University costs can be difficult for native Americans to understand, let alone people who might be interested in attending university in the United States without having lived there before. If you’re interested in the United States as a potential option for your secondary education, it’s a good idea to know a little bit more about tuition. Here’s what you might want to know about how these colleges spend your tuition.
What Does $100 of Tuition Pay For?
There are a lot of ways you can look at the budget for a specific school, but budgets can be difficult to understand, at least partially because these budgets are so dramatic and wide-reaching. Instead, consider how a college may spend $100 of your money. This is how, on average, a college will split up $100.
- $15.81 – Salaries
- $15.58 – Hospitals and Healthcare
- $11.66 – Research
- $11.47 – General Instruction Expenses
- $9.61 – Auxiliary Student Enterprises
- $8.26 – Academic Support
- $8.15 – Institutional Support
- $6.25 – Other, Including Taxes and Liabilities
- $4.75 – Student Services
- $4.52 – Public Services
- $3.41 – Grants and Financial Aid
- $0.53 – Independent Operations
Salaries are at the top, but this is a common place for many organizations to be — some businesses dedicate as much as around 30% of their revenue to salaries. From this breakdown, you can see that $61.46 on average will go to direct education costs, whereas $38.54 on average goes to the more indirect costs.
Tuition for Public Versus Private Universities
Of course, this is an overarching observation and it doesn’t take into account one of the most important elements: the difference between public and private universities. Public and private universities spend their money differently, quite frankly; even when you consider the difference in tuition in general between the two, you can also note that they spend their money differently.
Consider salaries, which take up around $5,987.96 of every person’s yearly tuition at a public college and $15,315.08 at a private college. This would seem to make sense because private colleges take in much more money. However, if you look at things like grants to students, you’ll notice that a public college utilizes about $748.50, whereas the private college only dedicates $239.38.
Tuition Trends and How They’re Changing
Tuition trends are something that may change on a regular basis, but it’s always interesting to take a closer look at them. One significant change is tuition as a percentage of revenue for public universities. This has to do with how much revenue colleges take in as a whole, but it also has to do with your tuition.
In the year 2000, tuition made up only around 29.2% of a public university’s revenue on average. However, this has changed over the years. In 2018, it had increased more than 15 percentage points to 46.6%, corresponding with more than a 25% increase in tuition as a whole.
Conclusion
There are many different ways you may choose that you want to go to an American university for college. Regardless of what initially draws you to an American university for your college needs, it’s important that you’re able to maintain your university costs and even understand a little bit about where those costs go. With this information, you’ll at least be able to understand what American universities are doing with their money.
