As many Mount Holyoke students know, a tuition increase was announced after a Board of Trustees meeting on 7 March. The tuition for 2016-2017 will be $59,120, a 4.5 percent increase from the preceding year. Amazingly, Mount Holyoke’s tuition fees are even lower than many peer institutions. Tuition increases are necessary evils that reflect increasing costs and current inflation while at the same time many families’ incomes are not increasing enough to mitigate tuition increases and many students are leaving college saddled with more debt.

Many private institutions, however, are raising the costs of tuition above inflation in order to compete with peer institutions and maintain the best facilities, have the most available resources, and rank well on coveted ranking lists presented by Forbes and US News and World Report—these are simply two of the many sites that rank colleges based on performance. The rankings provide incentives for institutions to raise tuition due to a positive feedback loop where higher rankings, means more applicants, less acceptances, and less need to offer financial aid.

Are there solutions to tuition increases that require less systemic change than the improbable Education Reform? The U.S. education system needs to implement significant changes—students do not perform as well as many other wealthy countries, costs are far too high for too many families (including at public institutions), the whole system is biased towards white, wealthy, men through districting, allocation of resources, and the ability to pay the costs along the way that make incredible differences over time (such as attending private secondary school, ACT/SAT prep courses, application fees etc.). Smaller changes that institutions can implement include: changes in resource allocation, sharing resources across institutions, and a larger dialogue between the business mindset of the trustees and what the institutions really need (more on solutions here).

An interesting example of a private institution that did something entirely different by eliminating tuition for three years (2008-2011) was Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Although the free tuition was an incentive for people to come to the college after a prior closure, it reflected an entirely different solution to the growing costs of education by simply not creating costs (see the CBS article here). Antioch will not be ranked near Harvard or Yale in the near future, so institutions like Antioch need to create other incentives to draw in students that might be deciding between a more prestigious institution’s label and less post-graduate debt. Not every institution, especially larger ones will be able to offer no tuition, even tuition freezes are oftentimes unfeasible, but institutions can recognize that alternatives to the current inflation of tuition do indeed exist.

Does a college really need entirely new facilities in order to have more appealing photos in its brochure or on its website? If the facilities decrease costs over time then they might be a worthwhile investment, but if these facilities simply increase ratings at the expense of students’ and their families’ wallets then they are not as worthwhile. Eventually, too many people will be entirely unable to afford the large price tags of private institutions. Colleges are a microcosm of the capitalist world we live in—investment and expansion take precedence over equal access to higher education and the stresses tuition places on families. The exponential growth rate model of capitalism is unsustainable in so many ways ranging from the environment at-large to housing costs to higher education, specifically in the United States. Higher education institutions oftentimes lead the way in innovation, research, and progressive thinking, so why not lead the way in a new tuition and rankings model determined by economic efficiency and valuing faculty and students of all socioeconomic backgrounds alike, rather than superfluous investments in buildings or renowned individuals who the institutions can advertise on a brochure in order to demonstrate their exceptionalism true to American form.