A new cost-assessment methodology unveiled last week offers colleges across the country a uniform way to explain their costs in per-student terms.
The National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) unveiled the results of their "Cost of College" project after three years of development.
The Cost of College project resulted from a call that the National Commission on the Cost of Higher Education made in 1998 to increase the public accountability of colleges and universities.
Damon Manetta, Assistant Manager of Public Relations at NACUBO, explained that the new methodology is not designed to create industry benchmarks.
"The NACUBO methodology is a paradigm for schools to simply and clearly summarize their financial information. Any college can use it through their own financial office and report the results as they see fit," Manetta said.
Dartmouth, however, has not yet subscribed to the NACUBO system.
"We are always interested in understanding our cost and revenue structures better," said Julie Dolan, associate vice president of fiscal affairs, noting that the College may consider utilizing the new methodology internally.
Adoption of the NACUBO system, however, would not influence decisions on how the College spends its money, she said.
"It could be useful for looking at some best practices or ways to highlight areas where we would want to explore ourselves a bit further, but we wouldn't want to develop our budget based on what other schools are doing. Dartmouth isn't average and we don't want to be," Dolan said.
She said that Dartmouth devises a budget that is based around issues of quality of the student experience rather than raw comparisons with the costs at other schools, which she considered "not particularly relevant."
"If that happens to cost us more than another place, so be it," she said.
The NACUBO study raises old questions about the expense of education, especially as Dartmouth plans to hike tuition by 4.5 percent next year.
Dolan explained that the primary reason for the larger-than-normal increase is this year's market downturn, which has depressed the return on Dartmouth's endowment and placed more pressure on the College's other main source of revenue, tuition.
The increase will not affect Dartmouth's need-blind admissions policy. According to Dolan, financial aid will be expanded to compensate for the rise in tuition.
Dolan also noted that it costs more to provide an undergraduate education than Dartmouth actually charges the student.
"Despite the fact that our tuition did go up, we try to keep those increases as low as we can. That is one reason why we are so thankful to all those alums and friends of Dartmouth out there who contribute," Dolan said.
A study testing out the new methodology supports this widespread claim that college sticker prices don't cover all costs to the institutions. At all 150 institutions where the methodology was tested, including Princeton, Harvard and Cornell, costs to the university exceeded what they charged the student.
Private four-year institutions like Dartmouth paid out as much as $20,000 more for each of their students than they charged in tuition. Public four-year institutions spent between $4,000 and $11,000 above tuition per student.
