College Costs and Self-Help Expenses

Mark Holmgren, David Bunting

Abstracts: College attendance costs are a continuous concern for students, parents, educators, and policymakers. However, most of these costs are unrelated to actual college attendance and instead reflect living costs from not working. For prospective low and middle income students the major barrier to college attendance is living costs since instructional costs are near zero after subtraction of financial aid. By confusing instructional costs with living costs, students routinely attribute their education debts to “high tuition” when 75 percent or more of this debt simply reflects personal maintenance costs during a four or five year withdrawal from the labor force.

Key words: college costs, self-help expenses