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Ohio University takes different stance than Ohio State, keeps Pride & Multicultural Centers open Ohio University President Lori Stewart Gonzalez addressed a student protest against Ohio Senate Bill 1. She said the university would not take any preemptive action on the bill's requirements because it is still going through the legislative process.

Americans are paying less for college, on average, than they were a decade ago. “That’s the good news,” Rose Horowitch writes. “The bad news is that no one seems to have heard the good news.” https://theatln.tc/N1vBSo1I

The idea that college is getting ever more unaffordable feels like a basic fact of American life. But this misconception comes from the idiosyncratic way in which college is priced: “Schools set a staggering official price that only a subset of the wealthiest students pay in full,” Horowitch explains. “There’s often a chasm between the published cost of attendance, or sticker price, and what people actually pay once financial aid is factored in, or the net price.”

The effect of this system “is most pronounced for low-income families, but middle- and upper-middle-income families receive substantial discounts too,” Horowitch writes. Only students whose families make more than about $300,000 a year and who attend private institutions with very large endowments pay more than they did a decade ago, one economics professor told Horowitch.

A mix of factors appears to explain these changes. In part, increases to the federal Pell Grant have limited out-of-pocket costs for low-income students. State appropriations have also rebounded for public universities since the Great Recession. And, Horowitch reports, colleges themselves appear to be offering more aid, accounting for more than 70 percent of all discounts.

Still, more Americans are saying that a degree isn’t worth the investment. “Colleges should do a better job advertising their value proposition, even as they stress that most people don’t pay the full sticker price,” Horowitch writes. But even when people learn how much they stand to earn with a degree, researchers have found that “just telling people the difference between sticker and net prices has been shown to have little effect on whether those people attend college.”

Higher education’s pricing model is probably not going anywhere. “It might not be long before we’re hearing about the rise of the $110,000 year of college—even as students are paying less than they do today,” Horowitch continues at the link in our bio.

🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

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