SOME IN THE ACADEMIC WORLD GET IT – AT 9:35 A.M. ET:  What?  Did I read this correctly?  A college is actually lowering tuition?  Leave us we should read on. 

And it's a well-known college at that – Sewanee, alma mater to several of our great and active Urgent Agenda readers.  From The New York Times:

For those who wonder how college tuition costs manage to keep rising year after year, apparently defying laws of economic gravity, Sewanee, a liberal arts college in Tennessee, has an answer: they can’t.

On Wednesday, Sewanee announced that it will cut its $46,000 annual bill for students by 10 percent in the fall.

The college, formally Sewanee: The University of the South, is betting that the drop in tuition — which at this point it can afford — will help it compete on two fronts: with the public universities that are siphoning off a growing share of the students it accepts, and with other private colleges where tuition is likely to increase by 4 to 5 percent this year, as it has for the last two years.

“The university has made a bold and perhaps risky move,” said John M. McCardell Jr., who became vice chancellor of Sewanee a year ago. “But given the realities of higher education in the current economy, we believe that some college or university needed to step up and say, ‘Enough.’ ”

Four cheers for Sewanee.  Too many colleges have become huge rackets, charging absurd prices that seem unrelated to the quality of the education they provide.  Incoming students watch as their revered institutions build all kinds of edifices and establish all manner of departments to suit this group or the other. 

(One prominent Urgent Agenda reader, himself an academic, said that if you want to really improve higher education, eliminate all departments whose names end with "studies.")

At the same time, colleges and universities apply for and receive heavy amounts of federal aid, without too many questions asked. 

If Americans generally have to cut back, then colleges have to cut back.  We hope Sewanee's step leads the way.

February 17, 2011