Lori Falce: High cost of college is no joke

My sister’s youngest child just graduated from high school, which means come fall, she will have two kids in college at the same time.

Teasing her about the campus visits and paperwork and packing and all of the costs was funny. Until I realized my son is 13. That puts me just five years away from being in the same boat.

What makes that decidedly not funny is what a difference five years will make.

The University of Pittsburgh adopted its 2021-22 tuition this week with a 2.5% increase. This means paying for a year at the Oakland campus will cost $19,092 for Pennsylvania students. Go to a branch campus like Greensburg or Johnstown, and you will pay $13,394.

Penn State is planning a similar increase after several years of across the board freezes or holding the line at some branch campuses. The hike would take a year at University Park up to $18,368.

The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education schools — like Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, where my niece and nephew will be matriculating — froze their tuition for the third consecutive year. That means just $7,716 a year. The last increase was just under 3% in 2018, after a 3.5% uptick in 2017, 2.5% in 2016 and 3.5% in 2015.

This means that if my kid opts to go to the most affordable option for higher education in the Pennsylvania, I can count on the bill for tuition likely hitting $38,539 before he pays for a single book and without having a dorm room. That’s before a single student fee and without paying for a meal plan.

And while my husband and I frequently joked about our kid following us to our own schools, a quick run down the math makes me hope that’s not what he wants. Penn State will top $88,000. If he went to La Roche like his dad, his senior year alone would cost more than all four at a PASSHE school.

If higher education keeps following the path it has, the five years between now and my son’s graduation are likely to mean an increase in total cost roughly equivalent to the down payment on a nice three-bedroom house in a good neighborhood.

It’s a scary proposition. Do I encourage my kid to take on years of debt? Do I let him take time after graduation to figure out what he actually wants to do? But the cost of a gap year could be thousands of dollars as the cost of that degree keeps climbing with annual increases.

He could be better off if I subtly nudge him away from the computer and science classes he enjoys and foster an interest in plumbing or welding. But is it fair to discourage him from doing what he wants because of the crippling price tag? After all, I went into journalism, which isn’t exactly known for its return on investment.

But when I first walked onto campus at Penn State, my tuition was just 44% of what it is today. My dream schools — Northwestern and Columbia — had tuition that made my mother blanch. Penn State and Pitt are now 50% higher than those schools cost then.

The biggest issue is that while that big ticket tuition might be perfect for a big ticket job, U.S. News and World Report ranks Penn State the fifth best school in the country for student counseling and top 20 for elementary, secondary and special education — all areas that will appreciate the knowledge but struggle to pay the bill.

I’m not laughing at my sister anymore. At the same time, I don’t want to scare my son away from the school or the career he wants. But if he decides carpentry is his passion more than robotics, I’m not going to be sad.