to skyrocket.
“There’s always a huge psychological impact to these thresholds,” Sandy Baum, senior fellow in the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, told The Globe. “I remember when it went above $50,000, and people were just in shock.”
A number of other Boston-area colleges have yet to update their already steep tuition and fees for the 2024-2025 academic year, but are also expected to raise their prices for the fall semester, according to the paper.
At Boston University, the price tag includes $66,670 in tuition, $19,020 for housing and food and the cost of books and other fees for a whopping total of $90,207 for the 2024-2025 academic year.
That represents a 42% jump from 10 years ago where the total cost was $63,644, The Globe reported.
Cost of attendance at Tufts in Medford will be $91,888, according to estimates on the school’s website. Yale University in New Haven, Conn. will cost $90,975 next year.
Other schools nearing the eye-popping $90,0000 threshold for the 2024-2025 school year include Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass. which costs $89,824; Amherst College in Amherst, Mass. at $88,210; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology at $85,960.
For the 2023-2024 academic year, Harvard charged $79,540 — which reportedly jumped to roughly $87,450 when expenses such as books were factored in. At Boston College, the all-in cost was $89,955 and Northeastern University was $86,821.
Fortunately, most students won’t be paying the full listing price thanks to financial aid and scholarships.
BU, for instance, will dish out $425 million in financial aid for the next academic year, school spokesperson Colin Riley told The Globe.
That need-based aid is “guaranteed for four years with BU Scholarship Assurance,” he said.
About 56% of BU’s students receive financial aid in some form, with the average aid package amounting to around $67,000, Riley said.
“Because this is an average, some of the neediest students paid $0, and others paid more,” he told the paper.
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More States Make Progress on School Choice
Several states are making progress empowering their citizens with access to education freedom and opportunity.
Earlier this month, Alabama became the 15th state in the nation to enact a program providing education savings accounts and the 10th state to enact universal education choice.
Last week, South Carolina and Louisiana took steps to become the 11th and 12th states to make every K-12 student eligible for education choice.
The South Carolina House of Representatives voted 69-32 on Wednesday to pass a bill to expand eligibility for the state’s education savings account policy to all K-12 students. Eligibility is currently limited only to students from low-income families.
South Carolina Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver celebrated the bill’s passage in the House, calling it “a HUGE step forward” in a post on X and “a win for students and families.”
That same day, the Louisiana Senate’s Education Committee voted 5-2 to advance a bill that would create a scholarship program called Louisiana Giving All True Opportunity to Rise, or LA GATOR.
The bill, SB 313, is sponsored by state Sen. Rick Edmonds and is the companion bill to HB 745 in the House, sponsored by state Rep. Julie Emerson. Both are Republicans.
Louisiana’s new Republican governor, Jeff Landry, campaigned on school choice and his education council proposed that state policymakers should, among other goals, “Ensure that parents are granted flexibility in their child’s education.”
Three other states also are making progress on school choice, although their proposals are not as robust as in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, or a dozen other states.
Wyoming
With Gov. Mark Gordon’s signature last week, Wyoming became the 16th state in the nation to adopt an education savings account policy. With an ESA, families may choose learning environments that align with their values and work best for their children.
In the Cowboy State, families will be eligible for $6,000 to use for private school tuition, tutoring, textbooks, school supplies, online learning, and more.
This is a small but significant step in the right direction. It could have been a much larger step, however.
The bill sent by the Legislature to the Republican governor made families eligible for an education savings account if they earned up to 500% of the federal poverty level, or $156,000 for a family of four. That’s the equivalent of the combined average salaries of a Wyoming firefighter married to a registered nurse.
However, Gordon used his line-item veto to modify the eligibility criteria so that families are eligible only if they earn no more than 150% of the federal poverty level, or just $46,800 for a family of four. That means that the typical nurse or firefighter alone wouldn’t qualify.
In his letter explaining his veto, Gordon said a provision of the Wyoming Constitution requires that such programs be limited to the poor. Article XVI, Section 6 states that neither the state nor any local government shall “[l]oan or give its credit or make donations to or in aid of any individual, association or corporation, except for necessary support of the poor.”
