Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education: A Brief History - Hardcover

by Bruce A. Kimball (Author), Sarah M. Iler (With)

Colleges and universities are richer than ever--so why has the price of attending them risen so much?

As endowments and fundraising campaigns have skyrocketed in recent decades, critics have attacked higher education for steeply increasing its production cost and price and the snowballing debt of students. In Wealth, Cost, and Price in American Higher Education, Bruce A. Kimball and Sarah M. Iler reveal how these trends began 150 years ago and why they have intensified in recent decades.

In the late nineteenth century, American colleges and universities began fiercely competing to expand their revenue, wealth, and production cost in order to increase their quality and prestige and serve the soaring number of students. From that era through today, the rising wealth and cost of higher education have continued to reinforce each other and spiral upward, increasing the heavily subsidized price paid by students. Kimball and Iler explain the strategy and reasoning that drove this wealth-cost double helix, the new tactics in fundraising and endowment investing that fueled it, and economists' efforts to understand it.

Using extensive archival, documentary, and quantitative research, Kimball and Iler trace the shifting public perception of higher education and its correlation with rising costs, stagnating wages, and explosive student debt. They show how stratification of wealth in higher education became tightly interwoven with wealth inequality in American society. This relationship raises fundamental questions about equity in US higher education and its contribution to social mobility and democracy.

Author Biography

Bruce A. Kimball (NEWTON, MA) is Emeritus Academy Professor at Ohio State University. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author of several award-winning books, including Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education and The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C. C. Langdell, 1826-1906. Sarah M. Iler (WAKE FOREST, NC) is adjunct professor of U.S. History at Columbus State Community College and Wake Technical Community College. She is the author or coauthor of essays on topics including the history of African American conservatism, the history of multicultural education, the history of liberal arts education, and the history of endowments in higher education.