[School Stories] Choose Your College Based on Tuition

To choose something, you need to look carefully at what you must give up. That is true when buying clothes and when choosing a house. Among the factors involved, price is especially important. The same should apply when choosing a college. You should choose to go to college only when, after carefully weighing both the income you will forgo while attending college and the tuition you must pay, you conclude that going to college is the better option.

In reality, however, tuition is often only a secondary consideration for people in our country. Our attitude is to get into college first, whatever the tuition may be. Then we worry about the tuition afterward. It is like buying something unconditionally and only later worrying about how to pay for it.

It is not only students who are dissatisfied with tuition. University administrators, who must run their schools on that money, also complain that they do not have enough. To secure capable professors, they must raise faculty salaries, and to prevent strikes by staff, they must raise their wages as well. They must improve classrooms and install air-conditioning. Since they cannot spend hundreds of billions or even trillions of won all at once, they also need reserve funds to build up savings over time. Unless someone is embezzling money, tuition is used directly for professors and staff, as well as for facilities and other expenses for students.

Of course, unnecessary costs can arise. The university may be paying employees who are not really needed, and incompetent professors may be drawing salaries as if nothing were wrong. But no one can know for certain what is unnecessary. Only through competition does it become clear where restructuring is needed.

Many students say the government should give money to universities to lower tuition. But that is the same as asking the public to pay more in taxes. Unless someone pays those taxes—or unless money that would otherwise go to helping the poor or building social overhead capital such as roads and subways is reduced—the government cannot increase what it gives to universities. Is it really proper to make other citizens bear, through taxes, the tuition burden of college students whose futures are still bright?

What we should do is consider tuition levels when choosing a college. Do not choose schools whose tuition is expensive relative to the quality of what they teach. Only then will universities seriously think about tuition.

We must also allow greater autonomy in establishing universities and in setting university enrollment quotas so that universities compete fiercely with one another. Only when competition among universities becomes intense will they reduce unnecessary spending and keep tuition, the price of education, at the lowest possible level.

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Original title: [학교이야기] 등록금을 따져서 대학을 선택하라

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2008-06-30

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=18&idx=10717