A comparison of tuition disparities among city, suburban, town, and rural public community colleges.

摘要

The purpose of this study was to examine differences in tuition rates and college affordability indexes (CAIs) between and among U.S. public community colleges formulated upon urbanization criteria extracted from the Integrated Post Secondary Data System (IPEDS) maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which operates under the United States (U.S.) Department of Education. The study compiled a data base of full-time, in-taxing district tuition, in-state tuition, out-of-state tuition, and CAIs for U.S. public community colleges. The study compared full-time in-district tuition, in-state tuition, out-of-state tuition, and CAIs between and among selected U.S. public community colleges by degree of institutional urbanization. A multi-factor analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to test the hypothesis. Post-hoc tests were utilized when ANOVA indicated statistical differences among data.Analyses of the tuition data indicated no differences in full-time in-district tuition. Significant differences were found to exist in full-time in-state and out-of-state tuition. Post hoc analyses identified significant differences in full-time in-state tuition between suburban colleges and their town and rural counterparts. Differences were also identified in full-time out-of-state tuition between and among city and suburban colleges and their town and rural counterparts. Specifically, the full-time out-of-state tuition rates for town colleges differed from those of city and suburban institutions. Suburban colleges also differed from rural institutions. Analyses of the college affordability index data set indicated that significant differences do not exist among CAIs based on urban-centric locales.