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The U.S. Department of Education this week unveiled what may be one of the Department’s few publications of real interest to the general public: its list of most expensive colleges in the country. As Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan puts it, “Its real purpose is to keep us up-to-date on who to make fun of.”
Well America will not be disappointed. Topping the list this year is the $51,300 a year Bates College. Next up is the $51,115 Connecticut College. That’s followed by Middlebury College, which costs $50,780 a year.
These East Coast liberal-arts schools are no surprise. Most expensive doesn’t necessarily mean most prestigious, however. The sixth most expensive college in America, for instance, is Sanford-Brown College, which costs $45,628 a year. That’s more expensive than Columbia.
You’ve never heard of Sanford-Brown? Well that’s because it’s a for-profit college that only dates from the 1970s. It specializes in things like allied health, cardiovascular sonography / technology, diagnostic medical sonography, magnetic resonance imaging, and radiography. One might hope that for $45,000 these are really good programs in magnetic resonance imaging or whatever.
Well, not really. According to testimony a Sanford-Brown graduate gave to Congress last year, the college is essentially a scam. In 2007 former students sued the company, alleging that Sanford-Brown “engaged in aggressive and misleading recruiting tactics and… the nature of its curriculum, training, and faculty.”
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Mark Spencer on July 01, 2011 2:50 PM:
I need to clarify the information about one of our schools – Sanford Brown College in McLean, Va. (formerly in Vienna, Va.).
Unfortunately, the campus mistakenly reported the average tuition and fees for the entire program, rather than a single academic year. This data calculation error resulted in a large overstatement of the real cost and an apples-to-oranges comparison. The average cost of tuition and fees per academic year that should have been reported for the 2009-10 year is $12,126 -- a far cry from the $45,628 listed.
Clearly our small, non-residential, career-focused college in suburban Washington, D.C. is not more expensive than schools like Vassar, George Washington and Columbia.
As soon as we learned last week of errors in our information, we notified high-ranking department officials. Unfortunately, the Department of Education decided to proceed with publishing information it knew was grossly inaccurate. We regret making this error and are working to have it corrected in the department’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) system -- the data source for the new website -- as soon as possible.
While we applaud efforts by Congress and the Department of Education to make college cost information more available to consumers through the College Affordability and Transparency Center (CATC), it's clear that lots of data in the system needs to be corrected before these lists allow for true and accurate comparisons of schools. As that is done, this will become a powerful tool for people assessing their education options.
As for your assertions about the quality of our programs, we disagree strongly. Sanford-Brown College in McLean is nationally accredited by the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS). We're proud of the quality of the educational programs we offer our students.