Check out this thought-provoking piece of reporting from NPR about where an undergraduate student's tuition dollars go and the debate over what should be included in calculating the cost of a student's education. Depending on who's answering that question, one can view tuition as terribly inflated or — if you count financial aid subsidies and the expenses of professors' research work as a part of each student's tuition — actually not high enough.
That latter argument is made in the piece by top officials at Duke University, which happens to be my alma mater. As a social sciences/humanities guy who didn't spend any time in a research lab, I probably fell into the camp of students for whom tuition was too high.
(As a personal aside, though, I thought Coach K's salary was worth every penny. Four national championships and the winningest coach in Division I? Priceless. Go Devils!)
