Albany Law Getting Smaller, Less Demand, But Higher Tuition

Read this excerpt and see if the conclusion sense to you:

Albany plans to reduce the size of its incoming class from 250 to 240 and cut 2% from its $32 million budget — a $600,000 reduction. The school has also nixed pay raises for employees and is raising tuition by 4%, though dean and president Thomas Guernsey said that increase isn't enough to offset the lost tuition revenue that will result from the smaller class.

Albany has received about 20% fewer applications this year. Reducing the class size is intended to help the school preserve the academic qualifications of the new class, and to ensure they have access to jobs when they graduate, said Guernsey.

If tuition is $x per student, a 4% increase for 240 students would translate to $249.6x in tuition revenue. So if you froze tuition for the hypothetical 250, you're talking about a budget difference of 0.4x, which for Albany's tuition is like $16,000 a year, which is negligible in large-scale academic operations. In real terms, 250*39000 = 9.75 million. 240*40560 = 9.73 million. Big deal. You lose $20k in revenue, but $600k from the budget.

It's also an absurd notion that a 4% decrease is going to either "preserve the academic qualifications" or "ensure they have access to jobs when they graduate." At this rate, what's 10 more Albany students on the market? Are they scared their median LSAT would drop below 154?

Also, you have to love a business that can jack its prices when demand drops 20%. This can only happen in bizarro world where the government guarantees the purchase price no matter how much society needs the product or how likely an individual is to pay back the $120k in debt.