College Sticker Price: $100,000 (Education Optional)

Recent revelations in U.S. News and World Report's annual college guide that the cost of top undergraduate degree now exceeds $100,000 may represent watershed. At more than $25,000 year, many students and their families will have to think hard about whether an Ivy-League is worth the expense. For some parents, the answer will be to send their capable child to less prestigious university or college for about $50,000 less. Most parents, however, will decide to scrimp, save, and sacrifice--and perhaps take out second mortgage on their home--rather than turn down that rare admission offer from Harvard, Yale, Brown, or Duke. By no means unrepresentative of what is meant by prestige school is Stanford University, consistently ranked in the top five in U.S. News's survey and privileged by an ideal climate, sumptuous facilities, and $2-billion endowment. The yearly competition for admission reflects this status: More than 15,000 applicants vie for 1,600 places in the freshman class. A year there does not come cheaply: $25,749 for tuition, room, and board--about the cost of new BMW 325i. For almost every year in the last two decades, Stanford's tuition increases have outpaced inflation and, more importantly, the rate of personal income growth in the United States. The increases primarily fund what Gerhard Casper, Stanford's president, has called mini-welfare state--an ever-expanding range of student services and new programs centered around the university's experiment. In the 1980s, then-president Donald Kennedy declared that Stanford's venture was a bold experiment that must succeed, and the university began spending with vengeance to make sure it did. To administer its great experiment, Stanford employs nearly 7,000 staff--more than one bureaucrat for every undergraduate--including $50,000-a-year Educator. (By contrast, there are only 1,400 faculty members. And there is large assortment of new departments (feminist studies, African American studies, Chicano studies, Asian-American studies, Native-American studies), ethnic centers, residential education (which receives more than $3 million year), and new classes and conferences. In 1991, the university established an Office for Multicultural Development as cabinet-level department and invested it with sweeping powers to ensure the university's transformation. You can't achieve transformation on the cheap. Stanford raised tuition by 5 percent this year, 7.5 percent year ago, and whopping 9.5 percent for the 1992-93 school year. A record two-thirds of undergraduates (and an even higher percentage of graduate students) now receive some form of financial aid. However generous this aid, the squeeze invariably falls on parents or the students themselves. And much of it is unnecessary: Last year, the Stanford Review examined the 1993-94 university budget for ways to cut costs and reduce tuition. The Review identified $10 million in savings by merging scaled-back gender- and race-studies departments with other programs. The paper saved an additional 1 million by eliminating multicultural dorm programming. All told, the Review produced plan to reduce Stanford's tuition by about 14 percent by trimming programs. It would be welcome. Explains Patrick Callahan, executive director of the California Higher Education Policy Center, There is close to middle-class panic in this country from increases in tuition by private and public institutions. Such fear is hardly overblown. In the trendy world of academia, which covets the latest politically correct program like shiny new hood ornament, there is competition to keep up with the. Yet Stanford's tuition ranks only 41st of 106 private colleges and universities surveyed by Cambridge Associates. Many parents may be shocked to learn that the extra expense has not increased the quality of undergraduate degree at Stanford, but rather has undermined it. …