A Look at Differential Tuition

In “Tools That Would Make STEM Degrees More Affordable Remain Unexamined” (Issues, Spring 2024), Dominique J. Baker makes important points regarding the state of college affordability for students pursuing STEM majors. As a fellow scholar of higher education finance, I wish to elaborate on the importance of disaggregating data within the broad fields of STEM due to differences in tuition charges and operating costs based on individual majors.

First, Baker notes that differential tuition is prevalent at public research universities, citing data indicating that just over half of all institutions charged differential tuition for at least one field of study in the 2015–16 academic year. I collected data on differential tuition policies across all public universities for 20 years and found that 56% of research universities and 27% of non-research universities charged differential tuition in engineering in the 2022–23 academic year, up from 23% and 7%, respectively, in 2003–04.

Differential tuition policies primarily affect programs located within engineering departments or colleges, with computer science programs also being frequently subject to differential tuition. There are two likely reasons why these programs most often charge higher tuition. The first is because student demand for these majors is strong and the market will bear higher charges. This is often why business schools choose to adopt differential tuition, and likely contributes to decisions to charge differential tuition in engineering and computer science.

The other reason is because engineering is the field with the highest instructional costs per student credit hour, based on research by Steven W. Hemelt and colleagues. They have estimated that the costs for electrical engineering are approximately twice as much as for mathematics and approximately 50% more than for STEM fields such as biology and computer science. Add in high operating expenses for research equipment and facilities, and it is not surprising that engineering programs often operate at a loss even with differential tuition.

The higher education community has become accustomed to detailed data on the debt and earnings of graduates by field of study, which has shown substantial variations in student outcomes within the broad umbrella of STEM fields. Yet there is also substantial variation by major in both the prices that students pay and the costs that universities face to educate students. Both of these areas deserve further attention from policymakers and researchers alike.

Robert Kelchen