Princeton University has decided not to raise its tuition for the upcoming year, the New York Times reports. Room and Board will still increase 4.2% to $10,980.

University officials said the strong performance of Princeton’s investments, which earned almost 20 percent last year, helped pave the way for the decision, along with generous donations by alumni and an increase in the size of the student body. Officials said a decision by trustees’ to spend more of the endowment, which totaled about $13 billion in June, also helped.

Hmm… strong investment performance, eh? Where do I recall hearing about another endowment getting really, really good returns?

Princeton’s provost, Christopher Eisgruber, who heads the university’s priorities committee, said in a statement today that the committee was “delighted that the university’s financial circumstances allowed the trustees to approve its recommendations for addressing highest priority needs.”

The committee’s recent report said that making higher education accessible to all qualified students was one of its considerations and that Princeton’s tuition increases had been “at the bottom end of the university’s peer group” in the past 10 years.

Apparently Williams froze tuition in 2000-2001, but otherwise I don’t see too many places being particularly friendly about the ever-raising costs of attendance. GWU has a nice plan in place which locks tuition in place on a per-student basis, set when they first begin attending, and guarantees institutional aid won’t decrease.

This comes, interestingly enough, at the same time as the release of a UCLA study about financial burdens leading people away from 1st choices. AP wire, via NYT.

Many students are settling for their second- and third-choice colleges, at least partly for financial reasons, a new survey says. The study, by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveyed more than 271,000 students at 393 colleges and universities. It found 32.7 percent of freshmen at a college other than their first choice. Almost half of those at their second choice had been accepted at their first. Of the students accepted at their first-choice university who did not enroll, a third said they could not afford it. Other reasons included geography and athletics. [emphasis mine]

Tuition costs won’t stop me from going to Yale, but they won’t make it any easier, either. We got reminder-flyers in our P.O. boxes this week about filling out the FAFSA. I wish the higher education scene could take a closer look at costs for students, particularly middle class students, rather than squeezing more money out to pay for quite lovely expansions of programs. It’s not fair to justify this just by saying “lots of this money goes to financial aid!” because tuition isn’t quite the sliding scale certain income taxes are (or could be). If a third of first-choicers couldn’t attend because of cost, that’s a problem. In the age of 4 billion dollar capital campaigns, when is it enough to take a step back and look at the burden these tuition raises are putting on students who don’t fall to the income extremes?

It was nice to see the House do some good student loans work this past week (Miller’s moustache looked great on CSPAN; we watched the vote come in) but it was too bad that the Bush administration also saw fit to continue subsidizing a student-loans company that was and is defrauding the American people. Can’t win ‘em all.