Quizbank/Cost-benefit analysis/Data


Images edit

Click the caption to see a large version of the image.

  1. Student debt shown in red is currently $1.5 trillion. It is second only to home mortgages, and the fastest growing household debt shown in the figure.
  2. Government subsidies per full-time student should also be considered in calculating the cost of higher education (shown for the academic year 2017-18.)
  3. Tuition & fees shows the tuition and fees used to estimate the annual revenue a full-time student brings to a college or university.[1]
  4. Tuition, fees, room & board shows the annual total cost to attend college full time.
  5. Demographics can be used to estimate what fraction of the population is in a likely age bracket to attend college. Approximately 22 million people of in the US occupy the 5-year (20-24) age group. Take 30% of that number and we conclude that at least 6.6 million students are currently paying for an education. This is reasonably close to the estimate of 10 million full-time students used for our calculation.
  6. Graduation rates are shown for completing a degree within 4 or 6 years.
  7. Not available on Wikiversity is the image w:File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png. It suggests that about one third of adult in the US hold college degrees.[2]

Tables edit

This table estimates the total enrollment in US colleges to be about 20 million students.[3]

Year Fall enrollment Degree-granting institutions
(all postsecondary) (degree-granting) (total) (4-year) (2-year)
2010-11 21,591,742 21,019,438 4,599 2,870 1,729
2011-12 21,573,798 21,010,590 4,706 2,968 1,738
2012-13 21,148,181 20,644,478 4,726 3,026 1,700
2013-14 20,848,050 20,376,677 4,724 3,039 1,685
2014-15 20,664,180 20,209,092 4,627 3,011 1,616
2015-16 20,400,164 19,988,204 4,583 3,004 1,579
2016-17 20,224,069 19,841,014 4,360 2,832 1,528

A look at the revenues from local, state and federal governments, as well as from students gives us a rough idea of what it costs to educate a full-time college student for one year during the 2017-18 academic year.[4] But as discussed elsewhere, this estimate is not likely to accurately represent actual cost of teaching any given course.

Public   Private nonprofit   Private for-profit
$15,870 Fed State & Local   $8,430 Fed State & Local   $340 Fed State & Local
$7,700 Tuition and Fees   $22,400 Tuition and Fees   $16,800 Tuition and Fees
Combine tuition & fees, as well as local, state, and federal funding (2017-18 academic year)
$23,570 Public   $30,830 Private nonprofit   $17,140 Private for-profit

References & Footnotes edit


  1. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76 nces.ed.gov nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp
  2. https://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf
  3. nces.ed.gov and w:Special:Permalink/926514015#Statistics
  4. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cud.asp