Press Releases | Costs

ACTA Launches HowCollegesSpendMoney.com

A groundbreaking new resource will help higher education leaders confront the exploding costs of college
January 31, 2019 by ACTA

WASHINGTON, DC—The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) announced that it has launched HowCollegesSpendMoney.com, an innovative gateway into a vast trove of data on college spending across the country.

HowCollegesSpendMoney.com provides unprecedented ease of access to financial information and spending trends from 1,500 public and private colleges and universities. Visitors can select specific colleges and instantly access eight years of their administrative and instructional spending patterns; compare them with other institutions in their peer groups; research student tuition, retention, and graduation rates; generate reports, and much more.

“The dream of a college education has become a financial nightmare for millions of students and families beset with runaway costs of tuition and fees,” says Michael Poliakoff, ACTA’s president. “With student loan debt burgeoning past $1.5 trillion and student borrowers graduating with more than $37,000 in debt, institutions simply must get control of their explosive costs if we are to safeguard the value of higher education for the nation.”

HowCollegesSpendMoney.com is designed to equip college trustees and leaders to be more effective stewards of their institutions. For the first time, they can easily arm themselves with critical data to make informed decisions about administrative and instructional costs in the best interests of their students—and the public.

“To face down the rising costs of college, those of us who serve on governing boards urgently need solid data, better analytics, and more transparency,” says Heidi Ganahl, Regent at the University of Colorado. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure. That’s why the new resource that ACTA is launching will be so instrumental in helping us make the critical decisions needed to tackle the administrative expense bloat on our college campuses.”

For more information, visit ACTA’s website.
View this video overview, as well as a brief guided tour of the site.

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CONTACT: Doug Sprei, dsprei@goacta.org

ACTA is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to academic freedom, academic excellence, and accountability in higher education. We receive no government funding and are supported through the generosity of individuals and foundations. For more information, visit GoACTA.org.

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Launched in 1995, we are the only organization that works with alumni, donors, trustees, and education leaders across the United States to support liberal arts education, uphold high academic standards, safeguard the free exchange of ideas on campus, and ensure that the next generation receives an intellectually rich, high-quality college education at an affordable price.

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