Apparently Yale does the same thing. http://www.yale.edu/admit/freshmen/financial_aid/index.html

Also, this doesn’t appear to apply for graduate students.

Funny you should mention the government… in this case it’s a private institution providing free education sans government incentives. If anything, the government incentivizes just the opposite, and encourages outrageous tuition costs through the student loan program. “It’s affordable, just get $50,000 in federal student aid! Enter the work force with massive debt!”

Just thought I’d mix it up a bit with a libertarian argument…. heh heh.

It’s a good point that you’re making. Stanford and Yale (and most other highly ranked schools) are private institutions, thus the government has no control over their tuition prices. It’s really quite interesting that a private institution has decided to do something like this…

However, I think TD’s point still stands: free education makes society better.

Adam, not quite. The incentive is that educational institutions don’t pay taxes yet get to benefit that society provides. Harvard has a gigantic endowment because it’s one of the largest landlords in boston. In fact, cambridge is perpetually locked in negotiations w harvard because it doesn’t have enough money to function as a city. BUT it still controls the building codes so the city won’t let harvard build something new unless they pay a bunch of extra money for the operation of the city.

On top of that the University collects money from federal grants and student aid as you mention. A true libertarian would argue that these organizations are suckling at the government teat.

It’s hard to argue that pell grants etc create an incentive to have higher tuition. Higher fees drive qualified students away.

Hey, I’m all for local government milking Harvard for all it’s worth, as long as said milking is constitutional. My guess is that in spite of (because of??) Harvard’s extensive land ownership there are few who could argue that Harvard isn’t good for the city economically speaking.

Also, I think you’re correct in saying that universities “suckle at the government’s teat.” Although in many regards I’m playing the devil’s advocate (let’s admit it, I’m getting gobs of money in student aid in pursuit of my master’s degree) I still think that there is evidence to show that student aid increases tuition costs. A fairly exhaustive study is available here:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa531.pdf
Although my own knowledge of economics is rudimentary I think that the findings of the study are at least worth consideration.

In the end, we all want universities that are devoted to both their students and to the cause of humanity. Right now, it seems that many are bloated, overly bureaucratic institutions with misguided goals. The question is whether government intervention represents a cause or cure.

I ran across this website run by an MIT prof: http://philip.greenspun.com/school/tuition-free-mit.html

It was written in the late 90’s, and it’s just sort of interesting.

[…] Tuition-Free MIT :: Comments for Stanford Post […]

Adam, unaware of that study. In the past it’s been hard for me to take the cato institute totally seriously but at least they lay out their bias before the article even starts. Rather than a summary as is the academic standard we are treated to an “Executive summary.” We’re immediately assaulted with a quote from fa hayek conveniently taken out of context. Hayek, if you’re not familiar gained traction for his advocacy of lassaiz faire capitalism.

I also find the general language to be odd.

I didn’t read the whole article but I found that the author failed to examine other exogenous factors. Such as the fact that tuition is going up because federal funding to educational institutions is going down. It draws a causal line firmly that I don’t think he has appropriate evidence to make.

Kim, the thing I like most about that article is that it advocates the destruction of most academic bureaucracy. The community colleges that I’ve attended were far better managed than stanford, harvard or mit maybe because they just didn’t have the budgets to employ hundreds of incompetent people.

Adam, re: government intervention being a cause or a cure. I think the question is how can government intervention be useful and what should it keep it’s nose out of. The original article seemed to intimate that stanford decided on it’s tuition policy after it was leaned on by the feds.

Academic bureaucracy is a huge problem. Several of my profs at UCD have noted that administration is growing, perhaps to the detriment of our “cheap”er tuition. As institutions grow, they tend to create a system that allows their perpetual growth…I don’t think its conscious, but it is inherent to systems. What students and faculty at universities should advocate is streamlining outside bureaucratic forces.

I thought that the MIT professor made some interesting points, and did a god job of trying to get out of the system himself by “paying” his students to attend class. He also makes a good point that by getting rid of tuition, MIT would be more competitive because it would be attracting better students.

I also think he made a good point when discussing if MIT’s education was really worth $100k, as compared to other schools whose tuition is far lower.