Chicago City Wire

Tuition at Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) more than doubled between 2006 and 2016, giving the school the dubious claim of having the fastest tuition growth rate of any Illinois public university and illustrating a dangerous cycle of higher education costs, the Illinois Policy institute says.

The institute's report, written by Ted Dabrowski, the vice president of policy, and policy analyst John Klingner, shows the average cost of tuition and fees jumped from $6,306 in 2006 to $13,374 a decade later – a 112 percent increase that corresponds to an average hike of 7.81 percent each year. The writers said NEIU's is the most extreme example of a trend in Illinois’ public universities.

“Rather than keep tuition low, Illinois colleges and universities have taken the flood of federal and state monies available to higher education over the past two decades and spent it on a massive increase in administrative positions and exorbitant executive compensation,” Dabrowski and Klingner wrote. “That growth and those higher salaries have dramatically increased the cost of university pensions, causing the state to redirect a majority of its higher-education funds toward retirement costs.”

Northeastern Illinois University Interim President Richard Helldobler | http://www.neiu.edu/about/university-leadership/about-president

According to the report, Illinois universities increased their administrative positions by 31.1 percent between 2004 and 2010, during which student numbers grew by just 2.3 percent and faculty by 1.8 percent. Retirement costs for the state grew significantly over the same period as well. Accounting for just 17 percent of state higher education spending in 2006, retirement costs had swallowed 53 percent of that funding by 2015, the report said.