Overpriced and bad quality food, $11,470 outdated dorm complexes and a shiny $89,820 price tag for the 2027 fiscal year that’s sure to increase into the next. After all, it was a 4.3% increase from 2026.
Don’t expect any improvements, though. Obviously.
According to Lehigh University’s FY27 budget, the university has a $2 billion endowment and brought in $549.1 million in revenue during the 2026 fiscal year. The $44.1 million came from housing fees, $16.2 million from dining and $5.1 million from gifts.
The point is, they receive more than enough money.
Yet student organizations continue to be underfunded, staff benefits are slashed and Lehigh becomes more and more expensive by the year.
For a non-profit institution, it sure acts for-profit.
The solution might seem obvious: transfer to a school that’s cheaper. Lehigh is a private, somewhat prestigious university. We should expect the sky-high price tag that comes with such an education.
That would be correct to say if this was limited to just Lehigh and universities like it. Rather, this issue plagues practically every university across the United States.
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, the average cost of attendance for a four-year higher education institution in the 2016 to 2017 school year was $26,593. In the 2023 to 2024 school year, that number was $39,406. Even the cost for attending an in-state public university was nearly $30,000 per year.
Clearly this issue is something greater than just greedy administrators. The seemingly endless price gouging that comes with higher education in America results from how we treat education itself.
Education in the U.S. is treated as an alienable privilege reserved to those who can afford it.
It’s impossible to talk about rising costs of higher education while ignoring the culture surrounding education in this country. The reason we’re paying more than our parents’ annual salary to attend college isn’t because of inflation, but because our economic system and culture allows for price gouging.
Universities are miniature replicas of the neoliberal system that has dominated the U.S. since President Ronald Reagan; you, your finances, your intellect and your desire for upward social mobility all become exploitable under the system of higher education.
When universities become less about actual education and more about making profit for administrators and teaching students to make profits themselves, you get what Lehigh is.
Change needs to happen on a systemic and cultural level. Universities need to become more than “job schools,” as one professor put it in an event I attended on campus.
Education needs to be seen as fundamental to American society.
Countries including Mexico, Cuba and the Philippines have significantly smaller economies than the U.S., yet they fund free higher education for their citizens. Any argument it would be too expensive to subsidize education is one I’m not interested in hearing.
For students in one of the wealthiest nations in the world, a Lehigh education shouldn’t be barred by exploitative prices or paid for by loans a teenager in today’s economy could only dream of paying back.
Only when capitalist policies and the chase of profit surpluses are removed from universities will they be legitimate places of education and equity. Until then, slap a big ‘for-profit’ sign on all of them.
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