confronting costs
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Months after he resigned, the former president of Westfield State is now being sued for allegedly misusing school funds.
On Thursday, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley accused Evan Dobelle of spending nearly $100,000 on personal expenses and family vacations.
When you factor in the size of a school’s endowment and its ability to offer financial aid, it turns out, incoming full-time freshmen at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are paying more than their counterparts at Harvard. That’s according to the latest federal figures released by the Department of Education.
The sticker price at Pennsylvania State University runs about $30,000 a year for in-state students. At Swarthmore College, it’s nearly twice that. Yet Swarthmore ends up being cheaper for most students. That’s because this private liberal-arts college near Philadelphia offers many families a hefty discount, bringing down the average cost to even less than taxpayer-subsidized Penn State’s.
This kind of information used to be hard or impossible to find, because colleges don’t always want people knowing what they really cost—or that some families may be paying a lot less than others. But now the U.S. Department of Education collects this information, and we’re making it available in even more detail through our Tuition Tracker database.
The president didn’t say much about college affordability in his state of the union address this week, unlike in previous years, but some members of Congress are pushing the issue. U.S. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) introduced a bill Wednesday that would waive tuition at public universities. Instead, students would pay a percentage of their incomes after graduation.