However, education savings accounts are neither loans nor donations, but rather a fulfillment of the state’s constitutional obligation to provide citizens with educational opportunities.
As Article I, Section 23 of the Wyoming Constitution declares: “The right of the citizens to opportunities for education should have practical recognition.” No other policy yet devised provides families with greater educational opportunities than education savings accounts.
Georgia
The Peach State is on the cusp of becoming the 17th state to offer education savings accounts.
Last year, 16 Republican state legislators voted against a bill to create education savings accounts. This year, eight of those recalcitrant Republicans switched their votes to support the education choice bill.
After the bill passed both chambers in slightly different forms, a conference committee resolved differences and sent the bill to Gov. Brian Kemp’s desk for his signature. Kemp is expected to sign it soon.
Unfortunately, the conference committee failed to fix the proposal’s flawed “failing schools” eligibility criteria.
The Georgia Promise Scholarship Act would limit eligibility to K-12 students assigned to the lowest-performing 25% of district schools in the state. As I noted earlier this month, the “failing schools” model for an eligibility mechanism is unsound:
First, a child’s access to a quality education should not depend on the average performance of a nearby district school. A school that is high performing on average nevertheless may not be the right fit for a particular child who is assigned to it.
Why should a child’s access to a quality education be dependent on the average level of performance of his or her peers in that school?
Second, the ‘failing schools’ model is unnecessarily confusing for parents. Parents often don’t know if they live in an area where their students are eligible.
Moreover, as district schools frequently move in and out of the bottom 25%, the eligible zones also will shift frequently, making it even harder for parents to keep track of which areas are eligible. It will be incumbent upon local school choice groups to ensure that families know about their education options.
Three years ago, Kansas state lawmakers changed eligibility for their state’s education choice policy from a “failing schools” model to a means-tested one, precisely for these reasons.
After learning this lesson in the school of experience, Georgia lawmakers probably will do likewise in the coming years.
New Hampshire
Earlier this month, the New Hampshire House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill to expand eligibility for the state’s Education Freedom Accounts.
Eligibility currently is limited to students from families earning up to 350% of the federal poverty level, or $109,200 for a family of four. Under HB 1665, sponsored by state Rep. Glenn Cordelli, a Republican, students from families earning up to 500% of the federal poverty level, or $156,000 for a family of four, would be eligible.
That’s about the equivalent of the income of a typical commercial pilot married to a typical school counselor in New Hampshire.
In his annual State of the State address, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, encouraged the state Legislature to send the bill to his desk in the state capital, Concord.
The state’s families, Sununu said, “are singing the praises of Concord for finally passing Education Freedom Accounts which are now ranked as the most effective and popular school choice program in America—and why passing HB 1665 to expand this program is a great opportunity for families.”
“Let’s get it done!” the governor urged.
Sununu is right to highlight the popularity of the education choice policy. According to the most recent monthly tracking poll by Morning Consult, education savings accounts have the support of two-thirds of Granite State citizens as well as three-fourths of parents of K-12 students.
New Hampshire parents are voting with their feet. Over the past academic year, the number of Education Freedom Accounts has grown a whopping 58%, from 3,025 accounts awarded in 2022-23 to 4,770 in 2023-24. That’s more growth per capita than any other state nationwide.
The state Senate will soon hear the bill, but local school choice advocates are concerned about rumors that some senators are looking to scale back the eligibility expansion. Such a move not only is unlikely to persuade any opponents of school choice to support Education Freedom Accounts, but it is also guaranteed to reduce public support.
In addition to souring supporters of the expansion bill who suddenly would discover that their children no longer were going to be eligible, studies repeatedly have shown that the public favors universal eligibility over targeted eligibility.
The organization EdChoice’s most recent Schooling in America survey found that 76% of the public supports education savings accounts that are available to all families, regardless of income, while only 54% support ESAs that are targeted based on financial need.
Some have argued for limiting program enrollment as a cost-saving measure, but—at best—that’s pennywise and pound foolish. The average value of an Education Freedom Account is currently $5,255, barely one-quarter of the average cost of over $20,000 per pupil enrolled in New Hampshire’s district schools.
