The biggest single reason that folks contact me at College Parents of America is to complain about college costs.

 

Like many of you, those who have written or called me can't quite understand why so many colleges have to charge so much to educate a young adult.

 

After all, these people say, many U.S. schools have large endowments, highly paid professors who don't teach enough classes and, as one parent wag put it, "financial aid budgets out the wazoo."

 

Now, those of you who have been members of College Parents of America for awhile do know, of course, that a focus on ways to contain college costs has been with us since I started writing this column in September 2003.

 

In fact, a quick look at my column archives reveals that since I started putting fingers to keyboard every week, I have written at least 100 times, in some fashion or another, about college costs.

 

These columns have not been incendiary, and that is by design. I don't believe that a fire-breathing group of parents would get the attention of colleges and universities, or at least the kind of attention that would lead to constructive results.

 

What I have tried to suggest to school administrators, both in public and in private, is that today's parents are very anxious about college costs right now, very worried that they will continue to rise sharply in the next few years and very confused as to why these consistently high increases seem almost to be built into the system.

 

And what I have tried to suggest in both my columns to you and in my communications to schools is that there are some basic steps that all schools should take to get costs under control.

 

Principal among those suggestions is that colleges should adopt more business-like practices. Rather than deal with annual budget shortfalls by simply deciding to charge more, schools should learn to do what every successful business in America has done in the past 25 years: learn to do more with less and, where it makes sense in non-teaching functions, outsource.

 

The productivity gains that seem to be ingrained in our country's corporations have not yet seeped into our country's colleges and universities and that, it seems to me, is the heart of the matter.

 

One reason schools don't see a compelling reason to change their ways is the steady stream of increasing applications that come their way every year from our children. Born in the baby-boom echo, the number of young people applying to college has grown dramatically since the mid-1990s and that growth will continue for at least another five years. The number of 18- to 24-year-olds, considered by government statisticians to be the "college-aged" population, will peak in 2012.

 

Some forward-thinking colleges and universities, understanding that the stampede of new students won't last forever, have started to adopt more market-based pricing practices, and have begun to attract more students (and more revenue) by charging less to everybody.

But they are the exception, and not the rule.

 

Unfortunately, a "charge Peter more so that Paul can pay less" mentality reigns at many colleges and universities. The published prices for most schools continues to go up and up, while the net price (the average of what all families pay) goes up too, but at not nearly so fast a rate.

 

Put another way, most schools are discounting like crazy for some families, while charging more and more to those whom they deem to have the ability to pay.

 

That is not a long-term recipe for success in any business, and colleges and universities are in the most important business of all, educating our sons and daughters to enter the workforce or to pursue a graduate education in the field of their dreams.

 

Escaping from the current college pricing system will not be easy, either for discount-reliant parents or for discount-dependent schools. But for the sake of the future of American higher education, steps must begin to be taken to solve this college cost conundrum.

 

I'll be writing more in future weeks on this important topic and I welcome your suggestions on ways that colleges can do more to educate your children, but take less out of everybody's wallet in the process. Please Share Your Thoughts on How Colleges Can Cut Costs in order to better hold down the prices they charge families.