Total Cost To Attend A Top 50 Business School

Total Cost To Attend A Top 50 Business School by: Marc Ethier on December 12, 2016 | 4 Comments Comments 11,469 Views December 12, 2016Georgetown Universitys McDonough School of Business is the most expensive undergraduate business degreeA lot of fascinating numbers came out of PoetsQuants first in-house ranking of undergraduate business programs. There are the acceptance rates at the top 50 schools, and Class of 2014  alumni rated  their experiences at the schools on a host of key questions. Future articles will dive even more deeply into the investigative trove yielded by the survey results, including a look at student debt, SAT scores, and schools with the most students studying abroad and most study abroad options.Of particular interest to prospective B-school applicants — and, no doubt, their parents — is the total cost of four years of attendance, culminating in an undergraduate business degree, at each  of the 50 institutions. (PQ has compiled that inf ormation at the end of this article, listed by ranking, along with all available information on percentage of students with scholarships and average scholarship amount.) The range, depending on residency status, is anywhere from $71,058 to $279,190, with the low end representing  the cost of an education at Brigham Young Universitys Marriott School of Management — as long as you qualify in one very important category; more on that later — and the high end being the cost of attendance at Georgetown Universitys McDonough School of Business. (Marriott is 20th in the inaugural PQ ranking, while McDonough  is fourth.)PoetsQuants determined cost to include tuition and all university fees, as well as  room and board, transportation expenses, and  books and supplies. Tuition and fees can be calculated fairly easily; living expenses must be estimated. In most cases the schools themselves provided detailed estimates for the latter.HOW SCHOOLS DETERMINE TUITION AND FEES  Lynn WootenObviously, living expenses vary widely depending  on location. How, then, are tuition and fees determined? And what, exactly, are fees? Lynn Wooten,  senior associate dean for student and academic excellence at the University of Michigans Ross School of Business, tells PQ that for public schools at least, the profit motive is a nonfactor when it comes to determining how much undergrads pay to attend.Public school boards of trustees, or, in Rosss case, regents, look at the cost associated with producing a college education and try to say, Based on that cost, are we meeting that cost, and why do we need to increase it?' Wooten says. Traditional variables of cost — facilities, faculty, a huge infrastructure for information technology — all of those things go into it. People think college tuition has gone up a lot, but weve had some years at the undergraduate level where tuition hasnt gone up, and our regents are pretty conservative about trying to hold th e increase to minimal amounts — 4% or 5% increases. It really is driven by the cost to produce higher ed — thats  why youve seen tuition go up. Its not a profit motive.Rosss  tuition process, like that of most public schools, is driven by a budget model, Wooten says, beginning annually when the provosts office puts the budget together for the university as a whole. Based on that projected budget, she says, they will go to whomever the governing board is and say, OK, lets try to keep tuition steady, or this is why we want to raise tuition, and this is what we want to provide with that raised income. Or it may just be the cost of inflation.  One of the reasons why tuition has gone up a lot overall at universities is the infrastructure to run campuses, everything from study-abroad offices to career services, to libraries and IT support.And those ever-present fees? Fees are just nominal administrative fees, Wooten says. They can be associated with anything from †” depending on how the budget model works — things that relate to legal services, to student government fees, to registration fees. For example, for 2016-17, Rosss  fee was about $328. It had four major components: a registration fee to run the registrars office; a student government fee, and we give a lot of that money back to student clubs; legal services; and then a sport-and-rec fee — we have pretty good intramural sport and recreation buildings here.NOT A MATTER OF KEEPING UP WITH THE KELLEYS (OR FISHERS, OR CARLSONS )Rosss total cost  falls near the middle of the spectrum of PQs top 50: $132,856 for in-state residents, $197,688 for out-of-state. Nor is Ross an outlier in comparison with its Midwestern public-school neighbors. The  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign costs more, $142,840/$205,328, while  Ohio State Fisher ($86,812/$159,580), Indiana Kelley ($83,565/$173,362), Wisconsin-Madison ($91,738/$183,137), and Minnesota Carlson ($118,731/$ 152,411) are not significantly cheaper. Michigan State  Broad, meanwhile, is cheaper for in-state students ($114,202) but more expensive for out-of-state ($211,695).Ross  is 10th in the new PQ ranking, while Kelley is seventh, Carlson 12th, Illinois 23rd, Wisconsin 29th, Broad 38th, and Fisher 41st, so cost has little bearing on overall rankings. Moreover, Wooten says, what its peer schools charge has no impact on what Ross charges — at least at the undergraduate level.Usually what (other schools)  charge wont go into our  calculations, because for  public institutions, the tuition dollars are based upon that particular state and how much allocation each institution will get from its government, Wooten  says. At the MBA level and many graduate-school levels, yes, people will look at peer schools for tuition, but the undergraduate tuition is not determined by peer business schools — its university by university.WHATS THE LONG-TERM ROI?Lynn Wooten never reall y left college. She got her undergraduate degree  from North Carolina AT State University in 1988, her MBA from Duke Fuqua in 1990, and her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1995. Besides  a stint at the University of Floridas Warrington College of Business, Wooten has been at Michigan since the early 1990s. Moreover, Ive been in this profession all my life, she says. I went to college and went straight through. So after many years in the classroom and the last five  as Ross associate dean of undergraduate programs,  shes seen all the ups and downs and ins and outs of college life and knows the questions all prospective business students must ask themselves when it comes to financing their education.First I usually say to people, How do you want to finance your degree? Are you going to finance it by savings, scholarship, loans? And then you have to think about why you are going to university — is it going to be a transformational experience for you that in some ways justifies that cost? she asks. And then the component that I think everyone wants to consider: What will be my long-term return on investment? And there are some polls that look at the ROI on the college investment. Do you get it back from the work experiences and the things you learn?And so those are things that are pretty important. Page 1 of 3123 »