Instead of curtailing the proposal, state lawmakers should go all in by making the education savings accounts available to all.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2024/03/26/more-states-make-progress-on-school-choice/
*******************************************Government hostility to religious schools
So it appears that, after several more years of consultation, reviews and inquiries, Australia’s communities of faith will once again be disregarded, cast aside and left to fend for themselves in the land “beyond the wall”.
For those unfamiliar with the imagery, it comes from George R. R. Martin’s popular (and confronting) Game of Thrones literary series. In it, a giant ice wall is built to protect the land of Westeros from the horrors of the wintry north – primarily from the legendary dead army that is rumoured to be on the move. The only problem is that there are still humans who live beyond the wall, simple people, unaffectionately known as “Wildlings”. They are a free folk, a proud folk, with deep history, but fundamentally seen as lesser and cut off from the riches and protections of the mainland.
Such it seems is the view of religious people in Australia at this current point in history. Not only are we largely seen as backward and archaic by the elite ruling class, holding onto outdated superstitious beliefs, but also face repeated legislative raiding parties into our communities by state governments and activist media elements (who I like to refer to as the “Night’s Watch”).
This mentality is perhaps most evident when it comes to faith-based higher education, of which I run but a humble chiefdom. We are a significant minority in the Westerosian university landscape, and the inequality is increasingly blatant. Our Wildling students are forced to pay as much as four times the HECS fees of the city dwellers (despite our institutions often outperforming theirs); we have no access to the Maesters’ citadel (research funding and block grants), and our land rights are rapidly being eroded.
Take the example of the Queensland anti-discrimination bill introduced into the state’s parliament this month which strips faith-based educational institutions of the ability to employ staff who share their religious ethos and values – arguably the most oppressive laws in the land. We thought that those in the northern realms might at least have some empathy, but perhaps their long summers have made them complacent towards their devout Wildling brothers and sisters.
We have always felt, however, that we would be able to endure, particularly when those in King’s landing reassured us that we were indeed an important part of Westeros. We would be respected and left in peace, and when it came down to it, they would ensure our protection and survival. Indeed, the kings and queens on the revolving blood-splattered chair of political swords would even sometimes praise us from afar as we educated their children, looked after their poor and took care of their aged.
However, it now seems that, despite all the promises from the Iron Throne, that the protections will not be forthcoming. The Hand of the King (Australian Law Reform Commission) has advised that exemptions for religious educational institutions in the Sex Discrimination Act should be removed. Additionally, the High King of the eight kingdoms has now also indicated the Religious Discrimination Bill is to be dropped. Roughly translated, this means the Wildlings and their backwards ways are condemned. The long, dark night is upon us.
It is no shame to say that we hold a healthy fear of the army of the dead, or in our case the waves of frozen-eyed lawyers primed to overwhelm our educational institutions with litigation. We have already seen internationally that most cases of religious freedom involve educational institutions – where communities of individual Wildlings who hold the sacred values of marriage, or maleness and femaleness, or that life is sacred, are cast out to wander the wilderness.
One idea that has been discussed in our villages is that perhaps we should all just attempt to clamber back over the wall into Westeros, tell our communities to walk out and enrol in the already underfed public schools south of the wall. I anticipate, however, that there would not be enough food to feed us all.
The real question, therefore, is: does the Iron Throne and its multitude of cunning advisers genuinely want diversity in Westeros? By that I mean diversity of perspectives, cultures and opinion. Or are they seeking a monoculture which ensures every inhabitant bends the knee to whoever controls the ideology of the day?
If it is the latter, then the free folk will always be a thorn in the side of any ruler. Whatever the Wildling tribe – whether it be Christian, Islamic, Judaic or just individuals who covet the free life – the reality is that they won’t ever bend the knee to anyone who is not the True King of Westeros and beyond. Our allegiance and salvation does not rest with men and women – thank God.
All we Wildlings really pray for is the opportunity to live in peace, to educate our young people, freely associate, and serve where our help is accepted. Unfortunately, in this current wintry climate beyond the wall, that is by no means assured.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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