Connecticut College has made it into the news again— but for nothing unusual, just our price. For the umpteenth time since entering Conn, it has made another annual list of the most expensive colleges; this time, it was in a New York Times opinion blog, The Loyal Opposition (January 30, 2012).
“…You probably know that getting a Bachelor’s is insanely expensive,” writes columnist Andrew Rosenthal. “…But if you’re not in college, and don’t have a child who’s in college or getting ready to go, you might not have a terribly specific understanding of just how expensive ‘insanely expensive’ really is.”
After a few name drops (our peers—Bates, Middlebury and Colby— and similar schools like Union and Vassar) and the clarification that none of these schools are in the Ivy League (none of these schools, however, have been around for almost 400 years nor have endowments in the billions, like at Harvard or Yale), Rosenthal links to the Department of Education’s transparency website. He includes it to inform readers how to keep tabs on the most and least expensive schools. It has better uses, presenting me with critical information about our school.
There are the numbers that we know: at the start of fall 2010, there were 1,880 undergraduates enrolled on campus, just a stone’s throw from the oft-cited “a little under 2,000 students” statistic, and 196 full-time faculty members, giving us a student/faculty ratio of roughly 9.5:1.
There are the numbers that are unsurprising: 75% of the undergraduate population identifies as white, six percent Hispanic or Latino, four percent black and three percent Asian. (Zero percent identify as American Indian or Alaskan Native, but this may mean a statistically insignificant number of students identify as such.) Ninety-eight percent are under 24 and seventy-seven percent live out-of-state. Sixty percent are women, forty percent are male.
Then are the numbers that you have to dig a little deeper to find: tuition for the 2011-2012 academic year is $57,270 dollars, a 3.4 percent increase from last year ($55,410), and about a 9.7 percent increase from my freshman year, 2008-2009 ($51,685). (An interesting tidbit to go along with Libby Carberry’s article “The Connecticut College Housing Crisis”— the cost of room and board has increased at the most rapid rate, starting at $8,485 in the 2008-2009 academic year. It currently costs $10,980, a 20.4 percent increase from last year.)
Finally, there are the numbers we don’t often think about. During the 2009-2010 school year, approximately 800 students, 42 percent of Conn’s population, received financial aid, including 260 freshmen (52% of their class). At Conn, financial aid can include scholarship aid, grants, loans and work study. Conn’s website offers a more consistent set of statistics: 48% of students receive financial aid, and the average financial aid award is $32,708. It can be assumed that the other 52% of students take out independent loans, or pay full tuition.
Essentially, there is a large, unspoken gap between students: those whose family can pay in full for their education, and those whose family cannot.
This doesn’t seem evident on the surface: expenses amongst students are largely similar. We pay for snacks, alcohol, laundry, books and the occasional Cro pizza. In our mostly homogenous bubble, our daily activities are so similar that differences in economic standing can easily be ignored, or manifest itself solely in small social instances: someone offers to cover the check, a friend needs someone to spot them for coffee, the girl down the hall has no issue racking up parking tickets because she can easily pay them.
This dichotomy may affect us in more ways than one: the New York Times recently published an article about the growing education gap between socioeconomic classes (“Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show,” February 9, 2012).
The article cites the waning attention of any achievement gap between black and white students against the newfound interest of educational gaps between high-income and low-income students, due in part to the nationwide focus on income inequality.
According to a study by Stanford University sociologist Sean F. Reardon, the gap between high- and low-income students in standardized test scores has increased thirty to forty percent than in the 1960s; a little closer to home, another study released by the University of Michigan reported that the difference of college graduation between high- and low-income students has increased by fifty percent. The article notes that the most recent data presented in the studies was in 2007 and 2008, before the full effect of the recession.
There are several reasons to explain this correlation between high income and high achievement between school aged children, yet college seems to serve as an academic equalizer. There are no fancy tutors for hire. We all use the same books. At the end of the day, we are all receiving the same education, but our outcome may vary greatly: income remains the most telling indicator of success in the work force.
Conn’s allegiance to— and public love affair with— diversity is nothing to ignore. Diversity, however, is not limited to race and ethnicity: the numbers show that we have a vast socioeconomic diversity in our student body. Though it may not be as pretty to photograph, it presents itself with both benefits and challenges that are integral to everyone’s college experience. Why aren’t we talking about it?
