Price and Quality
Quality of education is one of the most confusing things about American higher education. There are no good quality measures routinely reported. The most common education quality parameters actually work against the modern learner, especially adult learners.
Source: Your Future is Calling For example, it is clear from comparisons that the cost for a four-year graphic design major varies tremendously. At the low end of our example we have an annual cost of $6,914 per year at Columbia College versus $42,360 at Boston University.
To understand this dilemma, we need merely look at the premiere University in America today – Harvard University. Beside being the original American university with the largest financial endowment, Harvard is cited as the university giving the highest quality of education. Unfortunately, actual Harvard quality parameters cannot even be used by returning adult learners to make a choice.
When we boil it down, the two cited quality parameters most critical to our perception or quality are price and selectivity. Why? Because as an adult living in Kansas City, Missouri we do not have the time or resources to travel to Boston and take several days to visit the campus, talk to faculty and sit in one of the dozens of libraries this esteemed institution has on its campus.
Given this reality, it is important to examine what price and selectivity mean to the college selection decision. When it comes to price, we have a general set of beliefs that apply to nearly all purchase decisions. Unless we have direct experience with the product or service our general belief is that high price must mean high quality, otherwise why would people continue to pay for it? In general, this is not a bad assumption, especially for an institution that has been around for hundreds of years as Harvard University has been.
It is the inverse of the high price/high quality assumption that really hurts the average Joe or Jane when selecting a college. The inverse assumption is that low price (tuition) means low quality. Now before you come out of your shoes about low cost higher education stop and hear me out. There are very good higher education options that are available for one half to one third the tuition cost of Harvard. To consider them you have to know which colleges those are.
The point of this conversation about price and quality in American higher education is that these commonly cited quality indicators simply do not help the majority of adult learners returning for their education. In the end, these learners need far better information than price to make a quality decision. See Your Future is Calling for specifics.
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