David Frum disses Duke
Posted May 28th, 2009 at 7:30 PM by Jon HamFrum makes some good points in this column, but he’ll have some Dark Blues feeling miffed about this rhetorical question:
Tuition, room, and board at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill cost about half what they cost at nearby Duke. Is a Duke education really twice as valuable as one from UNC?
May 29th, 2009 at 8:42 am
While the general thrust of his column is good, Frum seems to be mistaking cost for price here. It’s not at all clear to me that the cost of a Duke undergraduate degree is twice the cost of an UNC-CH degree.
But, of course, we all know that it isn’t twice as valuable, in any event.
May 29th, 2009 at 10:25 am
Exactly. How much would UNC-Chapel Hill, or Johnston County Community College, for that matter, charge for tuition if there were no state subsidy? A lot more than they do now.
North Carolina’s colleges are a “best buy” because every taxpayer in the state kicked in to pay down the actual cost of providing classroom seats. We just do more of it than Virginia and South Carolina. Duke is somewhat in a different class anyway, but if you looked at the tuition of other non-public colleges around the state like Elon, Meredith, or Campbell, you’d have a better idea of what a state college really costs — that is, what somebody paid for it, though maybe not the students.
May 30th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
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