Some people argue that you can't put a price tag on a Dartmouth education. Luckily, I can. The total cost of attendance for the 2010-2011 academic year is $55,724, up 4.6 percent from the 2009-2010 academic year, according to the College's Fact Book. Even if this number doesn't increase for the next three years, it would peg the cost of a Dartmouth degree for a member of the Class of 2014 at a cool $224,896. As students, we deal with that number occasionally, but for the most part, it's incomprehensible to us.
It's tough to come to terms with the fact that the price of one year of your education is more than the average American household makes in a year, but who are we to blame?
Sometimes my roommate complains that the College should be paying him $2,500 per term to share a half-room double with me instead of the other way around. Occasionally my cheerful community director sends a blitz informing me that everyone on my floor is being charged $14.90 because someone carved a penis into the bulletin board. For the most part, however, people feel uncomfortable discussing the fact that by the time most of them graduate, their brain will be worth more than their family's house.
Although we regularly encounter passive references to Dartmouth's cost, we almost never see an explicit price tag on the various aspects of our Dartmouth experience. DDS is the one exception, a place where we constantly see how much everything costs.
This constant reminder of price serves as a reference point to the outside world. That $5.25 order of chicken nuggets from FoCo could get you 27 nuggets off the Wendy's dollar menu. A $12.40 lunch from Novack consisting of a sandwich, an Odwalla and a muffin could provide a child in Thailand with rice for two months. Even that Nutri-Grain bar from Collis could get you two Nutri-Grain bars at CVS.
After each swipe of your card, your remaining DBA flashes on the cash register, letting you know how much you have left. At the end of the year, it doesn't roll over and you're stuck buying $72 cases of Vitamin Water.
What would it be like if all of Dartmouth were like DDS if a small green number on a cash register followed by a remaining balance instantly appeared follwing every dollar you waste at this school? This concept first hit me last Fall term. I rolled out of bed one Saturday and was greeted by a blitz from my dad telling me, "Today costs $250. Try not to waste it." Although his logic has obvious flaws, three 10-week terms for a total of $55,724 breaks down to just over $265 per day. By his calculations, I had paid $150 to sleep until 2 p.m. that day.
If the ORC timetable openly listed that each course at Dartmouth costs $4,000, maybe we would spend more time looking up professors and less time looking up median grades. If we knew that each individual lecture costs $80, and that we've already prepaid in full, maybe we'd collectively not sleep through our 9. Maybe the knowledge that a Dickey Center guest's speaking fee is $10,000 would make that "free" speaker as appealing as that "free" North Face at Tri Kap.
When you look at Dartmouth as a value equation a race to the $55,724 finish line it's a surprise that we don't petition to take four classes and spend all of our free time attending lectures and conducting research. We can always focus on the numbers, but who wants their time at Dartmouth of all places to be summed up by a number, much less a price?
Maybe you got more out of sinking the last half to win a five game series than you did out of your QDS distrib. Maybe you skipped a class freshman Fall and ended up meeting your future best friend while watching TV in Collis. Sometimes sleeping until noon or taking a three-hour nap is worth more than any psych lecture or dollar amount.
In the end, some people will worry too much about using up their Dartmouth DBA. They'll log as many metaphorical swipes as they can to use up all $224,896. In reality, I'll probably graduate with something left over (sorry Dad). It may not roll over, but I guess we're all banking on the fact that a Dartmouth degree will get us much farther than those $72 cases of Vitamin Water.
