This confusion is compounded by the inattention within higher education to the relationship between cost and price and by the indifference to the need to explain the issue to higher education's consumers. Another barrier to understanding the true cost of higher education, the commission discovered, is the usual disregard of capital assets in discussions of educational expenditures. Relying on the work of Gordon Winston, the Orrin Sage Professor of Political Economy at Williams College, and his colleagues on the Williams Project on the Economics of Higher Education, the commission included capital expenditures and assets in its estimates of the cost of education per student. And while general subsidy increased, it declined as a percentage of total student costs. The commission stressed that an accurate understanding of the affordability issue can only by reached by considering the fact that many students do not pay the total sticker price to attend college.
Students receive the general subsidy, and many other students also receive financial aid.
The commission developed two ways to calculate net price, measuring either affordability or accessibility. The net price measure of affordability subtracts grants only from the total price of attendance, providing a calculation of the amount of money a student actually pays to attend college. Between 1987 and 1996, both measures of net price rose. Changes in net price appear to have moderated between 1993 and 1996. For those attending independent institutions, the affordability measure increased 4 percent, but the access measure declined slightly, by about 7 percent.