Was reading this article on the NYT about the cost/benefit of various schools. Started looking up tuition of the various schools I've been visiting.

• Carnegie Mellon - $40,300/yr


• Harvard - $50,250/yr


• MIT - $36,390/yr


• Northeastern - $34,950/yr

Obviously many of these schools have generous financial aid for middle class parents based on their large endowments. However I went to a public school, Penn State, and I remember paying about $5,200/yr for my tuition, and when you include various other books and cost of living, I got out of there with about $17k in loans, which seemed enormous at the time. And yet, less than half a semester at the cheapest school above, and trivial to pay off compared with some of the debt discussed in the NYT article.

The postscript to this is that PSU's tuition has been skyrocketing the last decade. They have the historical tuition on file, actually, and you can see that I was indeed paying about $5,200/yr. But current rates are at an astounding $12,284/yr now. Wow! You can actually find an interesting budget task force report from 2002, whose recommendations were to start phasing in large tuition increases for incoming students, with attention to campus differentials to manage costs vs. student demand. Interesting stuff.