Fordham Rises in Wrong Rankings

How much is a quality college education worth today?  Now more than ever, prospective students ponder this question as they tour college campuses and try to decide if they can afford the leafy gothic campus of their dreams or if the red brick campus a couple towns away is just as good.

The bad news is that this decision is not getting any easier.  Every year, CampusGrotto.com releases a list of the top 100 most expensive colleges in the country, and Fordham has been steadily rising in this regard.  For the 2010-2011 academic year, Fordham University at Rose Hill made the list at number 29 in the country, with annual tuition and housing coming in at approximately $52,036 (which is a jump of 24 spots from the previous academic year).  Fordham's Lincoln Center campus went even higher, moving from 47 to 23 this year with a cost of $52,159.

Aside from the total cost, The Huffington Post reports that Fordham's dormitories at Lincoln Center and Rose Hill are the fourth and fifth-most expensive in the country, respectively.  This may be due to New York City, but the fact that Fordham ranks so high among such costly company is cause for reflection.

It is worth noting that Fordham is not alone in these price increases.  Tuition at private universities nationwide went up by an average of 4.5 percent, even managing to fare significantly better than their public counterparts who saw tuition rise by an average of 7.9 percent.  Hurt by substantial drops in their endowments and a sluggish economic recovery, it is probably something of a miracle that tuition did not increase more than it did.

What does this mean to Fordham's students, and where is all that money going?  As learning environments first and foremost, private universities like Fordham must place their primary focus within the classroom, and they usually spend over a quarter of a student's tuition on instruction and retaining quality faculty.  CampusGrotto.com estimates that the next-highest portion of tuition is spent on student services, which include things like financial aid, student organizations, campus activities and career counseling services.  The rest is divvied up between regular university costs, such as research, scholarships, security, public service and operations and maintenance (someone has to pay for those new flowers and pristinely trimmed hedges).  Clearly, there are plenty of costs to go around.

Although many students will be vexed by the continued increases in these prices, this does not necessarily mean that students are paying more out-of-pocket every year.  In fact, the New York Times found that, taking into account the net-inflation adjusted price, students are on-average paying less now than they were five years ago.  This is largely due to huge increases in the amount of scholarships, grants and loans that universities are giving out as their prices increase.  Fordham gave out more than $125 million in financial aid and scholarships to its students last year, and almost 90 percent of students receive some form of financial aid or scholarship funds.

As a Jesuit school founded on the principle of equality through a quality education, it is essential that Fordham continue to increase such student aid, particularly in times when costs are rising so quickly.  The school's rising costs in comparison to other universities only make such needs all the more obvious.  Despite taking in record new amounts, there are many areas that still need to be addressed, including the glaring lack of a full 24-hour section of the library and the continued closure of the Walsh gate during daytime hours.

These issues notwithstanding, Fordham's continued rise in academic stature and its ascension to national prominence seem to demonstrate that the school may be charging more, but is generally spending wisely.  Fordham made the list of most expensive schools for a reason, now it is up to the administration to continue to make the progress that such high spending entails.

Matthew Arth, GSB '11, is a marketing major and economics minor from Southlake, Texas.